The Finance and Business Lawyer
Kimberly DeCarrera
Do you want to learn how to start and grow a successful business? Kimberly will teach you all the lessons she’s learned from decades of working with businesses from startups to Fortune 10.
A Passion for Growth
Kimberly started her online journey in the early days of the commercial internet. Back in the days of blinking Geocities pages, Kimberly built a site that started making money with the books only version of Amazon!
But she had dreams of being a lawyer – so college and law school later, she began advising companies. From corporate formation to selling and retirement, Kimberly advised companies from small mom-and-pop corner stores to large multi-national mega corporations.
Her work has led her from county councils to the board room. But her passion is still the new business owner. Establishing and then growing a company is fun! And why do it for only one company as an in-house lawyer when she can help hundreds of companies grow with Springboard Legal!
Helping to Grow Your Company
Founders are typically really good at the core function of their business. They can deliver on the product or the service that their company produces. But founders are typically bad business people.
It’s not that Founders are horrible business people. They have just never been taught the knowledge or the skills that it takes to run a successfully growing company.
That’s where Kimberly comes in – to help Founders learn how to start, manage, and grow their business. It’s not enough to have a great idea, you need the knowledge and the tools to operate a well-oiled machine.
Here at Springboard Legal, you can learn the lessons from decades of advising companies of all sizes and develop the skill set that you need to grow. This will give you exactly what you need to succeed in your new business venture.
A Multi-Talented Renaissance Woman
You cannot pigeon-hole Kimberly DeCarrera into just one little box. She’s had a varied career, as a law firm owner, a consultant, in-house CFO/CLO, and a fractional executive. She blends her experiences to provide solutions for the next generation of business!
The intersection of law and accounting provides a unique balance between corporate legal and accounting departments to find solutions that might not otherwise be available to practitioners of only one discipline.
Kimberly is unique as a lawyer in that she is a business person first and will use her expertise in these different areas to develop the best path forward, in a legal and financially secure method. She can serve both as an functional expert in these areas while also serving as your business coach to help you grow your company. She will help your company grow smart and strategically.
Legal Expertise
Let’s talk corporate structure and tax strategies. Where and how should your company be setup? Should you add subsidiaries or separate business units? Corporate governance is important, no matter the stage of your company.
Kimberly can draft and negotiate contracts on your behalf, from customer contracts to leases to vendor contracts to employment agreements. Need standardized form contracts for your sales teams to use? Kimberly can draft them for you! Need to review supplier agreements for terms that you cannot live with? Kimberly is here to protect you.
She has also worked with companies to reevaluate staffing, policies, and yes, even complaints. She has appeared before the Departments of Labor, Revenue, EEOC, and others representing clients regarding their employment practices. She can write or edit your HR policies and handbooks.
A true Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel.
Financial Expertise
The first big question for startups and entrepreneurs, and then every year thereafter, is how to finance the business. Can you bootstrap your way to profitability or do you need additional funds? Should those funds come from debt/financing or venture capital? How do you pick the best deal for YOU and your company? Kimberly can help evaluate and negotiate with the different financing partners to make sure that the deal is good for you.
We can also work through tax strategies, looking for credits and tax abatements to help your company succeed.
Kimberly has also worked with companies to help streamline their daily financial operations, improve their accounts payable and receivable functions, and comply with various record retention requirements. She has assisted corporations through the enterprise system transitions, including selecting and developing vendors (or creating your own!) and preserving information from historical systems that may be needed in the future during their retirement phase.
Kimberly DeCarrera is also experienced in preparing businesses for mergers and acquisitions, both from a due diligence perspective of the acquiring company and preparing the target company for acquisition.
A true Chief Financial Officer.
Law Firm Expertise
Kimberly started her first law firm straight out of law school, when she was learning to practice law and learning about The Business of Law (Firms) at the same time.
She leveraged those lessons into a hybrid role as a business attorney and a law firm administrator in a regional multi-state insurance defense firm. While there, she established the electronic billing system, setup benefits packages, managed payroll, and started a marketing plan to expand the firm.
After stints as an unclaimed property consultant and in-house CFO/CLO, Kimberly returned to her roots helping law firms. She established a Fractional CFO program with a national law firm marketing agency. And now she is providing her services directly to law firms!
A true law firm expert.
