Scott Burton
CFO Consultant
Mr. Burton helps grow businesses by modeling and optimizing financial performance. He finds innovation opportunities for clients and improves executive decision quality.
By building an integrated financial plan, creating meaningful performance reporting, and providing insightful decision analysis, his process strengthens the financial infrastructure of growing organizations and builds investor confidence. This combination leads to a cohesive financial strategy and funding deals that close.
Recent examples:
- At a law firm with over 2,000 attorneys, created individual practice budgets that enabled organization-wide raises, increased revenue opportunities, and a newly integrated cash flow forecast to speed up Board decision-making.
- Reworked a product investment strategy and funding financial plan for a fintech SaaS that led to a $3.0m bridge loan and an $8.5m replacement term debt facility.
- Created a new consolidated performance reporting tool for a SaaS network security platform provider that combined five entities and three currencies for an accurate monthly view of the organization. This was integral to a $4m bank loan and fulfilled the requirements of an 8-figure equity follow-on round.
- For a commercial and industrial energy management software and solar storage hardware firm, guided the team through revenue model changes, including 3rd party financing of the product to capitalize on customer preferences for monthly billing. The cost structure was dynamic and required constant vigilance on all the dials affecting cash flow, burn rate, and additional financing strategies. The result was a $15m Series A round.
Mr. Burton has been a corporate finance consultant working with CEOs and executive teams to tell the company’s story in numbers to its board members, investors, customers, and alliance partners for the past 15 years. As a result, he is well-versed in the KPIs of SaaS companies, has extensive experience in the cleantech sector, and knows the characteristics VCs and private equity investors look for in companies seeking to join their portfolios.
In the current environment, the five key strategies he recommends growth-oriented clients focus on are: definition and sizing of the addressable market, choice of metrics around market traction (risk reduction), the economics and cycle-speed of R&D investments, creation of an aggressive path to positive cash flow, and clarity of how the business model strategy delivers a liquidity event within investor’s specific funding constraints.
In addition to financial strategy advisory, as a Fractional CFO, he supports client success by working with the client team on the daily, weekly, and monthly operations that support great execution:
- Operationalizing the order-to-cash process
- Making sound decisions about A/R and A/P management
- Accounting close with integrity
- Building a KPI report that pulls together finance, operations, and sales
- Re-forecasting the financial plan based on monthly accounting results and new business information
- Providing required reports to internal and external parties
- And crucially, bringing the finance perspective to an integrated ongoing view of the company
For more information, please contact Scott at scott@theceosrighthand.co.
