Rebuilding a family business’s finance function — strategy and execution, side by side

Situation

After a divestiture, most finance functions don’t get to choose between catching their breath and charting their future. They must do both at once.

A third-generation, family-owned manufacturer specializing in vehicle upfitting found itself in exactly that position. The company had sold off part of its business and, as part of the sale, key members of the finance team transitioned out. That left a function facing two needs simultaneously: strategic finance leadership to define where the organization should go, and hands-on tactical execution to handle the work piling up in the meantime.

Those two needs usually pull in opposite directions. A strategist hands you a plan and leaves execution to someone else; it temporarily helps clear the backlog but never sets direction. This business couldn’t afford the gap between them. They engaged Growth Operators to deliver both at once.

Execution

During our engagement, the Growth Operators team:

• Conducted a nextLEVEL® assessment across finance and accounting to establish a clear, prioritized view of where the function stood and what it needed
• Caught up eight months of overdue financials in three months — cleaning up the fundamentals, including issues stemming from the 2024 business sale
• Brought sales tax filing and payments current across more than 13 states
• Designed and implemented scalable, executive-ready monthly financial reporting
• Led day-to-day controllership and executed the key processes that keep the function running
• Reviewed lease accounting and confirmed compliance with applicable standards
• Defined the talent strategy for the finance team, then recruited and onboarded a new finance leader
• Updated SOPs and realigned the team structure for scalability

Results

• Cleaned up eight months of overdue financials within three months, restoring reporting accuracy and executive confidence
• Brought sales tax obligations current across more than 13 states
• Recruited and onboarded a new finance leader to carry the function forward
• Defined a future-state finance organizational design built to support the business as it scales
• Established scalable, executive-ready monthly financial reporting as the new standard

Client Success

The temptation after a disruption like this is to triage and clear the backlog now, worry about the future later. But a finance function rebuilt only to survive the moment will need rebuilding the next time the business shifts again.

That’s why we worked at both ends at once. While we caught up with eight months of financials and brought multi-state sales tax current, we were also defining the talent strategy, redesigning the team structure, and recruiting the leader who would own it going forward. The cleanup restored confidence in the numbers today; the organizational design made sure that confidence would hold as the company grows.

The result is a finance function that isn’t just current, it’s built to scale, with the right structure, the right reporting, and the right leader in place. That’s what it looks like to bring in operators rather than consultants. We don’t choose between setting the strategy and doing the work. We do both, side by side, and we don’t hand the function back until it can run on its own.