for founders who want a CFO's judgment without a CFO's line on the cap table.
Elderflower Advisory is a fractional finance practice in Nashville, built around one belief: a growth-stage company doesn't need a full-time CFO — it needs the discipline of one, applied three days a month, on a book small enough to give each founder real attention.
- practice type
- fractional CFO
- based
- Nashville, TN
- stage served
- seed → Series B
- billing
- fixed monthly
est. discipline
the practice began with one bad Tuesday
A founder we'd sat across from learned, on a Tuesday, that runway had quietly gone from eleven months to five. The books weren't wrong. They were simply six weeks behind — reconciled monthly, read quarterly, and never rolled forward. By the time the number surfaced, the good options had already expired.
Elderflower was built to close that gap for a specific kind of company: past its first finance hire, not yet ready to fund a full-time CFO seat, and carrying a board and a raise timeline that demand numbers held to institutional standard. The fix isn't more reporting — it's a shorter horizon, rebuilt weekly, so nobody learns about a bad quarter after it's already spent.
The name is deliberate. Elderflower blooms early, briefly, and reliably on the same cadence every year — which is exactly what a cash forecast should do.
five rules the work is held to
actuals before optimism
Every forecast starts from a reconciled ledger, not a founder's hope. If the books can't be trusted, that gets fixed before a single projection is drawn.
a range, never a point
Runway is reported as base, bull and bear lines with the assumptions behind each — so a board decision starts from a spread, not one convenient number.
closed on a clock
The monthly close and its variance memo land by the tenth business day, every month, without the founder chasing a bookkeeper for status.
the founder reads it first
Numbers reach you before they reach a board. No investor should ever know something about your company's cash that you learned in the same meeting.
a small book, on purpose
Only a handful of concurrent engagements are taken at once. Fractional works because attention is real — not because a spreadsheet was copied across ten clients.
on the desk
Marguerite Ellery
Marguerite runs every engagement herself — the close review, the 13-week model, the board narrative. The work reaches your inbox from the same hands that built it, so the person who wrote the runway line is the person who can defend it in the room.
Her background is FP&A and controller seats inside venture-backed software companies, through fundraises, board cycles, and the un-glamorous work of getting a messy ledger to a state a diligence team will actually trust. Elderflower is the distillation of that: the CFO discipline those teams needed, delivered part-time to companies that aren't ready to hire it whole.
When a fractional CFO genuinely isn't the right call yet, the intake ends with that said plainly — a wrong-fit engagement helps no one's runway.
— worked, checked, signed.
how Elderflower actually works
- structure
- A solo principal practice, supported by one senior associate for close and diligence sprints. You always work with the person who signs the model.
- who it fits
- Post-seed through Series B startups — typically past their first finance hire, carrying a board seat and a raise on the horizon.
- cadence
- Three days a month on the desk. Cash model rebuilt weekly, close reviewed by day ten, board pack every meeting.
- capacity
- A deliberately small book of concurrent engagements. New intakes open only as a seat comes free.
- terms
- Fixed monthly, month-to-month, no annual lock-in. Cancel with 30 days' notice.
- the stack
- QuickBooks & Xero ledgers · cap tables on Carta or Pulley · KPI feeds wired to your billing system.
- where
- 500 N Wilson Blvd, Nashville, TN 37205 — on-site for Nashville teams, remote for everyone else.
if your runway number lives in a spreadsheet nobody has opened since last month, let's fix the horizon.