Practice
Finance & CFO Advisory
Most owner-led companies do not have a finance function; they have bookkeeping and a feeling. Everything expensive — the cash surprise, the mispriced raise, the covenant call — is manufactured in the gap between the two.
All capabilitiesOur approach
Our perspective.
Lotus installs the machinery a full-time CFO would build — the forecast, the schedules, the weekly cadence — and staffs it with senior judgment, without the full-time cost. Advisory work, with the boundary stated: not audit, not attest, not tax preparation.
A finance function is machinery, not a person: the thirteen-week forecast reconciled weekly, debt schedules that match the loan documents, working capital measured, the review cadence run until it holds without us. Remove the firm and the instruments keep running. They are built to.
The practice runs on an evidentiary habit: every schedule tied to its source document, every number re-derivable from the record, every instrument reconciled to the bank rather than to memory. The boundary is stated just as plainly: this is advisory work: not audit, not attestation, not tax preparation. A firm paid on outcomes must be scrupulous about where outcome fees are allowed to exist; contingent fees are off-limits for attest work, so attest work is off the menu.
Common challenges
The challenges we help address.
The rearview finance function
The books close mid-month and describe last month. Nothing in the company describes the next thirteen weeks. Profitable companies run out of cash with the P&L looking fine. The account, not the income statement, is where companies die.
The advisor who visits
A fractional CFO who attends a monthly meeting and leaves observations is an advisor, not a finance function. If no forecast is maintained, no schedule reconciled, and no cadence held between visits, the function still does not exist twenty-nine days a month.
The capital event met unprepared
The lender’s file assembled in a scramble, the data room built after the LOI, the cap table reconstructed from email. Every question the file cannot answer costs basis points, trust, or the deal.
How we work
How the engagement runs.
- Step 1
Diagnose
Find where cash actually goes, what the loan documents actually require, and which numbers the owner runs on that no system maintains.
- Step 2
Architect
Map each instrument to the decision it must inform: forecast design, debt and covenant schedules, working-capital instrumentation.
- Step 3
Build
Install and reconcile the instruments: the thirteen-week forecast live against the bank record, schedules matching the documents, dashboards on real data.
- Step 4
Operate
The weekly finance cadence: forecast against actuals, variances explained, covenant headroom watched. Senior judgment applied on schedule, not on emergency.
Deliverables
What the work produces.
- Thirteen-week cash forecast
- Decide with the next quarter’s cash visible, week by week.
- Debt & covenant schedule
- Decide with headroom measured before the lender measures it.
- Investor & lender file
- Decide when to raise or borrow — with a file that survives diligence.
- Working-capital instrumentation
- Decide what the cash cycle funds — and what it no longer has to.
Services
How we can help.
- Thirteen-Week Cash Flow A direct-method cash forecast, maintained weekly: foresight as a working instrument.
- Investor Materials & Data Rooms The deck and the data room behind it: narrative and numbers that agree under questioning.
- SBA Loan Packaging A 7(a) file an underwriter can say yes to: coverage reality, equity injection, the lender’s read anticipated.
- Cap Table & Scenario Modeling The ownership record kept clean, and the dilution conversations moved from someday to the calendar.
- Debt & Amortization Modeling Debt schedules that match the loan documents, and covenant headroom watched before it is news.
- Receivables & Working Capital AR aging as a cash lever: collection cadence, terms discipline, the working-capital cycle measured.
- Cost Reduction & Spend Analysis Spend taken apart line by line: vendor consolidation, renewals negotiated, the recurring-spend audit.
Evidence
From the case studies.
Practice leadership
Related insights
The thinking behind the practice.
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