Facilities Management Consultant | helping organisations troubleshoot their FM services by improving procurement, benchmarking, contract management and operational efficiency

👉 EMC is a specialist consultancy supporting the full FM contract lifecycle, 

👉 audit → improve → market test/tender → mobilise → manage with a practical focus on making services testable, supplier performance evidence-led, and decisions commercially defensible.

👉Accomplished consultant supporting organisations to benchmark, procure, audit, tender and manage FM services with more control, better value, and fewer contract headaches.

From individual contracts to TFM & IFM. Specialist in PFI audits, benchmarking & tender strategy, bid evaluation, mobilisation support, ESG/social value alignment and ongoing contract management, I ensure your FM outcomes are contractual, measurable, and deliverable.

Let’s make your FM contract, tender, audit or benchmark perform and provide the best outcome for your organisation.

#facilitiesmanagement #fm #procurement #tendering #contractmanagement #benchmarking #PFI #PFIhandback

So far, that work has delivered:

•	£25m+ in savings across public and private RFPs
•	12–22% average cost reduction on re-tendered FM
•	Up to 30% gaps in legacy PFI soft services rates
•	£1.1m annual saving on one PFI contract.

It’s not just about cost. 

We drive service quality and ESG performance:

•	Clear KPIs and SLAs that increase uptime
•	Strong contract governance so issues get fixed
•	ESG and social value built into tenders
•	Suppliers held to account on Scope 3

What this looks like for clients:

•	Turn a “fixed” FM contract into a 6–7 figure saving
•	Catering deals that have drifted 15–20%
•	Replace vague promises with measurable KPIs
•	Give boards and CFOs a data-backed story

If you suspect your FM or PFI soft services are 10–20% over market – or your ESG story is mostly on paper – you’re probably right.

Send me a message with “BENCHMARK” and I’ll tell you in plain English where you stand on cost, quality and ESG.

Ernie Melling IFMA ,TMA

Former GE Capital Executive | I help founders and executives see what their financials aren’t telling them.

I spent 25 years inside the machine.

GE Capital. GE Vernova. NBCUniversal. Unilever. Structured finance, capital markets, project finance across Latin America. I was the CFO who sat across from banks, governments, and Fortune 500 boards and made the numbers make sense. I closed an $800 million power plant deal. I managed capital market teams and hundred-million-dollar sales budgets. I built financial models that moved real money in real markets.

I was good at it. For a long time, that was enough.

Then it wasn't.

I stayed almost eight years past the moment I knew I was done. Eight years of golden handcuffs, institutional momentum, and not having a single person in my corner who could help me think through what leaving actually looked like -- financially, strategically, personally.

When I finally left, I made mistakes. I jumped into a startup that looked great on paper and had no financial foundation underneath it. I learned the hard way that passion without financial intelligence is just expensive optimism. Then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars learning the things corporate never taught me -- how to sell, how to communicate with conviction, how to walk into a room and make people feel what I knew to be true about their business.

That education nearly broke me. And it turned me into something rare: a former Fortune 500 CFO who can read your financials like a surgeon reads an MRI and sit across from you like a partner who actually gives a damn.

That's what I do now.

I work with a small number of founders and executives -- people who've already built something substantial and want a strategic partner with real financial depth. Not a coach. Not a consultant recycling frameworks. Not a bookkeeper calling themselves a fractional CFO. Someone who's been in the rooms, closed the deals, read the balance sheets, and came out the other side with a clear point of view about what actually matters.

If you're a founder past $1M who can feel that the way you got here won't get you to the next level, I can show you exactly where the growth is hiding and where the model breaks.

If you're an executive who knows you're meant for something bigger than the title on your business card, I've been where you are. I made the leap. I can help you think through yours.

I don't work with everyone. I'm selective about who I take on because the work only works when both sides are all in.

One conversation is all it takes to know if we're the right fit.

Cruz Gamboa

Most founders don’t go bankrupt overnight.

They bleed slowly.
From numbers they refused to look at.

Revenue looks good.
Growth feels exciting.
Ego feels validated.

But:

➡️ Cash flow is tight
➡️ Margins are thin
➡️ One client controls everything
➡️ Burn rate is “we’ll figure it out”

That’s how businesses die.

Not from lack of ambition.
From lack of financial discipline.

Here’s the cheat sheet I wish every founder read earlier.

