Filling In As Interim CFO

Opportunity

At a food manufacturer, both the Controller and VP Finance found jobs closer to home after the plant had been relocated. There was nobody on staff who could fill in.  They had to move quickly to fill the gap.  The VP Finance had left a month before and the Controller was leaving shortly.  They needed someone who could pick up on things quickly and carry the ball for them.

Action

Despite only having about one day of transition time, we came in and covered what used to be two jobs. We re-engineered the finance area and eliminated the need for an internal head of IT. 

Result

The company was able to get by with just one person, a Corporate Controller, with less years of work experience than they had before, but well suited for the new structure.  We helped find the person for the company six months after we started and had finished the bulk of our re-engineering.  In addition to saving money on salaries in finance, we also drove down IT costs by eliminating the full time position with a part-time consultant.

Besides saving money on headcount, we implemented a number of other improvements.  Here are just a few.

• We changed how the company accounted for revenues under a supply agreement, which meant for more meaningful interim financial reporting and avoided the year end swings they typically had reported.
• We produced better reports out of the financial system, in particular better manufacturing reports, which helped the plant general manager continue to drive down operating costs.  
• This led to more competitive pricing against similar suppliers to a major customer of theirs.
• We revamped the financial reporting package and put in a one page dashboard to give a better handle on the business.  The owner liked the package so much that they intended to put features of it in place at other companies they owned.
• We added better product batch costing and product line reporting, which helped lead to better allocations of production across plants and decisions on different product lines.