Opus placed a senior FP&A analyst with a PE-backed business-services platform reporting $95 million in revenue and six business units. By month six, CFO board-pack preparation fell from 16 hours to four. The seven anonymized cases below document finance, RevOps, growth marketing, engineering and implementation assignments, with each hire's responsibilities and measured results.
These anonymized Opus customer case studies describe the work each hire owned, the responsibilities the client retained, and the measured results for that engagement. Each case includes its assessment and measurement period.
RevOps for a Series B software company
Weekly forecast preparation fell from five hours to 45 minutes
The software company
A Series B B2B software company with $32 million in annual recurring revenue, 18 account executives, and three sales managers. Salesforce was the sales system; marketing worked in HubSpot.
The forecasting problem
The company had enough pipeline on paper, but the CRO could not explain which deals would actually close. Managers used different definitions of "commit." Reps repeatedly pushed close dates without recording what had changed. Demo requests occasionally landed with the wrong owner or no owner at all.
Before every executive meeting, the CRO spent five hours reconciling Salesforce with managers' spreadsheets. The company needed someone to own the forecast process and resolve the problems behind the numbers.
The RevOps hire
A senior RevOps manager with eight years of experience supporting U.S. software businesses. During the hiring assessment, they reviewed a sample pipeline and challenged three "committed" deals because none had a confirmed buying process. They explained how the missing buying process affected the forecast and what evidence the CRO needed.
RevOps responsibilities
During the first month, they traced inbound leads from form submission through assignment, established stage-entry requirements with sales leadership, and rebuilt the forecast around customer evidence.
They introduced a weekly exception report showing deals with repeated date changes, missing next steps, or no recent customer activity. They also ran the forecast meeting. Sales managers still owned deal judgment and rep coaching; the RevOps hire owned data quality, process, and follow-through.
Results after two quarters
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Forecast error, measured 30 days before quarter-end | 23% | 7% |
| Demo requests assigned within five minutes | 61% | 98% |
| Late-stage opportunities without a documented next step | 37% | 8% |
| CRO's weekly forecast preparation | 5 hours | 45 minutes |
What changed for the CRO
The CRO could explain which deals had evidence behind them, which were slipping, and why. The RevOps manager brought exceptions to the forecast meeting and followed through on them. Sales managers could spend that meeting discussing how to win deals with a shared view of the pipeline.
Senior accounting for a four-entity services group
A reviewed monthly close by business day six
The services group
A $76 million B2B services group with four legal entities, an existing controller, and a small accounts payable and receivable team. The business used NetSuite.
Close and reconciliation problems
Month-end close routinely stretched to the fourteenth business day. Intercompany balances did not match. Prepaid expenses were maintained inconsistently. Vendor invoices arriving after month-end triggered repeated corrections.
The Head of Finance was supposed to be reviewing performance and supporting leadership. Instead, they spent evenings tracing balances and rebuilding schedules.
The senior accountant
A senior accountant with seven years of multi-entity accounting experience, including work with U.S. finance teams. In a practical assessment, they caught an omitted accrual and an intercompany mismatch, explained the appropriate treatment, and identified what required controller approval.
Accounting responsibilities
The accountant took responsibility for assigned general-ledger accounts, balance-sheet reconciliations, prepaid and accrual schedules, and intercompany reconciliation.
In the first close, they documented each account's supporting evidence, preparer, reviewer, and deadline. By the second, they had established a pre-close checklist with AP and payroll. By the third, they were sending the controller an exceptions summary instead of a folder full of unexplained spreadsheets.
The controller retained accounting-policy decisions and final review. The accountant prepared the supporting schedules and surfaced exceptions for that review.
Results after three monthly closes
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Completed, reviewed monthly close | Business day 14 | Business day 6 |
| Unresolved reconciliation items older than 60 days | 42 | 4 |
| Post-close correcting journal entries per month | 17 | 3 |
| Head of Finance's monthly reconciliation rework | 18 hours | 4 hours |
What changed for the Head of Finance
The Head of Finance received accounts ready for review, with support for every material balance and open issues surfaced early. The senior accountant investigated discrepancies and resolved them within the controller's review process. Monthly reconciliation rework fell to four hours.
Growth marketing for a consumer-products brand
Google spend increased 60% as program acquisition cost fell to $96
The consumer brand
A $58 million consumer-products brand with an established e-commerce business, an internal designer and video editor, and a marketing coordinator. Google Ads and creator partnerships were already funded, but neither had a clear owner connecting spend, creative, and customer acquisition.
Acquisition and creator-program problems
Google Ads looked healthy in platform reports, but much of the apparent success came from branded searches and returning customers.
Meanwhile, influencer partnerships produced inconsistent assets: attractive videos with weak hooks, missing product demonstrations, or no clear plan for paid usage. The Marketing Director was personally briefing creators, reviewing campaigns, and deciding what to test.
