“I am definitely starting to see more people with an FP&A background becoming fractional CFOs.”

Michael King, founder of The CFO Accelerator, coaches hundreds of  fractional CFOs and accountants in building “6 and 7-figure advisory firms”.

King arrives on the bustling fractional CFO scene at a time when demand for part-time finance chiefs working for several companies is  higher than ever. In King’s words in the next decade a small business having a fractional CFO will be just as common as bringing in a bookkeeper as hiring fractional CFOs becomes the “cost of doing business” at small and medium-sized enterprises. And according to King, those with an FP&A background have a significant advantage.

“FP&A really gets people ready for those CFO technical skills. So when I think about FP&A, I'm thinking about things like forecast projections, budgets and models, and data management, alongside communications across functional divisions within a business. And that's a huge part of what a fractional CFO has to understand”.

Covered in this episode

• King’s path from being a navy nuclear engineer to a fractional CFO leader
• The essential skills you need to be a fractional CFO
• When should an SMB choose a fractional CFO 
• Why budgeting and forecasting are “everything” 
• The key to using the fractional CFO position to connect the strategic goals of a business
• Why people in finance must learn to love sales
• When to move away from a fractional CFO and appoint a full time finance chief 
• Why cash flow is always “the first” and most important metric for any fractional CFO service
• Why you only need a small number of clients to “make a killing” as a fractional CFO
• How the Fractional CFO space will explode in the next decade “regardless of the economic picture”
• Fractional CFOs need to be “operating as far away from the decimal as possible” to be successful
• The process of adopting kids as the thing few people know about Michael 

 Watch the full show on YouTube

Read the full transcript and blog

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FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails, the FP&A platform for Excel users.

Episode links 

The CFO Accelerator podcast with Michael King

The CFO Report (Youtube channel)

The The 5-Minute Fractional CFO Newsletter