Steve Sullivan was two months into his job as CEO of CommunityAid when he had a terrifying realization.
“Oh my goodness, I don’t know if we’re going to make payroll.”
He was running a $20 million nonprofit with seven thrift stores and 400 employees. The mission was thriving. They were creating quality jobs, offering affordable shopping, and supporting other nonprofits in the community.
But Steve described it as “flying blind in a $20 million organization with 400 souls.” The financials were confusing and told a story of an uncertain future.
This wasn’t about bad people or lack of commitment. CommunityAid had outgrown their finance function.
When you’re mission-focused and growing, finance often gets left behind. Here are three signs it’s happening to you.
Sign 1: You’re Making Decisions Without Understanding Their Financial Impact
You know that feeling when you’re making a big operational decision and you’re not quite sure if you can afford it?
That’s what happens when your finance function can’t keep pace with growth.
Steve couldn’t connect daily decisions to the bottom line. He couldn’t tell that margins varied by day of the week or by location. There was no visibility into what levers to pull to improve performance.
You can’t optimize what you can’t measure. Being mission-driven doesn’t mean you get to be financially reckless. Your impact depends on sustainable operations.
Sign 2: Your Financial Reports Confuse More Than They Clarify
When you get your monthly financial statements, do you feel confident or confused?
CommunityAid had confusing financials. They had data, lots of data. But data without insight is just noise.
No dashboards showing trends. No way to quickly see if things were getting better or worse. They couldn’t spot hidden costs, like how turnover was impacting labor expenses across their seven locations.
Good data that’s poorly presented is useless. Your board or stakeholders don’t just need compliance. They need confidence. Growth requires forward-looking metrics, not just historical reports.
Sign 3: You Can’t Measure What Matters Most to You
For CommunityAid, labor was their number one expense. But they had no Full-Time Equivalent perspective, no efficiency metrics, no way to understand if they were staffed appropriately.
As a nonprofit, part of their mission was giving 10% of revenue to other nonprofits every year. But they couldn’t balance staffing costs with maximizing those funds for mission work. They had no way to compare performance across their seven stores or identify best practices.
When someone asked, “How many FTEs do we need and how do we get that?” nobody had an answer.
Your business goals or mission deserves better than gut-feel management. You can’t scale what you can’t measure.
The Shift: From Transactional to Strategic Finance
We helped CommunityAid identify the metrics they needed to focus on. We figured out the story behind their numbers and used that to help them get clear on direction.
We created forecasting models and dashboards for each store. We turned HR data into financially relevant information. We built systems for repeatable performance.
Steve went from “Oh my goodness, I don’t know if we’re going to make payroll” to “Oh my goodness, look at our EBITDA.”
They achieved regular EBITDA of 28-29%. They went from a dying organization to an exceptionally profitable one. Now they can give away 10% of their revenues every year with confidence. They even launched a foundation to help other nonprofits in their region.
“It’s been transformational for us,” Steve said.
This isn’t about hiring a full-time CFO you can’t afford. It’s about having the right level of expertise at the right time.
What This Means for Your Organization
If you’re recognizing these signs, here’s what I want you to know: your bookkeeper or controller is probably doing their job well. The problem is that what you need now is different.
You need strategic finance expertise that can keep up with where your organization is heading.
Three takeaways from CommunityAid’s journey:
- Take baby steps, don’t try to fix everything at once.
- Control how many levers you’re pulling and pay attention to results.
- Create trusted relationships to make real progress.
Steve shared this insight: “The outsourcing is a lower risk play because TurboExecs has the opportunity to plug and play with multiple resources to get you what you need, rather than relying on one resource to come in. It’s that collaboration that if someone would’ve said up front, I probably would’ve moved even quicker.”
If you’re experiencing any of these signs, book a right-fit call. We’ll talk about where your finance function is today and where it needs to be to support your growth. We’ll help you figure out if outsourced CFO services make sense for your organization.
What you’re building is too important to manage on gut feel alone.
Ready to move from flying blind to strategic clarity? Schedule your right-fit call here.