Fractional CFO to turn revenue
into dividends
Your sales team tells you revenue is growing. Your bank account seems to disagree.
The real problem?They could both be right.
The daily reality of a founder/CEO
Entrepreneurs and CEOs live every day with personal, operational and growth-related pressures.
And they are often left alone precisely when the most difficult decisions need to be made.
Outside: green. Sales are growing.
Inside: red. Cash is running low.
Sales does its job: sell. Now it's your turn to do yours: which sales should you turn down? Which clients should be deprioritized?
82%
Deloitte MarginPLUS 2024: 82% of companies fail to turn their growth into sustainable profits
Insource or outsource. Invest or defer. Hire or cut.
Every decision reshapes your company's future.
And the weight always falls on your shoulders — because no one truly knows how to help you.
61%
Vistage Research / RHR International: 61% of entrepreneurs/CEOs say loneliness negatively affects their performance
Growth. Margins. Liquidity. Budget. Financial statements. Forecast.
They tell you banks and investors expect credible projections and data.
Then you discover the real focus is on the story behind the numbers. The one you weren't prepared to tell.
81%
McKinsey & Co: 81% of investors say the story behind the numbers influences financial decisions
The client asks for a discount. Your sales rep asks you to approve it. Both are happy.
And you think: "After all, it was just 5%."
Too bad you don't know what that 5% really costs you. What if you just sold at a loss?
8X
McKinsey (The Power of Pricing): every 1% discount sinks operating profit by an average of 8%
"There is no favourable wind for the sailor who doesn't know where to go."
The problem isn't a lack of professionals around you. It's when you realise their inputs — sectoral and fragmented — still need to be pieced together.
Every decision becomes a mosaic. Yours alone.
With no relief from bureaucracy, taxes, employees, suppliers, and clients.
Your accountant protects your tax compliance and keeps your company's books in order. An indispensable figure for managing deadlines, financial statements, and dealings with the tax authority.
But the tax authority — greedy and relentless — keeps creating new levies and deadlines, keeping your accountant too busy to help you look ahead.
These days they also like to call themselves 'interim managers' — they make great presentations. Excellent ones. They sell you the latest trends, new software, the framework du jour.
But the dirty work is almost always left to you. They'll tell you why something needs to be done. What needs to be done. Never how. And they rarely stay long enough to see if the promised results actually materialise.
The bank offers you money when you don't need it. Then, when you actually have a project to fund, they start picking your numbers apart.
And that's when you realise something. The problem isn't just how the bank reads your numbers.
It's that no one ever taught you how to present them properly. And so you pay: in time, in interest rates, and in hours wasted justifying what you could have prepared better.
Many professionals. Many inputs. But always just one person having to put it all together.
28CFO — The navigator for SME dividends.
Every SME generates revenue. Few make profits. Very few know how to truly monetise those profits.
If you've made it this far, you've already understood something important: growing to earn more revenue and investing to grow further isn't enough if you don't have a system capable of turning that growth into profits and dividends for the owners.
The risk? You know it well.
New clients who demand discounts and pay late. Costs that keep rising. And bureaucracy always at the gates.
First comes profitable sales and growth. Everything else comes after.
For years we've used and refined the approaches of the world's largest multinationals across sectors and countries: we know what works and why.
The truth is that turning sales into dividends takes more than selling more — it takes the experience and sharp tools of multinationals competing in international markets.
Every SME is the result of inputs from many professionals — internal and external — and interactions with clients, suppliers, and even your competitors.
At 28CFO we aggregate those inputs and transform them into value, opportunities, and decisions. Finally separate the good clients from the toxic ones, the good costs from the dead weight, and align your organisation on your own wavelength.
Our goal is to make you get more from every € you invoice: we analyse and improve everything that happens, from pricing to costs.
We're not a converted recruitment firm or a conveyor belt of repurposed accountants: we help you recoup the sacrifices you invest in your company — with the aim of making ourselves redundant quickly.
We help SMEs turn paper growth into real dividends in the bank.
14 moves ago, I left Italy as a recent graduate. I worked for Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola and Ford Motor Company in 7 countries and 2 continents. In the last 7 years I've helped monetise over €130M in margins, structural cost reductions (including my own role) and working capital.
The pattern I found was always the same. In multinationals as in startups. In Italy as abroad. It's never a question of team dedication. But of a flawed approach to data.
Most teams live in the past: they explain the past. They use the past to project the future. No forecasting approach. No planning for risks and opportunities. And so, while risks brew, opportunities hide within sales, margins, and working capital.
That's why 28CFO was born: to equip SMEs with the tools we developed and tested in multinationals, and to help entrepreneurs turn growth and complexity into real dividends.
