Finance

Fractional CFO.
Real Financial Strategy.

Launch Industries is a Seattle, Washington finance partner for small and mid-sized businesses. We bring fractional CFO judgment, rolling cash forecasts, and decision-grade financial models into operations that have outgrown spreadsheets but aren't ready for a full-time hire.

Bookkeepers tell you what happened. Our finance team helps you decide what to do next. Pricing, hiring, capital raises, lease decisions, board updates: we sit in the room when the numbers matter.

What Our Finance Service Covers

Nine focus areas, one finance team. Pick the engagement that fits, or combine them into a full fractional CFO retainer.

Fractional CFO

Senior finance leadership on a part-time retainer. Strategic counsel, board prep, capital strategy, and ownership of the financial narrative without the cost of a full-time hire.

Cash Flow Forecasting

Rolling 13-week cash models and longer-horizon scenarios so you never get surprised by payroll, taxes, or seasonal dips. Updated weekly with actuals.

Budgeting & Reforecasting

Annual budget builds tied to operational drivers, then quarterly reforecasts that keep the plan honest as the year unfolds. Variance reporting included.

Board Reporting & Investor Decks

Tailored board packages, investor updates, and KPI dashboards that tell the story the way your audience needs to hear it. No reformatting Excel screenshots the night before.

Financial Modeling

Decision-grade models for hiring, expansion, pricing changes, new product lines, and acquisition scenarios. Built so you can stress-test assumptions yourself afterward.

Unit Economics & Gross Margin

Per-unit, per-customer, and per-product profitability analysis. We surface which lines actually carry the business and which are quietly bleeding cash.

Working Capital & AR/AP

AR aging cleanup, collections cadence, AP scheduling, and inventory turn optimization. Free up cash without taking on more debt.

Capital Raise Advisory

SBA loan packages, line-of-credit applications, equity raises, and bridge financing. We prep the materials, model the dilution, and sit beside you in lender or investor conversations.

M&A Due Diligence Support

Buy-side and sell-side diligence: quality-of-earnings prep, data room organization, working-capital pegs, and post-close integration planning for small to lower-middle-market deals.

How We Engage

A four-step engagement that's transparent at every stage, with deliverables you can hold us to.

Diagnostic

Two-week financial diagnostic. We review the last 24 months of financials, talk to operations, and deliver a written assessment: what's strong, what's exposed, and what the top three priorities should be.

Foundation Build

We close the gaps the diagnostic surfaced: cleaned chart of accounts, accurate accrual basis where needed, a working budget, and the first version of the cash model. This is the platform everything else runs on.

Monthly Cadence

Recurring rhythm: monthly close review, variance commentary, rolling forecast update, KPI dashboard refresh, and a thirty-minute leadership review. Predictable, calendared, never a surprise.

Strategic Projects

On top of the monthly cadence, we tackle the big decisions as they arrive: pricing changes, hiring plans, capital raises, leases, acquisitions, and exit prep. You get a CFO in the room when it counts.

Common Finance Use Cases

The patterns we see most often when small and mid-sized operators bring us in. If one of these sounds familiar, we've been there.

Outgrown the Spreadsheets

Founder finance hit its ceiling. The owner is making seven-figure decisions on a model held together with duct tape. We bring structure without flipping the whole org into ERP-land.

Past $1M in Revenue

The business crossed $1M and the old habits no longer scale. Cash gets tighter even as revenue grows. We rebuild the operating model, install accrual basics, and put a real forecast in place.

Margin Compression

Top line is fine, bottom line is shrinking. We dissect gross margin by product, customer, and channel, find the drag, and rebuild pricing or cost structure where the math supports it.

First SBA Loan Prep

Lender wants three years of clean financials, a debt-service coverage projection, and a use-of-funds narrative. We assemble the package, coach the conversation, and stay through underwriting.

Capital Raise Readiness

Preparing for a friends-and-family round, angel raise, or growth equity check. We build the model, the cap table scenarios, and the investor narrative so diligence doesn't catch you flat-footed.

