About Dylan Bastian

Dylan is an alum of Amazon's Operations Finance Rotational Program, where he spent two years supporting multi-site operations.

Operations finance is not corporate accounting. It is unit economics. Cost per unit, cost per shipment, cost per labor hour, tracked weekly and defended in front of the general managers responsible for hitting them.

The work is unforgiving about a few things. Every cost has to be attributable to something specific. Forecasts get compared against what actually happened, every week, and somebody explains the variance. And a number nobody can act on is not worth producing.

That is the discipline Lucent CFO engagements run on today. Financials tied to operating drivers rather than to accounting categories. Forecasts that survive contact with reality. Reporting built to answer the question the owner actually asked.

On the advisory side, Dylan spent four years in sell-side M&A at a boutique investment bank, working transactions on businesses from $20 million to $230 million in revenue.

Most people picture deal work as negotiation. Most of it is not. It is taking a company's financials apart line by line and working out what is actually true.

Which earnings are real, and which exist only because the owner is working eighty hours a week. What the unit economics look like once the add-backs come out. Whether margin improved because the business got better or because the mix quietly changed. Where revenue is concentrated, and what happens if the largest customer leaves.

Buyers pay for the version of that story they believe. Most owners see that analysis for the first time when a buyer hands it to them, which is far too late to do anything about what it says.

Lucent CFO exists to run that same analysis for the owner instead, years earlier, while there is still time to change the answer.

Lucent CFO works with owner-operators doing $1 million to $20 million in revenue, in home services, medical and dental, and agriculture.

A roofing company's job costing problem, a dental group's overhead problem, and a farm's cash flow through a bad year are three different problems. General advice does not solve any of them well.