eBook

Hiring a Part-time
CFO: A Founder’s
Handbook
Introduction
The Chief Financial Officer is one of the
most important people in most businesses.
They are accountable for the smooth
running of your company’s finances; they
foresee financial difficulties, flag them, and
provide solutions and suggestions to counter;
and they run your company’s day-to-day
financial operations

At the turn of 2020, flexible and remote

working has become the norm for a growing
number of organisations, and hiring a part-
time CFO is an increasingly popular choice
for startups and growing companies. Flexible
hiring can enable organisations to hire from
a more diverse and experienced pool of
people than would otherwise be available - if
it’s done right.

However, many founders still tend to think

of their CFO as a glorified accountant and
aren’t familiar with the nuances of hiring
senior finance professionals. If you’re in
that group, this guide is for you, covering
everything you need to know about when,
why and how to hire a part-time CFO that
can help grow your business.
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When do you need to start
thinking about hiring a CFO
Many early stage startups tend to be very
product-focused, and would be inclined
to use whatever funding is available to
hire additional developers, designers or
salespeople. This makes sense at the
beginning of the road: the finances of four
people writing code on their laptops are
fairly straightforward. Record keeping and
tax returns for wi-fi bills can be handled by
the founders themselves, with the help of an
outsourced accountant. At these stages, it’s
more important to actually have a product to
ship.

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However, it’s equally important to recognise
when this approach ceases to become viable
and a higher level of expertise is needed.
And while the exact time to hire a CFO might
change based on the type of business you’re
running and the level of financial savvy
existing founders have, a few telltale signs
that you need an in-house CFO include:

• Growing volume of sales (e.g.,

over £500k ARR)

• Difficulty collecting accounts

receivable

• Significant fundraising (e.g.,

institutional round from VCs)

• Founders lack the required

expertise in strategy and
planning, financial management,
and fundraising

• Growing amount of resources

devoted to finance-related tasks:
document preparation, due
diligence, vendor negotiations

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Part-time vs Outsourced vs
Full-time CFO
After you’ve decided that the time has come
to pull the trigger and hire that first CFO, the
next question you’re going to have to answer
is whether you want to hire someone for a
full-time position, or go part-time.

Advantages of hiring a part-time CFO

Almost by definition, a part-time CFO is a
temporary solution - you won’t find publicly
traded companies that are still using this
model. Nevertheless, hiring a part-time rather
than full-time financial lead is a very popular
choice for startups as it present numerous
benefits:

Cost: Bluntly put, CFOs are expensive.

According to Glassdoor, the average
annual salary of a CFO in London is
£127,325 - a potentially prohibitive price
tag for a startup to pay.

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 Workload: While the CFO’s
responsibilities are mission-critical,
for a younger company they are often
focused around specific occasions -
paying salaries and vendors monthly,
processing new employees, or
preparing a deck for a grant request.
For these instances, you want a senior
professional who knows your business
inside and out; but the rest of the time,
it’s difficult to justify having a full-time
person on board.

Level of experience: Hiring part-time

gives businesses the ability to access
a larger and more diverse pool of
senior professionals, who are unable or
uninterested in a full-time position and
would rather work flexibly. Your ability
to provide these conditions can help you
hire outside your budget - and enjoy the
added benefits of a person who comes
with a breadth of experience from
‘juggling’ multiple jobs and working with
a wide range of companies.

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 Time-to-hire: Finding a full-time CFO
is a lengthy process that will typically
require you to go through a recruiter,
who will charge an additional 25-30%
of your hire’s annual salary upfront. You
can hire a part time CFO using a flexible
hiring platform, which removes these
large upfront costs and allows you to
finalise your hire within days to weeks. A
part-time relationship is easier to end, for
both parties, making the potential cost
of mistakes much smaller and further
expediting the hiring process.

Over 60% of companies hiring flexible

finance professionals on Juggle Jobs
cite ease of hiring as a key benefit.

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Outsourced, or in-house?
If you’re going down the part-time route,
the next question you might ask yourself
is whether you might want to go fully
outsourced. There are multiple providers
offering part-time CFO services, including
our partners at Accountancy Cloud.
Hiring a third party CFO-as-a-service
saves you the need to interview and assess
candidates, This is a great way to get started
and ensure you have high-quality financial
expertise from the get-go.

You might outgrow these services when

your CFO role requires a lot of specialised
knowledge, which you would like to keep in-
house. If one or more of the following applies,
you would benefit from having a friendly
team member rather than an outsource
company because trust is everything.

