About Us.
The marketplace is increasingly complex, with businesses facing rapid changes, competitive pressures, and critical strategic decisions. Growth-stage companies need guidance to navigate these challenges, understand their true value, and make informed decisions for growth and success.
What We Do
We help growth-stage businesses that have outgrown basic bookkeeping access the financial information they need to scale with confidence. That means identifying value drivers, exposing what truly propels profit and cash flow, and turning raw numbers into strategic insight so business leaders can make better decisions and maximise enterprise value.
Who We Work With
Sentinel Capital Advisors works with growth-stage and operationally complex businesses that need CFO-level capability before they are ready for a full-time CFO.
We are most useful where a business is:
- raising capital
- evaluating an acquisition
- integrating an acquisition
- managing working capital or funding pressure
- moving from R&D to product commercialisation
- making major strategic, project, or expansion decisions
How We Do It
We provide strategic financial leadership focused on the decisions that materially affect cash, value, risk, and growth.
Our work typically includes:
- cash flow management, budgeting, forecasting, and financial modelling
- board reporting and decision support
- capital raising and investor support
- project and business feasibility analysis
- acquisition due diligence and integration planning
- valuation, M&A transaction support, and strategic options analysis
- financial leadership for capital-intensive, multi-site, and operationally messy businesses
Engagements are delivered primarily remotely for efficiency, with structured weekly and monthly client contact that fits your leadership rhythm.
Why It Matters
Businesses don’t fail because they lack ambition. They struggle because growth, complexity, and major decisions outpace the quality of their financial management.
That is where Sentinel adds value.
We bring a combination of hands-on CFO experience, transaction literacy, due diligence and valuation capability, and financial leadership. That helps boards, founders, and executives see the underlying economic reality of the business more clearly, make better decisions earlier, and reduce the cost of getting major financial decisions wrong.
What Makes Us Different
Our approach is built on real operating experience, not theory. Managing Director Doug Swanborough has:
- Served as CFO for two early-stage technology companies, implementing the same value-focused disciplines we now deploy for clients
- Led turnaround and restructuring projects as CFO of companies under acute cash and performance pressure (manufacturing, mining services & retail)
- Investigated complex financial matters as a Queensland Police Fraud Squad detective, bringing forensic discipline and scepticism to every analysis
This combination – hands-on CFO experience, turnaround discipline, and forensic investigation – means you get advice that is strategic, implementable, and grounded in how value is actually created, measured, enhanced, and realised in real companies.