The growth marketer
A senior growth marketer with hands-on experience in Google Ads and creator programs focused on customer acquisition. Their assessment required them to distinguish profitable customer acquisition from impressive-looking platform attribution and turn one product into five specific creative hypotheses.
Growth-marketing responsibilities
They separated branded and nonbranded performance, reconciled campaign reporting with first-time customer orders, and established one acquisition-cost definition.
For creator content, they built a monthly testing plan around specific customer objections: why the product cost more, how it compared with the common alternative, and whether it worked in a real customer setting. Each brief specified the opening hook, demonstration, proof, and call to action.
They owned creator selection, briefs, campaign testing, landing-page recommendations, and budget allocation. The existing designer, editor, and coordinator supported execution. Video production and website execution remained team responsibilities.
Monthly results by month six
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Google media spend | $100,000 | $160,000 |
| Total program spend, including creators and production | $120,000 | $192,000 |
| Attributed first-time customers | 1,000 | 2,000 |
| Program acquisition cost per first-time customer | $120 | $96 |
| New creator-video ad variants ready to test | 4 | 20 |
Orders were deduplicated across creator and paid-search touchpoints, using the same attribution window and customer definition. Average order value and first-order contribution margin were monitored alongside acquisition cost.
What changed for the Marketing Director
The Marketing Director had a first-time customer acquisition measure that separated branded and nonbranded search performance. Weekly reporting connected the creative tests to acquisition results and the next budget decision. The team had 20 new creator-video ad variants ready to test each month, up from four.
AI automation for an industrial distributor
Purchase-order automation freed approximately 533 hours a month
The distributor and its order workflow
A $110 million industrial distributor with a ten-person engineering team, an existing ERP, and an order-processing team manually entering customer purchase orders received through email and PDFs.
Order-processing problems
The company had several AI demos but no dependable production workflow. Operations still copied customer details, product codes, quantities, and delivery instructions into the ERP.
The CTO needed someone who could own the application, integration, review interface, and operational failure cases without pulling the core product team off its roadmap.
The automation developer
A senior full stack developer with seven years of production software experience and hands-on experience with document-processing automations. In the assessment, they addressed duplicate submissions, incorrect model outputs, permissions, and recovery from failed ERP writes before discussing the interface.
Automation responsibilities
The developer focused on one bounded workflow: standard purchase orders from approved customers.
They built a review application showing the original document beside extracted fields and proposed product matches. The model extracted information; approved ERP records supplied customer-specific pricing and product data. Staff reviewed and approved orders before submission.
They added duplicate detection, validation, retry handling, audit logs, and a manual fallback. Unusual orders were routed to the existing process rather than forced through automation. The client's platform engineer reviewed deployment and security.
Results after 120 days
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Eligible orders processed monthly | 4,000 | 4,000 |
| Average human handling time per order | 12 minutes | 4 minutes |
| Orders requiring correction or rework | 8% | 2% |
| Monthly human handling time | 800 hours | 267 hours |
At the same order volume, the reduction freed approximately 533 hours of monthly handling capacity. This measures available capacity and does not establish an equivalent reduction in headcount.
What changed for the CTO
Operations used the system every day, with exceptions visible and a manual route for unusual orders. The developer remained responsible for monitoring, maintenance, and the next approved workflow. The client's platform engineer retained deployment and security review.
FP&A for a $95 million PE-backed business
Explaining a margin miss and tracking the account changes that followed
The PE-backed platform
A PE-backed business-services platform with $95 million in revenue, six business units, and a finance team strong in accounting but thin in financial planning and analysis.
Forecast and margin-analysis problems
The books were accurate, but the business struggled to explain why earnings missed plan despite revenue growth.
Each business-unit leader maintained a different forecast. Customer profitability was buried in separate billing and labor reports. The CFO spent most of the board-preparation cycle assembling information instead of evaluating decisions.
The senior accountant's remit is to establish what happened in the accounts. This FP&A role focused on explaining earnings performance and evaluating management's options.
The FP&A hire
A senior FP&A analyst with experience in multi-unit businesses and executive reporting. Their assessment required them to turn inconsistent operating data into an earnings bridge and present three recommendations, including the assumptions that could make those recommendations wrong.
FP&A responsibilities
They built a common forecast using revenue, delivery staffing, utilization, pricing, and customer-level contribution.
Their first material finding was that several apparently attractive accounts required substantial work outside the original scope. They separated pricing problems from delivery-efficiency problems and presented specific actions to the CFO and business-unit leaders.
Management approved contract and delivery changes. The analyst tracked whether those actions actually improved contribution after implementation.
