See
Week one
The financial X-ray. We open the books, build the profit tree, and find where cash is actually going. You get written findings and a roadmap with dollars attached to each item — not a lecture on your balance sheet.
Fractional CFO advisory
When the P&L says you made money and the account says otherwise, another report won't help. You need someone who can tell you why it's happening and what to do about it — every month, not once a year.
The gap
Most owner-operated businesses outgrow their bookkeeper long before they can justify a full-time CFO at $200,000 a year. So the decisions that actually move money — pricing, hiring, borrowing, taking money out — get made on instinct, in the gap between the two.
That gap is the whole job. Fractional means the seat gets filled without the salary.
The engagement
A deliberate sequence. Each step earns the next one, and you know what you're getting before it starts.
The financial X-ray. We open the books, build the profit tree, and find where cash is actually going. You get written findings and a roadmap with dollars attached to each item — not a lecture on your balance sheet.
We fix what's leaking, in the order worth the most to you: pricing and margin, cash timing, spending controls, owner compensation, debt. You approve the order. We do the work with you.
A standing monthly seat at your table: a rolling cash forecast, a scorecard of the few numbers that actually drive your business, and a working session where decisions get made while there's still time to change the outcome.
Who this is for
Deep experience in three industries where the numbers behave differently than the textbook says:
Entity structures that cost more to run than they save. Depreciation left on the table. Commission treated like a paycheck.
Job costing that tells the truth. Work-in-progress reporting, over- and under-billing, and knowing which jobs made money before the year closes.
Deposits that tie out, overhead you can benchmark, and a partner compensation formula that still matches who's doing the work.
The pattern holds across industries: the owner is the last person to find out what the numbers were trying to say.
The difference
Most owners are told to hire three people who never speak to each other: someone for the books, someone for the return, someone for the retirement plan. The decisions that matter most sit exactly where those three overlap — how you pay yourself, how you hold the entity, what a good year means for next April.
Edward L. Ethington holds all three credentials and has spent more than twenty years on all three sides of that table.
The bottom line
A short call to hear what's going on, tell you honestly whether this is the right help, and point you somewhere better if it isn't. No cost and no pitch deck.
Book a fit call