Description

🔥 Excerpt
Founders love momentum—until complexity wrecks their cash position. I dig in with Group CFO Ryan Holden on building the financial visibility to scale with confidence.

⚡ TL;DR
If you’re still managing growth by gut and bank balance, you’re flying blind. Ryan breaks down the systems—90-day cash forecasts, segment reporting, and FP&A discipline—that let you hire, expand, and protect profit.

📄 Show Notes
I brought in Group CFO Ryan Holden because too many founders are running multi-million-dollar companies on instinct and daily balances. That works at $1M. It breaks at $5M. It’s dangerous at $10M+. Ryan’s specialty is stepping into that “we’ve outgrown our instincts” phase and installing the rails—clean reporting, 90-day cash forecasting, entity/location visibility, and decision-ready FP&A—so growth isn’t guesswork.

We unpack the rebuild that’s required every time the company doubles or triples. If you’re the bottleneck, fielding discounts off the cuff or teaching a bookkeeper to translate chaos into a P&L, this is your path out. Revenue can look great while profit is “meh” and cash is tight—until you segment by product, location, and customer and see exactly what’s dragging the average down.

We cover when to hire sales vs. ops vs. EA, how a fractional CFO who tightens the controller layer becomes the unlock from $5M to $20M+, and why the “insider–outsider” CFO view is priceless: close enough to your numbers to be useful, far enough from your org chart to be honest.

✅ Key Takeaways
• Complexity kills clarity. Each double/triple forces a rebuild—on purpose.
• Bank-balance management is a ceiling. Install rolling 90-day cash forecasts.
• Segment or stay blind: track by entity/location/product to see true winners.
• Hire in the right order; sometimes the EA or upgraded bookkeeping is the unlock.
• Finance must speak ops and sales; FP&A should drive action, not archives.
• Protect the core; say “no” before you chase channels that dilute margins.

👤 Bio
Ryan Holden is a Group CFO and Certified Management Accountant serving founder-led, service-driven companies in the lower middle market. He blends controller rigor with FP&A and operating insight to give CEOs clean books, clear forecasts, and decision-ready dashboards across multi-entity, multi-location environments.

🎁 Giveaway
Free Mini-Training + PDF: The Layers of Accounting & Finance for Founders
How to get it:
 1. Visit soundfinance.pro and book an intro call.
 2. Mention RPOW in the notes.
 3. Ryan will send the tutorial + PDF after the call so you can put it to work immediately.

🧭 Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
07:06 The Challenges of Growth and Rebuilding
14:55 The Importance of Clear Financial Visibility
27:52 The Insider–Outsider View of a CFO
34:44 Understanding the Health of the Business