Twelve Years of Running a Fractional CFO Practice. Twelve Things I Got Wrong.
Autumn Term, Lesson 8. Twelve years of running a fractional CFO practice, and twelve things I got wrong along the way.
WrightCFO turns twelve on 31 October. We’re a fractional CFO practice — eleven Chartered Accountants, working with founder-led businesses across the UK, mostly somewhere between £1m and £10m of revenue, and occasionally a good deal larger.
The short version
- A fractional CFO is most valuable at around one day a week. At three or four days, the independent outside view that clients pay for starts to erode.
- Agree at the start that a fractional CFO will sometimes deliver unwelcome news, and that this is the point of the role.
- Some businesses asking for a CFO actually need a financial controller first: reconciliations, systems and process.
- Fractional is not a cheaper substitute for a full-time CFO. Even large groups with their own CFO use one for an independent view.
- A fractional CFO works better as part of a firm that shares problems than as a lone individual.
- Lessons from twelve years: write payment terms into every contract, act early on warning signs, and don’t waste money on paid advertising.
I could write about what’s gone right. There’s a fair amount of it. But I’ve just spent seven weeks writing about companies where the number was sitting there in the accounts and nobody said it out loud, so it would be a bit rich to finish by telling you how well it’s all gone.
Twelve years. Twelve things I got wrong.
1. Three days a week isn’t fractional. It’s a part-time job.
This one costs me money to say, so I’ll say it first.
When a fractional CFO starts working three or four days a week inside a business, something happens that nobody warns you about. You stop being the outside voice. You become part of the wallpaper. You get pulled into the politics, you learn who isn’t speaking to whom, and it starts to matter to you. And the thing you were hired for — the ability to sit opposite a founder and say this isn’t working. The reason is it gets harder every single month. Because you’re now an employee in all but name. And employees don’t say that.
The entire value of an independent view is that it stays independent. Frequency just erodes it.
One day a week. Four days a month. That’s where the work is sharpest. I’ll go heavier for a defined piece of work, but I now turn down open-ended three-day-a-week arrangements, and I turn them down more often than my invoicing would like.
2. I made the exact mistake I’m paid to find.
One client, in twelve years, has never paid us.
International group. Big name, big numbers, based abroad. I looked at the size of them and decided we were safe, and on that basis I let three or four months of work go out of the door unpaid. Then they went into liquidation, in a jurisdiction where chasing it was somewhere between difficult and pointless.
Unhedged credit exposure to a single overseas customer, unmonitored, on the strength of the name. If a client showed me that, I’d tell them to fix it that week.
It got worse. I had an arrangement with my consultants that they were paid when the client paid. It was understood. It was not written down anywhere. And the first time it was ever tested, the consultant on that job was owed several months of her own money, her father was a director of her company, and he came after me for it — correctly. She’d done the work. She was owed. The fact that I hadn’t been paid was my problem, not hers, and the structure that made it look like her problem was one I’d built.
I paid her out of money I didn’t have. It was a horrible few months.
It’s in the contracts now. All of them. That clause exists because of one client, one liquidation and one very uncomfortable phone call, and it is the single most useful thing on this list.
3. We gave a client news he didn’t want, and he ended the contract.
We picked up that a client’s revenue recognition was wrong, ahead of their first audit. Correcting it pulled a tax liability forward into the year it actually belonged in. Not more tax. The same tax, in the right year.
The owner was furious. He ended the contract.
Our CFO was right, and the auditors were always going to make him do it — we just got there first and told him for free. But being right isn’t the same as being welcome.
There’s a second version of this. Reporting into a board of trustees, one of our CFOs found errors that were fairly fundamental and said so. That didn’t land brilliantly either.
In both cases our CFO did exactly what we’re there to do, and did it well. The message was right, the timing was right, and it was delivered with a good deal more care than the reaction suggested.
What was missing was upstream of them, and that part is mine. I hadn’t set either client up to expect it. Nobody had said, at the point of signing, there will come a day when we tell you something you don’t want to hear, and that day is the reason you’re paying us. Without that conversation at the start, honest advice arrives out of nowhere and lands like an accusation.
So it isn’t a lesson about delivery. It’s a lesson about what you agree before there’s anything difficult to say. We have that conversation now, at the beginning, every time.
4. I saw it in month one and left in month four.
Different client. A family business, and within a few weeks there were signals I didn’t like — the way money moved, the gap between what the owner was spending on himself and what the company could actually afford, the general direction of travel.
I saw it early. We parted ways months later.
I used to think the mistake was taking him on, but I don’t think you can always tell at the pitch. The mistake was the distance between the first indication and the decision. Everything I learned in those extra months, I already knew in the first one.
5. I built the business for people who couldn’t pay for it.
I started out convinced our market was startups. They can’t afford a full-time CFO, so they’ll want a fractional one. Watertight logic, apart from the part where they also can’t afford a fractional one.
So we built things they could actually buy: an hourly CFO service, and fixed-price pieces of work — a business plan reviewed, a financial model built for an investment pitch. That opened a door that “engage a fractional CFO” never would have.
6. Some people asking for a CFO need a financial controller.
This took me an embarrassingly long time to spot. Someone would come to us asking for strategic financial leadership, and two conversations in it was clear the actual problem was that nothing was reconciled, the systems didn’t talk to each other and nobody could produce a reliable number.
That isn’t a CFO problem. That’s a controller problem — systems, process, automation, discipline.
So we launched a fractional controller service, run by Kadia Barry (FCCA). Clean-ups, first audit prep, systems integration. It’s now some of the most useful work we do, and it exists because we finally listened to what people were describing rather than what they were asking for.
