If you’re hesitant to work with outsourced finance staff, Chris Ortega and Pam Chelden encourage you to think again. And in fact, they’d like you to reconsider the entire term “outsourcing.”

“It seems like ‘insource is us and outsource is them,’ and I think that creates such a negative connotation,” Ortega, CEO of fractional CFO and advisory services company Fresh FP&A, said while speaking at the 2024 AICPA & CIMA CFO Conference. “We want to be looked at as fractional partners,” he said. “That has a different flavor.”

Outsourcing is not “taking your entire process and offshoring it,” according to Chelden, director at consulting and financial services firm SC&H Group. She handles outsourced controller and CFO-level services in the firm’s accounting solutions practice. “Outsourcing can be US-based experienced professionals who can help you solve your problems,” she said at the conference.

Fractional staff can fill a variety of roles beyond acting as temporary backfill, Chelden said. Though her staff most often comes in when clients have vacancies, she said, they also help with projects such as ERP implementation, or temporarily fulfill internal staff’s duties to free them up to focus on implementation. It’s hard for staff “to do their day-to-day job and implement a system effectively” without risking burnout, she said.

Click here to read more about how fractional help can boost your finance team.—CV

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You’d have thought Elon Musk was handing Wall Street a bouquet instead of one of Tesla’s worst quarters in years. After all, his electric carmaker posted Ls across the board for the first three months of the year, performing even worse than analysts expected.

Investors already knew that Tesla was struggling, though. It was selling fewer vehicles even as it cut prices; it was laying off more than 10% of staff. The surprise was that Tesla was speeding up its rollout of new models—among them more affordable EVs—to early 2025 instead of later in that year. The potential for more affordable EVs to reverse Tesla’s fortunes after a year of losing market share was more than hope enough for Wall Street, where Tesla stock price shot up as much as 18% over its pre-earnings price.

“This is exactly what investors wanted to hear after a wave of doubt about the company’s commitment to producing a new mass-market car,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

To get a sense of just how pleased investors were by news of new models, take a look at some of the results they were willing to overlook as they bought up shares: Car sales revenue down 13%, overall revenues down 9%, profit 55%. Profits haven’t fallen that much since 2021, and revenues since 2012. Its inventory of unsold vehicles also nearly doubled compared to Q1 2023. Its price cuts as an attempt to juice sales have eaten into margins, putting the company “into cash preservation mode,” Emmanuel Rosner, analyst at Deutsche Bank, told the Wall Street Journal, which lowered its price target for Tesla stock by ~54% to $123. Before reporting, its stock was continuing the steep decline it charted over the past quarter and in the months prior.

For more on Tesla’s earnings, click here.—GD

Jason Gold, CEO of IR consulting firm Resurge, recalled a conversation he had with a friend who just had their first earnings call as CEO of a publicly traded company. The vibes were not good that Friday evening, as the company’s stock price was down 10% a day removed from that call.

Gold, then an analyst for an investment firm, grilled his friend as to why company leaders let the call veer in an unintended direction. Eventually, Gold’s friend asked him, “Where were you on Wednesday? I could have used you earlier this week to prepare me for Thursday.”

Beyond this being the origin story of Gold as an IR consultant, it shows in a nutshell what is at stake when thinking about your company’s investor relations strategy.

A successful IR program should achieve the ultimate goal of a “fair and accurate” company valuation, according to Jeff Corbin, who has decades of experience in IR and, more recently, employee communications, and is the author of the book, Investor Relations: The Art of Communicating Value.

“As a public company, if you get out there and tell your story the right way, and speak to your financials the right way, and then expose that story to the right people, [then] you should achieve a fair and accurate valuation,” Corbin told CFO Brew.

Click here for more on creating a successful investor relations program.—AZ

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