Fractional CFO — paid trial, AI consultancy, multi-entity + Delaware C-corp conversion

We're an AI and software consultancy. Founders in Washington DC and Puerto Rico, a distributed contractor team across Latin America, the Philippines and Ethiopia, and roughly a dozen active client engagements on retainer. Profitable before owner pay. Growing. We built the financial machinery — a three-scenario budget model, a close-and-KPI manual, an AR escalation ladder — and the founders are the bottleneck on running it. We don't need someone to tell us what to build. We need someone to own it. Two things make this urgent rather than nice-to-have. We're mid-conversion from a Puerto Rico LLC into a Delaware C-corp with the LLC as a wholly-owned subsidiary, and those decisions have real deadlines. And an advisor at the ownership level is now asking for consolidated metrics — per-client and per-partner profitability, revenue per employee, blended margin — that we can't produce on demand today. **What's actually true right now, so you can self-select:** - Gross margin sits around 41% against a 50-60% benchmark for services firms. - We model a tax reserve but hold no reserve account and run no sweep, so the cash number we look at is overstated. - No quarterly estimated-tax process. - Owner draws become W-2 salary at conversion, and we're evaluating Act 60 export-services treatment on the subsidiary. - A 24-month projection exists and needs re-basing against reality. None of that is a surprise to us. We built the models; we need someone who owns them. **What we care about:** - The budget model and the 24-month projection — owned, pressure-tested, re-based. - Cash: collections discipline, the liquidity floor, and the cash-healthy gate that governs when spend turns back on. - The conversion: the two-regime tax reserve across the S-corp/C-corp boundary, the sweep, quarterly estimates under the new structure. You'd work alongside a cross-border tax advisor — you're not filing anything. - Close cadence and a KPI pack we actually read: per-client and per-partner profitability, revenue per employee, utilization, blended margin. We're deliberately not telling you how to sequence these, or what's achievable in the trial. That's question one. Six months out, good looks like this: a monthly close that happens without anyone chasing it, a model we trust enough to make hiring and pricing decisions against, a tax reserve actually held rather than modeled, and one metrics pack that the founders and the advisor read the same way. **This role is not:** bookkeeping or data entry, tax preparation or filing, audit work. We have or are hiring for those separately. **Stack:** QuickBooks Online, Novo, Stripe, Notion. **You're probably right for this if you've** run finance for a services or agency business with contractor-heavy COGS, worked across more than one entity and more than one country, and been through an LLC-to-C-corp conversion on the finance side. You should be comfortable living inside a model, not just reporting off one. **How this starts:** a paid, fixed-scope trial — 10-15 hours at $70-100/hour depending on experience. A working audition: you get paid, we both get signal. If it goes the way we expect, it converts to an ongoing monthly retainer. Fully remote, with enough US-hours overlap for a working call every other week.