About Us
I’ve spent my career between two worlds: corporate finance leadership and running my own small business. Here’s how that shaped instantCFO.
A finance executive and an agency owner. Two careers, one person.
I have spent my career between two worlds. For twenty years, I led corporate finance teams at large travel companies, most of that time at Expedia, before that at American Airlines. I built forecasts, managed P&Ls, and gave executives leading multi-billion-dollar business units the forward-looking financial view they needed to make real decisions. A few years ago, I started my own insurance agency from scratch. Same person, different scale. Same discipline, applied to a small business I built and still run today. instantCFO exists because of what I learned bridging those two worlds.
Phil Rice
Founder, instantCFO
The Corporate Finance Chapter
For most of my career in corporate finance, I loved the work. The problems were analytically challenging, the teams were smart, and I got to build the kind of forward-looking rigor that lets senior leaders make decisions with confidence, not guesses.
As my career progressed, the work changed for me. The businesses got larger and less nimble. My days shifted from doing to reviewing. More meetings, less problem-solving. I realized I probably did not have another decade of that in me.
The instinct that had defined my career, when you do not know the answer, you find the person who might, then the next person, then the next, until you figure it out, still mattered. It just was not what I got paid to do anymore. That’s what led me to make a change.
The Agency Chapter
That meant hiring my first team members, building processes from nothing, learning the industry from the inside, and running a real cash cycle where a slow month feels very different than it looks on the corporate P&Ls I once managed at ten thousand times the size.
Inside the agency, I saw something I did not expect. The financial support available to small business owners at my scale did not match what a business at my scale actually needed. Bookkeepers can keep the books clean. A tax accountant can file your returns. But nobody was doing the forward-looking work that had defined my entire corporate career, and there was no single source of truth to make decisions from. That gap was not just my problem. It was structural. Every agency owner I compared notes with had a version of the same story.
Why instantCFO
The corporate finance discipline I spent twenty years building was designed to answer forward-looking questions. What does next quarter look like? What happens if we hire here or cut spend there? Where is the leak in our margin? At small business scale, none of that infrastructure exists. instantCFO is that service, with a CFO to help you make sense of the story behind the numbers. Enterprise-grade financial discipline, sized for the agency you actually run, by someone who runs one. If any of this sounds like your business, let’s talk.
