Business CFO for Hire Podcast
Real conversations with founders, operators, and industry experts on the financial decisions that actually move a business, before, during, and after the numbers show it.
Episodes
Charlotte Merritt
Charlotte, founder of OPPs Now, got her start organizing businesses the same way she once organized chaos as a kid, and now maps end to end operations for small firms, especially law firms, from client intake through production handoffs to the financials that eventually land on a CFO’s desk. She is not HR certified but knows enough to catch a firm out of compliance and bring in the right specialist, whether that is an HR partner, a marketing consultant, or a sales professional. Her ideal client sits in the five to twenty person range, right at the point where a business needs real process instead of everyone wearing every hat.
Karena Bell
Karena is the founder and CEO of ProfitLinz, a profit optimization and business advisory firm working mostly with privately held manufacturing, industrial, distribution, and logistics companies between 10 million and 300 million in revenue. Before ProfitLinz she spent years inside the auto industry, managing a data center for Volkswagen North America, running dealer technical operations at Chrysler, and leading an effort at Daimler that cut vehicle development time from seven and a half years down to two and a half. Her work now centers on forensic, line item level financial analysis that surfaces hidden loss leaders in pricing, operations, and labor, even inside companies that already consider themselves profitable, along with tariff recovery audits that have returned 15 to 40 percent of five years of client tariff payments, often in the seven figures.
Charles Hughes
Charles is a former Army first sergeant who spent 25 years running delivery operations, from field service supervisor up through COO roles at a technology company and a law firm. At Walgreens he led a 750-person field service organization supporting more than 8,000 stores, trimming an $90 million operating budget down to $50 million through attrition management and efficiency gains rather than layoffs. He now runs Aligned Growth Solutions, where his Cultivate Operating System, a nine-step framework across four phases, helps founder-led field services, MSP, and infrastructure companies in the 15 to 75 million dollar revenue range scale without losing operational control.
Diane Maistros
Diane is the founder and principal of Artemai Solutions, where she serves as a fractional COO and executive advisor for nonprofits in the behavioral health and human services field. She has spent more than 35 years in nonprofit executive leadership, working with organizations ranging from $3 million to $450 million in revenue. She has guided more than 15 mergers, executive transitions, and periods of significant organizational change. Her ideal clients are nonprofits between $30 million and $50 million in revenue in behavioral health and human services, though she works with organizations nationally, primarily across the mid-Atlantic region.
Daniel Street
Daniel is the founder of The Red Knight Group, a sales consulting and fractional sales leadership firm focused primarily on owner-led home service, remodeling, and construction businesses. His background spans more than 20 years and 200 million dollars in sales and operational leadership. He helps companies build the sales infrastructure they outgrow as they scale, including sales processes, KPIs, CRM discipline, follow-up systems, training, accountability, and sales leadership, turning sales from something dependent on the owner or individual talent into a repeatable, measurable system. His ideal client is an owner-led business between $1 million and $10 million in revenue that has proven demand but whose sales organization still depends heavily on the owner or a few individual performers.
Jane Gentry
Jane’s path started as a professional actor before she moved into outside sales, then launched her own practice at 28 after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. She was later recruited by a PE firm to run and merge two mid-market organizations, an experience that revealed how under-resourced mid-market companies are compared to enterprise, not in cash, but in the frameworks and best practices leaders are never exposed to. That shift led her to move her entire practice away from enterprise and focus on mid-market CEOs. With over 30 years advising organizations from $10 million to $800 million in revenue, including Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola and Mercedes-Benz, she now helps leaders fix the operating model, org design, and decision rights issues behind the growing pains that show up as declining margins, eroding trust, and employee churn. She works with no more than six clients at a time.
Todd Etchieson
Todd is an electrical engineer by training who has spent 35 years in high tech, working at companies as large as 98,000 employees and 30 billion dollars in revenue, and as small as 5 employees and 1 million dollars in revenue, including New Relic, Bright.md, Janrain, and Conversica. He now works as a fractional product and operating executive with SaaS and AI-enabled companies in what he calls the messy middle, the point between roughly 5 and 30 million dollars in revenue where a company has found product market fit but is outgrowing founder-driven execution without yet having scalable organizational alignment. He helps leadership teams create strategic clarity, transparent prioritization, cross-functional alignment, and sustainable execution rhythms, guided by three maxims: begin with the end in mind, no silent trade-offs, and disagree and commit.
