Fractional CFO · Seed to Series F · VC-backed startups & scaleups

Rigorously human.

Premise

Twelve years scaling VC-backed companies (round sizes between €4M - $100M, from business angels to tier 1 VCs), showed me a consistent pattern about why startups are growing slower than they could be. Founders, investors, and employees all want the company to win, but what winning looks like to them personally is not the same.

As CFO, I protect companies from falling into this common but vicious cycle:

  • pitch decks & financial projections are written towards what closes the funding round, jeopardizing future rounds through valuation pressure;

  • sales & product targets are being viewed as unrealistic by those who have to execute them, usually by being heavily back-loaded;

  • equity incentives lose their power as a result of starry-eyed targets, or because valuation information is non-existent or kept vague;

  • board reporting stops showing what is actually happening, resulting in loss of trust and focus, pressing founders in investor appeasement mode;

  • company growth stagnating, putting further pressure on next year’s projections, driving the cycle further downward.

This is often, but in my opinion erroneously, called a lack of “execution power” instead of what it actually is: alignments that have started drifting apart.

I reconnect founders, investors, and employees to shared financial goals by defining and communicating targets, incentives, and results clearly and openly: rigorously human.

Results

Stress-tested through working in startups & scaleups of all sizes (6 to 500 employees, seed to series F), leading teams (from 0 to 13, across finance, HR, legal & operations), I bring hands-on solutions to strategic finance questions that drive company growth and stakeholder success.

Ralf van Heumen

MSc Financial Economics · LL.M. Business Law

Some examples of projects I worked on, and what I achieved through breaking the misalignment cycle:

  • closed a multi-million bridge round, by turning a Series A pitch deck & financial projections towards its new purpose, structuring the round by pooling angel investors and family offices in an SPV to safeguard existing ownership control, while preventing excessive dilution;

  • helped drive a company-wide 10x+ revenue growth over 7 years with comprehensive BI dashboards that validated sales targets with realtime CRM data, consolidating progress-to-target, forecasts, SaaS-metrics, and commissioning in one view;

  • removed valuation ambiguity and created additional incentive for high-impact contributors, by integrating historical and expected future funding round data into individual equity incentives scorecards;

  • got investor buy-in on a high-burn (>50% of revenue) strategy, by introducing scenario-based planning into the board reporting;

  • drove company growth by enabling founders to focus on what matters operationally, by taking ownership of:

    • multiple due diligence trajectories, from tier 1 VC to M&A;

    • multi-entity international tax strategy, including transfer pricing;

    • commercial pricing and contracting;

    • subsidiary & product restructuring, resolving employee conflicts;

    • USA listed company-level audit by a global top-10 accounting firm.