If you own or operate a cannabis business, having an experienced Chief Financial Officer (CFO) on board can provide numerous benefits. A CFO is responsible for financial planning, budgeting, reporting, and analysis of your business’s financial performance. By understanding the complex regulatory landscape surrounding the cannabis industry, they are able to help you make informed decisions that will ensure long-term success. A cannabis CFO is key to helping cannabis CEOs run more profitable, sustainable, and successful businesses.
To begin with, a CFO can help you plan your finances to ensure that you remain profitable. This includes helping you develop an effective budget—an annual target–that allows you to spend money in the right places and on the right projects. With their help, you can better forecast cash flow and understand what investments are needed to reach your growth goals. They can even help you create an intelligent tax strategy to save money and protect your bottom line. Moreover, a good cannabis CFO can help you identify shortcomings and weaknesses so that you can proactively create objectives, corrective processes, and actionable plans to increase your margins and cash flow.
In addition, with a cannabis CFO’s extensive knowledge of accounting rules and regulations in the cannabis industry, a CFO can help keep your business compliant with all relevant laws and regulations. If need be, they can work with external auditors to ensure that all information about your company is verifiable and accurate. Experienced and knowledgeable cannabis CFOs can even assist you with exit planning strategies and optimize your business value for investors and other stakeholders.. Optimal exit planning will also ensure your financial success post-exit and close any gaps between what you desire or need to live on financially and what you net post-sale.
Furthermore, having an experienced, knowledgeable,combination cannabis CFO with a cannabis CPA who understands all the intricacies of accounting within the cannabis industry is invaluable when it comes to accurate bookkeeping and reporting. With their assistance, you will not have any issues dealing with taxes or submitting reports as required by law since they know how to handle everything correctly. This way, there will be no surprises during audit season as everything will already be taken care of professionally by someone well-versed in this area.
Finally, having a CFO still provides valuable insight into overall operations management within your organization as well as broader market trends that could affect the future performance of various financial initiatives such as stock options or capital gains taxation, for example. They are able to offer strategic advice on how best to proceed when making key decisions about where resources should be allocated or when considering expansion efforts into new markets or product lines. For instance, many CEOS make uninformed decisions, working by their seat of their pants rather than utilizing the correct numbers and KPI; to be successful, cannabis CEOs need to make decisions predicated upon sound financial data analysis rather than guesswork or intuition alone.
Having a skilled cannabis Chief Financial Officer onboard is essential if you want to increase your profit margins and cash flow. It doesn’t matter if you are grossing $1M, or $50M, if at the end of the day there is no profit and no cash to put in your pocket. This is further complicated within the cannabis industry due to its complexity caused by ever-changing state regulations concerning both medical marijuana operations and recreational use alike, coupled with federal restrictions still looming over businesses in this sector right now. The added benefit of increased investor confidence make hiring a cannabis CFO imperative if long-term stability is something desired from running such an enterprise; allowing cannabis owners/executives to focus on core competencies while relying on someone else’s specialized expertise when it comes to guiding them to run a more successful and profitable cannabis business.
The Canna CPAS is one such firm. The Canna CPAs not only offers cannabis CPA services to strategically increase legitimate deductions and help insulate its clients in the event of a tax audit, but they also offer outsourced part-time cannabis CFO services specifically designed to increase their clients’ profit margins and cash flow.
Sandy Suchoff, CPA is the Founder and principal of Lefstein-Suchoff, CPA & Associates, LLC D/B/A The Canna CPAs. Suchoff has been featured and interviewed on MSNBC, FOX News, and Tune In Business Talk Radio as a tax advisor, as well as ONR Oklahoma PBS TV, Chasing News on FOX & WOR, KRQE 13, Cannabis Radio, Purple Haze Radio, and Cannabis Tech & Today as an advisor on cannabis tax and accounting.