Nonprofit Board Reporting

Boards expect functional expense breakdowns, restricted vs unrestricted views, and grant burn-down reporting. We build the package that satisfies the finance committee and the auditor.

Multi-Entity Consolidation

Two or more LLCs, shared overhead, intercompany loans, and a CPA who only sees year-end. We build consolidated financials and management views that match how you actually run the business.

Family Business Succession

Generation transition, partial buyout, or earn-out structure. We model the deal, document the financial story, and bridge the gap between owner intuition and the next operator's data needs.

Industries We Know

Vertical-specific accounting quirks, KPIs, and compliance considerations we've already learned the hard way.

Cannabis Operators

280E tax exposure modeling, cost-of-goods classification that holds up under IRS review, banking workarounds with cannabis-friendly institutions, and multi-license entity structures with intercompany accounting.

Food & Hospitality

Prime cost tracking, gross margin by daypart, location-level P&L for multi-unit operators, labor percentage benchmarks, and menu-engineering analysis tied to the actual COGS, not menu guesses.

Professional Services

Utilization and realization rate analysis, project-level profitability, retainer modeling, write-down tracking, and forecasting that ties hiring decisions to confirmed pipeline.

Nonprofits

Restricted vs unrestricted fund accounting, grant burn-down tracking, functional expense allocation, and QuickBooks setups that survive a Form 990 audit without recreating reports by hand.

What We Replace, And With What

A few before-and-after patterns we see across our finance clients. Most of these can be fixed inside the first 60 days.

Monthly P&L delivered late, then ignored

Live dashboard refreshed weekly, with variance commentary in plain English.

Gut-feel pricing decisions

Unit-economics-driven pricing model with breakeven and contribution-margin views.

Surprise cash crunches every quarter

Rolling 13-week cash forecast updated each Monday, with named risks flagged early.

Generic Excel deck pasted into the board read-out

Tailored board reporting package with KPIs, narrative, and pre-circulated drafts.

Year-end scramble to answer lender or CPA questions

Continuously audit-ready books, with documentation and reconciliations done as you go.

Owner deciding on hires from intuition

Hiring model that ties each new role to revenue, gross margin, and payback period.

When to Hire Fractional vs Full-Time

For most small businesses under roughly $10 million in revenue, a fractional CFO is the right shape. Full-time CFO compensation in major US markets runs $200K to $350K base plus equity, and the workload often doesn't justify it. Twenty to forty hours a month of senior finance attention covers the close review, the forecast, the board package, and the strategic projects with margin to spare.

The trigger to move toward full-time tends to be a combination of three things: revenue past roughly $15 million, real complexity (multiple entities, international operations, regulated industry with a heavy reporting burden), and a capital event on the horizon (institutional raise, planned exit, public-company prep) where the CFO needs to be in every room every day.

Most of our clients sit comfortably in fractional territory for years. When the right time comes to bring finance in-house, we help with the search, the handoff, and the onboarding so the new CFO inherits a clean stack instead of an archaeological dig.

Security & Discretion

Financial data is among the most sensitive a company holds. We work under mutual NDAs by default, store credentials in vaults (1Password Business or your existing secrets manager), and follow least-privilege access on every accounting and banking system we touch. SSO and two-factor are enabled wherever the vendor supports them.

We keep a deliberate separation between the bookkeeping team and the CFO team on any given client. The team booking transactions isn't the team reviewing the close. That segregation of duties matters for audit readiness, for fraud prevention, and for the simple fact that good review only happens when one person hasn't done both sides of the work.

For capital raises, acquisitions, and other transactional work, we operate as if every document is going into a data room: clear naming conventions, audit trails, version control, and a written record of who saw what and when. Discretion is the default, not an upgrade.

Why Small Businesses Choose Launch for Finance

Four reasons clients keep us on retainer after the first close cycle ships.

