Think Like a CFO

See the Business the Way a CFO Does

Every week, David Lopez, CPA breaks down one financial problem from a different CFO angle — buying a business, making an owner decision, reading a financial report, or studying what caused a company to fail.

Across 52 weeks, the same core financial issues come up again and again: earnings quality, cash flow, recurring revenue, backlog, concentration, owner dependence, growth, debt, valuation and more.

The goal is simple: show you which numbers matter, what they are telling you, and what a CFO would do next.

Not accounting theory. Practical financial judgment for business owners.

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The Think Like a CFO Library

13 Financial Problems. Four Ways to Look at Each One.

The series is built around 13 CFO issues that show up repeatedly inside growing businesses.

Each issue is examined from four different perspectives:

Year One includes 52 cases: 13 acquisition analyses, 13 owner decisions, 13 financial-report explanations, and 13 post-mortems of major business failures.

The threads running through the year include earnings quality, recurring revenue, backlog and revenue visibility, working capital and liquidity, seasonality, capacity and labor, concentration risk, owner dependence, growth quality, customer economics, fixed obligations and leverage, valuation and capital allocation, and resilience.

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Latest Cases

Start Anywhere. The Lessons Connect.

Each case stands on its own, but related cases are connected by CFO thread.

You may first see an issue through an acquisition. A few weeks later, we may look at the same issue from the perspective of the owner, find it inside a financial report, or study a company that suffered because management ignored it.

The point is not to memorize 52 answers.

It is to start recognizing the patterns.

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Why It Matters

You Do Not Need to Be Buying or Selling a Company to Think Like a CFO

Some cases involve buying a company. Some involve deciding whether to sell, invest, hire, borrow or change course. Others explain the financial reports every owner should understand. And some study famous business failures to identify the warning signs before they become fatal.

They all teach the same skill:

How do you look past the headline number and understand what is actually happening inside the business?

Read enough of these and you start spotting the same issues inside your own company while they are still inexpensive to fix:

• Earnings that look strong until they are normalized
• Profit that never becomes cash
• Recurring revenue that is less dependable than it appears
• Backlog that cannot actually be delivered profitably
• A company that depends too heavily on its owner
• One customer, referral source or channel carrying too much risk
• Customers that create revenue but destroy margin
• Growth that consumes more cash than it creates
• Debt, leases and fixed obligations that remove strategic options
• Financial reports that show a very different story once you know where to look
• Warning signs that appear months or years before a business is obviously in trouble

That is what thinking like a CFO means: knowing which few numbers matter, understanding what they are telling you, and acting before the decision becomes expensive.

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How a CFO Thinks

This series is not investment advice and it is not an accounting textbook.

It is a practical look at how a CFO evaluates a business from four directions:

• What would I buy?
• What would I do if I owned it?
• What do the financial reports actually tell me?
• What happens when management ignores the warning signs?

David Lopez, CPA is the founder of Lopez CFO and provides fractional CFO services to growing owner-operated businesses.

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Need a CFO to help you make a decision like this?

Lopez CFO provides monthly fractional CFO services to owner-operated businesses — based in South Florida and working with companies nationally.