About
A finance department for companies that don't have one. Since 2002.
Built to be part of the business. Not a founder autobiography; a short account of what twenty-four years of doing this taught us, and what we believe as a result.
The story
Chris Greco has been the CFO for owner-led companies since 2002, including more than five years running finance for two auto dealerships. At every company, the same thing: owners making big decisions on books that were months behind, and a CPA who saw the numbers once a year.
CFO Anywhere was built to give those companies what larger ones take for granted: someone who owns the numbers and tells you the truth about them. Not a bookkeeper who never looks up from the ledger, and not an advisor working on top of someone else's bookkeeping. One team, from the transactions to the decisions.
Twenty-four years later the team is bigger, the software has changed, and clients hand us more of the back office than they used to. The job hasn't changed: keep the numbers right, coordinate the people around them, and give the owner the information and the time to run the company.
Fractional finance isn't new to us. We've been working this way since 2002.
What twenty-four years contain
Pattern recognition, not age. We've probably seen some version of what's happening to you.
— Two recessions.
— A pandemic that changed every customer's payment behavior overnight.
— A rate cycle that rewrote every borrower's math.
— Acquisitions, sales and founder transitions.
— Bank changes, covenant resets, a surety that wanted a WIP schedule by Friday.
— Cash crises, rapid growth, and the controller who quit in October.
— A family whose holdings grew from a few entities to more than twenty, on one fixed monthly fee, over two decades.
What we believe
1.
The books and the CFO should be the same team.
Advice built on someone else's numbers is a guess.
2.
A forecast isn't useful because it's accurate.
It's useful because management knows what would make it wrong.
3.
Numbers that arrive three weeks late are history, not management.
Close within 15 days or the numbers describe a company that no longer exists.
4.
Financial discipline should arrive before the full-time CFO does.
Growth increases the need for discipline long before it increases the need for a full-time hire.
5.
Say the uncomfortable number out loud.
Owners can handle the truth. They can't handle surprises.
How we work
We treat your money like ours
Every transaction gets looked at, not just keyed. If you're paying for something the business no longer needs, we want to find it.
We say what the numbers say
Including when it isn't what you hoped. Owners can handle the truth. They can't handle surprises.
We answer the phone
Clients call Chris, and that's the point. Calls come back the same business day.
We work with you, not around you
Your CPA, your banker and your attorney each see a part of the picture. We keep the ledger they all rely on.
The office
105 W. Jackson, Suite 3, Naperville, Illinois. A real office and a full-time team you can meet. Western-suburb and Chicago clients in person; everyone else, the same team on a screen.
Meet the team →Tell us what's going on. We'll tell you what we see
One conversation with Chris, no deck. He'll tell you what he sees and what it would take to fix it, including if the answer is that you don't need a CFO yet.
Chris Greco, Founder and President.
Your first call is with him, not a sales team.