Travis Woods

I'm Travis. I help growing, owner-led companies make sharper financial decisions by starting with how the business actually runs. I came to this work the long way around: by way of a fraud indictment, a startup that didn't make it, and a stubborn conviction that the numbers are always downstream of operations. Here's the longer version.

My career began at a traditional investment advisory firm, where I assisted an advisor with plans to eventually take over his business. Nine months in, the firm's chairman, Allen Stanford, was indicted for a $7B fraud. Just after my 23rd birthday, I was escorted out of my first job with a PB&J sandwich and my résumé.

I went back to school for an MBA, and reconnected with my now-wife, which made the detour more than worth it. After graduating, I rejoined the advisor and picked up where we'd left off, earning my CFP® and CFA® along the way.

While working with him, I launched Collaborative Advice to serve people my age on a flat-fee basis. That experience made me question buying a business whose revenue relied entirely on investment-management fees from clients 30 years my senior, especially with private-equity buyers driving up prices. Around the same time, I heard Brent Beshore talk about buying small businesses, and the idea took hold.

I hired a broker to search for a business to acquire, but COVID stalled any deal. Instead, a conversation with Josh Pigford led to co-founding Maybe, where I ran point on finance, work that pulled me toward CFO problems and convinced me that's where I did my best work.

I founded LiftCFO to bring that same operational and financial thinking to founder-led businesses. I'd seen a real gap: growing companies rarely have access to comprehensive financial guidance built for their stage. My engagements blend strategic finance, systems thinking, and operational improvement because operations drive the financials, not the other way around. That means I spend as much time on operations, process, and the systems behind the financials as I do on the statements themselves.

Today, my primary focus is LiftCFO, where I help growing, owner-led companies make smarter, faster decisions across both finance and operations. I stay involved in a handful of select client relationships built around exactly that intersection, and I no longer take on new individual clients through Collaborative Advice.