7. Fractional doesn’t mean “can’t afford a proper one”.
I let that assumption sit unchallenged for years, and it kept us small in our own heads.
We now work with a private equity-backed group turning over more than a billion, doing an independent interrogation of a group-wide budget alongside their in-house finance team. They don’t lack the money for a full-time CFO. They have one. What they wanted was somebody from outside the building who had no career to protect inside it.
That’s not a discount version of anything. It’s a different product, and I spent too long selling it as a compromise.
8. I was running a list. I should have been running a firm.
After lockdown, everyone became a fractional something.
I had a distribution list for open roles that had started off discerning and quietly got out of hand — over a hundred fractional CFOs on it, and I no longer knew most of them. I couldn’t vouch for their work. I was effectively running a recruitment desk with no quality control and calling it a practice.
In January 2024 I stopped. I went to the ten people I knew were good — worked with them, seen the reviews, trusted them — and said: let’s not be a list. Let’s be a firm.
It changed everything. It raised our standard immediately, and it’s the reason the next one is possible at all.
9. A fractional CFO working alone is a worse CFO.
I believed for a long time that this was a solo profession. One experienced person, one business, sorted.
It isn’t, and that’s how the Hive Mind started. (I thought of the name watching Stranger Things, which I’m told is not the usual origin story for a professional methodology.)
We meet weekly. We bring problems to each other. A client is allocated one CFO, but more than once a problem has genuinely been solved by eleven of them, because it went round the room first. Eleven careers’ worth of experience beats one, every time, and I don’t know why more practices don’t do it.
10. Every pound I spent on advertising was wasted.
Not most of it. All of it.
A stand at the business show at ExCeL cost me thousands, plus a speaker slot. It brought in a stream of people who wanted jobs, not a single one who wanted a CFO.
Then paid editorial. I was sold impressive-sounding readership numbers by more than one publication, including The Times. Return: nothing I could measure or trace.
I don’t pay for advertising now. I write, regularly, about things I actually know, and I try to show people what we can do rather than tell them. And the biggest single source of new client enquiries today is AI search — people asking an assistant who they should talk to, and being pointed at us. Twelve years in, that was not on my bingo card.
11. Not everything works, and you have to keep going anyway.
A book, self-published on Amazon, which was a pile of old blog posts bundled together with no editing worth the name. It was awful. My uncle bought twelve copies, bless him. Nobody else bought any at all. Thank God!
Twelve copies. It’s the only twelve in this article I didn’t plan.
There was also an e-book about cashflow, which managed to be even less successful, and the MicroCFO — which I still think is a good idea and will probably try again when the timing’s better.
I list these because the things that worked — the hourly service, the fixed-price work, the controller service — came out of exactly the same habit that produced the ones that didn’t. You don’t get to run only the successful experiments.
12. Doing it alone doesn’t work. For me either.
I spend a lot of time telling founders they shouldn’t be carrying it on their own, which is easy advice to give and harder to take.
The team is the first part of the answer. Genuinely collaborative, genuinely supportive, and I don’t take it for granted.
The second part is a group I sit in every Wednesday morning — the SME Growth Cohort, run by Graham Roberts. Business owners growing businesses, all with a tech bent, all of us further into using AI in our own operations than most. I look forward to it every week and I have never once come out without something I could apply that day.
Twelve years has taught me that the loneliest bit of running a business isn’t the work. It’s not having anywhere to take the decision you’re unsure about.
Most businesses sign off next year’s budget in the next six weeks. If yours is going to be signed off without anyone independent in the room, that’s the conversation worth having.
Thirty minutes, and nothing for you to send me beforehand. If we get to the end of it and you don’t need us, I’ll tell you. After everything above, you’d hope so.
You can book a slot directly with me here.
Frequently asked questions
What is a fractional CFO?
A fractional CFO is an experienced chief financial officer who works with a business part-time, typically a set number of days a month, rather than as a full-time employee. They provide strategic financial leadership, such as budgeting, forecasting, board reporting, fundraising and exit preparation, at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. More on what fractional CFO leadership looks like.
How many days a week should a fractional CFO work?
In our experience the work is sharpest at around one day a week, or four days a month. More time can make sense for a defined project, but open-ended arrangements of three or more days a week tend to erode the independent view that makes a fractional CFO valuable.
What is the difference between a fractional CFO and a financial controller?
A fractional CFO focuses on strategy and decision-making: where the business is heading and how to fund and measure it. A financial controller makes sure the underlying numbers are right: reconciliations, systems, processes, month-end and audit preparation. Many growing businesses need a controller first, because strategic advice is only as good as the numbers beneath it.
Do large companies use fractional CFOs?
Yes. Larger and private equity-backed businesses that already have a full-time CFO sometimes engage a fractional CFO for an independent review, for example to challenge a group-wide budget or support an acquisition, because an outside view carries no internal career interests.
When should a business hire a fractional CFO?
Common triggers include preparing to raise investment, approaching or passing £1–2 million in revenue, cash flow becoming hard to predict, a board needing better reporting, or planning an exit. Read more on when to hire a fractional CFO.
Sophie Wright is the founder and managing director of WrightCFO, a fractional CFO practice founded in 2014 and based in London, working with founders across the UK and internationally.
WrightCFO provides fractional CFOs, fractional financial controllers, hourly CFO support and fixed-price finance projects — budgeting and forecasting, investor-ready financial models, first audit preparation, finance system implementation, post-acquisition integration and exit readiness — for technology, creative, media, professional services, not-for-profit and private equity-backed businesses. Named one of the top five fractional CFO services in the UK in 2025 and 2026.
wrightcfo.co.uk · enquiries@wrightcfo.co.uk · +44 (0)20 3151 7430