Ignore red flags early → pay the price later.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

He was a waiter at Red Lobster.

He had $40.

Most people would complain. He built a $6B brand.

Here’s how:

✅ Saw a problem: kids in his neighborhood paying too much for hats.

✅ Took action: taught himself to sew, made hats at home.

✅ Scaled smart: sold locally → hip-hop stars wore FUBU → national attention.

✅ Got creative: turned his living room into a factory, raised money when banks said NO.

✅ Played the long game: built FUBU → became Shark Tank investor → mentors hundreds of startups.

Most people chase attention.
He chased problems that matter.

Critics said it wouldn’t work. He did it anyway.

You don’t need permission. You don’t need hype.
You need clarity, hustle, and persistence.

From $40 → living room hustle → global empire → Shark Tank.
That’s how legends are built

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Daymond John

He spent 31 years running Trader Joe’s.
Mastered pricing. Supply chains. Consumer psychology.
But one thing bothered him more than anything else: food waste.

Every year, the U.S. throws away 120 billion pounds of perfectly good food.
Not unsafe. Just didn’t fit profit models.

Millions of families struggle to afford groceries.
Most CEOs see this as “business as usual.”
Doug saw it as broken design.

After retiring, he didn’t join a board. He didn’t consult.
He asked a different question:

💡 What if food waste became the foundation, not a byproduct?
What if access mattered more than margin?

✅ Daily Table is born.
✅ Grocery store built on surplus food.
✅ Affordable meals. Nutritious produce. Dignity first.
✅ No charity branding. No eligibility checks.
✅ Nonprofit by design. Every surplus reinvested in lowering prices.

Critics say it can’t scale. Doug agrees.
It wasn’t meant to dominate. It was meant to fix a failure everyone ignored.

From grocery CEO → noticing waste everywhere → building a store that feeds people, not profits.

If you want to rethink how systems work, look at incentives, not supply.
This is the anti-profit grocery model.

Daily Table

This guy bought one random car dealership.
Turned it into a $5B empire.

No fancy startup.
No venture capital.

Just one smart business move.

Terry Taylor started like most people in the auto industry:

Working inside dealerships.

Climbing the ladder.

But he realized something important:

No matter how hard you work…
You’re still building someone else’s business.

So in 1982, he bought his first dealership in Daytona Beach.

Most people would stop there.

He didn’t.

But the real genius wasn’t buying more dealerships.

It was how he structured them.

Instead of hiring managers, he:

• Gave them 20–25% equity
• Helped finance their buy-in
• Let them run the store

Now managers weren’t employees.

They were owners.

And owners think differently.

They protect profits.
They grow the business.
They care about reputation.

So scaling became easy.

1 dealership → 10 → 50 → 120+ dealerships

Today the network does $5B+ in revenue.

Simple lesson:

People work harder for ownership than salaries.

Build partners.
Not employees

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Terry Taylor

Most people think billion-dollar companies start with experts.

Crumbl Cookies started with two tech guys who had never baked a cookie.

In 2017, they noticed something simple:
Cookies were America’s favorite dessert, but the category hadn’t evolved.
So they focused on a few key moves:

▶ Perfected one cookie first
▶ Kept the menu simple (1 classic + 4 rotating flavors)
▶ Turned weekly flavor drops into social media events

That simple strategy turned a 900 sq ft store and $10K into

✅ 800+ locations
✅ 1M cookies sold daily
✅ $1B+ valuation

They didn’t win by doing more.
They won by focusing on the few decisions that drive everything.

That’s true in finance too.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, go to scalingcfo.io
Take the free assessments and see exactly where to focus first.

Crumbl Cookies

$30,000 → $7 BILLION.
No hype. No fluff. Just strategy.

Dennis Washington was 30, broke, and borrowing $30k from a Caterpillar dealer.

He bought one bulldozer and started doing construction in Montana.

Within 5 years? He was the largest contractor in the state.

But he didn’t stop there.

He asked a simple question:
"Where is everyone running from?"

Then he built a formula:

✅ Buy failing businesses that everyone else ignores.
✅ Fix the basics cut costs, improve management, unlock cash flow.
✅ Use the profits to buy the next one.
✅ Repeat.

First test: a worthless copper mine.
Bought for $15M → $100M profits in 3 years.

Next: a struggling global construction firm, merged it → Washington Group International → sold for $2.6B.

