Fractional CFO · For founder-led companies
When was the last time your financial roadmap gave you real confidence?
The raise, the key hire, whether you can survive a soft quarter — think about the numbers you'd use to make those calls. Are you leaning on them, or leaning past them and trusting your gut because they never quite convinced you? A lot of very good founders are flying on instruments they don't fully believe.
Travis Callaway · Calgary, AB · remote across North America
The real before state
How it usually got this way
There's no shame in any of it. You've been the finance function — founder, product, sales, and also the person squinting at the cash position at eleven at night. Or you did the sensible thing and brought in a bookkeeper, or a junior hire, to take it off your plate.
And that helped, right up to a ceiling.
Because a bookkeeper reconciles and a junior fills in the model, but neither one can see the whole board. Neither one looks at your business, your market, and your next twelve months and says: here's the move.
So the roadmap stays a record of what happened. The gap between "the numbers exist" and "I trust the numbers" is small — right up until it decides something big.
The difference
An investor and a CFO, on the same person
The fix is simpler than a new system. It's a single pair of eyes that has been on both sides of the table.
Through your eyes — the CFO in the seat
Weekly treasury and cash forecasting, so you know your cash and your runway the way you know your revenue — without doing the math yourself at midnight. Senior ownership of the finance function, not another junior hire you have to manage.
Through your investors' eyes
A model built by someone who has judged hundreds of deals from the buy side and knows precisely what a sharp investor tests first. You see your business the way your investors do — before they ever see it at all.
Most founders get one lens. The whole thing is having both at once.
What you walk away with
Not a prettier dashboard. A roadmap you can lead from.
A financial roadmap you actually trust, built around the decisions you're actually facing:
What does cash look like if you close two deals instead of four?
What changes if you bring on a VP of Sales in Q2 instead of Q4?
Where do you stand if the raise you're planning for September slips to December?
You stop guessing at those answers. You stop walking into board meetings hoping no one asks the hard version of the question. You own the numbers — and you can show investors that you do.
The runway that wasn't
Certain about the runway. And wrong.
A founder came in certain about their runway. It was the load-bearing number in every plan they had. And it was wrong — not because they'd been careless, but because the number assumed money arrives when the invoice says it will, and it doesn't. A couple of the deals holding it up were wishes wearing the costume of forecasts.
Rebuilding it wasn't glamorous: week by week, real cash in, real cash out, the honest timing of everything. But the founder learned the true number across a table from someone on their side — with runway left to act — instead of discovering it live in a diligence call with an investor watching their face.
They reset the raise around the truth, and walked in without flinching.
The real number, early, from an ally. That's the job.
A real quote from a past founder or CEO will live here — the single biggest trust signal on the page.— Name, Title, Company · placeholder
What the engagement covers
Senior finance ownership, on a fractional retainer
For founder-led companies at $2M–$25M in revenue. One to three days a week, owning the model, the cash, the runway, and the fundraising numbers.
01
Fractional CFO
Financial model build or full rebuild, scenario planning across your next twelve months, weekly treasury and cash forecasting, board and investor reporting, and investor-ready models and fundraising support through the raise.
02
Investment due diligence
Investor-grade diligence on early-stage tech deals for funds and family offices — fixed-scope per deal or an ongoing retainer. A separate track from the founder work; by referral.
One to two active clients at a time. Not a tactic — just the reality of doing this work at the depth it requires.
If this is where you are
Start with a short form.
A few questions, maybe five minutes. It tells us both whether this fits before we go further — the first step asks almost nothing of you.
No commitment on either side. Just a conversation.
Reaching out from a fund or family office about due diligence?
travis@callawayfinance.com