Two years ago, the CFO retired. Ownership was already thinking about the long-term future of the business, which made replacing that seat a harder question than it appears. You do not add a permanent executive to the cost structure ahead of an ownership transition, and the CFO you hire today may not be the CFO the business needs on the other side of one. What ownership wanted was someone senior it could rely on for a year or for three, however long the runway turned out to be, who had been through an exit already and could get the financials ready for whatever came next.

We did not run a search. We called someone we had already placed. Ten years ago we put this consultant in a full-time CFO seat. She scaled that business tenfold and took it through an exit. When she became available to consult, she chose to partner with us, and she could commit for as long as the runway required. Then we built underneath her: a fractional operations team, part onshore and part offshore, to absorb the volume work. She opened at twenty to thirty hours a week, remote from day one.

The financials moved from cash to accrual. Seven years of general ledger history was rebuilt so the numbers reflected what had actually happened. Neither disrupted the day to day. Then the hours came down. As the systems and processes took hold, her commitment dropped from twenty to thirty hours a week to ten to fifteen. Two years in she is still in the seat, ownership has reporting it can act on, and the financials are ready for an outside party to work through well before anyone needs them to be.

“Hiring a full-time CFO did not make sense for where we were headed, and we did not want to rush that decision either. They brought us someone who had already built a company up and sold one, then put a team around her so we were not paying CFO rates for work that did not need it. She is on fewer hours now than when she started, which tells you it worked.”

Principal, Architecture and Design Firm