Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Cleveland Businesses

Cleveland companies of $3 million to $50 million are often better businesses than their books suggest. A second-generation fabricator in Euclid owns its building, carries little debt, and has customers that go back 30 years. It also has inventory that has not been counted in two years and a monthly close that happens quarterly. When the bank tightens, the surety asks questions, or a customer's reshoring order doubles the working-capital need, the company cannot prove what it is worth. The strength is real. The evidence is not.

The symptoms repeat across the metro. Receivables from a large automotive or aerospace customer run 75 days while the supplier wants 30. Job margins that looked fine at bid vanish at closeout because change orders were performed and never billed. The lender asks for a borrowing base and receives a balance sheet from last year's tax return. The replacement controller is a bookkeeper with a new title. Meanwhile the owner is quoting a stadium package or a hospital package because the general contractor called, without knowing whether the last large job made money.

The fix follows a sequence. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, inventory, and debt. Clean up the ledger so the numbers can be believed. Stabilize the weekly cash cycle and the monthly close. Document the process so it survives without us. Then transition it to your team or a full-time hire when the company can support one. That sequence, Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition, is how a $9 million shop in Strongsville proves it is a $9 million shop, and then becomes a $20 million one.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Northeast Ohio that means machine shops, stampers, and fabricators in Solon, Euclid, and Cuyahoga Heights, general contractors in Westlake and Mentor working hospital, university, and interchange projects, electrical contractors, HVAC contractors, and plumbing contractors serving health-care campuses and the Brook Park stadium district, site and demolition contractors along the I-90 corridor, building-materials yards and distributors in Elyria and Medina, and the home-services and professional-services firms that serve a metro of aging housing and older commercial stock.

The situations repeat. The owner still signs every check and reads cash from the bank app. A tariff or a customer's plant decision moved 40 percent of revenue in a single quarter. A surety has capped the program because the financial statements are prepared on a cash basis. The bank has moved the loan to special assets and wants a 13-week cash forecast by Friday. A sale is two years out and the buyer's lender will want three years of clean statements. Or the company is profitable on paper and short of cash, because the profit is sitting in inventory and retainage.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We coordinate with the people who do those things and we stay in our lane. And if your plan is to wait for the next order to fix the cash problem, we will explain on the first call why the next order usually makes it worse, at no charge.

A fractional CFO gives you the judgment of a chief financial officer for a fraction of the week and a fraction of the cost. In Cleveland that judgment goes to the questions an industrial cycle forces on every owner. Can a $15 million fabricator fund the raw material for a reshored program before the customer pays at 75 days, and what does that do to the borrowing base? What happens to the forecast if steel prices move again or the customer idles a line? Where does the company sit relative to Ohio's commercial activity tax, which applies at 0.26 percent to taxable gross receipts above a $6 million exclusion for 2025 and 2026?

We do not decide the tax position. We put it in the forecast and get your CPA in the room before the decision is made. The working tools are a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a monthly package with margin by job, by product line, and by customer, a lender relationship that is managed rather than endured, and a borrowing base the bank can audit without a phone call. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Lorain and Mentor.

Fractional CFO engagements start at $3,500 per month. CFO Advisory starts at $5,000, Operating CFO at $8,500, Embedded CFO at $12,500, and interim leadership is custom. Those are starting points, not quotes. Final pricing reflects company size, entity count, transaction volume, the condition of the books, urgency, and what the bank and surety are asking for. Travel to Cleveland is scoped in the engagement letter, and one-time cleanup and software are separate unless expressly included.

A controller's job is to make the numbers true and on time. Ours close the month within 10 business days, maintain a job-cost or product-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety can read, run receivables and payables on a calendar instead of a mood, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a manufacturer that means perpetual inventory that ties to the count, standard costs that get reviewed, and a borrowing base certificate that goes to the bank on the same day each month. For a contractor it means retainage tracking, change-order billing, and percentage-of-completion adjustments.

In Cleveland the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it when two large health systems, the utilities, the banks, and the large manufacturers all hire from the same pool of cost accountants, and a $10 million shop cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a close calendar rather than a filing cabinet. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Parma and Akron.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written on day one, the close calendar is published, and the deliverables are the same every month: financial statements, cost reports, WIP or inventory schedules, aging, a borrowing base, and a cash position you can read in five minutes. When the company is ready for a full-time controller, the documented process goes with the job. Fix it. Run it. Document it. Hand it off.

