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Solvient LLC logo

financial & operational leadership, built to scale

You've outgrown your back office.

You outgrew it because you built something worth outgrowing. A back office that runs well is the foundation — it has to work. But equally important is seeing what's coming, pressure-testing decisions before you make them, and having the capacity to act. That's the seat I fill.

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Act I — The Problem

The Ceiling

The problem usually isn't growth. It's capacity.

You built something real. Then the business outgrew the operation behind it. The numbers land too late to act on. Cash is a guess. The important decisions still route through you. That's not a demand problem — it's a back office that was never built to scale, now capped by the same things that got you here.

The symptoms usually show up as financial — a close that drags, a forecast that misses, cash that surprises you. But those are the check-engine light, not the engine. Treat the symptom and the light just comes back on. The real problem is structural. And nobody is looking far enough ahead to see the next one coming.

Sound familiar?

  • The close drags, and the numbers arrive too late to use.
  • The numbers come back wrong more often than they should.
  • Forecasts miss, and no one saw it coming.
  • Your team escalates decisions it should be making.
  • A capable controller is stuck doing a CFO's job — and it's breaking them.
  • Accounting operates as a silo, disconnected from the rest of the business.
  • Vendors are calling about payments, and some have stopped shipping.
  • You're pulled into the weeds daily, doing everything except running the company.
  • “Scaling” has meant adding people — and it isn't working.

The Box

Everybody's in the box. Your CFO can't be.

Let me show you something about your back office. Picture the finance roles left to right. The accountant is the tip of the spear — data in, reconciliations, clean records. The controller runs the accountants and owns the close — schedules, checklists, GAAP, tidy numbers, and knows exactly what this week and this quarter require. The senior controller adds the CPA, the years, the systems depth, the advanced reporting.

Accountant

The tip of the spear — data in, reconciliations, clean records.

Controller

Runs the accountants and owns the close — schedules, checklists, GAAP, tidy numbers.

Senior Controller

Adds the CPA, the years, the systems depth, the advanced reporting.

CFO

Forward-looking, strategic, outside the box.

All good. All necessary. And they share one thing: they live in the box. That's not a criticism — it's the job. These roles require someone who loves the box: precise, orderly, backward-looking, at home in the rules. If they didn't love it, they'd be bad at it.

The CFO gets a box too — the fourth seat on the chart. But it's a different kind of box. The first three live in the box: precise, orderly, backward-looking. The CFO's box is the one built to work outside that mindset — forward-looking, asking what if?, why not?, what's next? And in most companies, it's the box sitting empty.

Now look at the actual work. On one side sits everything accounting does. On the other, everything finance does — and how much longer that list runs, and how much higher it reaches.

Accounting (in the box)

  • Payroll
  • Invoicing
  • Payables & receivables
  • Non-tax compliance
  • Closing the books
  • Tax compliance
  • Auditor correspondence
  • US GAAP / IFRS
  • Maintaining KPIs
  • Basic reporting

Finance (outside the box)

  • Planning & forecasting
  • Scenario modeling
  • Designing KPIs
  • Capital raising
  • Risk assessment
  • Strategic formulation & deployment
  • Transactions & negotiations (acquisitions / dispositions)
  • Board reporting & management
  • Operational efficiency
  • Growth capacity planning

Your controller lives on the left and does it well. The CFO lives on the right — while still understanding and overseeing the left. Most companies have the left covered and no one truly owning the right.

Here's where most owner-led companies get stuck. The person who's been in finance for 20 or 30 years gets promoted to CFO because they know the system best — not because they have the training or credentials to lead the company's finances at its next size. So you start asking that person to think outside the box… when everything about their seat and their wiring was built to live inside it.

You're frustrated. They're frustrated. And usually nobody can quite name why.

It's like buying a good, dependable donkey at auction 20 years ago — and now asking it to run the Kentucky Derby. Nothing wrong with the donkey. It was just never bred for that race.

There's one more thing you have to see. Go back to those roles. There's a box that isn't on the page. It's yours.

CFO

The CFO seat is unfilled — the work falls to the CEO.

Here's what happens when the CFO seat sits empty. Ask an accountant or controller to do a CFO's work, and one of two things happens: they dig in and it doesn't get done, or they shrug and it doesn't get done — either way, silos form and frustration builds.

But the work on the right side doesn't disappear. The forecasting, the modeling, the capital calls, the pressure-testing — it still has to happen. So guess who does it?

You do.

You get pulled in to fill a seat you didn't want to fill and may not be equipped to fill — and now you're not running the company anymore. Not on strategy, new contracts, negotiations, culture, leading from the front. You can't be — because you're compensating for the missing piece.

The empty CFO box doesn't cost you a CFO. It costs you your ability to be the CEO.

