Fractional CFO for agencies in San Diego
Agency-native financial leadership for San Diego’s PR, communications, and digital firms — led by a San Diego CFO of the Year who lives and works here.
Schedule a ConversationA fractional CFO is a senior financial leader who works with your company part-time, owning financial strategy, the forecast, pricing, and cash, instead of a full-time hire. In San Diego, The Good CFO provides that seat to PR, communications, and digital firms between $2M and $20M in revenue. The work is led by Lindsey Head, who lives in San Diego, was named San Diego CFO of the Year, and scaled a local PR firm from $750K to nearly $25M from the CFO seat.
Fractional CFO services in San Diego
A fractional CFO is a senior financial leader engaged part-time — owning financial strategy, the forecast, pricing, and cash, and sitting in the decisions that shape the business — instead of a full-time hire you may not yet be able to justify. In San Diego we do that work for PR and communications firms, digital agencies, and creative shops, typically between $2M and $20M in revenue.
Our San Diego work is led by Lindsey Head, who lives here and was named San Diego CFO of the Year. If you are searching for a fractional CFO near you in downtown, La Jolla, Carlsbad, Del Mar, Encinitas, or North County, that is a genuinely local senior partner rather than a national firm assigning an account manager.
The full finance function comes with it: a fractional controller running the monthly close, FP&A for forecasting and client profitability, bookkeeping, payroll, and HR.
San Diego runs on retainers — and retainers hide things
San Diego’s agency economy leans heavily toward PR, communications, and digital, and the dominant revenue model is the monthly retainer. Retainers look like the most predictable revenue in professional services. They are also the easiest place in an agency to lose money without noticing.
The mechanics are always the same. A retainer is priced against an assumed level of service. Scope expands quietly — an extra weekly call, a crisis that lasts a month, an executive who now wants ghostwritten bylines. Nobody re-prices, because the client is happy and the invoice still goes out. Eighteen months later the account is consuming double the hours it was priced for, the effective rate has fallen below cost, and the team defending it has no data to make the case.
PR firms carry a second complication: pass-through. Media buys, event costs, travel, and vendor spend often flow through agency accounts on behalf of the client. Booked as revenue, it flatters the top line and wrecks the margin read. Booked correctly, it is invisible to the P&L and visible in the cash forecast, which is where it actually matters. And San Diego’s heavy travel, hospitality, and lifestyle client base makes that spend seasonal — a cash pattern you can plan around once you can see it.
Who you’ll work with in San Diego
Lindsey Head was CFO and COO of J Public Relations, where she helped grow the firm from $750K to nearly $25M in revenue, led its US and UK expansion and multiple acquisitions, and served as Controller before that. She was named San Diego CFO of the Year by the San Diego Business Journal, was a finalist four consecutive years, has been featured in Forbes, holds an MBA in digital entrepreneurship, and is a certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor.
That is an unusually exact match for this market: a PR agency, scaled roughly twenty-five times, internationally, from the finance seat, in this city. Retainer pricing, utilization, pass-through, multi-entity structures, and international expansion are not theoretical problems to her.
Behind her sits the rest of the firm — controllers, analysts, bookkeepers, HR and recruiting — so a growing account never bottlenecks on one person’s availability.
How a San Diego engagement runs
The first thirty days are a structured discovery: systems, numbers, and the decisions actually in front of you. You come out of it with a budget-and-forecast model, a first reporting package built on the metrics that predict health in a retainer business — client and project margin, utilization against capacity, effective billing rates, rolling cash — and a workshop day covering findings, a SWOT, quick fixes, and a roadmap.
After that it is a monthly rhythm, with the Hub refreshing cash, utilization, WIP, and client profitability weekly so nothing waits on a month-end report. We work to an agreed monthly budget and scope rather than hourly billing, and we do not hold you to a long contract.
When a San Diego agency is ready for this
The clearest signal in a retainer business is a gap between growth and cash: revenue is up, headcount is up, and the bank balance is flat or worse. That almost always means retainers priced for a level of service the team stopped delivering to years ago, and it is fixable — but only once someone can prove which accounts are underwater.
The other triggers are the familiar ones: an acquisition or international expansion on the horizon, a lender or investor conversation, or a founder making seven-figure decisions on instinct. Most of our San Diego clients sit between $2M and $20M in revenue. If the more urgent problem is a late close or a balance sheet that does not tie, a fractional controller is the cheaper and more logical starting point. We also serve Orange County and Los Angeles.
What we do for San Diego agencies
This page covers how we work in San Diego. For the service itself — what the role involves, what is included, and what it costs — start with fractional CFO for marketing agencies.
One team covers the whole finance and HR function. We most often lead with:
Common questions
Do you offer fractional CFO services in San Diego?
Yes. Our partner Lindsey Head — named San Diego CFO of the Year — lives in San Diego and leads our work for agencies here, drawing on her years scaling J Public Relations from $750K to nearly $25M. We work with PR, communications, digital, and creative firms across the county.
Is there a fractional CFO near me in San Diego?
If you are in San Diego County, yes. Our San Diego partner works with firms downtown, in La Jolla, Little Italy, North Park, Del Mar, Solana Beach, Encinitas, and Carlsbad. Our office is in Orange County, but the partner leading your account is local.
What size San Diego agencies do you work with?
Typically between $2M and $20M in revenue, where retainer growth, staffing, and cash need managing as a system rather than a spreadsheet. Below that, a fractional controller and clean bookkeeping usually deliver more value per dollar.
Do you understand PR agency finance specifically?
It is arguably our strongest local match. Lindsey Head scaled a San Diego PR firm roughly twenty-five times from the CFO seat, through US and UK expansion and multiple acquisitions. Retainer pricing and re-pricing, utilization, pass-through media and event spend, and multi-entity international structures are all first-hand experience.
Our retainers feel unprofitable but we can’t prove it. Can you help?
That is one of the most common engagements we take here, and it is a measurement problem before it is a pricing problem. We track hours and pass-through costs against fees at the account level, surface effective rates per client, and show you which retainers are underwater and by how much — which is what makes the re-pricing conversation with the client winnable rather than awkward.
Let's talk about your San Diego agency.
Tell us where things stand — we'll show you what senior, agency-specific finance leadership looks like, right here in San Diego.
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