A practical guide for founders, boards and finance leaders working out whether they need CFO-level support, what the alternatives are, and what each one costs.
You can usually tell from a board meeting.
The pack lands the night before. Forty minutes go on reconciling two versions of the same number. Someone asks what cash looks like in March and the honest answer is “roughly”. The strategic item gets pushed to next month, for the third month running.
Nobody in that room is underperforming, and the finance team is probably working harder than it ever has. The business has simply become more complex than the finance capability supporting it, and more effort will not close that gap.
Six signs you have outgrown your current finance setup
- Management accounts arrive more than two weeks after month end, and the meeting then spends its time debating them instead of acting on them.
- Cashflow forecasting lives in a spreadsheet one person maintains and nobody else can interrogate.
- You can explain last quarter confidently, but cannot model next year with any conviction.
- An investor, lender or prospective acquirer has asked for something your team could not produce quickly.
- Your most senior finance person is excellent on controls and reporting, but has never raised institutional money, integrated an acquisition or been through a diligence process.
- Strategic work such as pricing, margin analysis and scenario planning only happens when somebody gives up a weekend.
One or two of these is normal in a growing business. Four or more usually means the gap is structural, and that buying more hours at the same level will not fix it.
What a CFO does that a Finance Director does not
The titles get used loosely, so it helps to separate the three jobs.
A Financial Controller or Finance Manager owns the record: accurate books, timely reporting, clean controls.
A Finance Director owns the function: process, systems, team, budget, and the discipline that keeps the numbers trustworthy at scale.
A CFO owns the financial strategy of the business: how it is funded, where capital is deployed, what the numbers imply for the next decision, and how that story is told to investors, lenders and boards.
Most growing businesses do not need all three at once. The third job does not disappear when nobody holds it, though. It lands on the founder or the chief executive, on top of everything else they are carrying, and it is usually the work that slips.
Four ways to fill the gap
There are more options than carrying on or hiring a CFO. The right answer depends less on your revenue than on which specific capability is missing.
For a business sitting between a capable finance team and a full executive hire, a fractional arrangement often matches the shape of the need better than the alternatives. The demand is rarely for five days a week of CFO time. It is for someone with the right experience to be in the room on the eight or ten occasions a year when a decision turns on it.
What a fractional CFO actually does
“Strategic finance leadership” is easy to say and hard to picture, so here is what a well-run engagement tends to look like.
Weeks 1 to 3: diagnostic
A structured review of reporting, controls, cash, systems and team capability. The output is a short written assessment and a prioritised list of what to fix, in what order, and what it will take. It is unglamorous work, and a lot of the value sits there, because it stops the business solving the wrong problem expensively.
Weeks 4 to 8: fix the information layer
A reporting pack that answers the questions the board is actually asking. A forecast model your own team can run and defend, not one that only works when its author is at their desk. Cash visibility far enough ahead that you are making decisions rather than reacting to them.
Weeks 9 to 12: turn to the decisions
With reliable information in place, attention moves to the things that change outcomes: pricing and margin, the funding route and its timing, hiring sequence, capital expenditure, the shape of the next twelve months.
Thereafter: a standing rhythm
Typically a set number of days each month, plus availability around board meetings, funding conversations and whatever else the year turns out to hold. The model flexes: heavier through a transaction, lighter when the business is executing a plan that already works.
Two things a fractional CFO does not do: take over your bookkeeping, or replace your finance team. The good ones tend to make an existing team more effective, because there is finally someone senior to escalate to who has met the problem before.
Why the wider firm matters
As businesses grow, financial decisions stop being purely financial.
A funding round has tax consequences for the company and often for the shareholders personally. Expansion into a new territory raises questions about entity structure, transfer pricing, employment taxes and local compliance. An acquisition stretches reporting, controls and risk management well beyond the finance team. A share option scheme intended to retain key people can create problems years later if it is set up carelessly.
An independent fractional CFO has to go and find specialists for each of these, coordinate them, and hope the advice joins up. A fractional CFO working inside a full-service tax and advisory practice has those specialists along the corridor: corporate tax, VAT, employment taxes, share schemes, corporate finance. Pulling one in for an hour is a phone call, not a new engagement.
For businesses whose complexity is structural as well as operational, that tends to be the deciding factor.
What it costs
Fractional CFO support is usually priced one of two ways: a monthly retainer covering an agreed number of days, or a day rate for concentrated pieces of work such as a fundraise or a transaction.
It is worth setting that cost against the decisions you are currently making with incomplete information: the funding round priced lower than it needed to be, the loss-making product line nobody spotted for four quarters, the acquisition that took nine months instead of five.
How to work out whether you need it
Three questions to put to your leadership team:
- If an investor asked for a three-year model with defensible assumptions next Friday, who would build it, and how confident would you be signing it?
- What is the largest financial decision facing the business in the next twelve months, and does anyone involved have direct experience of making it before?
- How much of your own week goes on finance questions that should not reach you?
If the answers are uncomfortable, the gap is real. Which of the four routes above closes it is a separate question, and one worth taking advice on before you commit.
About HaysMac’s Fractional CFO service
HaysMac is a leading London firm of over 600 chartered accountants and tax advisers, working with entrepreneurial and fast-growing businesses, owner-managed companies, and charities and not-for-profit organisations across the UK and internationally.
Our Fractional CFO service gives growing businesses access to experienced CFO-level leadership on a flexible basis, alongside the tax, corporate finance and outsourced finance expertise of a full-service firm. It complements our outsourced finance resource, which builds and runs the reporting layer underneath.
To discuss whether fractional CFO support is right for your business, get in touch with Elena Ramkalawon at Eramkalawon@haysmac.com
