PART-TIME CFOS
What company works out of one mailbox with one answering machine but has 18 different offices? The answer: Financial Managers of Cambridge.
The offices all belong to the clients of this company, which provides part-time help on a regular basis to small companies without a chief financial officer (CFO). According to president Bradlee Howe, Financial Managers employees fill in at companies that are large enough to require a CFO, yet too small to demand one on full time.
Howe's four employees each spend about one day a week conducting strategic financial planning, with each client. Discussing the financial implications of their business strategy, says Howe, "forces our clients to take some time out each week to look at the big picture:" Their typical company does between one million and five million dollars in sales per year and is so wrapped up in its manufacturing, retailing or other activity that "finance is almost incidental," Howe says.
One such example is the LaRonga Bakery in Somerville. According to President Michael Ronga, the company recently underwent a rapid expansion that forced it into a cash flow problem. He says Financial Managers came in, rewrote the agreement with the bank, managed to keep the creditors at bay, dealt with the payroll and brought a better sense of accurate projections for the future.
Howe says the company helps its clients oversee bookkeeping, manage cash, set budgets, develop and maintain relationships with financial sources and undergo cost analysis so as to understand which of the products make the best sense for them. His employees have backgrounds ranging from teaching high school English to working as an accountant and controller.
Howe, a 1969 Harvard Business School graduate, worked for 12 years at Harvard in positions ranging from general manager of Harvard Student Agencies to fund-raising to corporate relations at the business school. Feeling a desire to "establish credibility out of the ivory tower," he established a weekly paper, the Cambridge Express, which published for close to two years before it folded.
He joined Financial Managers in 1983 and bought its client base from his former partner soon after. Now, he travels some 500 miles a week, spending much of that time talking finance with clients over his car phone. About the only problem he has with the company now is that with tax time coming up he'll be doing more returns than the average accountant.
From Bostonia, January/February 1988
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