Matteo de Padova
28
years of experience
Hero Mentor
Forbes Italia
SMEs
& startups
If you want to keep doing things 'the way we've always done them', make gut decisions while delegating financial matters to your accountant, or simply need to fill a temporary vacancy — we're not the right fit for you.
Are you sure you actually need us?
There are many firms that offer finance profiles on temporary freelance contracts.
They have lower prices, they're recruitment firms and may offer profiles with experience even in mid-to-large companies.
We focus exclusively on business profitability, toxic clients, and dividends that are (still) hiding.
The standard path to concrete results
You probably already have the answer — just look at your business current account.
Your accountant is fundamental. But their work is administrative, tax and statutory: closing the past, ensuring compliance, and managing the tax authority.
28CFO works on something else: your margins. Your liquidity. Pricing and discount policies. Cost structure. Working capital.
Your accountant tells you what happened. But you already know that.
28CFO helps plan and deliver what your accountant will see months later.
If knowing how much tax to pay is enough to run your business, you don't need 28CFO.
The first sign is almost always poor-quality growth: revenue grows, cash doesn't.
Other typical signs:
When these signals start accumulating, the risk isn't just losing margins. It's losing decision clarity precisely when the business is becoming more complex.
The starting point is almost always data. Too often scattered, incomplete or unused for decision-making.
From here we begin with:
This is the minimum you should expect from any self-respecting fractional CFO.
28CFO goes further.
Because opportunities don't materialise in reports, but in operations. Sales. Pricing. Margins. Costs. Working capital. Processes.
28CFO has already got its hands dirty turning identified opportunities into concrete results. We'll do the same for you.
The price varies considerably depending on the number of days per week, the professional's experience and the complexity of the project.
On average, consider a range between €2,000 and €6,000 per month.
Also consider that:
What your business needs is the experience, speed and tools of multinationals — at a fraction of what multinationals pay.
Different figures for different needs. Understanding the differences is important for choosing the right one to help your company at its current stage.
| Feature | Fractional CFO | Employed CFO | Consultant | Agency | Temporary Mgr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operational responsibility | ✓ Direct | ✓ Direct | ✗ Absent | ~ Partial | ✓ Direct |
| Typical monthly cost | 2,500–6,000 € | 9,000–16,000 € | 4,000–9,000 € | 4,000–12,000 € | 7,000–11,000 € |
| Business vision | ✓ Integrated | ✓ Integrated | ~ Partial | ✗ Absent | ~ Variable |
| Contractual flexibility | ✓ High | ✗ Low | ✓ High | ~ Medium | ~ Medium |
| Performance metrics | ✓ Structured | ✓ Structured | ~ Partial | ✗ Absent | ~ Partial |
| Results accountability | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ✗ No | ✗ No | ~ Variable |
We believe deeply in the projects we choose to take on and therefore sign a direct non-compete exclusivity agreement.
The only case where we consider working with companies competing with our clients is when the geographic territory is completely different — e.g. one in Italy, the other in Spain.
We have also provided for the exclusivity option in this case and we are proud every time a client requests it: it means they have understood our value and the difference we can make in the market.
In 90% of cases, your Finance Director is an excellent professional who knows how to keep the accounts in order, manage compliance, and handle relationships with the accountant, tax authority and auditors.
If you're calling 28CFO, it's because you want more from your business. Perhaps the international perspective of someone who has managed businesses in different parts of the world. Or a coaching role to develop your director's skills.
The roles are different, they complement each other. What matters is achieving the result for your business: improving the ability to generate dividends.
Visit any luxury watch brand's website. Choose a watch. Look at the date window in the photo: what number do you see? Exactly: 28!
It's not a coincidence. It's a choice.
In mathematics, 28 is one of the very few perfect numbers: only 4 exist below one billion. It is a rare, harmonious, self-sufficient number:
In business numerology, 8 alone is the ultimate symbol of money. The 2 in front softens it, introducing relationship, listening and partnership.
So 28 unites two forces: the 2 of collaboration and listening, and the 8 of resource governance and financial strength.
It's leadership born from listening and manifested in numbers.
Exactly what you expect from a fractional CFO.
Enter your business at the right cadence. Listen before acting. Govern the numbers without replacing the person who built and runs the company.
The goal is simple: to make ourselves progressively less necessary.
At the beginning, to get to know your business, your team, your clients and suppliers, physical presence is predominant.
But from 28CFO you expect results that generate dividends, not someone who clocks in. For this reason, after an initial phase, the work will increasingly be in hybrid mode.
And, of course, on-site whenever there is a genuine need for it.
Yes.
28CFO offers you this above all, alongside experience.
