The RoleAs a Fractional CFO at AmbitionCFO, you are a peer-level executive to the owners and leadership teams you serve. You step into complex, high-stakes environments and immediately earn trust. You lead strategic financial conversations, challenge assumptions, bring clarity to ambiguity, and help entrepreneurs make better decisions faster.
This role requires judgment, composure, and the ability to influence leaders not just advise them.
You will own a portfolio of four to eight client engagements simultaneously. For each one, you are the financial leader in the room. The expectation is not that you’ll have every answer on day one. The expectation is that within ninety days, the owner of each business will say, “We make better, faster, more profitable decisions because of our CFO.”
What You'll OwnYou will lead the Financial Control Framework for every client in your portfolio our 90-day onboarding, 13-week cash forecast, gross-margin rebuild, pricing teardown, and monthly profit-and-cash operating rhythm. Specifically:
- Serve as the primary financial leader and trusted executive partner for a portfolio of growth-focused clients across construction, distribution, and professional services.
- Build and maintain the 13-week cash forecast and the rolling 12-month profit forecast for each client, and run the monthly leadership meeting that anchors decisions to those numbers.
- Lead the gross-margin rebuild job costing, work-in-progress, pricing teardown, and cost-of-delivery analysis until every client knows where they make money and where they don't.
- Translate complex financial data into clear, decision-grade insights tied to the owner's specific goals.
- Surface risks, tradeoffs, and opportunities before the client asks.
- Advise on capital planning, debt strategy, and acquisition financing when the conversation gets there.
- Challenge unrealistic plans thoughtfully and hold leadership accountable to execution.
- Ensure financial reporting and systems support decision-making, not just compliance.
- Participate in firm-building peer reviews, client reference calls, and occasional brand-building activity inside your network.
The Standard We Hold Our CFOs ToYou will be evaluated on how consistently you embody the following principles. These come directly from our values and they are not posters on a wall.
01
Owner's mindset.You treat each client business as if it were your own. You feel the cash, you defend the margin, and you lose sleep over what they lose sleep over.
02
Heart of a teacher.Financial acumen is useless if the client cannot apply it. We educate, explain, and empower until the owner can run the play without us.
03
Future first.History is an input. Clients pay us for the next twelve months, not the last twelve.
04
Rough right over precisely wrong.We work in a world of imperfect data. We deliver decision-grade financial intelligence, not audit-grade perfection and we move.
05
Speak human.No jargon, no acronyms, no hiding. If the client doesn’t get it, we failed not them.
06
Challenge with care.We are paid to be partners, not “yes” people. We deliver hard truths with empathy and without equivocation.
07
Bias for action.We measure ourselves by what gets done in the client’s business not the elegance of the model that explained it.
Requirements
- 20+ years of progressive experience in finance and/or operations, with 10+ years sitting in a true CFO seat (controller, accounting manager, and bookkeeper roles do not qualify on their own).
- Prior fractional or multi-client CFO experience is preferred but not required if your in-seat experience is deep.
- Demonstrated executive presence with founders, CEOs, and senior leadership teams.
- Proven ability to influence decisions, challenge thinking, and coach leaders without resorting to authority or title.
- Direct experience inside founder-led businesses in the $10M–$100M revenue range (construction, distribution, trades, professional services, or similar complex operating businesses).
- You have built, scaled, or fixed a business not just analyzed one from the outside.
- Comfort working with imperfect data, evolving systems, and entrepreneurial chaos.
- Emotionally steady, accountable, solution-oriented, and resilient under pressure.
- Authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship.
Results We Expect Within 12 Months
- Clients make faster, better-informed decisions. A clear financial point of view drives every leadership meeting in your portfolio.
- The financial narrative is owned end-to-end. P&L, cash, and strategy are aligned and clearly communicated to the owner and the leadership team.
- Cash is protected relentlessly. Runway is always known. Owners make cash-informed decisions, not just profit-based ones.
- Margin moves in the right direction. Every client in your portfolio has a measurable improvement in gross margin or cash conversion within twelve months.
- Plans convert into execution. Decisions have clear owners, timelines, and follow-through.
- The business is more scalable than you found it. Reporting, forecasting, and the financial operating system are stronger when you leave the room than when you walked in.
