Milestone helps The Catholic Woodworker eliminate debt cycles and build financial confidence.

“The biggest value I’ve gotten out of this partnership is the forward-looking budgeting model — I didn’t have to figure that out on my own. Milestone did the heavy lifting and gave me the visibility to run the business the way it should be run.” Jonathan Conrad, The Catholic Woodworker – Founder & CEO

Situation

What began as a garage hobby in 2014 grew into a full U.S. manufacturing company, but The Catholic Woodworker’s financial operations struggled to keep pace. Founder Jonathan Conrad was spending too much time managing the books and not enough time leading the business strategically. Without a forward-looking financial model, the company found itself in a recurring cycle of seasonal borrowing it couldn’t seem to break.

Solution

The Catholic Woodworker partnered with Milestone in the fall of 2024 to take over its accounting function and bring expert financial leadership to the business. Milestone delivered clean, timely monthly financials and introduced a dynamic budgeting model built around the company’s seasonal cash flow realities. This gave Jonathan reliable historical reporting and, for the first time, a credible plan for what the business would look like months down the road.

Outcome

With Milestone managing its financial operations, The Catholic Woodworker is on track to make its final debt payment in August 2026 and break its annual borrowing cycle for the first time. Jonathan now receives accurate monthly financials by the 15th of every month, giving him the visibility to make informed decisions in real time. The partnership freed him to step fully into a strategic leadership role and focus on growing the business with confidence.

The Catholic Woodworker was born from a simple idea: combine a love of woodworking with a desire to share the Catholic faith. Jonathan Conrad started making wooden rosaries, crucifixes, and home altars in his garage in 2014, treating it as equal parts hobby and ministry. Over the next several years, rosaries emerged as the clear focus — the product with the highest demand and the greatest potential to scale. By the time the company made the deliberate decision in 2023 to put other product lines aside and concentrate entirely on rosary production, it had evolved from a one-man garage operation into a full U.S. manufacturing business.

With that growth came a financial education Jonathan hadn’t planned on. A close friend who served as CFO of his own company reviewed The Catholic Woodworker’s financials in 2021 and was candid: the books didn’t make sense. Inventory wasn’t on the balance sheet. Cost of goods sold wasn’t being handled correctly. “Your numbers don’t make any sense,” he told Jonathan. “The way that you’re doing it is wrong.”

Jonathan spent the next two to three years teaching himself proper manufacturing accounting. He got the historical financials right — and then brought in outside help to manage them so he could focus elsewhere. That’s when he engaged Milestone.

“What I thought I needed was just my time back,” Jonathan explains. “I was spending too much time every month trying to have clean financials. It was clear I needed to be in a strategic role, and I didn’t have the bandwidth for it.”

What Jonathan discovered through the partnership, though, was that reliable historical financials were just the starting point. The bigger opportunity — one he hadn’t fully appreciated before — was forward-looking financial planning. For a manufacturing business that buys inventory months before it sells, cash flow forecasting isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s essential.

That’s where Zach, Milestone’s fractional controller, made a decisive difference. Starting in fall 2025, Zach built a rigorous budget model and took personal ownership of the estimates-versus-actuals tracking process. Every month, he identified variances, made adjustments, and kept the plan focused on a single outcome: paying off the company’s remaining debt by August 2026 without taking on new borrowing.

“Every year we had the goal of getting out of debt, and then by summer, things didn’t go the way we thought, and we’d be right back in that same situation,” Jonathan recalls. “This is the first time I’m sitting here at the end of May thinking — the next two months are going to be tough, but we know what tough is going to look like.”

The company now receives clean, reliable financials by the 15th of every month — a standard Jonathan describes as critical. “If it takes you 45 to 65 days to close your books, you’re looking backwards three months,” he says. “You can’t run a business that way.” With monthly reports arriving on time, Jonathan can measure the health of the business continuously and make real-time decisions rather than reacting to stale data.

Jonathan also offers a candid perspective for other small business owners considering outsourced financial services: the value is real, but it requires participation. “Milestone isn’t going to get the value out for you if you don’t do any of the work,” he says. “If you value it, you cooperate, you show up, and you make sure they have what they need — it’s extremely efficient. If you don’t, it’s going to cost you a lot more money than it should.”

His broader message to founders: don’t wait until the financial problems become obvious. Most business owners enter their field as experts in their craft, not in finance. The symptoms — cash crunches, borrowing, unclear profitability — are often signs of a more fundamental problem: not having financial systems that allow you to measure and manage the business clearly.

“The businesses that accept the reality that clean financials are critical are going to find the value in working with a firm like Milestone,” Jonathan says. “And once you have that in place — once you can look forward, not just backward — it frees you up to do the things that only you can do as the owner.”

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