A fractional CFO can improve financing by controlling three levers: extending repayment terms, lowering interest rates by proving strong financial controls, and maximizing funding amounts. Many businesses accept worse deals than they need to. A CFO's expertise helps negotiate better terms across banks, government programs, and private lenders.
Chapters
As someone who's gone through this many times, not only in my personal business, but helping as a cfo, supporting small to medium sized businesses, refinancing and obtaining financing from lenders, whether it's conventional lenders like the banks, whether it's larger government related grants funds, and whether or not it's going through private forms of lending. Understanding what lenders need, understanding how to provide them the information that puts your business in the best position to succeed with obtaining financing and also negotiating rates based on risk associated with the lenders. A CFO can come in, help you put together the package that is going to be required for you to be able to obtain this financing, and also can be a very key advocate to ensure not only that you get it, but that you get it at the greatest rates possible. Because there's a few, there's a few areas in financing that are really important. It's going to be your amortization period, which is how long it's going to be that you get to repay this loan. A good CFO is going to be able to advocate you to pay this over a longer period of time. Interest rates, interest rates, advocating for you to have the lowest interest rate possible, helping the financial lender understand how their risk is lowered by the controls that are in your business, including having an experienced CFO on staff. And then thirdly, is the amount of leverage or funding that you're going to get as part of either an acquisition or in a refinancing. A good CFO partner is going to be able to maximize the value of cash resources that you're going to get in any sort of financing package. Where typically a lot of people one don't get financing, they get lower amounts of funding, their repayment period is shorter and their interest rate is higher. All of those factors put great strain on the cash flow in a business. A good CFO partner like our fractional CFO service will allow you to optimize your cash flow related to getting the best financing packages available.
