Virtual CFO Darlinghurst | Sydney Virtual CFO
A virtual CFO for Darlinghurst founders running project-lumpy creative, production, and hospitality-adjacent businesses. Revenue smoothing and margin…
Darlinghurst runs on project work: production companies, creative studios, and hospitality-adjacent brands whose revenue arrives in lumps rather than a line. A $4M production business here can bank $650,000 in March and $110,000 in May, and both months can be normal. The finance problem is not the swing itself. It is not seeing the swing coming, and not knowing which projects made money once the real costs land. A virtual CFO engagement in this postcode, scoped as the 90-Day Number [→ 90-Day Number page], does two things: builds a forward view of cash tied to the booked pipeline, and calculates true margin per project so the founder knows which work to chase.
Published: July 2026
The City of Sydney's own planning work identifies Surry Hills and Darlinghurst, along Crown, Baptist and Oxford streets, as the Eastern Creative Precinct, and notes the prominence of night-life, bars, restaurants and the creative sector through the Oxford Street Village. The business mix that follows is exactly what you would expect: production companies, creative and design studios, boutique services firms, and brands built around the venue economy.
What these founders share is not an industry but a revenue shape. Work is won and delivered in discrete projects, campaigns or seasons, with real swings between busy and quiet. That lumpiness is manageable when you can see it coming and dangerous when you cannot, because the fixed costs do not swing with it. Payroll, rent and software cost the same in the $110,000 month as they did in the $650,000 month.
This is also a different economy from the digital agencies a few streets west. An agency founder worries about retainer utilisation and bench cost, which is why the virtual CFO work for agencies [→ agency industry page] centres on capacity economics, and why the Surry Hills engagement [→ Surry Hills suburb page] looks the way it does. A Darlinghurst production or events founder worries about something else entirely: whether the good months are funding the lean ones, or just disguising them.
Take a $4M production company whose top three clients account for $2.4M of the year. That is 60 per cent of revenue sitting with three relationships, and the largest of them might be a single $900,000 engagement paid 30/40/30 across the delivery schedule. If that engagement slips one quarter, roughly $630,000 of expected receipts move right while about $660,000 of quarterly fixed costs stay exactly where they are. Nothing went wrong with the business. A date moved, and the cash position changed by more than half a million dollars.
A founder who has not measured their concentration is carrying that risk without having priced it. The fix is not necessarily diversification, which takes years. The fix is knowing the number, so the buffer, the payment terms and the pipeline decisions are made with the risk in view.
Project businesses routinely quote off feel and never reconcile the quote against the finished job. The pattern in the reconciliation is consistent. A $350,000 production quoted at a 45 per cent gross margin assumes around $193,000 of delivery cost. Then the actuals land: freelancers run $38,000 over the allocation, overtime adds $9,000, and two rounds of revisions the client never signed a variation for cost another $16,000. Real delivery cost is $256,000 and the real margin is 27 per cent, eighteen points below the quote.
Meanwhile the steadier, less glamorous work, the $180,000 ongoing client that nobody puts in the showreel, quotes at 38 per cent and lands at 36. The prestige work is thinner than the quiet work, and the founder has been chasing the wrong jobs. This is the single most common finding in a margin build for this cluster, and it changes pricing, crewing and which pitches get written.
The quiet stretch is where a lumpy business actually gets into trouble, not because revenue paused but because fixed costs did not. Run the same $4M company with $220,000 of monthly fixed costs: payroll, Darlinghurst rent, software, insurance. A two-month gap where receipts fall to $120,000 a month opens a $200,000 shortfall that the preceding good months needed to have already banked.
Collections make the gap wider than the calendar suggests. Xero's Small Business Insights data shows Australian small business invoices settling around six to seven days past their due date on average, so an invoice issued on 14-day terms is realistically a week-three receipt. In a project business, where a single invoice can be 15 or 20 per cent of the month, one late payer moves the whole cash position. A 13-week cashflow forecast [→ 13-week cashflow service page] exists to surface exactly this: the gap, its width, and the week it opens, early enough to do something about it.
Pull the three questions together and the picture sharpens. The company does $4M with 60 per cent held by three clients. Fixed costs run $220,000 a month. The largest engagement, $900,000, is slated to start in April with a $270,000 kickoff payment.
In March, the client pushes kickoff to July. The 13-week forecast, tied to the booked pipeline rather than last month's P&L, shows a trough opening in late May and bottoming out $340,000 below the comfort line in June. The founder now has ten weeks of notice instead of a bank balance surprise, and three levers with time to pull them: bring forward the mid-tier project sitting in the pipeline, agree a revised deposit with the slipping client to hold the slot, and defer the two hires pencilled for May.
At the same time, the margin-per-project build shows the prestige jobs running at 27 per cent against the 45 quoted, while the steady jobs hold 36. The founder reprices the next two prestige pitches with a proper variation clause, and stops treating the quiet client as filler. Neither decision was available while the numbers lived in feel.
For a Darlinghurst founder the natural deliverable is a 13-week cashflow forecast tied to the booked project pipeline, usually paired with a contribution margin per project view built from the last 12 to 18 months of jobs. Where the pressing question is different, the deliverable is different: a unit economics build [→ unit economics service page] where pricing is the problem, or a fundraise-ready model where a raise is inside a year. One named deliverable, agreed on day one.