Now? Real estate, aviation, railroads, marine services… a $7B empire all from turning broken things into cash.

Most people run from broken businesses. Dennis Washington built a $7B empire fixing them.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Dennis Washington

LVMH is worth $292.9 billion.

You're worth $10M and stressed about payroll.

Same industry. Completely different money game. Here's why.

I've sat inside dozens of $5M–$50M businesses as a fractional CFO.

The pattern never changes.

Founders confuse 3 separate problems:

❌ "We have a cash flow problem."

No. You have a timing problem. Revenue is fine. Your money is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's fixable in 90 days.

❌ "We have a scaling problem."

No. You tried to grow before your operations could hold the weight. Every single time. Growth didn't break you, the lack of systems did.

❌ "We have a fundraising problem."

No. Investors don't fund vision. They fund numbers that prove the vision is real. You don't have a pitch problem. You have a financial story problem.

Now look at the billion-dollar brands:

Inditex built Zara to $193B by selling inventory before the bill came due.

Hermès built $235B by turning scarcity into a balance sheet strategy.

Fast Retailing scaled Uniqlo globally because they built finance infrastructure first.

None of that is luck.
All of it is decisions, financial decisions dressed up as brand decisions.

The difference between them and you isn't capital.

It's that they stopped running on gut feel and built a machine that tells them exactly where every dollar is going, and why.

You don't need a $500K CFO on payroll.

You need 10 hours a month of the right financial brain in the room.

That's the actual arbitrage most $5M–$50M founders are sleeping on.

If your finances are running you instead of the other way around,

Comment "CFO" below and I'll show you exactly where to start.

Samsung wasn’t always a tech giant.

It was a tiny grocery store in 1938.

Lee Byung-Chull had $0. Just noodles, dried fish, and ambition.

Most people would stay small. He built a $720B empire.

Here’s how:

✅ Saw a need. Korea needed industry after the war.

✅ Took action. Trading → textiles → heavy industry.

✅ Bet on the future. Electronics in 1969. First black-and-white TV. Then semiconductors. Then global domination.

✅ Built a culture. Quality over quantity. Meritocracy. Vision.

✅ Played the long game. Critics doubted. Scandals happened. Growth didn’t stop.

From noodles → TVs → semiconductors → Galaxy phones → global tech leader.

Most people chase attention. Samsung chased leverage.

Legends aren’t born. They’re built.

SAMSUNG

He had nothing.
No friends. Barely spoke English. ADHD made school unbearable.

At 16, he dropped out. Taught himself to code. Became obsessed with modifying video games.

At 22, he moved to Canada. New country. No network. Just a laptop and a love for snowboarding.

Started an online snowboard store → it failed.

But the software he built to run it? People wanted it.

💡 Lightbulb moment: Forget snowboards. Sell the software.

✅ Shopify is born.
✅ Made e-commerce simple.
✅ Millions of stores. 175 countries. Even Amazon switched.

From high school dropout → coding every week → building the internet’s mall worth $147B.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io
Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

TOBIAS LÜTKE

Peter Steinberger could have built “cool” software.

He didn’t.

He built useful software.

PDFs were everywhere. Developers were stuck with messy workflows. Peter asked:

What if developers had tools that just worked? That solved real problems, not just looked good on a portfolio?

✅ PSPDFKit → powers PDF apps across mobile & web.
✅ Open-source projects → simplify workflows, save engineers hours.
✅ OpenClaw → personal AI agent that actually helps you code.

Most people chase attention. Peter chases problems.

Critics say niche tools won’t scale. Peter doesn’t care.
He’s not in it for hype. He’s in it for impact.

From engineer → spotting friction everywhere → building tools that make developers’ lives better.

If you want to build something meaningful, solve real problems.
The market rewards results, not ideas.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Peter Steinberger

Most founders don’t fail overnight.

They bleed slowly.
From decisions they ignored.
From processes they never set.
From metrics they refused to measure.

Revenue looks fine. Growth feels exciting. Ego feels validated.

But underneath:

➡️ Decisions get delayed → chaos spreads
➡️ Processes depend on you → hero culture burns out
➡️ Metrics are “nice to have” → guesswork rules
➡️ Accountability is optional → everyone points fingers

That’s how scaling dies.

