Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Milwaukee Businesses

Milwaukee companies rarely fail from lack of work. They fail from the distance between when they spend and when they are paid, made worse by a calendar that stops outdoor work for a quarter. A $10 million industrial contractor in New Berlin buys material in October, installs it in November, bills it in December, and collects in February, if the owner's engineer approves the invoice the first time. A $6 million machine shop in West Allis builds to a forecast from a customer whose own customer just paused. In both cases the working capital was spent before anyone in the office knew the size of the bet.

The symptoms are familiar. Receivables age past 60 days while the line of credit covers payroll. Inventory grows because purchasing was told to buy ahead of a tariff, and nobody told the bank. Change orders are performed, argued about, and never billed. The WIP schedule is a spreadsheet nobody trusts, and the surety has noticed. Meanwhile, the accountant the company hired in 2021 has left for a health system in Wauwatosa, which offered a signing bonus and a parking spot with a roof.

The fix has five steps and they do not reorder. 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. Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition. That is how a $5 million Milwaukee subcontractor or supplier grows into a $20 million one without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls.

The companies we serve are privately held, roughly $3 million to $50 million in revenue, and owned by the people who run them. In the Milwaukee region that means general contractors in Waukesha and Brookfield, HVAC contractors and plumbing contractors serving the North Shore and the South Side, electrical contractors on data-center and industrial work in Mount Pleasant, Port Washington, and Kenosha, fabricators and industrial-services companies in the Menomonee Valley and along the I-94 corridor, and the building-materials yards and distributors that supply all of them. We also work with home-services companies, professional-services firms, and the second- and third-tier suppliers to the region's large manufacturers.

The stories rhyme. The owner still approves every check and reads cash from the bank balance. The controller retired after 25 years and took the process with him. The bank wants monthly covenant reporting and a borrowing-base certificate, and both are late. A surety has capped the bonding program until the financials are credible. A customer that was 40 percent of revenue has gone quiet. A second-generation owner is taking over and discovering what the first generation kept in a drawer. Or cash is short, the vendors are calling, and the owner needs a plan rather than reassurance.

Hire someone else if all you need is bookkeeping, a tax return, an audit opinion, or a lawyer. We work alongside the people who do those things and we do not pretend to be them. If your plan is a full-time CFO and a hope that the books fix themselves, the first call is free and we will spend it talking you out of it.

A fractional CFO gives a $10 million company the judgment of a chief financial officer without the compensation package of one. In practice that means a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid and pricing decisions made with margin data instead of instinct, and a monthly package that tells you where the money went and where it is going. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Germantown and Kenosha.

Milwaukee lenders are conservative by habit and they read borrowing bases with care. A contractor deciding whether to take a package on the Mount Pleasant campus, the Port Washington site, or the I-94 rebuild needs to know before signing whether it can fund the labor and material ahead of a first pay application, what retainage will do to year-end working capital, and whether the line will stretch. A supplier deciding whether to buy a year of steel ahead of a tariff needs the same model with inventory turns in it. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a forecast, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually within the week.

Fractional CFO engagements begin at $3,500 per month. An Operating CFO who runs the finance function day to day begins at $8,500, CFO Advisory at $5,000, and Embedded CFO at $12,500; interim leadership is quoted for the situation. Those are starting points. What you actually pay reflects company size, entity count, transaction and inventory volume, the condition of the books, urgency, and what your bank and surety require. One-time cleanup, software, and travel are separate unless the engagement letter includes them.

A controller makes the numbers true and on time; everything else is detail. 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 contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, certified payroll support on public and prevailing-wage work, and percentage-of-completion adjustments. For a manufacturer or distributor it includes inventory counts that tie, standard costs that are revisited, and a borrowing-base certificate that is right the first time.

In Milwaukee the difficulty is not the work itself. It is hiring someone who can do it and keeping them, when the health systems, the insurers, and the large manufacturers all hire from the same pool of accountants. A $10 million contractor in Franklin cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller sidesteps the problem: we run the function and document it, and the next hire inherits a process instead of a puzzle. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Port Washington and Racine.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written down on day one, the close calendar is published, and the deliverables are the same every month: financial statements, job-cost or product-cost reports, WIP, aging, 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.

