Finance leadership, built by an operator.

Tall Tree Associates helps growing companies professionalize their finance function — connecting operations, strategy, and capital along the way.

Institutional discipline combined with owner-operator perspective

Years leading teams and executing transactions at blue-chip institutions set the baseline for how engagements are run — paired with the firsthand perspective of operating a family business. The result is financial strategy grounded in operational reality, not theory.

How we help

We bring outside financial leadership into a growing company, each scoped to what the business actually needs to achieve its goals.

Fractional CFO

Join the executive team to oversee the finance function — bookkeeping, controller, and FP&A — and build the systems a company will leverage as it continues to grow.

More on this service

Capital Strategy Advisory

Refine the pitch, build the model, and prepare venture and growth-stage companies for the next phase of capital formation.

More on this service

Let's talk about where your finance function needs to go next.

Start a conversation

Fractional CFO

Joins the executive team to oversee the finance function — bookkeeping, controller, and FP&A — building lasting systems and protocols while the company grows into the need for a full-time CFO.

The work is set by the CEO's actual goal, whether that's growing the business, maintaining market share, moving toward profitability, or simply freeing CEO mindshare from the finance function.

  • Oversight of bookkeeping, controller, and FP&A functions
  • Financial systems and protocols built to scale with the business
  • Direct partnership with the CEO on strategic priorities

Capital Strategy Advisory

Advises companies preparing to raise on refining the pitch, building the model, populating the data room, and understanding capital needs and timing ahead of investor dialogue.

Works with the executive team to weigh the tradeoffs between dilutive and non-dilutive capital, looking beyond the current round toward building a holistic, long-term strategy.

  • Pitch, model, and data room preparation
  • Capital needs and timing analysis
  • Dilutive vs. non-dilutive capital tradeoffs

Not sure which fits? Let's start with a conversation about your business.

Contact Tall Tree Associates

Adam has built a career out of leaning into hard problems on unfamiliar ground. As a Marine intelligence officer leading a team in Afghanistan, the job was to assess a high-stakes, fast-moving situation from nebulous information — asking the right questions, fusing scattered intelligence into a clear picture, then building the team and process to act on it.

That same instinct carried onto Wall Street, where structuring and negotiating transactions at Barclays and BlackRock demanded the same attention to detail and comfort operating without a clear picture — reading a deal, a market, or a management team correctly, then assembling the high-impact teams needed to get it done.

Most recently, that meant becoming an operator himself — buying an established business and professionalizing its finance function from the inside, trading the advisor's chair for the owner's.

At Tall Tree Associates, we bring that combination — owner-operator perspective and institutional-grade discipline — to help our partners and clients meet their next objective.

Now
Founder
Tall Tree Associates
Owner & Head of Finance
Southern Sign Company
Previously
Director, Investment Banking
Barclays
Vice President, Corporate Development
BlackRock
Captain, Intelligence Officer
U.S. Marine Corps
Education
MBA, Finance & Strategy
NYU Stern School of Business
BA, Economics
Hamilton College

Direct

Based in
Wilmington, NC
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