Scott Burton
CFO Consultant
Mr. Burton helps grow businesses by analyzing, modeling, and optimizing financial performance. He also finds innovation opportunities and improves 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, which leads to closed funding.
Recent examples:
- 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 monitoring and intelligence platform provider that combined five separate entities and three currencies for an accurate monthly view of the organization. This activity was integral to a $4m Silicon Valley 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 key attributes he recommends growth-oriented clients focus on are: how you define the addressable market and what its size is, comfort with your metrics around market traction (risk reduction), the economics and cycle-speed of R&D investments, your aggressive path to positive cash flow and how that translates to investor’s return-of-capital, and how you articulate the strategy that delivers a liquidity event within investor’s specific funding constraints.
In addition, as a Fractional CFO, he supports client success by working with the client team on the daily, weekly, and monthly operations that support these strategies such as:
- 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 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.
