A plan is only useful if it survives contact with the budget. We build the financial spine that tells you whether the strategy is affordable and when.
Every company has a plan somewhere. The problem is that it usually lives in one person's head or in a deck from an offsite two years ago, and nothing in the monthly numbers connects to it. Strategy that isn't priced is just a preference. The work here is making the ambition specific enough to fund, schedule, and measure.
Baum's Accounting Services is built on 18 years of controller, CFO, and advisory work, including five years running the books at a construction company and eight leading finance at a mortgage bank. We work with growing companies around Lexington and with clients across the country, most of them somewhere between five and fifty million in revenue, at the point where the founder can no longer hold the whole plan personally and the leadership team needs a shared version of it.
The planning work moves in one direction: from where the company wants to be in three years back to what has to be true this quarter. That means putting a number on the goal, then working out what capacity, headcount, working capital, and capital spending it requires to get there. Some plans survive that test. Plenty do not, and finding out in a planning session is far cheaper than finding out eighteen months in. What comes out the other side is a set of financial targets tied to specific initiatives, with an owner attached to each one and a date it gets checked.
Most of the value shows up in specific choices rather than in the document. Whether the second location opens this year or next. Whether growth gets funded from operations, from a line of credit, or by slowing distributions. Which customers or service lines the company wants more of and which it would be better off without. When to add a salesperson versus a project manager. Each of those has a number behind it, and the number changes the answer more often than people expect. Getting them on the table together, priced, is usually the first time a leadership team has seen the whole tradeoff at once.
Plans die from neglect, not from being wrong. The fix is a review rhythm that takes an hour and actually happens. Monthly, the results come in against the targets and the gaps get named. Quarterly, the initiatives get a harder look: what moved, what stalled, what the market did that nobody predicted, and whether the sequence still makes sense. Adjustments made in that setting are cheap. The same adjustments made in a panic, after two bad quarters, cost real money. Having someone outside the company running the review helps, because an outsider can ask why a project keeps slipping without it becoming personal.
Construction plans around backlog, bonding capacity, and equipment cycles, so the cash question and the growth question are the same question. Senior health lives with reimbursement timing and census swings that make staffing decisions unforgiving. Environmental services carries project accounting and regulatory costs that don't show up cleanly in a standard chart of accounts. Retail has inventory, seasonality, and location economics. Professional services has utilization and the fact that capacity walks out the door every evening. We have worked across all of these, and the planning approach adapts to how each one actually earns rather than forcing every business through the same template.
There's overlap in the conversation and a real difference in the inputs. A coach works on how you lead and how the team operates. This work starts from the financial statements and the cash position, and every recommendation carries a number. Both can be useful. If you already have a coach, we usually end up supplying the numbers that make those sessions concrete.
The people who own the numbers. Usually that's the CEO or COO, whoever runs operations, and whoever runs sales. Finance staff join for the build. Sessions work better with four or five people in the room than with fifteen, and better still when the group has authority to decide rather than to recommend. We will tell you if someone important is missing.
Yes. Some companies bring us in for a planning cycle and run it themselves afterward, with a check-in each quarter. Others find that building the plan surfaces reporting gaps they want fixed, and the engagement grows from there. Either way works. The planning project stands on its own and doesn't require committing to anything beyond it.
Other work in this area that tends to come up in the same conversation.
Financial statements, budgets, and reporting formatted to what the grantor requires, plus the tracking they'll expect afterward.
Read moreOngoing financial leadership at the hours your business needs, covering forecasting, capital decisions, margins, and the meetings where numbers get questioned.
Read moreMulti-year projections tied to what you're actually planning to do, with the cash and capital requirements each scenario would demand.
Read moreBook a consultation and we will look at where things stand today and what it would take to fix them.
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