Fractional CFO for agencies in Orange County

Fractional CFO services in Orange County

A fractional CFO gives you senior financial leadership — strategy, forecasting, cash, pricing, and a partner in the room for real decisions — for the fraction of the week you actually need it, rather than a full-time salary. In Orange County we do that for creative and digital agencies, typically between $2M and $20M in revenue.

This is our home market in the most literal sense: our office is at 23 Spectrum Pointe Drive in Lake Forest, and three of our partners live and work in Orange County — co-founder Vincent Nguyen, Aubrey Zuelke, and founder Matthew Everitt. If you are searching for a fractional CFO near you in Irvine, Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, Santa Ana, or Tustin, we are the local option that is also the specialist one.

The CFO seat is the lead, not the whole offer. We also staff the fractional controller running your close, FP&A, bookkeeping, payroll, HR, and recruiting — the whole back office, sized to where the agency is now.

What’s different about OC agency economics

Orange County’s agency scene skews creative and digital, and it skews founder-led. That combination produces a specific financial profile. Revenue is a mix of retainers and project work, and the project side is lumpier than anyone’s plan assumes. Digital and performance shops run client ad spend through their accounts, which inflates the top line and destroys any margin read if it is booked as revenue rather than pass-through. Growth is usually funded from operations rather than outside capital, which makes cash timing the binding constraint on almost every decision.

Then there is the founder problem, which is not really a finance problem until it is. In a shop of fifteen to eighty people the founder is usually still the best salesperson, the final creative approver, and the person deciding what a project should cost. Pricing drifts. Utilization goes unmeasured. Nobody can say which clients are actually profitable, because nobody is tracking hours against fees at the project level.

That is the work here: getting the revenue recognition right, getting WIP visible, getting project and client profitability measured monthly, and building a forecast that tells you about a cash squeeze eight weeks out rather than the week it arrives.

Who you’ll work with in Orange County

Vincent Nguyen, our co-founder and managing partner, built his career inside this ecosystem. He spent four-plus years as Finance Manager at Column Five in Newport Beach, is Head of Finance at Foodbeast in Irvine, and holds or has held fractional CFO and controller seats at Pattern/Domaine, Apiary Digital, Soda & Lime, CRFTWRX, and Welcome Villain Films, alongside a nine-year run advising The Golden State Company. He leads delivery across the firm.

Aubrey Zuelke brings twenty-plus years across corporate finance and operations — Controller at StoryFile, CFO/COO of an event-production company, and Director of Finance and Operations across seven multi-entity e-commerce businesses. Multi-entity structures and systems integration are her territory.

Matthew Everitt, our founder, spent twenty years in the CFO chair across media, advertising, and entertainment before building the firm — including co-creating and executive producing NBC’s World of Dance.

The one office we actually keep

Plenty of firms list an address in every metro they would like to serve. We keep one, in Lake Forest, and we are straightforward about it: partners live in Los Angeles and San Diego and work those markets in person, but Orange County is where the firm is based.

Practically, that means we can meet at our office or yours without it being an event. It also means the close cadence, the workshop day, and the quarterly planning session can happen in a room when a room is what the conversation needs — which, in our experience, is more often than remote-first firms would like to admit.

Every engagement also comes with the Hub, where cash, utilization, WIP, and client profitability refresh weekly, so the numbers are current between those conversations rather than a month behind.

When an OC agency is ready for this

The usual trigger is not a crisis. It is the accumulation: pricing set two years ago that nobody has revisited, a headcount plan built on optimism, a quarter that grew while the bank balance did not, or a client list where the largest account might also be the least profitable and nobody can prove it either way.

Most of our OC clients sit between $2M and $20M in revenue. Below that, a fractional controller and clean bookkeeping usually deliver more per dollar than a CFO would. Above it, the conversation shifts toward what a full-time hire would look like — and we will tell you when you have reached that point. We work with agencies in Los Angeles and San Diego as well.