Forte Business brings ASX-grade financial leadership to Australian startups and SMEs — without the full-time cost, the corporate overhead, or the learning curve of a first-time hire.
Start your journey →Who we work with
This isn't a service for every business — and that's deliberate. Forte works with founders and owners who are dealing with something significant: a raise, a refinance, real growth, or real pressure.
Seed to Series A businesses moving toward Series B or C. You've got a board, an upcoming audit, or a step-up raise ahead — and you need financial leadership that can stand in front of investors and make sense.
Private, often founder- or family-owned. The bookkeeper and external accountant got you here, but they can't take you where you're going — especially when a bank facility, a succession, or a structural change is on the table.
Mounting ATO debt, a lender asking hard questions, or cash that's stopped making sense. Directors who move early have real options under Australian law — including safe harbour protection from insolvent trading liability. The worst thing to do right now is wait.
Sound familiar?
You didn't start your business to spend your days wrestling with cash flow, reconciling accounts, or trying to make sense of reports that raise more questions than they answer.
Revenue looks fine but cash is always tight. Something doesn't add up, and you can't quite put your finger on it.
Decisions get made on gut feel because there's no clear picture. By the time the numbers land, it's too late to act on them.
Your accountant reports on the past. Your bank wants the future. Nobody's translating between the two — or telling you what to actually do about it.
Too much of your time goes on finance and admin. It's not your strength, it's not your value, and deep down you know it's not good enough for where you're trying to go.
How it works
Forte Business is built around a clear, repeatable process that gets your business into shape — and keeps it there.
We start with a straightforward conversation — you tell us what's going on, we explain exactly how Forte works. If it's right for you, great. If it's not, we'll say so honestly and point you towards something that is. No pressure, no pitch.
A thorough, objective review of every aspect of your business — not to find fault, but to find the real root causes. We work out what's actually driving the problems and build a plan focused on the levers that will make the biggest difference. Clear-eyed, practical, no fluff. Clients can walk away with the Pathfinder and execute the plan themselves. None of them have.
We set up and run the financial and business management processes your business actually needs — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually. Everything has its place and its rhythm. You stop firefighting and start running things properly.
We sit alongside you for the long haul — keeping momentum, staying focused on what genuinely matters, and cutting through the noise around everything that doesn't. Objective, direct, and always in your corner.
Services & pricing
Fixed monthly retainers, priced by the value and complexity of what you're dealing with — not by the hour. Every engagement is delivered directly by Gavin Cooke. Not a firm. Not a junior associate. The same experienced CFO, every time.
Some engagements are better handled as a fixed-scope project — a fundraise sprint, buy- or sell-side M&A support, a finance-stack implementation, short interim CFO cover, or a strategic review when a business needs clear, unsentimental answers fast. All quoted as fixed-fee work specific to your needs, never hourly rates.
The specialist bench
Forte clients get fast, trusted access to specialists across insurance, debt and asset finance, FinOps tooling, tax advisory, and IP and commercial law — relationships built over 20+ years, brought in when you need them. You don't have to find them, vet them, or brief them from scratch. They already know how we work.
The difference
Most fractional CFOs come from either a startup background or a corporate one. Forte brings both — plus a third lens that very few can offer.
Founding CFO of an ASX-listed company — continuous disclosure, audit, and capital-markets reporting aren't theoretical. That's exactly what a bank wants before extending a facility, and what a board expects in a reporting pack.
Having built a startup, the advice you get fits the business in front of you — not a textbook. Knows which controls matter at your revenue level and which are theatre, and what it actually feels like to run out of runway.
Twenty years in SMEs includes the hard years, not just the growth years. Can read a liquidity crisis or an ATO debt spiral early, and lead a genuine turnaround — not just report on the decline.
Speaks the language of a founder and the language of a CFO, board member, or banker peer in the same meeting — the gap most commonly cited in fractional CFO engagements that don't work out.
"I bring public-company financial discipline and a founder's own scars to businesses that will never have a corporate finance department — without the corporate overhead or the learning curve of a first-time CFO."
Gavin Cooke, founder of Forte Business
For advisors & accountants
If you're an independent fractional CFO or an advisory-minded accountant, you can use the Forte platform to deliver structured, high-impact advisory services to your own clients. Our IP, frameworks, and tools. Your name, your relationships, your pricing.
The Pathfinder assessment, board-pack templates, KPI and FinOps toolkit, and delivery cadence — all documented and ready. You're not starting from scratch; you're standing on twenty years of experience.
A structured training programme gets you up to speed on the method. An active licensee community keeps you connected and current. You run independently — but you're not on your own.
The platform carries the operating load. Your expertise goes further. Whether you're building a practice from scratch or adding a structured advisory offer to an existing one, Forte gives you the infrastructure to do it properly.
Start with a clear picture of where things stand. It takes minutes to get going and costs nothing to find out if Forte is right for you.
Get started →