For businesses hiring
A covenant test in six weeks. An exit next year. An FD you want to develop, not replace. You need the judgement — not the salary, the search or the headcount.
Just your work email for now. We’ll be in touch before we open.
Most senior finance work in a scaling business is not a permanent job. It is a project with a start, an end and a deadline you did not choose. It is false economy to shoehorn it into a finance team that has neither the experience nor the time to deliver it.
What you need
Satisfy the PE house and the funders. Support the executive on VCP execution. Run a twelve-person finance team. Keep performance steady across a multi-site estate.
Who we would put forward
A CFO who has operated in PE-backed environments. Sector experience optional — the business is PE-backed and there is handover documentation.
Typical brief
5 days a week for 4 weeks, then 3 days a week for 15 weeks — 65 days
£1,200–£1,400 a day
£78,000 – £91,000
Rushing the permanent hire over the same nineteen weeks: roughly £95,000 of prorated package on £180k plus bonus and on-costs, plus a placement fee of about £45,000. Call it £140,000 — and you still carry the risk of the wrong hire.
What you need
Prepare for a first audit without losing the close, and without your FD disappearing into it for six weeks.
Who we would put forward
A Group Financial Controller with an audit background. International and multi-site experience useful.
Typical brief
3 days a week for 4 weeks, then 2 days a week for 8 weeks — 28 days
£600–£800 a day
£16,800 – £22,400
The alternative: your FD out of the business for weeks, audit overrun fees of around £15,000, and a first impression with new stakeholders you only get to make once.
What you need
A model that incorporates the complex cap table and existing headroom. A corporate finance house engaged to take it to lenders. A permanent team left with clear process notes on running the model, and compliance certificates published on time.
Who we would put forward
An FD or CFO who has worked in leveraged businesses, with relevant sector experience.
Typical brief
3 days a week for 6 weeks, then 2 days a week for 6 weeks — 30 days
£800–£1,000 a day
£24,000 – £30,000
The equivalent permanent hire costs about £204,000 a year all in — £120,000 salary, 20% bonus, 25% on-costs and a placement fee — for a twelve-week problem.
The problem, the days, the timeframe.
A short list of interviewed, priced people who have done it before.
Scoped, time-bound, priced before it starts.
As a business scales, the finance function it grew up with stops keeping pace. It is rarely one dramatic failure — it is a set of small signals that the numbers are no longer good enough to run the business on.
Do these resonate? You are not alone. Most businesses meet all of this and more as they scale — and the people we work with have been through it before, in businesses like yours.
Register for early access →LinkedIn, Upwork, Fiverr and Malt are built to cover everything — software, design, marketing, admin, finance. Breadth is their business model, and it is exactly why none of them can tell a good finance leader from an average one.
A keyword search finds the title on the CV. It rarely uncovers the lessons learned helping a founder scale, a sale completed after a previous attempt failed, or the work of untangling a data lake so the business can finally use a tool like Power BI.
You wanted three to five strong, comparable candidates. A fee paid on placement rewards speed and the recruiter’s strategy, so what often arrives is the one they favour, with the rest there to flatter it. You are choosing from their process, not yours.
Neither the business nor the recruiter can specify this work precisely at the start. Gravitas, delivery and integrity do not fit a job description. Defining the brief is the first piece of work, and it is the piece nobody is paid to do — so we do it first.
We do one thing. Finance, for scaling businesses, assessed by people who have done the job — which is the only way to judge whether someone can hold a board, a lender and an auditor in the same week.
“Fractional CFO or permanent CFO: what’s the difference?” — the comparison your chair will ask for.