Wisconsin does not issue a statewide general contractor license. Commercial work runs on local permits and on the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC credentials the trades carry individually. Residential builders pulling permits for one- and two-family homes need a Dwelling Contractor credential for the business and a Dwelling Contractor Qualifier for the person who answers for it, and the qualifier certification requires a 12-hour approved course before application. That patchwork is a finance problem as much as an administrative one: a lapsed credential can stop a permit, a stopped permit stops a draw, and a stopped draw is a cash event. We keep the renewal calendar inside the finance function where someone will actually look at it.

Wisconsin's construction lien law rewards the organized and punishes everyone else. A subcontractor or supplier must serve its identification notice within 60 days of first furnishing labor or materials, and a late notice protects only the work performed after the owner receives it. A notice of intent must precede the lien by at least 30 days, and the claim must be filed within six months of last furnishing. Courts have treated those windows as fixed. We do not give legal advice. We put those dates on the billing calendar so your attorney is consulted before a deadline, not after.

Surety capacity in southeastern Wisconsin comes down to financial statements the underwriter believes: a WIP schedule that reconciles, consistent gross margins by job, working capital that does not vanish at year end, and an owner who can explain the numbers without a translator. Data-center and utility owners add prequalification, badging, and invoicing rules of their own. Our principal has managed mechanic's liens, claims, and litigation support coordination for multi-entity contractors and has built the lender and surety package that keeps the next bid from waiting on the last close. Our construction CFO page covers the mechanics.

In Milwaukee, trouble usually shows up in the same sequence. The line of credit is fully drawn in February and never comes back down. A customer's release schedule slips and the inventory bought for it does not. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier in Menomonee Falls moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP and goes quiet. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from savings for six months and calling it a bridge loan. None of that is terminal if someone takes charge of cash in the next two weeks.

We start with a 13-week cash forecast built from the actual receivables, the actual payables, the actual inventory, and the 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 arrive 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 current cycle is uneven here. Construction employment grew 3.2 percent in the year to July 2026 while the state shed manufacturing jobs, and the reasons cited were retirements, tariff uncertainty, and customers running with one foot on the brake. A tier-two supplier in Cudahy is resizing at the same time an electrical sub in Mount Pleasant is turning down work. Both need the same thing: real margin by job or by part, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly. One of them is about to discover that its largest customer has been its least profitable for three years, and a spreadsheet is the cheapest place to find that out.

Winter is the first line in the working-capital budget. Between December and March, site work, paving, roofing, and exterior trades lose days to cold, lake-effect snow, and short daylight, while payroll, rent, and equipment notes run on. Crews are kept on so they are still there in April, and the April pay application ends up carrying February's overhead. The structure that works is a cash forecast that prices the slow quarter in advance, a seasonal line sized to the trough rather than the average, and a service or maintenance base that bills through the cold. Summer bids should carry a winter productivity assumption. Most do not.

Industrial and data-center work brings a particular cash pattern. Hyperscale owners, utilities, and plant operators prequalify vendors, badge crews, hold retainage, and pay on approval chains that run through construction managers and lenders. A $4 million package in Racine County can require four months of financing before the first dollar arrives, and it will land on the contractual day and not an hour before. The utility itself is planning for a 3.9 gigawatt increase in demand over five years, which means substation, transmission, and generation work for the trades on the same terms. We build that curve before the bid, size the line to its peak, and put the 60-day notice deadline on the same calendar as the billing dates.

Tariffs and customer concentration are the quiet challenges for the region's suppliers. A machine shop or fabricator that serves two large manufacturers is a fine business until one of them pauses a program or reprices a contract to recover a tariff. Steel bought ahead of a duty is working capital that does not turn. We measure concentration by customer and by program, report inventory in days rather than dollars, price every quote with a current material cost instead of last year's, and build a growth plan that adds a second leg before the first one is tested. Behind that sits succession: many of the region's best shops are family businesses whose books were built by someone now retired, and the worst time to clean up a ledger is during diligence.

• Winter productivity loss and fixed overhead priced into bids and the cash forecast
• Dwelling Contractor credentials and trade licenses tracked inside the finance calendar
• Wisconsin 60-day identification notice and six-month lien filing built into billing
• Data-center, utility, and industrial project cash cycles financed before the bid
• Inventory bought ahead of tariffs measured in days and financed deliberately
• Customer and program concentration measured monthly and answered with a diversification plan
• Succession and sale readiness: reconciled statements, margin history, and concentration analysis