Serving Houston and the greater metro
Fractional CFO and CMO — Houston and the Gulf Coast
Local Fractional provides partner-led fractional CFO and CMO services to Houston businesses generating $2M–$50M in revenue. The Fractional CFO Partnership is a flat $5,000–$10,000+/month retainer (with a lighter $2,500/month Fractional Executive Advisory tier for businesses with clean books), delivered remote-first to Houston businesses, with travel for board meetings, planning, and other key on-site moments. Co-founders Chris Gauvin and Taber Wetz lead every engagement directly.
Senior-level financial and marketing leadership for Houston’s growth-stage companies. Texas-based, on the ground when it matters, and built for the operators actually running the business.
Why would a Houston business hire a CFO based in Dallas?
Fair question, and the honest answer is that it should not matter nearly as much as who does the work. We are a Texas firm — Houston is three and a half hours down I 45, not a different world — and we do not keep an office there. Engagements run remote-first with travel for board meetings, lender conversations, diligence and anything else that genuinely needs someone in the room.
What should matter is seniority and continuity. A great many firms serving Houston match you to a consultant from a bench, and the person who wins the engagement is not the person who runs it. Every Local Fractional engagement is led personally by a founding partner — Chris Gauvin or Taber Wetz — with controller-level support underneath where the books need rebuilding rather than just reporting.
The Texas context is genuinely shared: franchise tax, the way a Gulf Coast bank underwrites a contractor, how energy-cycle exposure reads on a balance sheet to someone who has seen it before. See how the engagement model works — we price on scope rather than on postcode, so a Houston client pays what a Dallas one pays.
If you are weighing this against an interim hire, they are different instruments: an interim CFO fills a seat that just emptied, a fractional CFO is a permanent part-time seat. Most Houston enquiries that arrive asking for an interim actually want the second one.
The Houston Business Landscape
Houston’s trades-and-home-services sector is enormous and growing. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and roofing companies scale fast in a metro this big, and a $3M–$15M trades business running on spreadsheets eventually hits a ceiling. Installing a 13-week cash flow, a real KPI scorecard, and a pricing discipline breaks the ceiling — fast. See our industry pages for how the playbook runs by trade.
Manufacturing and distribution is another major Houston segment. The operating complexity sits in the numbers — inventory turns, contribution margin by SKU, customer concentration risk, and the cash conversion cycle. These are exactly the areas where a fractional CFO delivers outsized returns in a short engagement.
Consumer packaged goods and e-commerce brands are thriving in Houston — local-to-national CPG, specialty food and beverage, health and wellness. These businesses often have aggressive top-line growth but margin, channel mix, and working-capital problems hiding underneath. Clean unit economics and a defensible growth plan are what make the next investor or acquirer conversation go well.
On the SaaS, technology, and professional-services side, Houston’s growth has been substantial. These are the engagements where a fractional CFO is preparing the company for a capital raise, an acquisition, or an exit — and a fractional CMO is building the revenue engine that makes the valuation defensible. That combined operator-led approach is how we do our best work.
Houston and Gulf Coast Areas We Serve
The metro is served as one region on identical terms — no travel surcharge, and no difference in access between a Galleria client and one in Conroe. What changes between these areas is the shape of the business, and the reporting follows the business rather than the postcode.
Downtown, the Galleria & Uptown
Professional services, energy trading and the firms that orbit them. Partner distributions, project-level profitability and management accounts that a lender or an investor will accept without a rewrite are the standing asks.
The Woodlands & Conroe
Corporate relocations, healthcare practices and fast-growing professional services along I 45 North. Cash-flow forecasting comes up here more than anywhere else in the metro — growth on this trajectory outruns its working capital well before it outruns demand.
Katy & Cypress
Construction, specialty trades and home services scaling with the western suburbs. Job costing and work-in-progress schedules are almost always the gap between the books and reality — see our construction and contracting practice.
Sugar Land & Missouri City
Manufacturing, distribution and a deep base of family-held operators. Customer concentration and inventory timing drive most of the cash risk, and neither is visible on a standard P&L.
Pearland, Clear Lake & League City
Aerospace suppliers, healthcare and technical services, where contract accounting and cash timing against milestone billing drive most of the finance workload.
The Energy Corridor & West Houston
Oilfield services, engineering firms and their subcontractors. Revenue here is cyclical by nature, so the forecast has to be built on a real cycle rather than a trailing twelve-month average that flatters the top of one.
Galveston County & the coast
Hospitality, marine services, logistics and tourism-linked retail. Seasonality is severe and predictable, which makes it forecastable — but only if the model is built around it.
Spring, Humble & North Houston
Established local operators across home services, distribution and light industrial, frequently first-time CFO engagements. The immediate need is a close that closes on time and a 13-week cash view.
Services Available to Houston Businesses
Fractional CFO
Cash flow planning, forecasting, and strategic financial leadership.
Fractional CMO
Revenue-focused marketing strategy and brand positioning.
Exit Planning
Sell-side advisory and buyer-ready positioning.
