Virtual CFO Service
Full Financial Support
for your business
As a successful business owner, you want clarity about your finances, and you want confidence in your future. You want the financial components of your business to be thriving, organized, and fully aligned with the rest of your life.
You’ve worked hard to build up and support your business, and now you need your business to fully support you, your family, and the life you want to live.
Let me help you get there as your Virtual CFO.
I specialize in working with established, service-based business owners who want to change the way they approach their finances. In this ongoing partnership, I am able to help business owners make needed fundamental changes that align their business with their long-term vision.
I help businesses become proactive instead of reactive.
As your Virtual CFO, I’ll help you manage cash flow, work to increase profitability, provide financial & operational analysis (and take the lead on implementation), help you develop new incomes streams, position you to scale, lay out relevant plans for repositioning (or pivoting) of your services, provide projections & forecasts, create budgets, keep you GAAP compliant, track meaningful KPIs, create more efficiency, and manage all the financial pieces. Throughout this process, I will be actively engaged with you, your staff, and your business.
And while these technical aspects are important, the biggest benefit you’ll gain from working with me is peace-of-mind. As your Virtual CFO, I’ll help you structure your business so that it is healthy, sustainable, and aligned with your unique lifestyle and all of your goals.
In short, I’ll help you work from a place of financial empowerment.
Practically speaking, you’ll find that my role as Virtual CFO for your company incorporates (and sometimes eliminates) some other consultant roles like bookkeeper, tax strategist, business coach, etc.. Every client I work with is different, of course, so let’s talk about your specific business needs and goals.
The kind of issues that I address most often with Virtual CFO clients:
Profit Margins:
- Gaining clarity as to your current profit margins
- Laying out options for how your profit margins can realistically be improved
- Providing a multi-step plan of implementation that will increase your profit margins
- Assessing the margins of what you can pay new hires, modeling out potential labor configurations, etc.
Pricing:
- Conducting market research on your direct and indirect competitors
- Assessing the positioning of your company
- Creating models for price increase possibilities (along with data-driven attrition rates)
- Developing a detailed plan for price increase rollouts and leading the implementation
Cash Flow:
- Pinpointing money leaks (i.e., you see the money coming in, but aren’t sure why you have so little left in the bank)
- Financial forecasting that accurately considers all aspects (income, expenses, loan re-payments, draws, taxes, required payments toward past accrued debt, etc.)
- Predicting cash flow for different situations
- Budgeting & forecasting
- Managing the actual cash flow
Owner Pay:
- Assessing the ways you’re currently paying yourself through your business and helping you potentially reconfigure this so that you’re supporting all your goals (this can incorporate payroll, draws, distributions, retirement contributions, among other things)
- Creating processes that prioritize paying yourself
Pivoting and/or Re-Positioning of Offerings:
- Conducting market research
- Developing a transitional schedule and plan to pivot and/or re-position one of more of your service offerings
Scaling your Business:
- Comparing your long-term goals with the revenue caps of your business
- Creating a plan that re-configures your business to be structured in a way that positions you to scale as well as to reach (and even exceed) your stated revenue goals
- Modeling out potential timeframes and conditions for your business to maximize its’ scaling potential
Expansion:
- Analyzing the cost & energy out-puts needed to open a new location
- Forecasting & modeling the cash-flows and timelines for the new location to be cash flow positive
- Helping you financially assess changing leases and/or the purchase of your own building
- Researching and financial modeling for the addition of new income streams to your business
Taxes & Tax Strategy:
- Assessing your business’ tax status
- Helping you determine which legal (and financial) business structure makes the most financial sense from a tax perspective
- Assessing and projecting owed taxes for savings, profit, and cash flow purposes
- Optimizing your business tax deduction strategy on a continual basis (most business owners are leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table each year by failing to strategize in this way—and as you grow, this strategy should continue to evolve)
- Calculating estimated quarterly tax payment requirements
- Calculating and filing of sales tax payments
- IRS and state audit support
Staff:
- Helping you determine & develop key new positions in your business
- Providing insight on pay scales for new hires, needed pay increases, bonuses, and more
- Developing employee incentive structures and commissions
- Tracking meaningful employee ROIs and KPIs as helpful and relevant
- Resolving any federal or state payroll tax issues
Accounting Records:
- Cleaning up your QuickBooks Online file (or getting your business switched over to QuickBooks Online)
- Streamlining (and clarifying) the way your business is capturing different income & expense streams
- Instructing your staff on needed accounting procedures
- Creating any needed, regular Journal Entry templates
- Making custom report templates
- Creating a system that differentiates multiple entities’ finances from each other in a GAAP compliant way
If this service sounds like a match for you & your business, click on the button below & schedule a free consultation.
Note: If you’re looking for a CFO Service that is less comprehensive, I also offer CFO Lite Services. If you are not sure which service is right for you, that’s ok–go ahead and schedule a consultation and we’ll talk about it!
“I honestly cannot think of a better or more important investment I have made in my business—or in myself.”