Operations Experience
Does your company have solid policies and procedures? Do you know what your KPIs are? How to enforce those KPIs? Is your technology working for or against your goals?
Kimberly can help your company scale by implementing the best practices for sales and operations so that your company can strategically set goals and grow. Let’s dive into every aspect of your company to find and emphasize the strengths. And work to fix the weaknesses, whether that is through staffing, technology, or processes.
A true Chief Operations Officer.
Supply Chain Expertise
The experience does not come from just advising companies from the outside. Kimberly previously served as the Chief Financial and Legal Officer of a hyper-growth third-party logistics firm, growing headcount and revenue simultaneously during a supply chain crisis.
She was invited by the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF) to speak at their annual DEI conference – Driving Diversity & Leadership Conference to talk about current supply chain and labor issues.
Kimberly was also named as a Supply Chain Pro to Know in 2022, after leading the 3PL firm through hyper-growth including adding three new offices.
Unclaimed Property Expertise
Kimberly represents corporate holders in unclaimed property in multi-state audits, voluntary disclosure programs, and annual compliance programs.
She specializes in finding unique ways to handle past due property, through voluntary disclosure programs as well as special corporate programs to specifically target past due property. She has also represented clients through the herculean effort of obtaining waivers of interest for late reporting property from California, among other jurisdictions.
She represented holder interests as an official observer to the Uniform Law Commission’s efforts that culminated in the 2016 Revised Uniform Unclaimed Property Act.
Recognized as an expert in unclaimed property, Kimberly has been featured in Forbes, Tax Analysts, CBS Atlanta News, and Peachtree TV.
- Forbes: Getting to Know You Tuesday: Kimberly DeCarrera
- CBS Atlanta News: Georgia Does Little to Connect People with Unclaimed Property
- FinOps Report: JP Morgan Whistleblower Case Tests Unclaimed Property Compliance
She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and in-house corporate training on unclaimed property.
The Proof is in the Pudding
Kimberly is a practicing attorney, licensed in Georgia. And this isn’t her first rodeo. She’s been advising companies for years.
She started in her own firm, advising companies, including a local liquor store, a real estate joint venture, a construction company, and more. Then she went on to become the law firm administrator (think: Chief Financial Officer or a Chief Administrative Officer) for a multi-state insurance defense firm.
But running a law firm that catered to insurance companies wasn’t really doing it for Kimberly. So she went on to a financial consulting firm, working with major corporations – many of which you would know their names. In industries such as software and technology, manufacturing, transportation and logistics, banking, and health care. She saw the best and the worst of corporate America. Most importantly, she was tasked with fixing many of the issues in the financial and legal workings of these companies.
Then she went in-house, with a high growth logistics company. She was in the middle of the supply chain crisis, working to fix her corner of that massive problem throughout the pandemic. She helped to scale that company by 2x in revenue and 3x in head count.
Recently, she also served as Fractional CFO to a variety of law firms that were growing 2-10 times a year. She worked with these firms to design growth forecasts, capacity and compensation plans, and manage cash flow while growing.
She now brings all of her experience, working with these companies to you.
From bankruptcy recommendations to $100 million annual revenue
A business owner came to Kimberly asking for some help when his Chief Financial Officer resigned at the same as giving his recommendation that he file for bankruptcy. A lot of hard work and more than a little luck, that company became one of the Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Companies with over $100 million in annual revenue.
Closing an audit for $0 Liability
There’s nothing quite like getting an audit notice. But with Kimberly’s previous work with the company, they were able to defend their policies and procedures as well as the results to close a multi-state audit for zero dollars in liability! Talk about a major win!
Financing Negotiation for the Win!
In order for companies to grow, they are going to need financing! That’s where Kimberly has helped companies, with banking and venture capital relationships and negotiating deals for companies. From negotiating larger lines of credit and covenant compliance to vetting and negotiating with venture capitalists and private equity investors, there is a lot to negotiate for financing your company’s growth.
Ethics Matter in Business
A client and friend was accused of a conflict of interest with his volunteer board service and government service. We prepared a well reasoned and researched response and presented arguments at a hearing. The county’s Board of Ethics cleared the client of any wrong doing, proving that ethics are a nonpartisan issue that helps businesses and governments prosper.
These are representative of outcomes that have been achieved for past clients. It’s important to remember that past performance does not guarantee future success.