Not from lack of ambition.
From lack of rules.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.
#scalingup #founders #ceo

Most people saw a ping pong table.

Max Koehler saw a business.

In 2019, he noticed something strange:

Table tennis is one of the most played sports in the world,
but in U.S. cities there were very few places to play regularly.

Most founders would open a traditional club.

Max built PingPod instead.

Small glass studios.
Open 24/7.
Booked entirely through an app.
No staff. No front desk.

But the real genius?

A camera above every table.

Every rally gets recorded.
One tap → instant replay → share on social.

Players created the content.
The content created the marketing.

Clips went viral.
Bookings exploded.

Today PingPod is valued around $40–60M.

All from one simple observation.

The best founders don’t just build products.
They build systems that grow themselves. 🚀

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, go to
scalingcfo.io

Take the free assessments and see exactly where to focus first.

#scalingup #founders #CEO

Max Koehler

99% of founders do this backwards.

They try to scale a business
that no one has proven they want.

Then they try to sell a business
that only works because they exist.

Here’s the real order:

1. Start
Don’t build the product.
Sell it first.

If no one pays, it’s not a business.
It’s a fantasy.

2. Scale
Do less. Better.
One offer. One audience. One channel.

Systemize everything.
If it needs you to survive, it’s not scalable.

3. Sell
Buyers don’t pay for hype.
They pay for predictable cash flow.

Clean books.
Recurring revenue.
Low founder dependency.

Start with proof.
Scale with systems.
Exit with leverage.

That’s how you build something that prints money, not something that prints stress.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

$1M revenue feels like winning.

It's actually where most businesses start quietly dying.

The mistakes don't look like mistakes at first.
They look like growth.

❌ Mistake #1: Treating revenue like safety

Revenue is vanity.
Cash flow is reality.
Profit is sanity.

You can do $8M and still run out of money.
Most founders find this out the hard way.

❌ Mistake #2: Hiring for the business you want

Payroll is fixed.
Revenue is variable.

That one gap has quietly killed more $3M–$5M businesses than bad products ever did.

❌ Mistake #3: Fundraising when you're desperate

Investors don't fund need.
They fund leverage.

The moment you need the money is the worst moment to ask for it.

❌ Mistake #4: Confusing a good year with a good model

One great year can hide a broken business for 18 months.

Until the market stops being kind.
And suddenly everything breaks at once.

❌ Mistake #5: Having no one who sees the real picture

Not a bookkeeper.
Not a coach recycling frameworks.

Someone who can look at your numbers and tell you exactly where the growth is hiding — and where the model breaks.

The businesses that make it past $10M, $20M, $50M?

They didn't avoid all of these.

They just caught them early enough to survive.

📌 If you're past $1M and want a fresh set of eyes on your financials, DM me.

On March 12 we ran the first Profitable Business Experience workshop.

At the end, one attendee said I should be teaching this at Harvard. Another wants her whole team in the next one.

The difference between this and every other workshop? Everyone walks out with an AI-generated report from ScalingCFO.io tied to their exact numbers, their constraint, their 90-day plan. Not a workbook. 

A document they can use the same day.

April 16 is the next one. $497.

Full story in the newsletter. Registration at scalingcfo.io/workshop.
#scalingup #CEO #FOUNDER #growth

Why This Is the New Standard for Workshops Ascend & Scale Newsletter | March 2026 On March 12, we ran the first Profitable Business Experience worksho

Open article: The Profitable Business Experience by Cruz Gamboa • 3 min read

Successful 8-figure business. Less than a month of runway.

The brand was real. The customers were loyal. The margins were strong.
And the company had less than 30 days of runway left in the bank.

Nobody did anything obviously wrong. 

A partner ran millions in ads without anyone tracking whether they were actually working. Debt piled up quietly. 

Revenue looked fine, until it didn't. By the time they saw the damage, it was already baked in.

That's the valley of death. And it doesn't announce itself.

It shows up as a debt payment you can't quite cover. A line of credit that gets frozen. Cash advances pulling from your revenue automatically while you're still trying to grow. 

You're doing the right things: cutting costs, finding better channels, getting leaner, but the debt service is eating the oxygen before any of it can breathe.

The scorecard looks ugly. The story underneath is completely different.
If that feels familiar, revenue moving, cash not following, numbers that don't quite add up, you don't have a motivation problem. You have a visibility problem.