It really is difficult to say enough about Erin, the quality of her work and the way she goes about it. After somehow managing to survive in business for over 30 years with almost no professional financial guidance, Erin came in and 1) helped me put things in the best possible professional order, 2) opened my eyes to resources and opportunities I had no idea existed, 3) helped me to a much better understanding of a number of issues related to my own mindset/self-imposed limitations around my business and money, and 4) supported me emotionally and intellectually as I made important decisions about growth and investment. You will find that she is both smart and proactive. If she commits to working with you, she will be all in and expect no less from you. I am better in more ways than one for my association with her, and I honestly cannot think of a better or more important investment I have made in my business — or in myself. If she seems a good match for you or your business, I cannot recommend her highly enough.
–Barry Nash, Barry Nash and Company
“Bringing Erin on was the biggest blessing for me personally and the business.”
I had the pleasure to work with Erin during a time when I considered my business to be at a “low”. The compounding struggles of the pandemic had me feeling defeated, and bringing Erin on was the biggest blessing for me personally and the business. Erin embraced ALL facets of business ownership – the tangibles (finance, operations) as well as the intangibles (beliefs, morale, personal emotions). In doing so, she managed to validate, educate and empower me as a person, which in turn empowered me as a business owner. She has laid the foundation for CLEAR and EFFICIENT financial strategies to help not only bring the business out of the “low” – but now speeding into a new “high”. I am feeling extremely confident with where the business is heading. THANK YOU, Erin. My gratitude is endless.
–Joyce Bertulfo, Revyve
“Thanks to Erin we are in track to have our highest grossing year ever!”
As a 15-year owner of a design and branding agency, I’ve experienced many successes, but with that also comes opportunities for support and growth. I wanted to be more in control of our finances and intentional with the money we made. I truly felt like my team and I had taken as far as we could on our own, and we were lacking the clarity needed to know what actually was the “right” next moves. It was time to bring someone in that could give us a deeper understanding of the “numbers” that could help take my business to the next level. Most importantly, what they meant, how to interpret them and how we could actually use that information to better plan for the future. That’s where Erin comes in. She works with us on regular basis to make key decisions that impact our business in day-to-day operations, helps us make informed (and smart) decisions based on our long-term financial goals and set new goals for the future based on opportunities we would not have seen otherwise. Overall her communication, guidance and insight have exceeded our expectations. I would highly recommend her to anyone with a business that isn’t quite large enough to hire an in-house CFO, but still wants the peace of mind, expertise and direction that a CFO can provide. It has made a world of difference in my business, and my money mindset. Thanks to Erin we are on track to have our highest grossing year ever!
–Kristin Moses, DesignGood
“There’s no doubt in our minds that having her on our team has allowed us to earn more money, stress less, and create a clear vision for the future.“
We’ve been working with Erin as Virtual CFO for more than a year, and she’s been a huge asset to our company as we’ve been working through some major transitions (not to mention COVID!). She’s been our biggest cheerleader, our financial guru, our rock, and our accountability partner. There’s no doubt in our minds that having her on our team has allowed us to earn more money, stress less, and create a clear vision for the future. She’s made financial decision-making simpler and has helped us focus on the big picture instead of getting lost in the details. Erin offers an experienced outside perspective that would have been impossible for us to attain otherwise. We feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work with her and know that she will continue to be a part of our major business decisions as we move forward.”
-Thriving ATX Business Partners
What other clients have experienced:
Every client that I’ve worked with has recouped far more than their investment into my services. Here are some recent client successes (from 2021 and 2022): one client more than quadrupled their business revenue and profit by implementing a series of major operational & financial changes; another client is now several steps into a realistic, multi-staged plan that repositioned their services and has their business moving from $0 net profit/month to $65k net profit/month within an 12-month timeline; another client successfully increased their core service pricing by 33% as well as adding two additional revenue streams (and this client is finally operating with a scalable business model); another client has restructured the tax strategy for their multiple businesses to shave off more than $100k in tax liability every year. In addition, this client has leveled out cash flow and has quadrupled profit; and another client has successfully increased their revenue 100%, increased their pricing by 60%, and increased the owners’ compensation by over 50% (and purchased a second home), all while working fewer hours than before.
Some additional important details:
- My service as a Virtual CFO for small businesses tends to be of greatest value & fit to service-based business owners who are currently generating $2M to $8M/yr.
- I only partner with a few clients in the role of Virtual CFO each year, and I value the personal interactions that I have with my Virtual CFO clients. I have a small team that helps with things like administrative tasks, market research and historical bookkeeping, but I’m the person who will be directly working with you.
- My availability to take on new Virtual CFO clients fluctuates. Most of my clients work with me for a couple of years (and many, for longer!), so I can only take on a new client when I have an opening.
- Hiring me is a significant investment. I work on a monthly retainer model, and the specific price is based on the size & needs of you and your company.
MEET YOUR VIRTUAL CFO, ERIN
Erin Armstrong is a Chief Financial Officer, Business Coach and Tax Strategist who’s on a mission to financially empower business owners. Her unique, comprehensive approach integrates all the financial aspects of your business (such as accounting practices, tax strategy, profitability, budgeting, & cash flow) with an emphasis on developing a positive money mindset so you can move forward in a confident, proactive and empowered way.
Over the past 11 years, Erin has worked with hundreds of businesses across the country as a Virtual CFO, Accountant, Tax & Financial Consultant, Business Coach, and Speaker. She’s also led business financial workshops in many major cities throughout the US. Erin is an Enrolled Agent licensed by the IRS. She lives with her husband and daughter (and their two dogs) in the Dallas area.