And that's the most expensive line item that never shows up on your P&L. Every month the seat sits empty, you pay for it — in the strategy you didn't set, the deal you didn't pressure-test, the growth that stalled while you were buried in the back office, and the enterprise value you quietly left on the table. You just never get an invoice for it.

Which is the part most owners miss: the cost of filling the seat is a rounding error next to the cost of leaving it empty.

That's the gap I fill — so you can get back to yours.

Let's talk

Act II — The Approach

How I Work

A coach who's played the game.

I've spent 25+ years in the financial and operational seat — this isn't theory. I come alongside you like a coach: we build the systems, install the leadership, and put the right tools to work — then I make sure your team can run it without me.

The real shift I'm after is moving you from operator to architect — from solving every problem yourself to designing the place where problems get solved without you.

The point isn't to make you dependent on me. It's to leave you with capacity that lasts.

  1. 01

    Get control.

    Organize the system and get the right people in the right seats. Stabilize before we optimize.

  2. 02

    Look under the hood.

    Separate what's working from what isn't — honestly. Keep what works; no reinventing the wheel. Then we look forward, not just back.

  3. 03

    Fix it in the right order.

    Some gaps are people; some are technology, including AI where it earns its place. Sometimes one before the other, sometimes both at once — sequenced to your situation.

  4. 04

    Build to scale, then hand off.

    Install it, then coach your team to run it without me.

Three business colleagues reviewing financial results together at a laptop during a working session

Act III — The Solution

Services

Every finance function does three jobs. Most owner-led companies only staff for the first.

01

Record

Capturing what happened: invoicing, payables, payroll, the close, compliance. Necessary, but a rear-view mirror.

What you already have.

02

Decide

Turning the numbers into forward-looking calls: what happens to cash if we take that deal, which customers actually make money, whether you can carry that hire or acquisition. This is the forward view — what's coming, what it costs, and what to do about it.

03

Scale

Building the operation to grow without adding a body for every new demand: systems that run themselves, data you can trust, AI on the repetitive load.

You've got Record handled. What most companies are missing is Decide and Scale. That's what I bring.

The Decide

Fractional CFO & COO Leadership

Senior financial and operational leadership without a full-time hire. Numbers you can trust, cash you can see, and an operation that runs on systems instead of heroics — so you can lead the business instead of running its back office.

Outcomes

  • Forward-looking cash visibility and discipline
  • A faster, reliable close
  • Forecasting and planning that stay dynamic, not static
  • KPIs that cut to signal instead of noise
  • Guardrails your team can act within
  • Decisions pressure-tested before you make them
  • A forward view you can steer by
  • An owner freed to work on the business

The Scale

AI for Finance & Operations

Good decisions still don't scale if everything runs through one or two people. But I don't lead with tools — I lead with control. First we organize the system and get the right people in the right seats. Then we get under the hood and separate what's working from what isn't. Some of what we find is a people issue; some is a technology issue — including where AI can take real, repetitive load off your team. I work both, sequenced to your situation, and we keep what already works. That's how AI actually creates leverage in a back office: not as a bolt-on, but as one lever inside a system finally built to scale.

Outcomes

  • Repetitive work automated where it counts
  • Trustworthy data as the foundation
  • The right tools, adopted with intent
  • Capacity that grows without headcount for every task

The best companies are the ones that throw off cash and can run without the owner in every room. That's what real capacity buys you — options, freedom, and a business worth more than the day you started building it.

Let's talk
Portrait of Dustin Williamson, founder of Solvient LLC

Dustin Williamson · Managing Director

/in/dustinwilliamson

About

25+ years in the seat.

I'm Dustin Williamson — a CPA (also CVA and CGMA) with an MBA in international management from Thunderbird School of Global Management and 25+ years of financial and operational leadership for owner-led, lower-middle-market companies.

My career has run the full width of finance. I began in Big 4 international tax on a three-year assignment in Brussels, moved to the investor's side of the table in venture capital and cross-border structured finance, then spent years as an operating CFO — restructuring balance sheets, rebuilding back offices, and steering companies through turnarounds and sales. I've sat in the CFO's seat, the sponsor's seat, and the advisor's seat, so I've seen the same problems from every angle. That's what lets me see what's coming before it arrives.

I first founded Solvient in 2009 to bring that experience to lower-middle-market companies. I'm bringing it back now — with the operational depth and practical AI capability today's owners actually need.

CPACVACGMAMBA, Thunderbird School of Global ManagementLean Six Sigma

Insights

Notes from the seat.

Original writing on putting AI to work in the back office, building scalable capacity, the owner-as-architect shift, and the CFO-gap diagnostic. Coming soon.

Contact

Let's talk.

If your back office has stopped keeping up with the company you're building, let's talk about what it would take to change that.

Emaildwilliamson@solvientllc.comPhone(713) 714-3234LinkedIn/company/solvient-llcAddress2701 Louisiana StHouston, TX 77006By appointment
Schedule time with me
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