Fractional CFO in San Diego
Senior fractional CFO leadership for San Diego companies. Forecasting, FP&A, investor reporting, and the strategic finance work that growing San Diego businesses outgrow before they can justify a full-time CFO. Local. Senior. Vetted.
Why San Diego Companies Hire a Fractional CFO
San Diego has a particular kind of growing company. Biotech and life-science startups in Torrey Pines that just closed a Series B and now have a board pushing on burn assumptions the founder cannot quite defend in the format the new investor wants. Defense and dual-use tech companies in Sorrento Valley working on a SBIR-to-Phase-III bridge whose contracts officer is asking questions about indirect rate pools and DCAA-compliant accounting nobody on the internal team has actually built before. SaaS companies in UTC scaling fast and watching their deferred revenue line balloon, no formal revrec policy in place, no analyst on staff who can explain what changed month over month. Action-sports and consumer brands in Carlsbad scaling from boutique to retail, with an inventory accounting setup that worked at twenty SKUs and started leaking margin somewhere around two hundred. The pattern is the same. Revenue starts moving fast. The numbers fall behind.
That is usually when the conversation about a fractional CFO starts.
A fractional CFO is not an outsourced accountant. It is a senior finance executive, embedded in the business part time, maybe one day a week or maybe three, who shows up at exec meetings and owns the forecast and pushes back when leadership wants to hire too fast, all without the company having to absorb a full executive comp package before it can really afford one. They build the model. They sit in board meetings. They tell you whether the next hire is reckless or essential. And they do it without the half-million-dollar comp package a full-time hire would cost. For most growth-stage San Diego companies, that math is the entire point. The same playbook works at the technology layer too, which is why we built a parallel fractional CTO services practice and a fractional CIO services practice for clients that need executive-level technology leadership without the full-time hire.
KORE1 has placed senior finance leaders across San Diego County for years through our broader fractional CFO services practice, and the San Diego engagements have a flavor of their own that is hard to convey to anyone who has not actually worked the SD market through a couple of cycles. The biotech corridor is its own ecosystem. The defense and aerospace cluster is another. The SaaS bench has its own gravity around UTC and Sorrento Valley. And the consumer and action-sports world up the coast in Carlsbad and Encinitas plays by entirely different rules. A fractional CFO who has spent fifteen years inside one of those clusters brings introductions you cannot buy, plus warm relationships with the regional banks, the boutique audit firms, and the small group of M&A attorneys who quietly run a lot of the deals in this county. The fractional CFO bench overlaps with our broader accounting and finance staffing network across the SD corridor.
What Our San Diego Fractional CFOs Actually Do
The work is rarely glamorous. It is mostly building the things that should already exist.
Forecasting and FP&A
Forecasting that ties to reality. Most companies have a spreadsheet someone built two years ago that no one fully trusts anymore, partly because the assumptions inside it have not been touched since the founder was still doing the books on Sunday nights. We replace it with a rolling 13-week cash forecast and a real annual model the leadership team can defend in front of a board, a banker, or an investor without flinching when someone asks where a number actually came from.
FP&A and management reporting. Monthly board packs. Variance commentary. Department-level P&Ls so the head of sales actually knows, in dollars and not vibes, what their team costs versus what it produces, which is the kind of basic visibility most growth-stage SD companies are missing for longer than they should be.
Cap Table, Investor Reporting, and Diligence
Cap table and equity. Especially for the Series A and B crowd. Option pool sizing. 409A coordination. The cleanup nobody wants to do until a diligence list shows up.
Investor reporting. Lenders, board members, equity holders. Different audiences want different things. A good fractional CFO knows which.
Audit prep and 409A. We have walked San Diego clients through their first audit more times than we can count. It is a different muscle than running monthly close, and most internal teams have never done it.
M&A diligence. Buy side or sell side. The deals that fall apart usually fall apart because the financials could not survive a serious diligence process. We make sure yours can. Banking and lender relationships matter just as much. Refinancing, ABL lines, working capital facilities, venture debt. The San Diego banking scene has its own tempo and its own short list of people who actually pick up the phone. Knowing who they are matters.
Industries We Serve in San Diego
Biotech and Life Sciences
Torrey Pines, Sorrento Valley, UTC. Long product cycles. Grant accounting, milestone-based revenue, complex capital stacks, and pre-revenue burn modeling that boards and investors will pull apart line by line. We pair fractional CFO leadership with our biomedical engineering staffing team for full-stack life-science support.
Defense, Aerospace, and Dual-Use Tech
Sorrento Valley, Kearny Mesa, Point Loma. SBIR/STTR phase transitions. DCAA-compliant accounting, indirect rate structures, contract types most accountants have never touched. We pair finance leadership with our engineering staffing and electrical engineering staffing benches.
SaaS and Software
UTC, Sorrento Valley, downtown. ARR-based models, deferred revenue, rule-of-40 metrics, and the SaaS conventions investors will ask about before the first term sheet. Many of these clients also lean on our San Diego IT staffing team and software engineer staffing bench when they scale.
