To navigate the current financial landscape, more small and mid-sized businesses in Ottawa are looking to fractional CFOs as a potential solution.
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To navigate the current financial landscape and the rising cost of doing business, an increasing number of small and mid-sized businesses in Ottawa are looking to fractional CFOs as a potential solution.
Laura Gray is the regional director for Ottawa, Eastern Ontario and Gatineau at The CFO Centre, a global company that has been in business since 2001 and is now one of the world’s largest providers of fractional CFO services. “Our client base is growing rapidly,” Gray told OBJ recently.
According to Gray, who joined the company a year ago when it hired its first Eastern Ontario regional director after operating in the nation’s capital for 12 years, interest in fractional CFOs is on the rise in Ottawa.
“Since I was put in this role, we’ve been growing (our client base) by 10 to 15 per cent every month,” she said. “It’s a little bit labile, but there hasn’t been any stagnation.”
Part of Gray’s role is to network and find clients who could benefit from the fractional CFO model. She said an overall increase in awareness locally is “unequivocally” at the centre of the upwards trend.
“We’ve had clients in Ottawa before, so it’s not as if this is the first time,” she said. “Because I’m here and developing those partnerships, my face is here doing all the business development and people are getting to know the business.”
The CFO Centre, which currently has three CFOs based in Eastern Ontario, caters primarily to small and mid-sized businesses rather than startups tight on cash. Locally, Gray said most of their clients are in tech — cleantech, medtech, SaaS — as well as manufacturing, construction and real estate. They also have clients in media, virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
In Ottawa, Gray said many of the businesses who approach them are looking at mergers and acquisitions, or seeking support raising capital to fund their next stage of growth. Others come to them when they’re in distress.
“We get businesses that manage to get to that point (of raising millions in revenue), before contacting us to say, ‘Oh my goodness, we need a fractional CFO,’” she said. “They manage to get hot and be very profitable without having a CFO in place. So when we come in, it’s going to pause any kind of stagnation that they’ve had. We’re going to mitigate that and get them to the next phase.”
