About
Two operators who got tired of watching good plans die in a folder.
Proper Growth is the coming together of an ops and planning operator and a finance operator. Neither half works alone, which is why we stopped trying to sell the halves separately.
Why we don’t say fractional
Integrated back of house for consumer brands.
There are a thousand fractional operators in this space and the title stopped meaning much. Most of them take an advisory seat or an operator seat. Not both.
We do act as COO and CFO. But there’s a window where this function matters most and gets funded least. The hard part isn’t that a CFO and a COO cost money. It’s that at this stage every dollar of overhead is a dollar not in inventory or media, so building the bench internally means funding it out of the same capital those decisions are supposed to protect.
That’s the window we work in. The strategy a COO and a CFO would set, we build with you through your own data. Then we go execute it, without you carrying the headcount to do it.
Back of house is the accurate description. It’s the less glamorous work that doesn’t get done unless someone owns it.
Where the standard came from
One from ops. One from finance.
Cash & Cover isn’t a framework we read about somewhere. It’s the argument the two of us kept having, written down and turned into a rule.
Sean Christman
Ops, planning, and go to market
Supply chain, logistics, and warehousing. Demand planning and buying. Marketing, product, and retention at different points. Dozens of vendor moves, warehouse moves, and ERP integrations. Thousands of products brought to market.
Where he ended up is the seam between product and marketing. Understanding what demand marketing will create, what the site will capture, and therefore what actually needs to be bought.
All of it from inside brands, not advised from outside them. The cover side of Cash & Cover is his.
Sean on LinkedIn →Greg Faustini
Finance
CPA and an accountant by training. Runs the CFO side here: cash flow modeling, FP&A, accounting, and the financial gate on every capital decision we bring you.
Greg owns the money question. The cash side of Cash & Cover is his, and the bar it holds every buy to is the one he set.
Greg on LinkedIn →What we believe
You can't out-market broken ops.
Growth without control is borrowed time.
Cost cutting is a reset, not a strategy.
Most growth problems are capital allocation problems in a marketing costume.
If you disagree with any of those, we’re probably not the right fit, and thirty minutes will tell us both.