Fractional CFO – Creative Agency Financial Operations & Business Systems

Maricich Health is seeking an experienced Fractional CFO with marketing, advertising, or creative agency experience to strengthen the financial and operational processes behind project estimating, budgeting, forecasting, resource planning, and profitability. A primary objective is to help Maricich move from experience-based project estimating to a more standardized, data-driven approach using information from completed projects. The consultant will evaluate current processes, recommend improvements, and work with leadership and agency teams to implement scalable financial systems and workflows. Scope of Work • Develop standardized project-estimating and budgeting processes using historical project data. • Create benchmarks by project type, service, deliverable, department, and role. • Improve proposal pricing, project forecasting, and profitability analysis. • Compare estimated versus actual hours, costs, schedules, and margins. • Implement financial SOPs, approval workflows, and project budget reviews. • Establish processes for scope changes, change orders, project closeout, and lessons learned. • Develop dashboards for profitability, utilization, capacity, budget performance, and forecasting. • Improve resource planning and connect staffing forecasts to project budgets and schedules. • Evaluate and improve project-management, time-tracking, and financial-reporting systems. • Standardize agency workflows across Client Engagement, Project Management, Creative, Production, Finance, and Leadership. • Identify opportunities to automate workflows and reporting. • Train teams and support adoption of new processes and systems. Desired Experience • 10+ years of financial, operational, or consulting leadership experience. • Significant experience within a marketing, advertising, branding, digital, or creative agency. • Previous experience as a Fractional CFO, CFO, Finance Director, VP of Finance and Operations, or comparable senior leader. • Demonstrated experience implementing financial and operational processes—not only providing strategic advice. • Strong understanding of agency estimating, budgeting, forecasting, pricing, profitability, utilization, and resource planning. • Experience using historical project data to improve proposals and project estimates. • Experience developing financial SOPs, dashboards, controls, and approval workflows. • Experience implementing or optimizing project-management, resource-planning, time-tracking, and financial-reporting systems. • Strong facilitation, communication, documentation, and change-management skills. • Healthcare marketing or regulated-industry experience is a plus.