Fractional CFO for Wholesale & Retail Businesses in Chicago
Most of your cash is on the shelves. We show which products and categories actually earn the space they take up, so the next buy, supplier or location is decided on numbers.
Three things most Wholesale & Retail businesses can’t answer.
Your biggest asset is your blindest spot.
Shrink, dead stock and slow movers all hide inside one gross margin number that gets checked once a year.
Category margin is a guess.
You know total sales. You don’t know which categories earn once cost of goods, freight and shelf space are counted.
The second-location call gets made on feel.
Expansion gets decided on how busy the first store feels, not on what it earns. It’s the most expensive call in the business to get wrong.
The office, applied to Wholesale & Retail.
What retail and wholesale owners ask us
Can you keep the books, or only the reporting?
Both, and we’d rather do both. Then the margin and turn we report are built on records we know are right. If you have a good bookkeeper, we’ll work with them.
We’re a single store. Is this too early?
Sometimes, honestly. The Read is built to answer exactly that before you commit to anything. If it’s not worth fixing yet, you’ll hear it from us.
Can you help us decide on a second location?
Yes. The decision should rest on what the first one actually earns: real margin by category, real turn, real fixed cost. We build that view and then model the second.
We do wholesale and retail. Does that complicate things?
It’s common, and it’s where numbers get muddy. Different margins, shared inventory. We separate them so you see what each side contributes.
What if I’m thinking about selling in a few years?
Then start earlier. Buyers pay for earnings they can verify, and most of what we do is make earnings verifiable. Eighteen months out changes the number. Sixty days out just makes diligence less painful.
Every engagement starts with a Read.
If it doesn’t find more than it costs, you don’t pay for it.