About Rowan Keane
Runway you can defend. Board decks you can stand behind.
I have spent fifteen years inside SaaS finance teams, mostly at companies between $1M and $60M in ARR. I now do that work part-time for seed-stage founders who owe a board real numbers and do not yet need a full-time CFO. This page explains where I come from, what I believe about planning, and how much capacity I have.
Background
I started in audit for two years, hated it usefully, and left for my first operating role in 2011. Since then I have only worked in software companies.
- 2011–2014 · Controller, Series A infrastructure SaaS
- Employee 22. Owned the close, the first revenue recognition policy, and the model used in a $14M Series B. Company grew from $1.1M to $6M ARR while I was there.
- 2014–2018 · Director of Finance, then VP Finance, vertical SaaS
- Built the FP&A function from a single spreadsheet to a three-person team. Ran diligence through an acquisition by a private-equity-backed platform in 2018. I stayed nine months post-close to integrate reporting.
- 2019–2023 · VP Finance, developer tools company
- Joined at $4M ARR, left at $31M. Two priced rounds, one bridge, a 2022 cost reset that cut burn 38% without touching the engineering roadmap, and a second acquisition — this one strategic, closed early 2023.
- 2023–now · Fractional CFO
- Independent. Nineteen seed-stage clients to date, most between $200k and $3M ARR. Eleven have raised a subsequent round; three have been acquired; two shut down deliberately and returned capital.
I mention the two that shut down because the work was the same. A clean model that shows you have fourteen months and no plausible path to a Series A is doing its job. It just is not a happy job.
Why fractional, and why now
A full-time CFO at seed stage costs $250k to $320k all-in, plus equity, and will be under-used for at least eighteen months. The work that actually needs doing — a defensible model, a monthly close you trust, a board pack, a hiring plan tied to cash — is roughly six to ten hours a week once it is set up.
The alternative most founders reach for is a bookkeeper plus the CEO's own spreadsheet. That covers history but not forward view. Bookkeepers close the month. They do not tell you that your current hiring plan puts you out of cash six weeks before your Series A raise window opens.
-
Hire me instead of a CFO
If you are under about $3M ARR with one finance-adjacent ops person or none. Senior judgment, part-time hours, no equity conversation.
-
Hire me alongside a bookkeeper
Common setup. They own the close and the ledger. I own the forecast, the board pack, and the capital plan. We talk on the fifth business day.
-
Hire someone full-time instead
Past roughly $8M ARR, or with usage-based pricing at scale, multi-entity structure, or an imminent Series B process, you want a person in the building every day. I will tell you when you have crossed that line and help you write the job description.
Principles
Four things I hold to. They are not clever. They are just what separates a model people use from a model people ignore.
-
One source of truth
One model file. One definition of ARR. One headcount plan. If sales, the board deck, and the bank forecast disagree, the answer is not three reconciliations — it is deleting two of the files. Version sprawl is the most common thing I find in week one.
-
Models a founder can drive
You should be able to open the model on a Sunday, change the sales hiring date from March to June, and see what happens to runway without calling me. Inputs are blue, formulas are black, and nothing important is buried in a nested lookup.
-
Forecasts that name their assumptions
Every number has a stated driver sitting next to it: ramp time per rep, logo churn, gross margin on the hosting line. A forecast without visible assumptions is a guess wearing a suit. Investors can tell.
-
Bad news early
If the quarter is going to miss, your board should hear it in week six, not in the deck. I will tell you first, plainly, with the two or three levers that still exist. I would rather be the person who is uncomfortable in March than surprised in June.
Rowan sent me a one-line message in the second week: your net new ARR has been flat for five months and the pipeline says it stays flat. Nobody had put it that simply. We changed the plan in three weeks instead of finding out at the board meeting.
Founder, seed-stage API company, $1.4M ARR
How I work with boards
Your board does not want a forty-slide deck. They want to know whether the plan is on track, what changed, and what you need from them. A good seed-stage pack runs twelve to sixteen pages and goes out seventy-two hours before the meeting, not the night before.
What a good pack contains
-
One-page summary
Plan versus actual on four or five metrics, cash and months of runway, and the three things you want discussed. If a director reads only this page, they are still informed.
-
Growth and retention detail
New, expansion, contraction, churn. Logo and net dollar retention with the cohort math behind them. Pipeline coverage against next quarter's number.
-
Cash and the plan
Actual burn by month, forecast burn, runway to a named date, and the hiring plan that produces it. Variance to the last forecast, explained in sentences.
-
Decisions requested
Option pool refresh, a pricing change, an approval to extend the raise window. Named, with a recommendation attached. Boards are much better at answering questions than at generating them.
What it deliberately leaves out
No product screenshots that belong in a demo. No five-year revenue curve at seed — nobody believes year four and it makes year one look unserious. No metric that appears once and never returns; a metric you show one quarter and drop the next reads as cherry-picking, and directors remember. No color commentary on individual employees. And no new number introduced live in the meeting. Everything in the discussion is in the pack they already read.
I write the pack, you present it. I join the meeting when you want a second voice on the numbers, and stay quiet otherwise. It is your board relationship, not mine.
Tooling
I have opinions but no religion. The stack matters far less than whether the close happens on time.
- Model
- Google Sheets, almost always. Excel if your board or lender expects it. I do not put seed-stage companies on a planning platform — the license and setup cost is not justified below roughly $10M ARR.
- Ledger
- QuickBooks Online or Xero. Both are fine. Migrating between them mid-engagement is rarely worth the two weeks it takes.
- Billing and revenue
- Stripe with a clean product catalog, or Maxio if your contracts are annual with mid-term changes. Usage-based pricing needs a real data pull from your own systems, not a billing export.
- Spend and payroll
- Ramp or Brex for cards, Rippling or Gusto for payroll. What matters is that vendors are coded consistently, so the burn detail means something.
If you already run something else, I work inside it. I have never asked a client to change systems in the first ninety days, and I would be suspicious of anyone who did. Switching tools is a project; fixing your forecast is the job.
Availability
I take five clients at a time. That is a hard cap, not a soft one. At six I stop reading the numbers closely enough to catch the thing that matters in week six, and catching that thing is what you are paying for.
- Current capacity
- One opening, starting the first Monday of next month. One further slot expected to open at the end of the quarter as a client transitions to a full-time hire.
- Typical commitment
- Six to ten hours a week per client, concentrated around the close and the board cycle. Minimum engagement is three months.
- Hours and time zones
- Based in San Francisco. Core overlap 8am–11am Pacific for EU teams, and normal Pacific business hours otherwise. I answer email within one business day.
- How it starts
- A 45-minute call, then a two-week paid diagnostic before either of us commits to anything longer.
If both slots are spoken for when you write, I will say so and suggest two other fractional CFOs I would send my own company to. I do not keep a waitlist that goes nowhere.
Want to see whether this fits?
Send me your current runway number and how you calculated it. That one sentence tells me most of what I need to know before a call.