Client Story
From
the
Ground
Up
“I’m much more efficient, and I can make better decisions based on reliable information our Interim CFO delivers. It’s not just me – the project managers and even the leaders of the architecture and engineering departments can focus more on what they need to. The entire operations of the business is benefiting from this.”
Ryan Teicher
CEO
REDCOM Design & Construction is a full-service design-build firm based in Westfield, New Jersey. With architects, civil engineers, and a construction team under one roof, they take clients from raw land through entitlement, design, and construction, handing over the keys when it’s done. “Trees to keys,” as CEO Ryan Teicher puts it.
The business runs about 50 to 55 people and delivers large-scale commercial projects. Its financial structure is more complex than most firms its size – the architecture and engineering side bills like a consulting firm while the construction side runs on AIA invoicing (standardized construction progress billing created by the American Institute of Architects), work-in-progress reporting, and percent-complete accounting. The finance department has to operate across both at once. That demands someone who understands the specific rhythms and risks of construction – when to read the macro, when to dig into a project, and how to translate what’s happening in the field into what leadership needs to see.
Why REDCOM Engaged an Interim CFO
Ryan had enough financial fluency to know what he should be seeing. He just wasn’t seeing it.
REDCOM had cycled through a full-time CFO and then a senior controller. Both were capable people. Neither was operating at CFO level – looking at the business strategically, building forward-looking tools, connecting financial data to decisions.
WIP reports ran on a three-month lag. There was no rolling P&L. No departmental visibility. Ryan knew the business’s net profit at year-end but he had no idea which part of the business was producing it.
“We never really had the need for a highly sophisticated CFO,” he says. “At least, that’s what we thought.”
The case for Interim CFO was straightforward. CFO-level thinking applied to a business that had outgrown its financial infrastructure, without the cost of a full-time hire. Ryan found ProCFO Partners through a referral, and one conversation was enough to know he’d found the right fit.
Construction Finance Is Its Own Language
A $15 million project running 12 to 14 months doesn’t sit still. The numbers behind any project are in constant motion, and knowing when to dig into the detail versus when to read the big picture is a skill that takes industry experience to develop.
There’s also the people layer. Project managers hold the ground-level intelligence that explains what the numbers mean. An Interim CFO who can’t have a real conversation with a project manager is working with incomplete information.
“You have to have a CFO that can understand that,” Ryan says, “and really knows when to dig in and when to not dig in to get behind the numbers.”
ProCFO Larry Ward came in with that construction fluency. His first work was building the reporting infrastructure REDCOM needed – tools Ryan could use to run the business towards future goals, not just review what’s already happened.
What Changed: Interim CFO Impact at REDCOM
The shift started with reporting cadence and moved outward from there.
- Month-end close cadence: WIP reports had been running on a three-month lag. Ryan’s target – which he thought was aggressive – was to get to a one-month lag. Larry’s response: one month is the floor. With the right systems, 15 days is achievable. They’re now at one month and working toward it.
“If there’s something that happened three months ago that we need to react to, we’re three months late,” Ryan says. “Now we’re just 15 days late, which in construction is nothing.”
- Departmental P&Ls: For the first time, REDCOM can see profitability by construction, architecture, and engineering separately. Overhead is distributed appropriately to each department. Ryan can now look at a department’s margin and model what adding one person actually means for revenue.
- Rolling P&L: A rolling P&L alongside a calendar P&L means Ryan can manage to forecasts throughout the year rather than reconcile them at year-end.
Financial Reliability Across the Organization
The impact isn’t limited to Ryan’s desk. Project managers used to spend mental energy chasing billing questions – whether invoices were current, whether clients were paying. Now the system handles it. Architecture and engineering leadership focuses on the work, not whether billing is up to date.
“It’s not just me as a CEO,” Ryan says. “It’s the entire operations of the business that’s benefiting from this.”
ProCFO Partners also brought more than one CFO’s experience to the engagement. The broader network – a thought collective of experienced ProCFOs across industries – backs every relationship. Ryan’s engagement connected him to that depth, not just to a single hire.
When asked to name the impact in a single word, Ryan didn’t hesitate: reliability.
A New Way to Make Decisions
Before departmental P&Ls, growth decisions were educated guesses – back-of-napkin analysis, pattern recognition, gut check. Now Ryan can look at a department, understand its margin, and model specific decisions before making them.
“I’m a bit of a data nerd,” he says. “And I love the fact that I have all this data to help me make more educated decisions.”
Staffing decisions are sharper. Resource allocation is clearer. The consulting side of the business – architecture and engineering – was always assumed to carry higher margins than construction. Now that assumption is confirmed with numbers specific to REDCOM, not the industry in general.
Ryan went from knowing answers directionally to knowing them precisely.
Building The Next
REDCOM has been running clean data for about six months. The goals Ryan set at the start of the engagement – the ones he thought would take two years – are already behind him with the financial leadership provided by their Interim CFO.
The next phase will build on that foundation, with process improvements inside the finance department, a succession path for people in that department to grow into new roles, and getting the month-end close from one month to 15 days.
“We’ve been collecting the data and we’re able to start formulating where we want to go,” Ryan says. “It’s all really new and it’s really exciting.”
A firm that takes projects from trees to keys knows what it means to build for the long term. The financial infrastructure REDCOM is putting in place now is the foundation for their next.
