I'm Tom Dillon, CFA, the founder of Frak Finance, where I work as a fractional CFO for small-to-medium businesses, software companies, and ecommerce brands out of Chicago. Here's what has my attention right now.
Helping founders read past the bank balance
A theme I keep coming back to is that a healthy-looking bank balance can hide a real problem. Lately I've been writing about why your bank balance can be lying to you, the cash leak that quietly breaks profitable businesses when timing goes wrong, and why an annual budget signed off in December is often already outdated by spring. Most of this work is about helping founders see the numbers behind the number.
Guiding deals, valuations, and exits
Over the last 18 months I've supported more than 40 acquisitions, so a lot of my focus right now is on the deal side: M&A guidance, valuations, and audit readiness. I've been writing about the due diligence mistakes that quietly kill deals, what a business would actually sell for versus the "3x revenue" numbers founders like to throw around, and the bigger market moves worth watching, from Unilever's Grüns acquisition to the billion-dollar bank merger reshaping the Southeast.
Thinking about the CFO's seat on CFO Chronicles
I host the CFO Chronicles podcast, and a lot of my thinking lately is about where the CFO actually fits. I've written about who owns what between the CEO, COO, and CFO in a fast-growing company, how CFOs earn the CEO seat long before the title changes, and the tension I see in AI right now between a CEO's ambition to scale and a CFO's discipline to ask whether the business can support it yet.
On the personal side
When I'm not in a client's books, I'm a dad in the Chicago area, and you'll usually find me on the golf course or traveling with my family. I also care about financial literacy starting early: instead of a birthday gift, I've been putting a deposit into an account for my nephew each birthday and Christmas, then walking him through what that money is doing and why.
Want to talk through any of this? You can find me at Frak Finance or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Last updated June 2026.