Action Sports and Consumer Brands
Carlsbad, Encinitas, Oceanside. Brands scaling from boutique to wholesale, retail, or marketplace. Cash conversion cycles that swing wildly with seasonality. We help leadership see past the noise and back the finance team up with payroll outsourcing when headcount starts moving fast.
How a KORE1 Fractional CFO Engagement Works
Discovery
We sit down with your CEO, founder, or board lead. Not a generic intake form. An actual conversation about what is keeping someone up at night and what the financial leadership gap looks like in practice.
Match
We pull from a vetted bench of senior finance executives. Most have CFO or VP Finance experience at venture-backed, PE-backed, or SBIR-funded companies in the San Diego market. We do not send three resumes and wish you luck. We send one that fits, and we explain why.
Engagement
The fractional CFO starts. Usually on a defined cadence, often one or two days a week to begin. Scope is written down, expectations are clear, and the engagement gets revisited every quarter or so because what your CFO needed to be working on in month one is rarely what they should be focused on by month six.
Local Presence, National Bench
KORE1 runs a dedicated San Diego practice that has placed finance, technology, and engineering professionals across the county for years. That matters for fractional CFO work, more than people expect, because honestly half of what makes a senior finance leader valuable is the network they walk in the door with on day one, the relationships built across the SD ecosystem over a couple of cycles, the people they can call without a cold-email warmup. Local bankers. Local audit firms. Local M&A attorneys. Local investors. People who know what a Torrey Pines biotech audit actually looks like, or what a SBIR Phase II rate structure should not look like.
Our broader staffing agency in San Diego practice has placed thousands of professionals across the county over the years, and our dedicated San Diego IT staffing team works the same market every day. The fractional CFO bench is the senior end of that same network. And when an SD engagement needs a controller, a senior accountant, or an interim accounts payable lead alongside the CFO, we can move on it within days because the rest of the bench is already in place through our accounting and finance consulting practice.
National reach matters too. A fractional CFO based in San Diego can run an SD client. A fractional CFO with deep biotech experience anywhere on the West Coast can also run an SD client remotely with monthly on-site visits. The match is what matters. Geography is one input. Most San Diego engagements are structured as direct hire, contract, or project arrangements depending on what fits the company best. Why KORE1 covers what makes our model different.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a fractional CFO cost in San Diego?
Most engagements run between 4,000 and 12,000 dollars a month depending on hours, scope, and seniority. A typical Series A SaaS or biotech company in San Diego will usually engage for about one day a week, and once the cadence settles in after a month or two, the cost lands somewhere in the 6,000 to 8,500 range per month. Compare that to a full-time CFO base of 250,000 to 400,000 in this market, plus equity and benefits. The fractional option saves real money for companies that do not yet need a full-time hire.
How fast can KORE1 place a fractional CFO in San Diego?
Usually inside two weeks. Sometimes faster. The bench is local and active. Discovery conversations can happen in days. Introductions to two or three vetted candidates often follow within a week.
Will the fractional CFO actually come to our office?
Yes, when it makes sense for the engagement. Most San Diego placements include regular on-site time. Some are fully on-site one or two days a week. Others are mostly remote with on-site days for board meetings, leadership offsites, and major reviews. The cadence is built around what your team needs.
What size company benefits most from a fractional CFO?
The sweet spot is roughly 5 to 75 million in revenue, or any venture-backed company past Seed. Smaller than that and a strong controller plus an outside accountant is often enough. Larger than that and a full-time CFO usually makes sense. The fractional model is built for the in-between.
Can a fractional CFO help us prepare for a fundraise or sale?
That is one of the most common reasons San Diego companies bring one in. Fundraise prep, data room buildout, diligence response, investor model construction. Sale prep is similar work in reverse. A fractional CFO who has been through it before saves months and protects valuation.
Do you place fractional CFOs into biotech and life-science companies specifically?
That is actually one of the deepest parts of our San Diego bench, and we treat it as its own track because the accounting is genuinely different. We have placed CFOs into pre-clinical, clinical-stage, and commercial-stage biotechs. The work around grants, milestones, deferred revenue, IPR&D, and milestone-based recognition is a discipline of its own, and the wrong CFO in a biotech seat tends to create more problems than they solve, so we screen for it directly through our biomedical engineering staffing network.
What about companies on government contracts or SBIR grants?
Yes, and this is more common in San Diego than people outside the defense corridor realize. SBIR Phase I to Phase II to Phase III transitions are a finance event as much as a technical one. DCAA-compliant accounting, indirect rate structures, provisional billing rates, the works. Our defense-track CFO bench has lived through this cycle multiple times across General Atomics-adjacent vendors, NIWC contractors, and earlier-stage dual-use startups, and they know what auditors are actually looking for when the contracting officer gets nervous.
What happens if we eventually want to hire a full-time CFO?
Many engagements end this way. The fractional CFO often helps run the search, defines the role, interviews candidates, and onboards their successor. We can also lead the full-time search through our broader fractional CFO services practice.
Ready to Bring in a Fractional CFO?
If your finance function is starting to feel underpowered for where the business is heading, the cost of waiting is usually higher than the cost of fixing it. Reach out and we will set up a conversation. No sales pitch. Just a real discussion about what your finance team needs and whether a fractional CFO fits.