P S A

Common Questions

Questions We Hear

Before Every Engagement

Straight answers to the things F&B founders ask before working with PSA — about fit, cost, process, and what to expect.

 

Table of Contents

Is PSA the Right Fit?

No. $1M–$3M is actually where we do some of our most impactful work. The financial problems that will limit your growth at $5M or $10M are already forming right now — in your COGS structure, your supplier terms, and your working capital cycle.

The founders who engage early tend to scale faster and with more cash efficiency than those who wait until the problems are obvious. A $1.5M brand with clean financial infrastructure is worth more than a $5M brand with hidden margin compression.

Most of our clients aren’t in crisis when they start. They’re doing well — growing revenue, gaining traction, building the brand. What they share is a nagging sense that the numbers should feel better than they do.

You don’t need to be bleeding out to benefit from a financial diagnostic. In fact, the best time to find and fix structural margin problems is before they compound at scale. A $40K annual leak at $2M becomes a $200K problem at $10M.

Yes. We work across the full F&B spectrum — restaurants, breweries, CPG brands, manufacturers, bottlers, and multi-concept operators. The five layers of the Shelf-to-Savings™ framework apply across all of them, though the specific drivers look different by business type.

For restaurants, the highest-impact layers are typically COGS (food cost, waste, supplier terms), Overhead (labor allocation, fixed cost structure), and Pricing (menu engineering, channel profitability). The same structural problems exist — they just live in different line items.

Now is exactly the right time. Investors price risk. A brand with clean financials, clear unit economics, and a documented margin improvement story raises at materially better terms than one without it.

One of our clients completed an institutional raise at a 40% higher valuation after an Elite engagement — not because their revenue was higher, but because their financial story was tighter and their model was defensible. We help you build the financial narrative that investors want to see.

Cost & ROI

Pricing isn’t published because every engagement is scoped to the specific business — revenue size, complexity, number of SKUs, current financial infrastructure, and what you actually need.

What we can tell you is that every engagement is structured to return a multiple of its cost in margin recovery. We don’t take on work where the math doesn’t work for the client. The Clarity Call exists specifically to scope the right engagement and give you a clear picture of the investment before you commit to anything.

A full-time CFO costs $180K–$250K per year in salary alone — before benefits, equity, and overhead. That’s not accessible for most $1M–$20M brands, nor is it necessary.

PSA provides fractional CFO-level work at a fraction of that cost — structured as a monthly retainer or a one-time engagement. Most clients recover the full cost of an engagement in the first 60–90 days through margin improvements, supplier renegotiations, or working capital optimization. The Advisory retainer delivered an 11x ROI in year one for one of our clients.

It depends on the size of the business and what we find — but here’s what our actual clients have seen:

  • $67K found in a single FPT session for a $1.8M hot sauce brand
  • $180K recovered in 90 days for a $4.2M brewery
  • $210K identified for a $7M CPG brand
  • 11x ROI on Advisory retainer in year one for a $3.4M RTD brand
  • $156K recovered + 40% higher raise valuation for a $5.1M snack brand

None of those results required adding new revenue. The money was already in the business — it just wasn’t visible.

Still Not Sure if the Math Works?

The Clarity Call is 30 minutes. We’ll size your biggest opportunity before you commit to anything.

Schedule My Free Clarity Call

I ALREADY HAVE A BOOKKEEPER

Your bookkeeper records what happened. That’s their job — and they do it well. But recording history is not the same as understanding what it means or knowing what to do about it.

PSA sits above the bookkeeping layer. We analyze the numbers your bookkeeper produces, identify what’s leaking, model what decisions will do to your cash, and build the financial infrastructure to support growth. Your bookkeeper tells you what you spent. We tell you whether you should have spent it — and what to do differently.

In an Elite engagement, we handle the bookkeeping too — and integrate it with the strategic layer so nothing gets lost in translation.

Your CPA is focused on compliance — tax filings, returns, historical accuracy. They’re looking backward once a year. That’s not CFO advisory.

CFO advisory is forward-looking. It’s asking: what will this decision do to our cash in 90 days? Which SKUs are actually making us money? Can we afford this production ramp? Should we take this retail deal? Your CPA is not built to answer those questions in real time — and that’s not a criticism, it’s just a different job.