Results by month six
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly reforecast turnaround | 6 business days | 2 business days |
| CFO's board-pack preparation | 16 hours | 4 hours |
| One-month-ahead EBITDA forecast error | 19% | 7% |
| Monthly contribution improvement from approved account actions | Not tracked | $35,000 |
The contribution improvement was measured after associated delivery costs and normalized for comparable volume. It resulted from management's commercial and operating decisions, informed and tracked by the analyst.
What changed for the CFO
The CFO had an explanation of the earnings miss and quantified options to discuss with business-unit leaders. The analyst could join conversations with the CEO or sponsor, explain the assumptions, and track the actions management approved. Board-pack preparation fell from 16 hours to four.
Implementation management for a software company
Median time to the first live workflow fell from 56 to 32 days
The software implementation team
A vertical software company with $48 million in annual recurring revenue. Typical customers required data migration, integration configuration, administrator training, and an agreed operational workflow before going live.
Implementation delays
Sales was closing business faster than the implementation team could launch it. Projects stalled because customer responsibilities were unclear, data arrived in the wrong format, and technical dependencies surfaced late.
The VP of Customer Success spent hours each week joining escalation calls. Customers heard "we are waiting on engineering," but nobody could clearly explain who needed to do what next.
The implementation manager
A senior implementation manager experienced in customer-facing software launches. During the assessment, they ran a mock kickoff with an impatient executive sponsor and a technical stakeholder, clarified scope, and established responsibilities without becoming defensive or overpromising.
Implementation responsibilities
They managed a defined portfolio of implementations, working with the client's existing solutions engineers and customer-success managers.
For each project, they established data requirements, customer and internal owners, acceptance criteria, dates, and an escalation path. They introduced a readiness check before technical work began, so engineers were not discovering missing inputs halfway through a launch.
They led customer calls, maintained the project plan, and pushed unresolved decisions to the appropriate owner. An account counted as live only when the agreed workflow was operating and the customer had accepted it.
Results across comparable implementations in the first six months
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Median kickoff-to-first-live-workflow time | 56 days | 32 days |
| Implementation milestones completed on time | 59% | 89% |
| VP's weekly time spent on implementation escalations | 7 hours | 2 hours |
Six previously delayed customers with $504,000 in contracted annual recurring revenue also reached their agreed live milestone. This was existing contracted business activated. The figure does not measure new revenue sold by the hire.
What changed for the VP of Customer Success
Customers had one manager driving the launch and making the next action clear. Engineers received complete requirements, and the implementation manager handled customer calls and project follow-through. The VP's weekly escalation time fell from seven hours to two.
Analytics engineering across five warehouses
Consistent operating reports across five warehouses
The warehouse network
A $140 million specialty distributor operating five warehouses after several acquisitions. Order and fulfillment data lived across two ERPs and a warehouse-management system, with existing data feeds available.
Conflicting warehouse reports
Each location reported performance differently. One measured an order as shipped when a label was printed; another used actual carrier pickup. Internal transfers occasionally appeared in customer-order totals.
The COO received a weekly report that took 18 combined team hours to assemble and still required a meeting to reconcile competing numbers. Expedited freight costs were rising, but the company could not reliably connect them to inventory placement or warehouse practices.
The analytics engineer
A senior analytics engineer with strong SQL, data-modeling, and business-intelligence experience. Their assessment required them to reconcile two conflicting operating reports and explain which business definitions needed agreement before building a dashboard.
Analytics responsibilities
They worked with operations and finance to define on-time shipment, order backlog, inventory availability, and expedited freight consistently.
They built tested data models and an exception report identifying overdue orders, inventory mismatches, and high-cost fulfillment patterns. They reconstructed the historical baseline using the same definitions so apparent improvement could not come merely from changing the calculation.
The analysis showed that two locations were repeatedly expediting orders for products available elsewhere in the network. Operations changed inventory allocation and carrier cutoffs; the analytics hire measured the effect.
Results after five months
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly team time assembling the operating report | 18 hours | 2 hours |
| Reporting freshness | Up to 5 business days behind | Refreshed overnight |
| On-time shipment, using a consistent definition | 89% | 95% |
| Expedited freight cost per 1,000 orders | $4,200 | $2,900 |
The fulfillment and freight improvements followed operating changes made by warehouse leadership. The analytics engineer supplied the analysis and measured the effect of those decisions.
What changed for the COO
By Monday morning, the COO could identify the location with a problem, understand the cause, and assign the next action. Operations and finance worked from the same definitions, with reports refreshed overnight. The team spent two hours a week assembling the operating report, down from 18.
Discuss your next senior hire
Bring the role, existing team, first assignment and decision-maker to a scoping call with Opus. We can use that brief to define the responsibilities and candidate evidence your search needs.
Source: anonymized customer engagement summaries supplied by Opus.
