How a $600 Million Telescopic Tractor Company Raised a $60 Million Line of Credit in Three Months

Due to the scope of the problem, our MetaExpert worked with the company full-time for three months. In fact, they asked him to stay on as Vice President of Operations until the sale was finalized, which lasted another year and a half.

As interim CFO, he had to come in and assist their executive team and their board of directors, who were venture capitalists and thus didn't always have the same goal as the bankers. They already had all of the expertise they needed, but they needed somebody to bring it together and also deal with Wall Street. This was a publicly-traded company, so there were a lot of outside actors. It required people skills and the ability to bring disparate stakeholders together. It also required a strong focus on earnings per share, because that was how it was made to look good.

MetaExpert brought important skills to this project. The required skills as interim CFO were:

• The ability to hit the ground running and quickly learn what was required.
• Strong people skills to handle the disparate stakeholders and negotiate between different entities. He had to connect to people where they were and understand their concerns.
• The ability to be, first and foremost, a good accountant.
• Exposure to a variety of corporate boards, understanding how they worked. He had to spend time with the boards of different subsidiaries, which each had their own culture and purpose.
• Experience raising money.
• Experience working with bankers and attorneys.
• Skills at making presentations. He had to continually show target goals, what the current price per share was, and how close they were to getting the line of credit. He also had to work on projections of cash flow and capital purchases. He did this on a whiteboard in the corner of his office.

In fact, MetaExpert did such a good job he was never called to task by the venture capitalists, which is quite an achievement. It says that he was very prepared and used fact-based, believable presentations to make the case for what needed to happen.

Contract Length

The initial contract length was three months, but David was offered a permanent position of VP of Operations in one of the divisions. He stayed on until the sale was completely finalized.