Make finances your advantage with a Rankin McKenzie CFO.

After COVID, our restaurant, brewery, and event businesses were facing a lot of challenges, and I knew I needed better financial information to understand what was working, what wasn’t, and where we needed to make changes. Christie came in, took a close look at our accounting and financial processes, and helped us see where things could be improved. She gave us practical recommendations to make our reporting more useful, speed up processes, put better checks and balances in place, and reduce costs. She also helped us review our banking and tax service providers, which ended up saving us money and improving how things were being handled.

The biggest value Christie brought was helping us move from knowing we had problems to actually making the changes needed to fix them. She started by helping us look at different options for our accounting and finance needs, including whether it made sense to outsource. Having the costs, pros, and cons laid out clearly gave us confidence that we were making the right decision for our business.

Once we had a plan in place, she guided us through a significant change within our finance team.  She helped us find the right person for the role, develop a transition plan, manage the handoff of responsibilities, and make sure critical information was transferred properly. What could have been a very difficult and disruptive process ended up being far smoother because of her leadership and support. I would recommend Christie to any business owner who wants a trusted advisor to help bring order and clarity to their business.

Ray Szafranski has become an invaluable extension of our leadership team. He learned our business remarkably quickly and consistently provides timely, insightful financial analysis that helps us make better strategic decisions.

One of Ray’s most impactful contributions has been developing a comprehensive five-year financial model that gives us greater visibility and confidence in our long-term planning. He also provides meaningful insight into our budgets and forecasts, helping identify areas that require additional focus and enabling more informed decision-making.

Beyond his technical expertise, Ray has been an outstanding mentor to our finance team, helping team members grow professionally and prepare for the next stages of their careers. His deep knowledge of international business structures, tax strategy, and compliance has been especially valuable as we navigate complex cross-border considerations. He brings a practical, solutions-oriented approach that helps us remain compliant while thoughtfully minimizing tax exposure for both the company and its owners.

Ray combines exceptional financial expertise with a collaborative, people-focused approach, making him a trusted advisor and an integral part of our leadership team. I highly recommend him to any organization seeking a strategic financial partner who delivers both technical excellence and practical business insight.

I’ve worked with Jeff for over 20 years across multiple companies and industries, and he has consistently proven himself as a trusted, high-impact leader. At Walz Group, a California-based tech-enabled operational business that was recognized in the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies in the US for 3 consecutive years, Jeff played a pivotal role on the executive team.  He led both operations and finance through a period of rapid growth, restructured the business, strengthened its operational foundations and significantly improved its financial accounting and reporting processes.

We partnered again when he led operational and financial due diligence on data platform ventures, serving as fractional CFO for a SaaS company that grew from a Raleigh-based startup to operate in multiple countries on multiple continents, supporting it all the way through its successful acquisition a few years later by a Global Fortune 500 company.

Jeff melds operational excellence with deep financial expertise, and is known for his tremendous reliability, relentless work ethic, and exemplary ethical and business integrity making him an invaluable partner to any leadership team.