The engagement is scoped, fixed and finite. We agree the deliverable that answers your most expensive question, build it across the ninety days on top of your existing actuals, and hand it over with a working session so you can run it yourself afterwards. On day 90 you own the model. Some founders move to a light periodic check-in, some run the year on the model alone, and some come back later for a separate build. All three are correct outcomes, and none of them happens by default. There is no auto-renewal and no open-ended retainer.
The commercial terms are fixed: $17,850 plus GST, paid in three instalments of $5,950, one named deliverable by day 90. Most Australian virtual CFO work is sold the other way, as an open-ended monthly retainer typically in the $3,000 to $8,000 per month band with no named deliverable and no end date. Project-based virtual CFO work is rare in this market. We think the reasons most firms avoid it, the scoping is harder and the founder gets to leave at day 90, are also the reasons it is the better product.
If you want the mechanics of the flagship deliverable before talking to anyone, the guide to building a 13-week cashflow forecast [→ related article: Building a 13-Week Cashflow Forecast] walks through the structure.
If you already have a bookkeeper, keep them. This work sits on the decision layer, on top of clean actuals; it does not replace reconciliation, payroll or compliance. If the ledger is not trustworthy, fix the ledger first, then build the forward view, because a forecast built on bad actuals is theatre. And if the business is under $2M revenue, the 90-Day Number is usually the wrong spend at this stage; the honest advice is to run a simple cash tracker and revisit once the project sizes justify the build.
Founders a suburb over face the same revenue shape with different textures: the agency cluster in Surry Hills, the studio and product businesses around Redfern [→ Redfern suburb page] and Alexandria [→ Alexandria suburb page], and the services firms in the CBD [→ CBD suburb page]. The deliverable that fits is the one that answers the question that is actually expensive right now.
I run a production company with big monthly swings. Can a virtual CFO help?
Yes, that swing is the exact problem the work addresses. A 13-week cashflow forecast tied to your booked pipeline shows the gaps between projects before they arrive, so fixed costs, hiring and drawings are planned around them rather than discovered inside them. It turns an unpredictable business into one you can see a quarter ahead.
How do I work out which projects actually make money?
By building contribution margin per project: the fee against the true delivery cost once freelancers, overtime and unbilled revisions are counted, reconciled across your last 12 to 18 months of jobs. Production businesses often find the prestige work runs eighteen points below quote while the steady work holds. Knowing this changes which work you chase and how you price it.
What is revenue concentration and why does it matter?
It is the share of revenue that depends on your top few clients or projects. When three relationships hold 60 per cent of the year, one slipped start date can move your cash position by six figures without anything going wrong. Measuring concentration lets you price that risk and hold the right buffer, instead of finding out the hard way.
Do you do our bookkeeping?
No. A virtual CFO works on the decision layer: cashflow, margin, concentration, built on top of your existing bookkeeping. Keep your bookkeeper running exactly as they are; this work turns their clean records into forward-looking decisions.
How is this different from the Surry Hills agency engagement?
The Surry Hills work centres on retainer utilisation and agency capacity economics. Darlinghurst founders more often run project-based production, creative and hospitality-adjacent businesses, where the work is revenue smoothing and margin per project rather than utilisation. Same brand, different problem, shaped by a different founder economy.
What does it cost?
The 90-Day Number is a fixed $17,850 plus GST for one named deliverable by day 90, paid in three instalments of $5,950. There is no retainer and no "from" pricing; the number is the number.
What happens after the ninety days?
You own the deliverable and can run it yourself; the final working session exists for exactly that. Some founders move to a light periodic check-in, some take the model and run the year alone, and some come back later for a separate deliverable. There is no default roll-on.
We are under $2M revenue. Is this for us?
Usually not yet. The 90-Day Number is built for founders in the $2M to $15M band, where project sizes and fixed costs are large enough that the forward view pays for itself. Under that, a disciplined cash tracker covers most of the need, and the engagement is worth revisiting once you cross the line.
Sydney Virtual CFO is a Sydney-based virtual CFO service for founders running $2M to $15M businesses across SaaS, ecommerce, professional services, construction, and other low-volume, high-value industries. We deliver fixed-scope CFO engagements with a named deliverable on day 90: a 13-week cashflow forecast, a fundraise-ready financial model, a unit economics build, or a board reporting pack you can run on your own.
Our front-door product, the 90-Day Number, is fixed scope at $17,850 plus GST. We are one of the few project-based virtual CFOs in Australia, in a market built almost entirely on monthly retainers. No retainers without a deliverable. No 80-page reports. No theatre.
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This content is general information only, written for Australian founders running businesses in the $2M to $15M revenue range. It does not constitute tax, financial product, investment, or legal advice and should not be relied on as such. The work referenced is led by a Chartered Accountant (CA ANZ), but Sydney Virtual CFO is not a licensed tax agent, not a licensed financial adviser, and not authorised to provide personal financial advice. Tax obligations, accounting treatments, fundraise terms, and statutory requirements depend on your individual circumstances. For advice specific to your business, contact the team directly or consult a registered tax agent, licensed financial adviser, or qualified lawyer. Information was current at the time of publication and may change without notice. We review and update guides periodically.
