Jim Goodwell, CPA
Fractional CFO & FP&A

Who runs Great Falls CPA?

Great Falls CPA is a boutique practice, not an agency with a bench. Jim Goodwell is a Maryland-licensed Certified Public Accountant and an EY alumnus who has spent more than a decade at Director level in financial planning and analysis, working inside privately held and private-equity-backed companies. The person you meet on the introductory call is the person who builds the model.

The background

The career started in public accounting at EY, which is where the habit of tying every number back to something defensible comes from. Audit teaches you that a figure without support is an assertion, and that a schedule nobody can follow will not survive review. Both lessons carry directly into FP&A, where the reader is a sponsor or a lender rather than a partner, and the consequence of a number that does not tie is a harder conversation at the next board meeting.

The decade since has been spent on the operating side, in Director-level FP&A roles inside companies that were privately held, sponsor-owned, or both. That has meant standing up finance functions that did not previously exist — the first real three-statement model, the first 13-week cash flow, the first board package that a sponsor did not send back with questions. It has also meant the unglamorous half: sitting with a controller through a month-end close that runs long, working out why the flash report and the final statements disagree, and rebuilding a schedule that broke the moment the business added a second entity.

The practice is built around that experience rather than around a methodology. There is no deck of frameworks waiting to be applied to your company. There is a set of artifacts that a company under institutional ownership is expected to produce, and a fairly specific understanding of how each one gets built, where each one usually breaks, and what a lender or a sponsor is actually reading when they open it.

Who I work with

The engagements that fit best are lower-middle-market companies that have outgrown their reporting. Typically that means a business with a competent controller and a clean-enough close, but no forward view: the historicals are fine and the forecast is a spreadsheet somebody built once and nobody trusts. Often there is a new sponsor, a new credit agreement, or both, and the reporting expectations arrived faster than the finance team did.

Sponsors are frequently the ones making the introduction. A deal team that has just closed on a founder-run business knows what the first hundred days of reporting need to look like and knows the company cannot produce it yet. Hiring a full-time CFO for that gap is often the wrong instrument — it is slow, expensive, and the eventual hire may need a different profile than the one this specific problem calls for.

How engagements run

Most engagements start with a build and settle into a cadence. The first thirty days are diagnostic and constructive at the same time: reading the credit agreement, walking the close with the controller, finding out which numbers are reliable, and getting a first working version of whichever artifact is most urgent — usually the 13-week cash flow if there is a liquidity question, and the forecast model if there is not.

By sixty days the build is real rather than provisional, and the work shifts toward the recurring rhythm: the monthly reforecast, the weekly cash update, the lender package on the schedule the credit agreement dictates, the board materials on the sponsor's calendar. From there the engagement is deliberately sized to what the company needs, which for many businesses is a few days a month rather than a full-time seat.

Everything built is yours and stays legible. The models are documented, the assumptions are visible rather than hardcoded three tabs deep, and the intent is that your controller can run the monthly update without me on the call. An engagement that leaves a company dependent on the consultant who built the file has solved the wrong problem.

Credentials

• Certified Public Accountant, licensed in Maryland
• EY alumnus
• Member, Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA)
• Ten-plus years at Director level in FP&A, inside privately held and PE-backed companies