About
Built on institutional underwriting.
Base Case CFO brings the discipline of institutional underwriting to founder-led contractors: size the downside, protect the capital, and make the decision the numbers support. The firm is led by its Founder, who has spent a career on the capital side of the table, the same side as your bank.
Why we exist
Someone has to own the judgment.
A contractor doing $8M to $40M has a bank covenant the owner half-understands, cash that swings with retainage and pay applications, and margins that slip mid-project. The bookkeeping gets handled. What goes unowned is the judgment: which receivable to chase this week, how close the next covenant test really is, what a soft quarter does to the bonding line, and whether the business is ready for the bank, the board, or a sale.
Base Case CFO exists to own those questions, with a name signed to the answers.
The discipline
Base case. Bear case. Bull case.
Every plan is built three ways. This is the institutional underwriting lens, and it is where the firm takes its name: protect the capital first, then decide.
Base case
The disciplined scenario, the one decisions are made from. Realistic, not hopeful.
Bear case
The downside, sized before it arrives: a soft quarter, a slow payer, a covenant under pressure.
Bull case
The upside, kept honest, so ambition is planned for without being assumed.
Three scenarios anchor every plan. They are also the three pillars in our mark.
Founder
A career underwriting capital structures.
The Founder of Base Case CFO has spent a career on the capital side of the table, originating, underwriting, and executing the capital-structure decisions that contractors and construction businesses face on a smaller scale. The questions do not change with the size of the deal. How much debt is prudent, where the leverage breaks, what the lender will require, and what happens to the business if the base case does not hold.
Across his career in institutional real estate and private equity investing, the Founder has underwritten more than $24 billion of real estate and deployed nearly $700 million of equity, structuring transactions with senior debt, leverage, and the lender covenants that come with them. That work began in acquisitions and asset management at a publicly traded REIT, running institutional multifamily deals through full ownership and financing cycles, and continued into co-founding a private equity firm focused on early stage and growth equity investing, where the Founder raised dedicated institutional equity funds, led due diligence, advised portfolio companies, and served at the board level.
The throughline is disciplined, downside-first underwriting. Base Case CFO brings that same rigor to owner-led construction and trade businesses: building the conservative case before the optimistic one, structuring debt that survives a slow quarter, and preparing you to sit across from your bank as a credible, well-organized borrower. That is what the name stands for: lead with the base case, and build only on the numbers that hold.
Accountability
One Founder. One signature.
Two things you cannot buy from software or a bookkeeper: judgment that adapts to your actual situation, and a person who sits in the room with your bank and signs the numbers. At Base Case CFO, the Founder owns the forecast, the covenant strategy, and the monthly decision call, and stands behind the recommendations. Every call made and every outcome is kept in a written decision log.
We are deliberately narrow. We provide outsourced CFO and strategic finance, and we do not provide audit, tax, legal, securities, or investment-banking services.
Start here
Weigh a covenant breach against the cost of a full-time CFO.
A breach can mean repricing, default, or a forced sale. A full-time CFO runs $250,000 to $400,000 all in. The Sprint is a fixed fee and a clear assessment of where you stand.