The Freight Routing Decision Most Distributors Get Wrong (And What It Costs Them)
If you run a distribution business that imports or exports goods, there’s a good chance your freight routing decision was made once, years ago, and never looked at again. That single oversight is one of the most expensive and most fixable mistakes I see as a fractional CFO working with importers and exporters. Most […]
Entering Latin America: What Manufacturers Need to Know Before They Ship
There’s a particular kind of enthusiasm I see in manufacturers when they first start talking about expanding into Latin America. It’s usually triggered by one good conversation with a distributor at a trade show, an inbound enquiry from a buyer in Mexico City or São Paulo, a gap in the market that looks too […]
How to Know When Your Finance Team Needs to Upskill
I’ve spent more than thirty years working inside the finance functions of businesses that buy, sell, and manufacture across borders, qualifying suppliers on factory floors in China, restructuring a European logistics hub in the middle of Brexit, and spending weeks in Mexico working out whether a new manufacturing partner could actually deliver what they […]
US and Canada Expansion: Structuring Your Shipping Routes for Cost, Not Convenience
Every business owner I work with reaches the same crossroads once they decide to expand into North America. They’ve done the market research, they’ve found the distributor, the customer, the marketplace listing that’s about to go live and then someone asks the question that actually determines whether this expansion makes money or quietly drains it: […]
Shared Container vs Full Container: The Real Cost-Benefit Breakdown
Every few weeks, a client asks me some version of the same question: should we wait until we can fill a full container, or ship a smaller, shared load now? It sounds like a logistics question. It isn’t. It’s a cash flow question wearing a shipping container’s clothes. After more than two decades working inside […]
How to Choose Your First Overseas Warehouse Location
Choosing the right overseas warehouse location is one of the biggest decisions a growing business will make when expanding into new markets and it’s also one of the easiest to get wrong. Many years ago, working with an international hardware brand, we had a warehouse in the Northwest, but 90% of the customers were freighting […]
Vetting Overseas Suppliers – What I Learned Standing on Factory Floors in China
I’ve lost count of the exact number, but it’s somewhere around nineteen trips to Chinese manufacturing regions over the course of my career. Nineteen sets of jet lag, nineteen rounds of tea ceremony small talk before getting down to business, and nineteen opportunities to learn that almost everything useful about vetting overseas suppliers is invisible […]
Fractional CFO for Importers and Exporters: Why Contacts Matter More Than Spreadsheets
If you’re searching for a fractional CFO for importers and exporters, here’s the honest answer most advisors won’t give you: the numbers only tell half the story. The other half lives in your network. When clients come to me about scaling internationally, the conversation usually starts with numbers: margins, freight costs, exchange rates, lead times. […]
What Does a Fractional CFO Actually Do All Day? A Realistic Look for UK Business Owners
You’ve probably heard the term. Maybe a fellow business owner mentioned their “fractional or outsourced CFO” in passing, or you’ve seen it discussed in UK entrepreneur communities and startup forums. You nodded along, but the honest question lingering in the back of your mind is: what does that person actually do? It’s a fair question. […]