B2B CFO® Ranks Among Fastest Growing Arizona Companies
B2BCF0 RANK: No. 23 on the fast-growth list FOUNDER AND CEO: Jerry Mills HQ: Phoenix FOUNDED: 1987 EMPLOYEES: 197 partners across 39 states and four full-time employees in Mesa REVENUE INCREASE, 2009-10: 46.5 percent Q&A with founder Jerry L. Mills How do you maintain fast growth through the years? Maintaining steady, fast growth has been a matter of setting goals and then working diligently to build an infrastructure that supports our team and allows us to achieve our goals. It is also a matter of constant evaluation and making periodic adjustments to the process of the goal achievement. For example, when new technologies become available or when a process can be improved, we need to always adjust our course — first direction, then velocity. How does growth become a part of your business culture? I review my goals weekly. I also leverage the expertise and help from a personal coach who goes over my goals with me and helps me augment and expand them, causing me to stretch and grow at all times. I go over our goal achievements each month with the staff so the team will constantly have our progress in front of them. Making sure everyone knows the direction and the goals is crucial to our success. Looking out 12 months, what is your greatest obstacle to continued growth? I see absolutely no obstacles that will impede our ability to achieve and meet our...
Firms prove even the corner office can be outsourced
SOURCE: LONG ISLAND BUSINESS NEWS Firms prove even the corner office can be outsourced CFOs-for-hire fill gaps created by downsizing DATE: 09/12/2011 By: CLAUDE SOLNIK Marc Palker has been the CFO at Mr. Bar-B-Q for a year, but it hasn’t been a fulltime job. Palker, who has worked full time as a CFO for more than a half-dozen firms, is a director of CFO Consulting Partners, which provides interim and part-time chief financial officers who help with financial reporting and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, among other duties. He spends one to 1 Vi days a week at Mr. Bar-B-Q and works at other companies on other days. In what may be outsourcing’s newest trend, CFOs increasingly are working part time or an interim basis for small and midsized companies. “It works well for us because we don’t have the need for a full-time person,” said a spokesman for Mr. Bar-B-Q, an Old Bethpage distributor of barbecue tools. “He does reports, consulting, gives opinions.” While some firms bring in former CFOs to do work accounting firms – as much as traditional CFOs – might do, CFO outsourcers argue they typically provide a different perspective. CFOs typically help with strategy, deals and sometimes with compliance as well as leading financial operations. “Everybody in our firm is a former CFO,” said Alan Tepper, senior managing director at CFO Consulting Partners. “People at accounting firms never in the shoes of CFOs would provably approach the assignment differently.” Downsizing has both fueled demand for interim CFOs and placed many talented CFOs on the market. “A lot of people left the traditional work force by choice or...
A Cash Crisis
SMALL TALK MAY 17, 2010 Colleen DeBaise answers an entrepreneur’s question about when to call it quits Q: I’ve owned a small clothing boutique for three years. I weathered the economy, but now a construction project that will last three months has blocked foot traffic to my business. This is killing my cash flow so much that I had to delay paying my rent and my sales tax. When do I call it a day? —Susan, Burlingame, Calif. A: Fighting for survival is never easy, but keep in mind: If you don’t pay sales tax, the state could shut you down. When that happens, “you lose control—and that’s even more frustrating,” says Jerry L. Mills, founder of B2B CFO Partners LLC, a Phoenix firm that provides part-time chief-financial-officer services to small businesses. So, direct any reserve funds toward the payment of taxes as a first step in getting out of an already bad situation. After that, place a call to your insurance agent, and see if your business owner’s policy includes business- interruption insurance, which generally kicks in when natural or man-made hazards threaten your company. And while it’s best to avoid legal action, you might consider contacting an attorney to see if you have any recourse against the party—be it the city or a next-door neighbor—who’s jackhammering. Given the situation, you might also be able to negotiate a lower rent from your landlord, especially while construction continues. As far as deciding whether to close up shop, you should perform a simple cost-benefit analysis, looking at whether the positives outweigh the negatives if you remain open for six more...
When to Outsource
5 tips for calculating the cost versus the benefit of contracting key business functions BY Amy Reinink | April 20, 2010| Michele Hanson-O’Reggio calls it the “lone ranger” mind-set: the tendency of small-business owners to assume they can and should handle all business functions in-house rather than pay to outsource those functions. But Hanson-O’Reggio, founder of the small-business outsourcing and consulting firm Biz Success Partner, is one of many outsourcing and productivity experts to say that outsourcing, once seen as the sole purview of large corporations moving offices offshore, can save even the smallest businesses time and money. In fact, Hanson-O’Reggio recommends entrepreneurs outsource non-essential functions almost immediately upon launching a business to let them focus on the functions they specialize in. “The expected return is greater than the investment,” she says. She and other outsourcing experts offer the following tips for determining the expected return for your business. Consider the overhead and non-productive hours. The first layer of cost savings in outsourcing comes from payroll taxes, insurance and benefits paid to full-time employees. Mark Loschiavo, executive director of Drexel University’s Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship, says entrepreneurs should expect to pay roughly 30 percent of an employee’s salary in addition to the salary itself for these overhead costs.Lunch breaks, doctor appointments and other gaps in working hours bring the actual cost of a full-time employee to nearly double his or her base salary, says Hanson-O’Reggio. Hanson-O’Reggio also says it’s important to consider the financial gains associated with spending time netting new clients rather than doing the bookkeeping or replying to e-mails. Know your worth and use that knowledge to...B2B CFO® are media experts on, and can speak to the media on:
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