SESSION 1
Building Scalable Growth Through Strategic Fractional Partnership
Author
How Adapture Renewables Built Scalable Growth with Strategic Fractional Partnership
How do you keep operations ongoing… while doing a deep audit endeavor?
This was the critical question facing Ivan Kwan, VP of Corporate Finance at Adapture Renewables, as his company began to scale. It’s a classic high-growth dilemma: the core business is moving at top speed, but the finance team is stretched thin, facing strict deadlines and budgetary constraints.
In our recent “The Future is Fractional” virtual conference, Ivan sat down for a candid fireside chat with Diana Peralta from Scrubbed to share his playbook for solving this exact problem. He detailed how he moved from handling the company’s first audit by himself to building a scalable, resilient finance function through a strategic fractional partnership with Scrubbed.
If your business is struggling to balance growth and resources, here are the key highlights from his session.
How Adapture Renewables Built Scalable Growth with Strategic Fractional Partnership
This was the critical question facing Ivan Kwan, VP of Corporate Finance at Adapture Renewables, as his company began to scale. It’s a classic high-growth dilemma: the core business is moving at top speed, but the finance team is stretched thin, facing strict deadlines and budgetary constraints.
In our recent “The Future is Fractional” virtual conference, Ivan sat down for a candid fireside chat with Diana Peralta from Scrubbed to share his playbook for solving this exact problem. He detailed how he moved from handling the company’s first audit by himself to building a scalable, resilient finance function through a strategic fractional partnership with Scrubbed.
If your business is struggling to balance growth and resources, here are the key highlights from his session.
Building Trust with an Incremental Strategy
For leaders worried about a “loss of control,” Ivan detailed his deliberate, incremental strategy for engaging a fractional team. Instead of going all-in, Adapture Renewables started with hiring people from Scrubbed for foundational tasks like bookkeeping (AP/AR). This allowed them to build confidence in the process and establish approval workflows that maintained control.
This approach also opened the door to an unexpected benefit: the ability to “sample a buffet” of services. As Ivan explained, they could engage specialized expertise, like ESG reporting or technical tax, for a one-off engagement without having to hire a full-time, niche expert.
Integration is a Mindset, Not a Memo
The session’s most powerful insights centered on how to make a fractional partnership work. For Ivan, success came from a crucial mindset shift. Ivan warned against treating fractional teams like “a 1-800 number… a black box you call.”
The key, he said, was a crucial mindset shift:
I looked at the fractional staff as our staff, just housed elsewhere.
Ivan Kwan
Vice President of Corporate Finance and Treasure
This meant investing in integration through frequent communication and, most importantly, face-to-face time. Ivan admitted he didn’t visit the Scrubbed office until 2022, already four years into the partnership. When talking about his experience, he shared that “I would often tell that in that 10 days or so, I felt more connected with the team than in the prior four years combined”
Achieving Flawless Compliance and Tech Adoption
The move paid off. When asked about the measurable impact, Ivan pointed to two key outcomes:
Flawless compliance:
The session’s most powerful insights centered on how to make a fractional partnership work. For Ivan, success came from a crucial mindset shift. Ivan warned against treating fractional teams like “a 1-800 number… a black box you call.”
The key, he said, was a crucial mindset shift:
Tech adoption:
The fractional team, already adept with tools like Zoom, Slack, and Asana, helped speed up Adapture’s own tech adoption. When the pandemic hit, it “was not adopting something new or novel,” Ivan explained. “It was just scaling up what we already had, the ecosystem we already had with the Scrubbed team.”
Watch the Full Session
Ivan’s story is a masterclass in how to strategically leverage fractional talent to not only manage growth but also to build a more resilient and efficient operation.
To get all the insights, including Ivan’s advice on the single best role to start with and his hindsight on what he would do differently, you can watch the full session recording.
