Fractional staff can give you ‘instant horsepower’

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.

Fractionals can also free up CFOs for more strategic work. Ortega said staff from Fresh FP&A helped give a CFO time to focus on fundraising, “her passion area where she wants to add the biggest value,” he said. “We work alongside the tactical operations side of her organization…That gave her capacity. That’s instant capacity; that’s instant horsepower.”

Treat them like team members: Chelden and Ortega also gave advice for working effectively with fractional staff. They both stressed the importance of treating them like permanent employees. Onboard them like you would a team member, Chelden said. “Make sure they’re meeting the expectations that you would have if they were a full-time senior accountant on your team or a controller on your team,” she added.

Set your scope of work up front but be open to adjusting it, Chelden advised. Often, she said, her teams will discover partway through an assignment that a client needs more help, at which point they might discuss amending the scope.

Consider a tech solution: Consider whether you’re using temporary staff as a “Band-Aid” for a problem that could be better solved by technology, Ortega said. Chelden recalled a time her staff worked for a company that was using Excel to handle a complicated medical billing process. Her team suggested they adopt new software that could make the process much smoother, though the client was reluctant to change. But two years later, after experiencing a lot of turnover related to the clunky process, the client asked Chelden and her team to help set up a new billing system.