Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Orlando Businesses

Orlando's economy is built on large owners who buy from small companies. A theme park, a hotel operator, a hospital system in Lake Nona, and a public convention center each have their own procurement portal, their own payment terms, and their own idea of when a month ends. A $12 million mechanical contractor working for all four is really running four billing systems on one bookkeeper. The invoices go out late, in the wrong format, or with the wrong lien waiver attached, and the money arrives 20 days later than it should.

The rest of the pattern is familiar. Receivables from a hospitality general contractor stretch to 75 days while the line of credit carries payroll. Change orders are performed on a resort renovation and never billed because the owner's representative changed twice. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and receives a spreadsheet with a tab named Final v3. And every construction accountant in Central Florida who is any good already has an offer from a resort finance office at a salary a $10 million subcontractor cannot match.

The fix is a sequence, not a hire. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, and debt. Clean up the ledger until the numbers can be believed by a lender and a surety. Stabilize the weekly cash cycle and the monthly close. Document the process so it survives without us. Then transition it to your team. That is how a $6 million company in Sanford becomes a $20 million company without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Central Florida that means general contractors on hotel, resort, and medical work along International Drive and in Lake Nona, electrical contractors and HVAC contractors serving the attractions and the convention corridor, plumbing contractors following the production builders into Clermont, St. Cloud, and Winter Garden, site and utility contractors on the industrial pads in Osceola County, and the building-materials distributors that supply all of them. We also serve home-services companies, hospitality vendors, and professional-services firms in Winter Park and Lake Mary.

The situations repeat. The owner approves every check and has no forecast past next Friday. The controller left for a resort company. The bank wants monthly reporting and a WIP schedule, and both are late. A surety has capped the bond line because the last WIP showed under-billings nobody could explain. Revenue doubled in two years on the strength of one park expansion and the close did not keep up. Or hurricane season is three weeks away and nobody has modeled what a closed park does to a vendor's October.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We work beside the people who do those things and hand them cleaner books. If your plan is to hire a full-time CFO and hope the ledger cleans itself, we will talk you out of it on the first call, 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 practice that is a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a bank relationship that is managed rather than endured, bid decisions made from job-margin data instead of the superintendent's confidence, and a monthly package that says where the money went and where it is going. The national fractional CFO page covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Apopka and Kissimmee.

Central Florida lenders know the tourism cycle and they price it. A contractor whose top three customers are all hospitality owners will be asked what happens when visitation dips, and the answer needs to be a number. A subcontractor considering a convention-center package sized at half its annual revenue needs to know, before signing, whether it can fund 90 days of labor and material ahead of the first payment. Those are CFO questions. We answer them with a model, a bank conversation, and a decision, usually inside the same week.

Engagements start at $3,500 per month for a Fractional CFO and $8,500 per month for an Operating CFO who owns the finance function day to day. CFO Advisory starts at $5,000, 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, and urgency. One-time cleanup, software, and travel to Florida are separate unless expressly included.

A controller's job is to make the numbers true and on time. Our fractional controller closes the month within 10 business days, keeps a job-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produces a WIP schedule a surety can read, runs receivables and payables on a calendar, and reconciles every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a contractor that includes retainage tracking by customer, change-order billing, lien waivers matched to payments, and percentage-of-completion adjustments. For a service company it includes revenue by contract and technician productivity by truck.

In Orlando the hard part is not the work. It is keeping the person who does it. The resorts, the hospital systems, and the simulation and defense firms around the University of Central Florida all hire accountants at scale, and they pay more than a $9 million contractor can. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a written procedure instead of a rumor. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written down on day one and the deliverables are the same every month: financial statements, job-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.

Florida regulates contractors at the state level through the Construction Industry Licensing Board, and the license depends in part on the qualifier's personal finances. The Board looks for a FICO-derived credit score of at least 660 and no unsatisfied judgments. A qualifier who falls short can still be licensed by posting a bond or letter of credit, $20,000 for Division I licenses and $10,000 for Division II, halved after a Board-approved financial-responsibility course. The owner's personal credit and the company's books end up in the same file, and a construction CFO watches both.

The lien statute is the collections department's real calendar. A subcontractor or supplier without a contract with the owner must serve a Notice to Owner within 45 days of first furnishing, and before the owner's final payment to the contractor, or the lien right is gone. A claim of lien must be recorded within 90 days of the last day of work. On a resort renovation with a dozen subs, the paperwork discipline is the difference between a receivable and a write-off. We put the notice in job setup and the 90-day clock on the collections calendar, and your construction attorney handles any claim.

Florida's sales tax rules treat a contractor performing a real property improvement as the consumer of the materials, paying tax to the supplier and not charging the customer tax on the finished work. The line blurs for a contractor that also sells and installs fixtures that do not become part of the building, which is common in hospitality fit-out. We do not give tax advice. We make sure the contract form and the job setup capture what your CPA needs, and we ask the CPA before the first invoice goes out rather than after the audit notice arrives.

Trouble in Central Florida tends to arrive in the same order. The line of credit is fully drawn by spring and never comes back down. Payroll taxes slip a quarter. A supply house in Apopka moves you to COD. The surety asks for an updated WIP schedule and goes quiet after reading it. By the time the bank asks for a meeting, the owner has been funding payroll from savings for months and calling it a bridge. None of that is fatal if someone takes control of cash in the next two weeks.

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 Florida banks have workout groups that have seen every version of this and prefer 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 new. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The current cycle is mixed. Industrial vacancy rose to 10.2 percent at midyear 2026 after four years in which more than 20 million square feet was delivered, while the convention center, the airport, and the hospital campuses keep bidding work. International visitation fell 2.4 percent in 2025 even as the total set a record. A site contractor that staffed up for speculative warehouses in Osceola County and an electrical sub turning down hotel work need the same thing: a real margin by job, a cash forecast that goes past next Friday, and the discipline to stop taking work that loses money slowly.

Customer concentration in Orlando has a specific shape: a handful of very large owners. A vendor or contractor that does 40 percent of its revenue with one resort operator has a good customer and a bad balance sheet, because that owner sets the payment terms, the rate, and the schedule, and can pause a program in a bad quarter without notice. We measure concentration every month, model what a 90-day pause in the largest account does to cash, and keep the bank informed before it asks. The goal is to make sure the customer cannot fire you by accident.

Hurricane season lands differently here than on the coast. Orlando is inland, but a storm that closes the parks and the airport for three days closes every vendor that serves them, and a season with a near miss still produces material delays, insurance surcharges, and a labor market where every electrician in the state has three offers. We build a storm scenario into the 13-week cash forecast in June, with a plan for the week when the trucks do not roll and payroll still does.

Growth is running to the counties, not the core. Osceola and Lake are among the fastest-growing counties in Florida while Orange and Seminole saw domestic outflows in 2025, and international migration supplied 82 percent of the region's growth. For a plumbing contractor following the production builders into St. Cloud and Clermont, that means draw schedules that pay by phase rather than by month, and a labor pool that depends on policy nobody in Kissimmee controls. We model the draw calendar against payroll before the first lot starts, and we price the labor risk instead of hoping it away.

• Large-owner customer concentration measured monthly and stress-tested against a 90-day pause
• Multiple general-contractor billing formats, retainage rules, and lien waivers run from one process
• Notice to Owner served inside 45 days and the 90-day lien clock tracked with collections
• Storm-week shutdown and recovery surge built into the June cash forecast
• Production-builder draw schedules in Osceola and Lake counties modeled against payroll
• Real property improvement versus equipment sale treatment captured in job setup for the CPA
• Competition for accountants from resorts and hospital systems answered with a documented, transferable process