The finance team the holding companies have — built to share.
We built The Good CFO to erase a line that divides the agency world: the agencies inside a holding company get world-class finance, technology, and shared services — and everyone else goes without.
Independent agencies get the short end of the finance deal.
Inside a holding company, the portfolio agencies have everything: a shared finance team, real technology, and systems built by people who have solved your problem a dozen times before. Independent agencies rarely get any of it.
Instead they're handed a choice, and it's a bad one — a strategic CFO who won't touch the books, or a bookkeeper who can't see around corners. Neither is the financial leadership a growing agency actually needs, and the space between them is where good agencies quietly lose money.
It started with the team I wished I'd had.
The Good CFO began with a problem I kept running into. I've spent more than twenty years as a CFO in media, advertising, and entertainment — including time inside a holding company, close enough to the portfolio agencies to see exactly how much the shared-services model gave them.
When I started taking on agencies as a fractional CFO, I hit a wall fast. To do the work a CFO is actually for — strategy, growth, being in the room for the decisions that matter — I couldn't also be the person running the monthly close and the day-to-day accounting. If I wanted to lead, I needed a team behind me.
One of my first and best hires was Vincent Nguyen, who I brought on to lead finance at Column Five. We clicked immediately over technology, innovation, and systems thinking — and over a principle we both hold onto hard: blame the process, not the person. Vince became my co-founder, and together we turned that shared conviction into a firm.
Together we built the tools and systems that made finance faster, clearer, and more human — the foundation of what's now the Hub, and of the team every client works with today.
The standard that taught me what “good” means.
Early in my career I worked under David Paine at PainePR — and it changed how I think about this work for good. David had written a Service Manifesto that moved through the agency world, Putting Clients and People First. Its argument was radical for its time: quality isn’t a talent problem, it’s a systems problem.
He built the firm on it — flatter teams with experienced people doing the actual work instead of layers of juniors and inspection, a humanist culture that treated people as professionals rather than billable units, and continual improvement drawn straight from W. Edwards Deming, including the line I’ve never let go of: better than 94% of outcomes come from the system, not the people.
That is where my definition of a good CFO took shape — not a scorekeeper, but someone who designs the system so good people can do their best work, and who treats finance as service to the people and clients it exists to support. Much of what we believe today traces straight back to that manifesto.
A great CFO is defined by good as much as by numbers.
"Blame the process, not the person" sounds simple, but it changes everything. Most problems in a business aren't people problems — they're system problems. Fix the system and good people do great work. Blame the people and you lose them, and keep the problem.
That belief runs through everything: responsible use of data, people over profits, and a systems-thinking method that moves agencies from firefighting to intention. We use financial expertise in service of something larger than the ledger.
"The hallmark of a great CFO is to be good."
It's where the name comes from, and it's the whole reason we exist: to do good things with good people.
One team, the whole finance function — without the holding company.
What started as one CFO who needed a team is now the team: fractional CFOs, controllers, analysts, and bookkeepers, plus fractional HR and recruiting — all under one roof, and all fluent in how agencies actually make money. Every engagement includes the Hub, and every client is backed by the collective experience of our whole team.
It's the shared-services advantage of a holding company — the people, the technology, the systems — available to any agency that wants it. That's the line we set out to erase, and it's what we do every day.
See what a holding-company finance team feels like.
Tell us where your agency stands today, and we'll show you what senior, agency-fluent finance and HR leadership looks like — the Hub included.
Let's Talk