Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Minneapolis-St. Paul Businesses

Minneapolis-St. Paul is a middle-market town. It has more Fortune 500 headquarters per capita than almost any metro in the country, and beneath them sits a deep layer of privately held suppliers, contractors, distributors, and services firms that grew up serving them. Those companies tend to have good operations and thin finance departments, because for 20 years the customer paid on time and the bank was patient. Both of those conditions have gotten less reliable, and a $20 million company that has never needed a real forecast now needs one.

The symptoms are consistent. The controller has been there 22 years and is retiring, and nobody else knows how the close works. The ERP was implemented in 2011 and the reports come out of a spreadsheet someone built to work around it. Margins by product line or by job have never been calculated because the company was always profitable in total. The bank line is renewed annually on a handshake and the new relationship manager wants a covenant package. A second generation is taking over and discovering that the balance sheet has three entities, two of which exist for reasons nobody remembers.

The fix follows a sequence. Assess what is true about cash, margin, 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 a retirement. Then transition it to your team or a full-time hire when the company can support one. That is how a Twin Cities company built by one generation gets handed to the next without the accounting department becoming the reason the handoff fails.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In the Twin Cities that means mechanical and electrical contractors in Eagan and Burnsville, general contractors in Plymouth and Maple Grove, site and utility contractors along the Highway 169 and 494 corridors, building-materials distributors and lumberyards in the collar counties, precision manufacturers in the northern suburbs, medical-device suppliers on the I-494 strip, and professional-services firms in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul whose largest clients have started asking for fixed-fee bids.

The situations repeat. The company is profitable every year and short of cash every March. The bank wants a borrowing base and a covenant certificate, and the controller has never prepared one. A surety has capped the bonding program because the WIP schedule does not reconcile. A data-center subcontract is on the table and the owner does not know whether the company can fund the mobilization. A founder is 68 and the succession plan is a sentence. Or a customer that represented 40 percent of revenue has moved the work to a national vendor and the cost structure has not noticed yet.

You should call someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, a tax return, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We coordinate with the people who do those things and we stay in our lane. And if what you actually need is a good bookkeeper and a bank meeting rather than a CFO, we will say so on the first call, at no charge, because it is faster for both of us.

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 the Twin Cities that judgment is applied to specific problems. How large should the line of credit be to carry a site contractor from the November shutdown to the April thaw without a panic? What does Minnesota Paid Leave, which took effect January 1, 2026, with a 0.88 percent premium split between employer and employee, do to a labor burden that was priced in 2025? Should a $12 million electrical contractor pursue data-center work in Rosemount or Farmington when the local political calendar can pause a project after the mobilization?

We answer those questions with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually in the same week. The working tools are a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a monthly package with margin by job or product line, a lender relationship that is managed rather than endured, and a seasonal plan that puts the winter trough in the forecast in July rather than discovering it in January. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Lakeville and Blaine.

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 the Twin Cities is scoped in the engagement letter, and one-time cleanup and software are separate unless expressly included.

A controller makes the numbers true and on time. Ours close the month within 10 business days, keep a job-cost or product-line ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety can read, run receivables and payables on a published calendar, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a contractor that includes retainage tracking, change-order billing, and percentage-of-completion adjustments. For a distributor it means inventory that ties to the count, gross margin by line, and a borrowing base the bank can audit.

The Twin Cities have a specific controller problem: the person who has done the job for two decades is leaving, and the process lives in their head. Replacing them from a market where the large employers hire the same accountants is slow and expensive. A fractional controller solves that by running the function during the transition and writing it down, so the eventual hire inherits a close calendar, a reconciled ledger, and a documented process rather than a binder of sticky notes. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, and we have implemented reporting on top of older ERPs that nobody wants to replace this year.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written on day one, the deliverables are the same every month, and the cash position can be 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.