Fractional Pricing

Senior CFO-level judgment at a fraction of a full-time hire. You get the experience without the all-in cost of a full-time executive, and you can flex the engagement up or down as the business changes.

Multi-Industry Depth

Cannabis, food service, professional services, nonprofits. Each has its own accounting quirks and KPIs. We've shipped in all of them and recognize the patterns instead of learning on your dime.

Implementation, Not Dashboards

We don't deliver a 60-page strategy memo and disappear. We build the model, run the close, write the variance commentary, sit in the board meeting, and stick around for the follow-through.

Paired with Bookkeeping

If your books aren't ready for CFO-level work, we can put our bookkeeping team on it or coordinate with yours. The whole stack stays aligned so the finance work isn't built on sand.

Need clean books underneath the CFO work? Our bookkeeping team handles the close, the reconciliations, and the data layer so the finance work sits on a foundation that doesn't wobble.

Frequently Asked

Finance Service FAQ

When do I actually need a CFO?

Common trigger points: revenue past $2 million, more than one entity, a capital event on the horizon (loan, raise, sale), margin compression you can't explain, or a board or lender that wants more sophisticated reporting than your bookkeeper produces. Below those thresholds, a strong bookkeeper plus a part-time controller often does the job.

How is finance work priced?

Finance work is billed through our standard pricing plans — typically the Monthly Flex Plan for ongoing retainer work or the Dynamic Hourly Flex Plan for project-based work like a model build or capital-raise prep. See the Pricing page for the full plan options. We give a written proposal after a free 30-minute discovery call.

Do you replace my bookkeeper or work alongside?

Almost always alongside. Bookkeeping is the data layer; finance work sits on top of it. If your bookkeeping isn't clean enough to forecast from, we'll say so and either help you tune it up or introduce you to our bookkeeping team. See the /services/bookkeeping page for that side of the work.

Do you handle taxes?

No. Tax filing, tax planning, and IRS representation belong with a licensed CPA or EA, and we keep that line bright. We partner with CPAs (and can introduce you to ones we trust) and we build the financial models, projections, and entity-level reporting that make their work easier and cheaper.

Do you build the model, or just review one I already have?

Both. About two-thirds of engagements involve building a model from scratch because the existing one was inherited, brittle, or never finished. The other third are review-and-rebuild engagements where there's a starting point we can salvage. Either way, we hand off a model your team can maintain.

Can you support a capital raise or SBA loan?

Yes. We assemble the financial package (historicals, projections, debt-service coverage, use of funds), prepare the data room, coach you through lender or investor questions, and stay in the conversation through close. We don't broker deals or take placement fees, so our advice stays aligned with you.

How do you handle cannabis 280E?

We model 280E exposure explicitly, classify COGS aggressively but defensibly under IRC 471, structure multi-license entities to isolate non-plant-touching activity where legally appropriate, and coordinate with your cannabis CPA on filing positions. We also help with banking workarounds and cash-handling controls.

What's the cadence of work?

A typical retainer client gets a weekly forecast refresh, a monthly close review with variance commentary, a quarterly reforecast and KPI deep-dive, and ad-hoc strategic project work as decisions come up. Touchpoints are calendared so nothing slips, and you always know what's coming next.

Do you work with companies under $500K in revenue?

Sometimes, when the work is project-based (model build, raise prep, financial cleanup) rather than ongoing CFO retainer. Under that revenue level a full CFO retainer is usually overkill. We'll tell you honestly if you're better served by a bookkeeper and a strong CPA at this stage.

Do you sign NDAs?

Yes, always. We sign mutual NDAs as a default at the start of any engagement, and we operate under access controls that limit who on the team sees what. For capital raises and M&A work, we treat every conversation as confidential by default.

Ready for a Real Finance Partner?

A free 30-minute discovery call. We'll listen, ask a few sharp questions about your numbers, and tell you the two or three things we'd tackle first. No deck, no pitch.