It depends on which engagement you choose. In the Advisory-Only Partnership, we layer strategic CFO coverage on top of your existing team — no one is replaced. Your bookkeeper keeps doing what they do. We add the strategic financial layer they can’t provide.

In the Elite Finance Partnership, we provide the full finance function — accounting, payroll, tax coordination, and CFO advisory — as an integrated system. For most clients at this level, this replaces fragmented vendors who don’t talk to each other with one cohesive financial team.

How It Works

The Clarity Call is 30 minutes. There’s no pitch, no slide deck, no sales pressure. Here’s exactly what we cover:

  • Where your business sits across the 5 layers of the Shelf-to-Savings™ framework
  • Your single highest-probability margin opportunity — sized in dollars
  • Whether and how PSA can help, and which engagement makes the most sense
  • What a realistic recovery timeline looks like for your specific business

You’ll leave with clarity regardless of whether we work together. That’s the point.

We’re built for operators who are running a business, not sitting in financial reviews all day. Here’s the realistic time commitment by engagement:

  • FPT: 2–3 hours of document prep upfront, then a 90-minute delivery session. That’s it.
  • Elite: One monthly working session (60–90 min) plus occasional async communication for time-sensitive decisions. Everything else runs in the background.
  • Advisory: Same as Elite — one monthly session plus on-call support as needed.

We do the heavy lifting. You make the decisions.

The Financial Pressure Test is a one-time engagement — no ongoing commitment required. Many founders start here to see the work before deciding whether to continue.

The Elite and Advisory partnerships are ongoing monthly engagements. We don’t lock clients into long-term contracts — the relationship continues because it’s producing results, not because you’re obligated. If the work stops delivering value, you should stop paying for it.

Results & Timeline

Faster than most clients expect. The FPT delivers findings in 10 days. In Elite engagements, the first 30 days typically surface the highest-priority opportunities — supplier renegotiations and pricing corrections often produce recoverable dollars within the first 60–90 days.

The $180K brewery recovery happened in 90 days. The $67K hot sauce finding happened in a single half-day session. These aren’t edge cases — they’re what happens when you run a structured diagnostic on a business that’s never had one.

We’ll tell you that — honestly. If the diagnostic doesn’t surface meaningful opportunities relative to the cost of the engagement, we’ll say so. We’ve walked away from potential engagements where the math didn’t work for the client.

In practice, we have yet to run a full diagnostic on a $1M+ F&B brand and find nothing material. The structural inefficiencies that the Shelf-to-Savings™ framework targets are nearly universal in growing F&B businesses. The question is never whether they exist — it’s how large they are.

What if nothing is found?

Shelf-to-Savings™ is a proprietary 5-layer diagnostic framework built specifically for Food & Beverage operating realities. It connects what happens on the shelf — pricing, inventory, production, waste, and labor — to what lands in the bank.

The five layers are:

  • L1 — COGS: Misallocated product costs, supplier pricing never renegotiated, BOM errors
  • L2 — Overhead: Fixed costs masking true performers, incorrect SKU/site allocation
  • L3 — Working Capital: Cash conversion cycle gaps, timing mismatches with distributors
  • L4 — Pricing: Negative channel contribution, stale pricing, distributor terms
  • L5 — Growth Tax: Contracts and rates set when you were smaller, never renegotiated at scale

Every engagement runs through all five layers. Most businesses leak significantly in two or three of them.

A general advisor can read a P&L. What they can’t do is interpret it through the lens of trade spend, freight-in dynamics, co-packer agreements, distributor margin requirements, inventory turns by SKU, and deduction management — the operational realities that make F&B finances fundamentally different from a services business or a tech company.

When a general CFO sees a margin problem in F&B, they often recommend cutting headcount or raising prices. Those are blunt instruments. A specialist sees the supplier contract that hasn’t been renegotiated in three years, the SKU that’s destroying margin in one channel but profitable in another, and the cash cycle mismatch that a 30-day payment term change would fix.

That’s the difference. And it’s why PSA works exclusively in F&B.

Still Not Sure if the Math Works?

The Clarity Call is 30 minutes. We’ll size your biggest opportunity before you commit to anything.

Schedule My Free Clarity Call