// About Marlova · Coppell, TX

Not a firm with junior analysts — one CFO who has closed the books and defended the raise.

Marlova is a fractional finance practice for founders who are past product-market fit and about to sit across from an investor. Every model, forecast and board pack is built by the same senior hands — no offshore template, no black-box spreadsheet you can't explain in the room.

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Marlova's founder reviewing a printed cash-flow model marked up by hand

fig.00 — the desk it happens at

No account managers between you and the numbers. You talk to the person building the model.

A board deck, laptop model and highlighted variance table laid out on a desk

fig.01 — why Marlova exists

// The origin

Built after one too many board meetings held together with a broken spreadsheet.

Marlova started with a pattern seen again and again: a strong founder, real revenue, and a finance stack that couldn't survive a single hard question. The model wouldn't reconcile to the bank. The runway number changed depending on who you asked. The board deck was screenshots.

Those founders didn't need a $240k full-time CFO. They needed senior judgment a few focused days a month — someone who had run a close, defended a raise, and could translate the ledger into a story a board would actually trust.

So that's the whole practice. From Coppell, Texas, Marlova operates as an embedded finance function for growth-stage teams — the modeling, the forecasting and the board narrative, priced to your stage and billed per engagement instead of a salary.

// How the work is run

Four rules the numbers get held to.

operating principles

rule.01 — traceable

Every cell has a source

Nothing gets hard-coded and hidden. Models are driver-based and source-linked, so you can walk any output back to the assumption that produced it — in front of an investor if you have to.

rule.02 — defensible

Built to survive diligence

The standard isn't "looks clean in a deck." It's whether the model holds up when a partner at your lead fund starts pressure-testing CAC payback and net revenue retention line by line.

rule.03 — direct

Straight talk on the runway

If the burn says you have five months and you think it's nine, you'll hear it early. The value of a fractional CFO is the uncomfortable number delivered before it's a crisis.

rule.04 — scoped

Right-sized, not padded

Pre-revenue teams get told to wait. Founders who need daily bookkeeping get referred out. Marlova is CFO-level modeling and reporting — not data entry dressed up as advisory.

rule.05 — on time

Board packs ship in ≤5 days

Once your ledger is reconciled at close, the board pack lands within five business days — variance-to-plan, cash bridge, cohort economics and a written narrative your board reads in ten minutes.

rule.06 — one owner

Same hands, start to close

The person on your fit call is the person building your model and sitting in on the investor calls. No handoff to a junior team you never met.

// The spec sheet

Who Marlova is built for — and how it works.

Stage: Seed through Series B. Post-revenue, pre-CFO teams from roughly $50k to $800k MRR.
Sectors: SaaS & recurring-revenue businesses chasing net revenue retention and a defensible CAC payback.
Engagement: Billed per engagement — a one-time model sprint, a monthly retained CFO seat, or add-on fundraise support. No salary, no equity ask.
Onboarding: Two-week sprint. Ledger, cap table and contracts reconciled into a clean baseline, then a full source-linked model.
Cadence: Monthly board pack + bi-weekly working sessions, with Slack access for the questions that don't wait for a call.
Based in: Coppell, TX. Working with founders across the DFW metroplex and remote-first teams nationwide.

// The point of all of it

You should be able to defend every number your board sees.

Marlova · fractional CFO & advisory · Coppell, TX

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