Fractional CFO for Marine Service Companies
A marine service shop lives and dies on billable hours and parts margin, and both are easy to lose track of when the yard is slammed all summer and dead all winter. A fractional CFO builds the utilization and margin picture — so you find out which techs and which jobs actually pay before the slow season does the accounting for you.
Billable hours and parts margin are the business
Your labor is only worth what you bill, and the gap between hours paid and hours billed — techs waiting on parts, warranty work, comebacks — is where the profit silently goes. Parts and materials carry their own margin that gets eroded by markup drift and shrink. Blend it all together and a busy yard can run a thin margin without anyone noticing until winter.
A CFO builds the utilization and parts-margin reporting, so you know your real effective labor rate and whether the parts counter is contributing or just moving boxes.
The math behind capacity, pricing, and the season
Effective labor rate, tech utilization, parts margin, and job profitability decide whether to raise rates, add a bay, or hire another tech. And the seasonal swing means summer cash has to carry a winter that bills a fraction of it — a curve you should be funding on purpose.
We model the unit economics and a seasonal cash forecast, so pricing, hiring, and capacity decisions come with a number and the off-season is planned for, not survived.
How Kaizen runs it
You get a senior CFO a few days a month on top of clean books that separate labor and parts. We build the effective-rate and utilization KPIs, track parts margin, run a seasonal cash forecast, and model rate changes and capacity.
It's the difference between a full yard and a profitable one. In marine service those diverge more than the summer chaos would suggest, and the gap is exactly what we're there to close.
What's included
- Effective labor rate and technician utilization tracking
- Parts and materials margin reporting
- Job and work-order profitability
- Seasonal 13-week rolling cash forecast
- Warranty and comeback cost visibility
- Rate, hiring, and capacity scenario models
- Diligence-ready financials for a future sale
- Monthly board-ready KPI and margin pack
Pricing
Straight answers
We have a bookkeeper. Why a CFO?
A bookkeeper records; a CFO builds the effective-rate and utilization picture, prices the work, plans seasonal cash, and models capacity. Many shops keep their bookkeeper and add us for strategy.
Can you show our real effective labor rate?
Yes — billed hours against paid hours, net of warranty and comebacks. It's often a sobering first number and the fastest lever on profit.
How do you handle the seasonal swing?
We build a seasonal cash forecast so the summer surplus is deliberately carried into the winter, instead of the off-season becoming an annual scramble.
What size shop is this for?
Usually multi-tech operations with real parts revenue. A one- or two-person shop with clean books may just need good bookkeeping and reporting — we'll tell you honestly.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
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