72-Hour Cash Flow
Complete cash flow analysis delivered in 72 hours.
SMB Acquisition
Buy-side advisory and financial due diligence.
Industry Specialists
HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, professional services.
Also Serving Across Texas
What does a fractional CMO do for a Houston business?
Worth flagging that the marketing side is where Houston searches already find us most easily — considerably more easily than the finance ones. The work is marketing accountability at the executive level: knowing which spend produced revenue, setting the positioning and the offer, choosing channels on evidence, and being willing to stop what the numbers cannot defend.
Our marketing partner leads the work; it is deliberately not a CFO side project. Standalone engagements are common. The paired version is stronger, because the CFO closes the loop between what marketing spent and what the ledger says came back.
Typical Houston engagements sit with industrial and B2B companies whose pipeline is relationship-driven and almost entirely unmeasured, with multi-location home-services businesses where cost per acquisition varies wildly by branch and nobody is looking, and with professional-services firms competing on reputation without a system for building one.
Structure and current pricing are on the CMO page; some clients start there, others begin with the finance side and add marketing later.
Who you will actually work with
Worth being concrete about, because it is the difference that matters most. A great many firms match you to a consultant from a bench, and the person who wins the engagement is not the person who runs it. Here every engagement is led personally by a founding partner — the same person in month one and in month thirty.
Chris Gauvin
Co-Founder & Fractional CFO
Leads finance engagements personally — monthly close, cash-flow forecasting, lender and board reporting, and exit preparation.
Taber Wetz
Co-Founder & Fractional CFO
Leads finance engagements personally, with a focus on forecasting, pricing and margin work, and preparing a business to be sold.
Melissa Valdez
Fractional CMO
Leads the marketing practice — positioning, channel mix and the funnel maths that says which spend actually produced revenue.
Explainers
The questions that come up before anyone signs anything, answered in one picture each.
Fractional vs Interim vs Full-Time CFO
Three different instruments. Which one your situation actually calls for.
What a Fractional CFO Costs
The three tiers, what each includes, and why we price on scope not location.
CFO + CMO: Who Owns What
Two silos, one bridge. Marketing knows what it spent; finance knows what came back.
Your First 90 Days
Books cleaned, a cash view you can rely on, then the decisions those two change.
The 13-Week Cash Flow Forecast
Cash in, cash out, and the balance week by week — far enough ahead to act.
Houston and the Gulf Coast — Common Questions
What fractional CFO services are available in Houston, TX?
Monthly close and management reporting, 13-week cash-flow forecasting, budgeting and variance analysis, KPI scorecards, lender and board reporting, pricing and margin work, and exit or sale preparation. Engagements run as a fixed monthly scope rather than an hourly rate, so the cost is predictable from month one.
Do you have an office in Houston?
No, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. We are a Texas firm and Houston is three and a half hours down I 45, so travel for board meetings, lender conversations and diligence is a drive rather than an event. Day to day the work runs the way it does for our clients everywhere: scheduled working sessions, shared dashboards and direct access to your accounting system.
What is the difference between an interim CFO and a fractional CFO in Houston?
An interim CFO fills a full-time seat that has just emptied, usually for a defined stretch while you recruit. A fractional CFO is a permanent part-time seat — the same person, every month, indefinitely. Most enquiries that arrive asking for an interim actually want the second one, because the underlying problem is that the business cannot yet justify a full-time CFO rather than that someone has left.
Do you serve The Woodlands, Katy, Sugar Land and Conroe as well as Houston proper?
Yes, on identical terms. There is no travel surcharge and no difference in access between a Galleria client and one in Conroe or Galveston. The whole metro and the Gulf Coast are served the same way.
Do you work with Houston nonprofits?
Yes. Nonprofit finance carries requirements a commercial book does not — restricted versus unrestricted funds, grant reporting, functional expense allocation, and a board that has to read the statements without an accounting background. We treat that as its own specialism rather than as a variation on commercial reporting.
Do you offer fractional CMO services in Houston as well?
Yes, and it is a separate discipline led by our marketing partner rather than a CFO wearing a second hat. It runs alongside a CFO engagement or entirely on its own. Houston industrial and B2B companies in particular tend to have pipelines built on relationships and almost no measurement of which of that activity actually produces revenue.
Can you help with a sale or sell-side process in Houston?
Yes. Exit readiness is years of work rather than a transaction, and the finance side of it is mostly unglamorous: clean books, a defensible quality-of-earnings position, customer concentration understood before a buyer finds it, and management accounts that survive diligence. Starting that eighteen months out is worth considerably more than starting it at the LOI.
How much does a fractional CFO cost in Houston?
We price on scope rather than on location, so Houston rates match our Dallas rates. Most engagements land well below the fully loaded cost of a full-time CFO once salary, bonus, benefits and payroll taxes are counted.
Ready to Talk?
No pitch, just a conversation about your business and where you want to take it. We will figure out together if there is a fit.
Book a Free ConsultationOr email info@localfractional.com