Minnesota licenses residential building contractors and remodelers through the Department of Labor and Industry, funds a Contractor Recovery Fund through those licenses, and licenses several trades, including electrical and plumbing, at the state level with their own bond and insurance requirements. Commercial general contracting is not licensed by the state. None of that decides your bonding capacity. A surety does, on the strength of a WIP schedule that reconciles, gross margins by job that hold, working capital that is real, and an owner who can explain the numbers. We build that package and keep it current so the spring bid season does not wait on the winter close.

Minnesota's lien law runs on two clocks that a busy office can miss. A subcontractor or supplier without a direct contract with the owner generally must serve a pre-lien notice within 45 days of first furnishing labor or materials, and on residential projects of one to four units the prime contractor must put the statutory notice in the contract or deliver it within 10 days. The lien statement itself must be recorded and served within 120 days of last furnishing. We put both deadlines in the job setup, so the notice goes out with the first invoice and the 120-day date is visible on every aging report. Whether to file is your attorney's call. Making sure the option still exists is ours.

The Twin Cities construction season is the real financial constraint. Exterior work, site work, paving, and foundations compress into the months between thaw and freeze, which means a contractor earns most of its margin in seven months and pays for twelve. The winter is not idle: interior work, service, and pre-season buying continue, and the equipment and the line of credit do not pause. We build the seasonal curve into the forecast, size the credit line to the February trough, and plan the pre-season material buy against the cash that will actually be there.

Trouble in the Twin Cities usually arrives in late winter. The line was drawn to the limit in October to finish the season, the final pay applications are stuck in a county or a general contractor's approval chain, payroll for the office staff continues, and the equipment lender wants its February payment. Then payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supplier moves the account to COD before the spring buy. The surety asks for a year-end WIP and does not like it. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding the company from personal savings since Christmas.

We start with a 13-week cash 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 2026 construction labor decline created a second kind of trouble. A contractor that lost crews in the first quarter is carrying backlog it cannot staff, and the penalty clauses in the contracts do not care why. That company needs a realistic production schedule, a conversation with its general contractors before the liquidated damages start, and a cash forecast that reflects the revenue it can actually earn rather than the revenue it signed. One of these companies will discover that its best customer was never profitable once the labor was priced correctly, and it is better to learn that in a spreadsheet.

Winter is a balance-sheet event. Frost in the metro typically arrives in mid to late November and holds through April, and the building code requires footings and utility lines below a frost depth of about four feet. For a site, utility, paving, or foundation contractor that is a five-month gap in revenue with no gap in fixed cost. We model the seasonal cash curve explicitly, negotiate equipment payment schedules that match it where the lender will allow, and push the pre-season material buy into a supplier credit line rather than the operating line.

Labor cost has a new line in 2026. Minnesota Paid Leave premiums began January 1 at 0.88 percent of covered wages, split evenly between employer and employee, with a lower 0.66 percent rate for employers of 30 or fewer. On its own the number is small. On top of state and local sick-leave rules, minimum wage indexing, and a construction labor pool that shrank in the first quarter, it is one more reason a bid priced from last year's labor burden is wrong. We keep the burden schedule current and put it in every estimate.

The data-center wave is the metro's largest opportunity and its least predictable. The first hyperscale campus is finishing in Rosemount, a second developer has proposed a 343-acre campus in Farmington that residents have sued to block, and Eagan has paused large-scale data centers entirely. A mechanical or electrical contractor that staffs up for that work needs a forecast with a scenario in which the project pauses after mobilization, and a contract that pays for the mobilization either way. We build both before the bid goes out.

• Seasonal cash curve from thaw to freeze modeled into credit lines, equipment payments, and material buys
• Minnesota Paid Leave and local sick-leave rules built into the labor burden on every bid
• Data-center project risk stress-tested with pause scenarios and mobilization protection
• Pre-lien notice at 45 days and lien statement at 120 days tracked from job setup
• Surety capacity supported by a WIP schedule that reconciles to the ledger
• Controller succession handled with a documented, transferable close process
• Second-generation transitions supported with entity cleanup and financials a bank and a family can read