Fractional CFO for agencies in Los Angeles

Fractional CFO services in Los Angeles

A fractional CFO is a senior financial leader who works with your company part-time — setting financial strategy, owning the forecast, and sitting in the decisions that shape the business — without the mid-six-figure cost of a full-time hire. In Los Angeles we do that work for advertising agencies, production and entertainment companies, and media businesses, typically between $2M and $20M in revenue.

Two of our partners are based in Los Angeles: Steven Orenstein and Myles Watling. That matters when you are searching for a fractional CFO near you rather than a firm that will service the account from three time zones away. We can be in your office in Culver City, Santa Monica, Playa Vista, Burbank, or downtown when a conversation deserves a room, and work remotely the rest of the time — which is most of it.

Alongside the CFO seat we staff the rest of the finance function: a fractional controller running your monthly close, FP&A for forecasting and project profitability, bookkeeping, payroll, and HR. One firm, sized to what the business needs right now.

The LA economics we already understand

Los Angeles is not a generic agency market, and the finance problems here are specific. Production-heavy businesses run project accounting across multiple entities, with costs that land months before the revenue does. Entertainment work carries participations, residuals, and deal structures a generalist accountant will simply mis-book. Large advertising shops move enormous pass-through media through the P&L, and if it is recognized as revenue the top line looks impressive while the margin quietly makes no sense.

Add the LA labor picture — union and guild payroll, a heavy freelance and crew bench, multi-state and multi-entity structures that appear the moment a company does work outside California — and the monthly close stops being routine bookkeeping and becomes a discipline.

We arrive knowing all of that. Not because we researched the vertical, but because our partners ran finance inside it: 72andSunny, WONGDOODY, McCann-Erickson, Young & Rubicam, The Phelps Group, Ground Zero, TBWA/Chiat\Day. Our founder co-created and executive produced NBC’s World of Dance here. There is no quarter-long ramp while someone learns what a pass-through is.

Who you’ll work with in Los Angeles

Steven Orenstein has more than forty years as an agency CFO and COO in this city. He scaled 72andSunny from $6M to $130M-plus and led its holding-company acquisition, spent eleven years as CFO of WONGDOODY through its own sale, and before that was SVP Finance at McCann-Erickson with earlier leadership at Young & Rubicam and DavisElen. If your horizon includes a sale, a holding-company conversation, or a step-change in scale, he has been there repeatedly.

Myles Watling spent nearly eight years as CFO/COO of The Phelps Group, where billings grew 65% during his tenure, and more than nine years as Controller at Ground Zero across multiple entities and cost centers. He later ran Client Accounting Services for the mid-market as a consulting partner at Armanino. He is the person you want when the books need rebuilding and the close needs to become reliable.

Behind whichever partner leads your account sits the rest of the firm — controllers, analysts, bookkeepers, HR and recruiting — so the work does not bottleneck on one person’s calendar.

How a Los Angeles engagement runs

We start with a structured thirty-day discovery: your systems, your numbers, and the decisions actually on your horizon. Out of that comes a budget-and-forecast model, a first reporting package with the KPIs that matter for your business, and a workshop day where we present findings, a SWOT, a few quick fixes, and a roadmap.

From there it is a monthly cadence — a close you can rely on, a forecast that updates, and a partner in the room for the decisions that need one. Every engagement includes the Hub, our client portal, where cash, utilization, WIP, and client profitability refresh weekly rather than waiting on a month-end PDF.

We work to an agreed monthly budget and scope rather than billing hourly, and engagements are not locked into long terms. If you want to see how we think about the work before talking to us, our approach lays out the method in full.

When an LA agency is ready for this

Usually somewhere between $2M and $20M in revenue — the range where financial decisions start outrunning the founder’s bandwidth, but a full-time CFO at $250K to $450K all-in is still hard to justify. The specific signals: pricing that no longer holds, cash that feels tight in a year that grew, a production slate whose profitability nobody can actually name, or an acquisition, raise, or exit on the horizon.

If your questions are further down the stack — the close is late, the balance sheet does not tie, reporting has outgrown a bookkeeper — start with a fractional controller instead. It is cheaper and it is the right sequence. We also work with agencies in Orange County and San Diego.