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Ryan Spalding
Ryan is a growth-focused finance executive, pressure-tested inside companies scaling faster than their infrastructure could carry. Start-up, family office, founder-led, private equity-backed, publicly traded — in each one he was the person who had to get it ready for the next wave. A fixer, a doer, a leader.
Twenty years in, the lesson repeats: the finance function has to fit the owner, not the textbook. Ryan is an operational CFO — hands-on in the business and strategic about where it is going. He has built accounting teams and FP&A functions from nothing, raised capital, and recapitalized debt. Most of all, he has been the financial business partner a CEO or founder can think out loud with.
Based in Dallas, Ryan has worked in public, private equity-backed, family-office and founder-led businesses ranging from under $100 million to $45 billion in revenue. His experience spans manufacturing, distribution, and consumer products, with a focus on industries including telecommunications and wireless, consumer electronics, retail and e-commerce, food and beverage, scientific instrumentation, and biotechnology. He is direct and hands-on, and comfortable saying what the numbers actually mean rather than what the room hopes they mean.
Most of what an owner, founder, or CEO brings him turns out not to be a finance problem. The cash crunch is a timing problem. The margin slide is a mix problem. The write-off that will not go away is a system setting. Ryan’s first job is finding what is actually wrong, because the wrong diagnosis buys an expensive fix that does not work. His second is building what keeps it from coming back: a month-end close taken from twenty days to five, a forecast review in front of leadership by workday seven, risks and opportunities tracked weekly, and customer- and SKU-level profit and loss statements that show which revenue is worth having and which is quietly subsidized.
The track record behind that is specific. He has scaled a private equity-backed manufacturer from $95 million to more than $300 million in revenue while lifting EBITDA margins from 23% to 32%, a fivefold increase in enterprise value. He has closed and integrated two acquisitions, both accretive in their first year, and beaten synergy targets by $10 million. He has led a first institutional debt syndication, owned a $40 billion revenue plan, and lifted gross margins from 35% to 43% across ten manufacturing plants while turning around a division coming off years of decline. When a business went to market, he wrote the confidential information memorandum in-house and built the data room himself.
He has run finance on SAP, Oracle, Odoo, home-grown systems, and, when that was all a company had, Excel and Google Sheets — and he knows which problems an ERP solves and which ones it only relocates.
Ryan’s areas of expertise include:
- Working with founders and new owners to grow the business to the next level
- Interim, fractional, and first-time CFO leadership
- Standing up accounting, FP&A, and reporting functions
- Cash flow forecasting and working capital management
- Month-end close acceleration and financial reporting
- Customer-level and SKU-level profitability
- Budgeting, forecasting, and long-range planning
- Lender, board, and private equity sponsor reporting
- Mergers, acquisitions, integration, and exit readiness
- ERP selection, implementation, and remediation
Ryan earned his MBA from the Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University and his BS in Accounting and Management from California State University. He is based in the Dallas, Texas area.
Outside of work, Ryan is a passionate dog lover and an advocate for animals generally, supporting several organizations working in animal rescue and welfare. He has a six-year-old Akita, his second. He also enjoys time with family and the classic science fiction and horror films of the 1930s — an era when the effects had to work in camera and the take had to be right on the day.