Check out this week's newsletter.
#scalingup #ceo #growth #founder

cruzgamboadrive

patagonia-solar-llc

A founder I work with built something most people spend a career chasing. Real customers. Not followers, not vanity metrics, actual people who come ba

Open article: They once crossed the $10M mark but now  had 20 days of runway. by Cruz Gamboa • 5 min read

They once crossed the $10M mark but now  had 20 days of runway.

A founder fired her bookkeeping firm last month.

The firm wasn't wrong. They found real problems -- co-mingled finances, missing cost detail, tax errors, revenue streams lumped together.
But they handed her a list with zero context about what she was actually building.

None of it landed.

That's the difference between a financial audit and a strategic one.

In our Sprint Audit, we didn't touch the numbers first. We fixed the frame. Built her business model. Found the one metric her QuickBooks would never show her. Tracked down the upsell gap quietly bleeding her margin.

By the end she had a revenue target, a profit margin to defend, and an exit number on the whiteboard.

The books weren't her problem. They never are.

Full case study -- plus why we built ScalingCFO in the first place -- in this week's newsletter. 
Link in comments.
#scalingup #eosworld #CEO #founder

A ScalingCFO Newsletter You probably have seen that I launched a new platform called ScalingCFO.io. I'll tell you what ScalingCFO actually is before I

Open article: The Frame Before the Numbers by Cruz Gamboa • 4 min read

"Workshop" has become one of those words that means almost nothing.

I'm running one on April 16th. 

Here's exactly what happens in it.

We're not talking about funnels. 
No breakout rooms. 
Nobody's sharing their vision board.

Here's what we actually do:

I show you the five financial numbers that tell you more about the health of your business than your revenue line ever will. 

You actually figure out what is the cash gap to achieving your ideal revenue target. 

We get clear on your #1 constraint to get there.

Then I walk you through what each of them looks like when something is quietly breakin, before it becomes a 20-days-of-runway conversation.

I've run this with founders doing $1M, $3M, $7M.

The pattern is almost always the same.

The numbers they're watching aren't the ones that matter. The ones that matter, nobody showed them.

That's the whole thing. 

Two hours. Clear picture. You leave knowing exactly what to look at.

$497 for now, going up to $997 starting May. 

If two hours of financial clarity isn't worth that to you, you're not the right fit.
If it is, go here: 

scalingcfo.io/workshop
#scalingup #CEO #founder #growth

I spent 20+ years at GE Capital reviewing companies doing hundreds of millions in revenue.

Revenue was never the story. 

It was just the opening line.

The real question was always what was happening underneath it... the cash timing, the margin after real costs, the debt structure quietly shifting while everyone celebrated the top line number.

Most founders I work with now are doing $1M to $5M. 

Smart people. 
Working hard. 
Revenue going up.

And almost none of them have ever looked at those three things.

Not because they don't care. 

Because nobody showed them where to look. And because past $1M, there is always a fire drill. You keep building. On a foundation you've never actually pressure-tested.

The gap between what you think is happening in your business and what's actually happening has a dollar amount.

Swipe to see the three numbers that tell you what it is.

#scalingup #CEO #GROWTH #founder

Growth is NOT Scaling

I had dinner with a founder last week who has made $100,000 in a single day.

She can't look at her bank account.

Not because the number is always bad. 

Because she doesn't know what it means. No system, no context -- just anxiety every time she opens the app.

That's not a revenue problem. That's a cash culture problem.

At GE Capital during the 2008 crisis, we used one tool to cut through the noise with distressed companies in the Carolinas, a 13-week cash flow forecast. 
Money in, money out, gap to fill. Nothing more.

Her reaction when I showed her: "If you tell me I'm $10K short this week, I can go make $10K."

That's the whole thing.

Most founders are running in reverse: selling hard, spending freely, then checking what's left and wondering why it never adds up. The forecast flips that. You start with cash reality and work backward.

A cash-first culture means you know your number BEFORE the bank tells you.
Weekly. Not quarterly. Not when your accountant sends a report.

The person with the clearest financial picture always wins.

You can't pay bills with sales.
#scalingup #ceo #founder #growth

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The Battle

Ernie Melling IFMA ,TMA

Cruz Gamboa

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taplio

The Battle

Ernie Melling IFMA ,TMA

Cruz Gamboa

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Cruz Gamboa's LinkedIn Performance

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