Philosophy
Finance Leadership Built for Growth
We’ve learned that the best financial strategies emerge when finance works seamlessly with operations, sales, and product teams.
We embed senior finance talent directly into your management team, breaking down barriers between functional areas to create financial planning processes that everyone understands, trusts, and uses to drive decisions.
Our fractional model means you access senior-level expertise exactly when and where you need it – from building your first three-statement model to managing complex scenario planning.
This is the marginal gains philosophy in action: incremental improvements in collaboration, communication, and analytics that compound into a cohesive business strategy to drive operational excellence.
Why Partner With US
- Senior Expertise, Scalable Investment: Access experienced FP&A professionals and fractional CFO’s without the full-time commitment. Scale services precisely with your growth stage.
- Rapid Integration, Immediate Impact: Most clients see actionable insights within 30 days. We work within your existing systems and deliver board-ready analysis from day one.
- Decision-Ready Intelligence: We don’t just produce reports – we arm leadership teams with the financial clarity to make better decisions faster, from pricing strategy to M&A evaluation.
Our Team
Our advisors average 15 years of financial leadership experience across diverse business industries including CPG, BioPharma, Medical Devices and SaaS. We’ve served as trusted financial partners to portfolio companies backed by leading institutional investors ranging from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, KKR, A&M Capital and American Pacific Group.
Our team has guided businesses through multiple successful exits—including strategic sales and IPOs—and led turnarounds that transformed distressed operations into profitable enterprises. This experience spans the full business lifecycle, from startup inception through Fortune 500 scale, giving us perspective on what financial systems and strategies work at each stage.
When you engage Marginal Business Advisors, you access practitioners who have built, scaled, and optimized financial functions in environments that mirror your own challenges.
Tom Preute, MBA | Founder
I founded Marginal Gains Business Advisors because the companies that win in the next decade won’t be the ones with the biggest finance teams—they’ll be the ones who leverage AI and modern FP&A tools to move faster than their competition. We’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how financial planning works. What once required teams of analysts—multi-scenario modeling, automated variance analysis, real-time forecasting—can now be done by one experienced FP&A professional with the right technology stack. This is why fractional finance work isn’t just viable for small and mid-sized companies anymore—it’s often superior to the traditional model.
My career prepared me for exactly this moment. I started on the M&A team at Lehman Brothers in Frankfurt, then spent two decades building FP&A capabilities across the full business lifecycle—from guiding Advanced Fibre Communications and OpenTV through their IPOs, to scaling financial planning systems at Medtronic and Bayer Healthcare, where I spent a decade as Divisional VP Finance overseeing $1.2B in revenue. I’ve built the forecasting models, budgeting frameworks, and reporting infrastructure that survive board scrutiny and investor diligence at the enterprise level.
Now I bring that discipline to small and mid-sized companies that need Fortune 500 FP&A capabilities without the Fortune 500 overhead. As we’ve grown, I’ve brought on additional team members with deep financial planning experience and the flexibility to adapt quickly to rapidly changing business environments—giving our clients access to specialized expertise exactly when they need it.
The fractional model works because you don’t need full-time FP&A support every week—you need it when building your first three-statement model, when investors demand scenario planning, when rapid growth breaks your planning process, or when you’re preparing for a transaction.
We deliver enterprise-grade FP&A at the exact level of engagement your growth stage requires.
