A founder under pressure. 40–50% off fixed costs in under three months.
Success Story · FP&A & Cost Structure · Services · Early-Stage
An early-stage US services founder had never sat down with their P&L and looked at the cost structure on a single page. The team had grown, the office had grown, the salary bill had grown — nothing had ever been mapped, questioned, or restructured against actual revenue. We embedded as their fractional CFO, mapped every fixed expenditure, renegotiated a premium co-working lease, transitioned the team to remote, rationalised the workforce, and restructured compensation. Total fixed costs dropped 40–50% within two to three months. Salary costs dropped 30–40%.
The ChallengeA founder running operations, sales, and finance — finance got the leftovers.
The business was growing in name but suffocating in cost. The founder had four problems compounding at the same time — and each one made the others harder to fix.
- No P&L review the founder owned. Monthly numbers arrived from the outsourced bookkeeper as a statement, not a decision tool. The founder had never sat down to look at the fixed cost base on a single page. Spend was approved one line at a time, never against the total.
- A premium co-working lease built for growth that hadn’t arrived. The office had been signed at a market premium when the business expected a larger team within twelve months. The team grew — but not at the pace the lease assumed. The rent line was now the largest single fixed cost in the business.
- A salary bill that grew reactively, not structurally. Every hire had been justified individually. No one had ever asked whether the team, at its current shape, was the team the business actually needed. Some roles overlapped; some were carrying obligations that had become marginal; compensation had drifted upward in pockets without any framework.
- No bandwidth to fix any of it. The founder was running operations and sales simultaneously. Cost-structure work needs concentrated, senior, finance-led attention over weeks — not hours stolen from operating the business. Without someone embedded in the finance seat, the cost base was going to keep drifting.
What We DidMap, renegotiate, restructure, hand over — across under three months.
The business did not have a revenue problem — it had a structure problem. Mapping every fixed expenditure onto a single page revealed that roughly 40–50% of the fixed cost base was supporting capacity the business no longer needed. EasePro embedded as fractional CFO, ran the cost restructure alongside the founder, and handed over a working cost-structure system — not a permanent consultant in the loop. Five deliverables, four phases:
- One-page fixed cost map. Every fixed line grouped by category and sorted by size, annotated with contract terms, exit windows, and renegotiation levers. The first time the founder had ever seen the total cost base in one view, and the working artefact for every restructuring decision that followed.
- Co-working lease renegotiation. The existing premium lease was taken back to the table — a smaller footprint negotiated against current usage, unused service tiers removed, and an exit pathway documented for the remote transition. The single largest cost line dropped materially inside one quarter.
- Remote-first transition plan. A structured, role-by-role shift to remote-first for the majority of the team, with tooling and working-norm changes documented, client meeting cadence revised rather than cancelled, and a small in-person footprint retained for client-facing work.
- Workforce rationalisation & compensation restructure. A team-shape review against actual revenue and pipeline. Overlapping roles consolidated, some positions converted to contract where the work permitted, and compensation rebuilt around a base/variable framework — reducing the salary cost base while keeping the people the business actually needed.
- Founder handover — the monthly cost-discipline cadence. A written operating manual for the monthly P&L review, a cost-structure decision framework, a quarterly contract-review schedule, and the trackers used during the engagement — plus a four-week post-handover shadow period for open questions.
The OutcomeWhat changed in under three months.
By the end of the engagement, the monthly P&L review was happening on the first business day of every month, with the founder in the seat. The fixed cost map was being updated as contracts changed and used as the working document for every spend decision. The quarterly contract-review schedule was on the calendar through the year. Cost discipline was no longer something that needed a fractional CFO to enforce — it was something the founder now owned.
Total fixed costs were reduced 40–50%, removing the structural mismatch between the cost base and revenue inside one quarter. The salary cost base was reduced 30–40% after workforce rationalisation and the move to a base/variable compensation framework, without losing core capability. Before the engagement, the founder described finance as “the part of the business I keep meaning to look at properly.” After three months, the same founder described it as “the part of the business I’m most confident I have a handle on.”
Figures shown are illustrative — based on a real engagement, anonymised and rounded for client confidentiality. Our engagement scope and confidentiality terms prevent us from sharing identifying details; the financial structure, methodology, and outcomes are unchanged from the actual engagement. References available on request, under NDA.