Michael Kodinsky
Michael is the founder and CEO of Serve Funding, a business financing advisory firm helping lower-middle-market companies, typically $5 million to $75 million or more in revenue, access debt capital when a bank says no. Rather than acting as a broker, his team works as a strategic advisor, matching each business to the best-fit financing solution, whether that’s an asset-based line of credit, revenue-based financing, SBA, equipment leasing, or bridge capital. The firm grew out of his time at a large lender watching referred deals fall apart in underwriting after business owners had already lost months chasing bank answers. His “Here to Serve” philosophy, chosen as his personal brand more than a decade ago, centers on prioritizing the right capital for each business over the highest commission.
Steve Thompson
Steve is the founder and CEO of Integrity Cost Consulting, a performance-based cost validation and reduction firm focused on four core expense areas: utilities, telecom, waste disposal, and industrial laundry. His team of subject matter experts, most with 20-plus years of experience in their specific category, uses a large benchmarking database to help manufacturers, healthcare organizations, nonprofits, and multi-location automotive and hospitality businesses find out whether they’re truly paying a fair rate, not just paying correctly. The firm works entirely on a performance basis: if they don’t find refunds or savings, the client doesn’t pay. Rather than promising savings outright, Steve’s team promises to validate and verify that expenses are accurate and reasonable, which in practice uncovers savings more than 90 percent of the time.
Kelly Malloy
Kelly is a Fractional COO with more than 30 years of combined clinical and operational leadership in health systems. Through Malloy & Co. Operating Partnerships, she embeds directly inside hospital and health system executive teams, not as an outside advisor, to convert strategy into measurable operational and financial performance during periods of margin pressure, stalled initiatives, or slow-moving integrations. In one engagement, a hospital’s bariatric surgical program had a willing physician, trained staff, and enough caseload, but lacked accreditation. After she guided the program through accreditation and streamlined its processes, case volume grew 143 percent, turning it into the hospital’s largest service line. She sees her role as giving health systems the bandwidth of a C-suite operator for a defined period, without adding a permanent executive salary to their books.
Bob Tankesley
Bob is an accounting and finance graduate turned fourth-generation entrepreneur who spent time at Ernst & Young before starting his own practice, where he has now been self-employed for 25 years, more than half of it doing mergers and acquisitions work in the lower middle market around Atlanta and the greater Southeast. He now runs Exit Teams as an M&A advisor and business broker, generally landing on two to three years as the optimal window to prepare a company for sale, long enough to make sticky operational improvements that impress a future buyer, but short enough not to burn out the owner. Much of his work centers on getting sellers to think like sophisticated buyers so their business is already positioned the way a buyer pool would want to see it, and on assembling the core deal team, financial, legal, M&A advisory, valuation, and wealth management, that most owners don’t realize they need until they’re already mid-process. He is also the author of a book on the emotional side of selling a business.
Melih Oztalay
Melih started SmartFinds Marketing in 1987, launched its internet division in 1994, and moved the company to a fully digital business model in 2004, a decision he credits with keeping the agency ahead of the shift in marketing budgets toward digital. Today his team of 25, working together for 15 years out of the Detroit area, works with established B2B companies in three ways: augmenting an existing marketing team at larger corporations, becoming the marketing department for mid-sized companies between 50 million and 300 million in revenue that have a sales team but no marketing function, or running a defined project, often the firm’s press release marketing program. His current focus is helping companies understand how AI is reshaping the B2B buying journey, including using JSON-LD schema code to improve AI visibility on their websites, since that same standard also helps meet the bar for inclusion on other authoritative sites. One case study he’s especially proud of: a technology client that saw a 198 percent year-over-year increase in leads through a conversion rate optimization strategy using AI-driven heat maps and A/B/C/D testing on their existing website traffic.
Podcasts I’ve Been On
| Date | Show | Focus of discussion | |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 2025 | North Fulton Business Radio | Stan is interviewed about the role and impact of a fractional CFO, including strategic financial leadership, risk management, communication, business turnarounds, and successful exits. | Listen → |
| April 2023 | Simon Says 2.0 | Stan discusses business financial management, profitability, sustainability, and how a fractional CFO provides executive-level financial guidance without the cost of a full-time CFO. | Listen → |
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