Fractional CFO services are becoming a game-changer for growing businesses seeking financial clarity without hiring a full-time executive. In today’s volatile market, where price sensitivity and competition dominate every sector, precision in pricing is not just a strategic advantage it’s a necessity. For import-driven businesses, where multiple variables impact landed cost, pricing missteps can quickly erode profit margins and jeopardize sustainability.
Apex Vitals, a healthcare product import company, was experiencing this firsthand. While the company had successfully scaled its operations, it struggled with a fundamental financial roadblock: accurately determining the cost of imported products and setting optimal, break-even-oriented selling prices.
Here’s how Contetra helped them turn that challenge into a repeatable, strategic capability with tools that now drive their pricing and profitability decisions.
The Challenge: Pricing in the Dark
Apex Vitals was facing two major challenges:
- No Clear View of Landed Costs
Imported goods are subject to a web of cost factors shipping, freight, insurance, customs, forex fluctuation, port handling, warehousing, and local delivery. Despite having a solid procurement team, Apex Vitals lacked a unified framework to account for and track these costs comprehensively. The result? Guesswork.
Each SKU came with uncertainty. Quoting prices became a gamble, often leading to either underpricing (and margin erosion) or overpricing (and lost deals). - No Structured Pricing Strategy
While Apex had an energetic sales team, they lacked clarity on what constituted a profitable price. Without insights into gross margins, break-even points, or how incentive structures affected profitability, pricing decisions were disconnected from financial strategy.
The company knew it needed structure. What they needed was a solution that integrated finance, pricing, and performance all in one place.
Contetra’s Solution: Clarity through Templates
Contetra stepped in with a simple but powerful philosophy: financial clarity through structure and strategy. As part of our fractional CFO services, our focus was to build easy-to-use templates that would empower the Apex Vitals team not overwhelmed them with complexity.
- Cost Walkthrough Template: Know the Real Cost
We started by building a custom Excel-based walkthrough template to capture:
- Purchase price of goods
- International freight and insurance charges
- Customs duties, taxes, and import levies
- Forex adjustments (conversion rates, remittance charges)
- Domestic handling and delivery costs
Every line item was mapped from the vendor invoice to warehouse shelf, enabling the finance team to view a true landed cost per unit broken down by SKU.
What made the template effective was its automation:
- Preloaded formulas to avoid errors
- Dropdown selections to reduce manual input
- Built-in logic to flag inconsistencies
Outcome: With the full support of our fractional CFO service team, Apex Vitals no longer need to rely on back-of-the-envelope calculations. Costing became accurate, repeatable, and scalable.
- Selling Price & Incentive Strategy Template: Sell for Profit, Not Just Revenue
With costing under control, we turned to pricing. The goal was simple: ensure the sales team could quote prices that met break-even goals while rewarding performance.
The pricing template allowed the team to:
- Input expected gross margins
- Factor in incentives and commission payouts
- Determine the minimum selling price for break-even
- Simulate different pricing and profit scenarios
- Understand how incentive changes affect PAT (Profit After Tax)
Sales leaders could now adjust margins, create incentive slabs, and see instant impact on net profitability before finalizing prices.
Outcome: Sales and finance started working from the same playbook. Pricing became data-driven. Incentives aligned with performance.
Business Impact: Pricing Confidence, Profit Control
Deploying these tools created immediate wins across the organization:
✅ Accurate Product Costing
With cost templates in place, Apex eliminated pricing errors caused by hidden or missed cost elements. Budgeting and procurement planning improved.
✅ Strategic Pricing
No more “gut feel” pricing. Sales teams now quoted confidently, knowing where margins stood and what price protected profitability.
✅ Aligned Sales and Finance
Finance and sales often speak different languages. The templates created a shared understanding – breaking silos and improving collaboration.
✅ Data-Driven Decision-Making
With forecasting and simulation built in, the leadership team could plan strategically instead of reacting to surprises.
Why This Story Matters
Apex Vitals is not alone. Many businesses struggle with pricing not because of poor intentions, but because of poor systems. Without the right tools, pricing becomes reactive, margin leakage becomes common, and scaling turns into a risky game.
What Contetra’s CFO advisory services proved was that even a simple template built with the right logic and integrated into daily workflows can transform a company’s financial clarity and decision-making.
Strategic finance doesn’t always need a complex ERP or expensive tools. It needs structure, repeatability, and user-friendly design. That’s what we brought to Apex Vitals and it worked.
Final Thoughts: Pricing Is a Process, Not a One-Time Task
Most companies think of pricing as a one-off number. At Contetra, through our CFO advisory services, we help businesses understand pricing as a system one that connects cost, strategy, and execution.
If your business:
- Imports goods
- Has sales incentives tied to performance
- Operates in price-sensitive markets
- Wants to scale sustainably
Then it’s time to stop pricing reactively. Just like Apex Vitals, you can build clarity into your operations with tools that guide your decisions, protect your margins, and drive your growth.
Want to know more about how we do this? Let’s talk. Together, we’ll make your finance team a strategic engine not just a back-office function.
