BNO is a marketing agency headquartered in Somerville, New Jersey, with two additional office locations. Founded in 1981, BNO is among the smaller agencies that have remained privately owned across more than four decades. Nicole Dottoli is Director of Finance at BNO and the only senior finance leader inside the agency.

The agency’s financial picture has three things to balance at once: hourly rates that stay competitive in a market being reshaped by AI, billing accuracy that depends on alignment between finance and client account teams, and a balance sheet that supports owner distributions through normal swings in collections.

By late 2024, BNO knew it had grown past what its day-to-day finance function could carry alone. The search for a fractional CFO for marketing agencies brought BNO to ProCFO Partners and Philippe Touzot.

Why BNO Engaged a Fractional CFO

The criteria for fractional leadership required relevant agency experience and the kind of strategic balance sheet analysis that hadn’t been part of the existing routine at BNO. Nicole already had the day-to-day handled, but they needed help with the next level.

BNO had worked with a part-time CFO years earlier, so this wasn’t a first-time search, and the lessons from that earlier engagement shaped the search. The agency needed someone fluent in agency billing rates specifically, with access to current industry metrics, and with a read on what was happening in the category right now. The category had moved post-COVID and was moving faster again as, among other factors, AI has begun reshaping creative work.

A Collections Process the Whole Leadership Team Owns

Among the first issues the engagement with Philippe uncovered was on the accounts receivable side, which sits inside the Cash Management focus area of ProCFO Partners’ Financial Flywheel™. AR isn’t just a collections problem when you look at it through this lens – it’s the entry point to how cash moves through the business, how working capital holds up, and how confidently the owners can make decisions about distributions and reinvestment. 

Past-due invoices were accumulating, and the agency was struggling to get paid on time across a portion of its client base. The root cause sat in the gap between accounting and account services. “We really didn’t have a process between accounting and the account team,” Nicole says. Account managers weren’t consistently in the loop on aging balances or collection risk. Discrepancies and approval issues on client invoices were getting caught too late to do anything about them.

The fix included a weekly AR meeting that hadn’t existed before. What made it work was who was in the room. The agency’s partners and the head of client service joined the weekly review alongside finance and the account leads. The decision could have looked like overkill, but Nicole credits the leadership presence with making the new cadence stick. The owners held both sides accountable for what was happening with the AR, escalations had a path, and the weekly review forced focus on who was doing what.

Going line-by-line through each client showed patterns in invoice dates, posting dates, and approval cycles that had been invisible in aggregate. BNO also started sending monthly AR statements to clients, which gave their clients a chance to rectify their own aging on their end. Aged balances across the portfolio resolved with one exception.

Reading the Whole Balance Sheet

Once collections were under control, the next gap was a different kind of blind spot.

“We were always so focused on just our cash balances and the P and L that we never took the time to analyze anything else on the balance sheet and understand how all of the accounts affect our working capital,” Nicole says.

So, working capital reporting moved into the monthly close. This is where the Financial Flywheel™ starts to do what it’s designed for: a fix inside Cash Management pulls the Reporting focus area along with it. The same visibility that cleaned up collections now had a place to live in the monthly numbers, and the monthly numbers started telling a more complete story than they had before. BNO started looking at days cash outstanding and tracking the trends month over month. The mechanics aren’t complicated. The implications are, especially for an agency that distributes profits to its owners and has to time those decisions against the natural rhythm of cash coming in.

That visibility tied owner distribution decisions to something more reliable than the cash balance on a given day. Distributions could be set against where working capital actually stood, how it compared to a normal level for the business, and how it was trending. The collections improvements compounded the effect: the balance sheet was healthier, the working capital cushion was bigger, and the read on it was clearer.

Rebuilding the Rate Card

When Philippe first looked at BNO’s billing rates, the list was extensive. Dozens of role-specific rates had accumulated over years of writing SOWs and onboarding new clients. The agency had outgrown that structure without noticing.

BNO collapsed the long list into a six-band tiered structure. A rate card touches three corners of the Financial Flywheel™ at once: Revenue Model, Profit Improvement, and Systems & Processes; pricing, margin, and the discipline of applying both consistently. Roles slot into categories now, not into bespoke rates, and the bands have enough spread between them to protect cost-rate confidentiality on the SOWs the agency produces. The cleanup uncovered duplicate roles BNO didn’t realize it had.

The exercise that built the new card was as valuable as the card itself. Philippe and Nicole ran it from two directions at the same time: a full bottom-up calculation from labor cost, overhead, and target margin, and a benchmarked comparison against competitor rates and industry averages. The dual approach forced the analysis to connect everything: utilization, billability, overhead structure, the real cost of each additional employee, the revenue impact of a rate move. “It helped me connect the dots overall between everything,” Nicole says.

That work now runs annually at BNO. Even when the rates don’t move, the analysis does.

Planning When the Plan Keeps Changing

The marketing and agency industry is being reshaped in real time by AI as a present reality affecting client conversations and billing economics, not as a future scenario. “We’re actually going through that right now, and how AI impacts the volume of work that we’re doing and how that correlates to our billing rates to clients,” Nicole says.

That pace puts pressure on a finance function. The old assumption that you could write an annual plan and stick to it with reasonable confidence doesn’t hold anymore. Philippe’s framing is that the work now is closer to continuous re-planning than to annual budgeting. This is what the Financial Flywheel™ is built for in the first place – a system that keeps turning rather than a one-time fix, so BNO stays ahead of industry shifts instead of catching up to them. The plan stays close to what’s actually happening, because what’s actually happening keeps moving.

For BNO, modernization also showed up on the accounts payable side. Paper checks went away, AI-assisted credit card receipt processing came in, and the AP specialist now does more analysis than data entry. Old processes that had worked once but had been outgrown got replaced.

A ProCFO Collective, Not Just a CFO

One of the things Nicole came back to when asked about the impact of ProCFO Partners was the breadth of the relationship.

“It’s not like you’re just getting one person, you’re getting the whole ProCFO network,” she says.

The Thought Collective goes to work when BNO needs a contact, a recommendation, or a perspective Philippe doesn’t bring directly himself.

The partnership also matters at a more personal level. Nicole is the only senior finance leader at the agency. Having someone to bounce strategic ideas off, or to share an Excel spreadsheet with on a tactical problem, fills an important gap. “Philippe brings this very strategic high level thinking. And I’m so used to the day-to-day that I don’t always see that,” she says. “But then also Philippe is not afraid to get in there and help me with an Excel spreadsheet.”

For a solo senior finance leader, that range is part of what makes the engagement work.

From Now to Next

BNO has spent the past year and a half tightening the parts of the business that finance was always meant to clarify: collections, working capital, rate structure, and the work of planning. The result is a finance function that sees further ahead than it used to.

“I think we’re looking at things now more strategically than operationally,” Nicole says. “We’re more proactive in our finance than reactive.”

That posture pays off when the industry is being reshaped this fast. The next year of work at BNO will involve client conversations about AI’s effect on scope and rates, another round of the annual rate card review, and continued sharpening of the financial reporting that now sits underneath every leadership decision – Goals & Strategy and Reporting now engaged alongside the rest of the Financial Flywheel™. The agency has the line of sight to create what comes next. The agency has the line of sight to create what comes next.