Ohio has no state general contractor license. The Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board licenses electrical, HVAC, plumbing, hydronics, and refrigeration contractors for commercial work, and general contracting is registered city by city, which in Northeast Ohio means separate registrations in Cleveland, Akron, Parma, and a dozen other municipalities. None of that sets your bonding capacity. A surety does, on the strength of a WIP schedule that reconciles, gross margins that hold from bid to closeout, working capital that is real, and an owner who can explain the numbers. On the stadium, hospital, and interchange projects, the general contractors also want monthly financials from their subs. We build that package and keep it current.

Ohio's lien statute runs on a 21-day clock. A subcontractor or supplier on a commercial project generally must serve a notice of furnishing within 21 days of first providing labor or materials, or within 21 days of the owner's notice of commencement, to preserve full lien rights. The lien affidavit itself is due within 75 days of last furnishing on commercial work and 60 days on residential. On a $2.4 billion stadium with a construction manager, a general contractor, and a dozen tiers of subs, the 21 days can pass before the first invoice is drafted. We put the notice in the job setup and track the affidavit deadline on every aging report. Whether to file is your attorney's call.

The commercial activity tax is the other Ohio line that surprises growing contractors. It is measured on gross receipts, not profit, and a contractor that crosses the $6 million exclusion mid-year owes tax on the receipts above it whether or not the jobs were profitable. Municipal income taxes follow where the work is performed, and a crew that moves between Cleveland, Brook Park, and Westlake in a single month generates three withholding questions. We keep the schedules, forecast the crossings, and make sure the ledger captures what the CPA needs to file. We do not give tax advice. We make sure it is in the bid.

Turnaround is the reason most Cleveland companies call, and the trouble arrives in a recognizable order. A customer idles a line or a tariff moves the price of steel, and revenue drops 30 percent in a quarter while the fixed costs do not. The line is fully drawn by June. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier moves the account to COD. The bank moves the loan to special assets and asks for a 13-week cash forecast, a borrowing base, and a plan. By then the owner has been funding payroll from personal savings for five months and calling it a bridge.

We start with a 13-week cash-flow forecast built from actual receivables, actual payables, and actual payroll, not the budget. Then vendor triage: who gets paid, when, and what they are told. Then a lender conversation with a plan attached, because banks extend patience to borrowers who show up with numbers. The principal has led finance through a Chapter 11 process, including debtor-in-possession operations and court-required reporting, so nothing on the list will be the first time. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The other Cleveland turnaround is the succession that stalls. A second-generation owner is ready to sell to the management team or a strategic buyer, and the buyer's lender wants three years of financial statements that reconcile, a quality-of-earnings review, and an inventory count that ties. The company has none of the three, and the deal slips a year while a competitor with clean books sells first. We build the reporting a buyer's diligence expects, including the quality-of-earnings schedules, before the letter of intent rather than during it. The books are the price. It is better to raise them in a spreadsheet than lower them in a negotiation.

Customer concentration is the first challenge, and in Northeast Ohio it is often inherited. A supplier that has served one automotive or aerospace customer since the 1990s may carry half its revenue in that relationship, and the customer's tariff response, plant decision, or reshoring order can move the supplier's cash by millions in a quarter. We report revenue and margin by customer, run the forecast with a scenario in which the largest one cuts volume, and size the overhead and the line so the company survives the scenario. Then the owner can accept the next program with a bank that already understands the plan.

The second challenge is the winter. Lake-effect snow off Lake Erie shortens the outdoor construction season and pushes site, paving, and exterior work into a window from April to November. Contractors carry crews and equipment through January and February on cash earned the previous summer, while HVAC and home-services companies see their busiest service months in the same stretch. The cash cycle follows the weather. A line of credit sized for August will not carry a company to April. We model the seasonal curve by trade, size the line to the trough, and schedule the pre-season buys so the company can afford them before the season pays for them.

The third challenge is the labor market inside a shrinking region. Cuyahoga County lost 2.5 percent of its residents between 2020 and 2025, and the stadium, the interchange, the hospital campuses, and the lakefront projects compete for the same electricians, ironworkers, and cost accountants. A $12 million sub will pay more for crews than it planned and will lose its controller to a hospital system if the job is undocumented. The answer is not to stop bidding. It is to bid with a wage curve in the estimate, a weekly cash forecast, and a documented finance process that does not walk out the door with the next resignation.

• Revenue and margin by customer with a scenario in which the largest one cuts volume
• Borrowing base and inventory reporting that a lender can audit without a phone call
• Notice of furnishing at 21 days and lien affidavits at 75 or 60 days tracked from job setup
• Commercial activity tax exposure forecast against the $6 million exclusion with the CPA
• Seasonal cash cycles smoothed with a line sized to the winter trough, not the summer peak
• Succession and sale readiness built before the letter of intent, including quality-of-earnings schedules
• Competition for construction and cost accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process