Focused engagement · Stabilization stage
Profitable on paper. Broke in the bank. Your money is in prison, and the firm can't do any deeper structural work until you get it out.
The firms I see in this state aren't lacking work. They're lacking the operational discipline to convert the work they've already done into money that lands in the operating account. Invoices go out late. Time entries are incomplete. Replenishment retainers don't get replenished. AR ages out into a hole nobody wants to look at.
This is the Stabilization stage of the method. It's the engagement that has to happen before deeper structural work, SOPs, KPIs, owner compensation, leadership, can productively land. You can't restructure a firm that's gasping for cash. You stabilize first.
This is the engagement where we stop the bleeding.
A focused intervention across the full cash-to-collection cycle. Designed to install systems that run on their own once the engagement closes.
Invoice timing, frequency, and content. Moving from monthly-or-whenever to a cadence that actually accelerates cash.
The protocol, and the cultural reset, that gets time captured the day it happens, not at month-end from memory.
Trust thresholds, automated triggers, and the script your staff actually uses when a balance is low. No more clients running months on a depleted retainer.
A pass over the existing receivables, what's collectable, what's already gone, what to write off and stop carrying as a phantom asset on the books.
Online payments, payment plans, ACH, card-on-file authorization. Configured inside your existing practice management stack, not a forced new vendor.
A short, weekly view the owner can actually read, work in progress, billed but unpaid, aging buckets, replenishment due. Visibility creates discipline.
Cash flow and collections is one stage. Other work needs other people, or other engagements.
Cash Flow & Collections runs roughly six to eight weeks. Week one is diagnosis, pulling reports out of the practice management software, tracing the actual flow of an invoice from time entry to collected payment, identifying where the leakage is happening and how much.
Weeks two through six are design and install. New cadence. New protocols. New dashboard. Working sessions with the billers, the bookkeeper, and the attorneys whose time entries are upstream of every invoice. Cultural reset where needed, gently when possible, directly when not.
The final two weeks are stabilization. We run the new system together, fix what doesn't fit, and document what does. You close the engagement with documented protocols, a working dashboard, and a measurably different bank balance. If you want me to stay on as your Fractional CFO, we talk about that at the end, not the beginning.
A real, anonymized firm Liz worked with. (Per Liz's primary-source case study record, 2026.)
Active cases, real work being done, and a constant cash struggle. The intervention was structural, billing cadence, time-entry discipline, retainer protocols, not a collections push. The bleeding stopped and the firm finally had the oxygen to do the deeper structural work that came next.
Read the full case →Your money isn't gone. It's in prison. The job of this engagement is to get it out, and then build the system that keeps it from going back in.
A billing clerk runs invoices. A collections agency chases old debt. This engagement designs the system around both, invoicing cadence, time-entry accountability, replenishment retainer protocols, follow-up rhythm, so the firm stops generating the leakage in the first place.
Yes. Billers, bookkeepers, and attorneys all need to be at the table. The fix doesn't stick if it only lives in the owner's head.
Online payments are a piece. Industry data shows they cut payment time meaningfully. But online payments don't help if invoices go out late, time entries are incomplete, or AR follow-up is inconsistent. We look at the whole flow.
The work sticks when the system survives without me. That's the engagement design, documented protocols, named owners, and a cadence your team can actually keep. Some firms bring me back as a Fractional COO or CFO afterward; many run it themselves.
Schedule a thirty-minute call. We'll talk about what's actually happening to your cash and whether this engagement is the right fit.
Not sure where to start?
Start with an Operations Audit →