Ask most financial advisors where their job ends, and they’ll give you a precise answer: a service list, a contract, a defined lane. Ask Jarome McKenzie, and he’ll tell you the question is the wrong one to be asking in the first place.
As founder and CEO of Arrowhead Strategy Group, a Kansas City-based strategic finance firm serving founder-led companies, McKenzie built his practice around a deliberate departure from how the advisory industry usually defines itself. A typical CPA files taxes and reports the numbers. A typical fractional CFO manages cash flow and closes the books. Both operate inside a defined scope, and both are trained to stay there. Jarome made a different call: instead of a fixed list of services, Arrowhead operates around a curated bench of CPAs, insurance brokers, attorneys, and lenders, and treats being the hub for a founder’s entire operational life as core to the job.
When “Not My Job” Isn’t an Option
In practice, that shows up in ways that have nothing to do with a balance sheet. Arrowhead clients have come to Jarome for help shopping for cheaper vehicle insurance, restructuring health coverage, vetting a hire, and untangling the financial architecture of an acquisition. Sometimes all within the same relationship. One recurring example his team points to: a client asking for help finding a golf training program for their kid, and Jarome treating the ask with the same seriousness as a tax question. Because turning a client away for something outside a defined scope would mean admitting the relationship was transactional in the first place, and Jarome has built Arrowhead on the premise that it isn’t.
“Most advisors have a service list,” Jarome has said of the distinction. “I have trust. The service follows from that, not the other way around.”
Diagnosing the Business Before Prescribing Anything
That same instinct shapes how Arrowhead approaches the technical work it’s actually hired to do. Jarome is explicit that he doesn’t believe in cookie-cutter advice. Every client gets diagnosed for what phase of the business they’re actually in before he recommends a single tactic. A growth-stage company burning cash for market share needs an entirely different financial strategy than one preparing for a sale, and Jarome treats conflating the two as a real failure mode, not a minor inefficiency. In one client scenario his team frequently cites, they told a founder flatly that tax mitigation wasn’t the priority yet, the business wasn’t cash-flow positive, and optimizing for tax savings before solving that would have been solving the wrong problem entirely.
It’s a small moment, but it captures the throughline: a lot of advisors are trained to answer the question they were asked. Jarome is more interested in whether it’s the right question.
Why Scope Discipline Isn’t Actually a Virtue
There’s a version of this story where “staying in your lane” reads as professionalism, a sign that a firm knows its limits and respects them. Jarome would push back on that framing. In an industry that’s historically conservative, where “this is how it’s always been done” functions as its own kind of institutional gravity, treating trust as the actual scope of the relationship is a deliberate departure, not an oversight. It means Arrowhead sometimes ends up doing work that looks nothing like traditional CFO services, and it means the firm has had to build infrastructure most advisory shops never touch, including its own AI-assisted transaction categorization system, because the tools that existed weren’t built with that same trust-first premise in mind.
For founders carrying the particular loneliness of running a company, where the person managing payroll is often also the person deciding whether to take an acquisition offer, hire a VP, or take their kid to a golf lesson before a client call, that distinction matters more than it sounds. A compliance-only advisor can keep a business’s books clean. Jarome bets that the founders who actually need help are asking a bigger question than that, and that a firm willing to answer it earns something a fixed service list never will.
“The businesses that work with us for years,” Jarome has noted, “usually didn’t start as clients. They started as people who called me about something that had nothing to do with accounting.”
To learn more about Jarome McKenzie’s approach to strategic finance for founder-led businesses, visit jaromemckenzie.com or explore Arrowhead Strategy Group at arrowheadstrategy.com. Founders can also hear more of his thinking on his podcast, No Trade Secrets, at notradesecrets.com.