• Externally funded (VC, Angel Investor)

• New business model / product (common in
startups breaking new ground)
• Complexity relating to finance - high
volume of transactions, international tax
considerations

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The CFO role should grow as the
company grows
Regardless of the model - outsourced, contract
or PAYE - hiring part-time is an excellent
choice early on. But as your company grows,
the CFO role will become more central to the
business and entwined in a growing number
of processes. After several funding rounds or
at approximately £5 million GMV, the financial
side becomes more complicated - and in
heavily regulated or high-risk industries, this
stage might come much earlier.

Complexity can arise due to international

expansion, new business lines, or simply more
people on payroll. The finance function needs
to support this growth smoothly and with as
few bumps as possible, meaning this would be
the moment to staff up. This could still mean a
part-time CFO and full time finance resource
elsewhere, but more often than not it will mean
a full time CFO.

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Screening Candidates -
Seniority Matters!
Hiring part-time should not mean settling
on the quality of the candidates - in fact,
you should see it as an opportunity to hire
someone more senior than you could afford
for a full-time position (see above). This is
true in all cases, but when it comes to your
chief financial officer - even more so.

Finance isn’t an area you want to take a

risk in. This is one of those areas where
experience really matters and a more
traditional background counts - especially
for a smaller organisation, where there are
less rounds of approval and mistakes are
harder to spot. You should look for extensive
experience in private practice, as well as at
least a few years working with a company
in a similar sector where they can bring
transferable skills.

Remember: This person will be interrogating

your numbers, reviewing your business plan,
and managing the people responsible for

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 developing your most important documents
which drive decision making. They will
ensure your employees get paid on time
and that everything is in order with HMRC.
Dependability and unflappability are key!

Learn more about sourcing and

interviewing for senior positions:
• How to run a first round interview
• Dos and Don’ts of Reviewing CVs

Interview Questions for a

Part-time CFO Position
Tell me about a time when you constructed
a financial model for a new business
model.

What you’re looking for here is a thought

process. How did they construct the
model? Who did they speak with? What
experience did they lean on? What
business models did they analyse? What

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 were the variables? How did they handle
the stakeholder interviews to get a sense
of where this would go and why? You’re
looking for someone who can really hold
their own, who is commercially savvy, who
is thorough, detail oriented, and has the
courage of their convictions.

Give me an example of a difficult

investment process and your role in
improving things.

Have they seen a difficult investment

process? Can they hold their nerve? Did
they bring solutions to the table? How did
they keep a cool head during this time?

Tell me about a valuable lesson you

learned from this fundraising process.

Do they take ownership for their role? Do

they focus on the prep and the planning
which is a critical role for a CFO - making
sure the due diligence is in place before
a process begins so you’re not chasing
your tail. Conversely, do they focus their
answers on the role that other people play
during and after the process?

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 How would you describe the finance
department’s role within a business?

This tells you how they see their particular

department. Are they fairly insular
(which can be fine, depending on your
organisation)? Do they want more
commercial involvement? There isn’t a
right or wrong answer here but you need
to understand holistically where they
see finance’s value, and whether your
organisation is right for that.

If you were hiring a finance team from

scratch today for a [rough revenue range
of your business] turnover [your sector]
business, what would that look like?

How much of that budget are they taking

for finance? How efficient are they with
headcount? Are they utilising junior people
which is managerially heavy but could
be useful in the future? Are they utilising
flexibility and part time employment?
How are they thinking about the business
evolving and where these people should
be based? Most importantly - are they
drawing on their past experience to speak

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 with authority and being humble where
there are gaps.

Tell me about a period of fast growth

within an organisation where you were
CFO and how finance supported this
process.

A great CFO knows they are a business

partner to accelerate the growth of a
business. Did they and their team spot
inefficiencies? Did they have candid
conversations with the CEO? You’ll get a
sense as to whether or not their previous
CEO saw them as a trusted advisor.

Who would you ask to provide a reference

for you?

Observe who they leave out and then ask

them why (you can validate and cross
check this information later). Remember
it’s not a bad thing if a CFO is a little
cagey about their poor relationship with a
previous company or CEO, as it suggests a
degree of discretion. If they’re too candid,
it means they might be equally eager
to reveal your company’s secrets in the
future!

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Summary and Next Steps
When hiring a CFO, you want to ensure
that your company gets top-notch
financial expertise and a trustworthy
advisor from the get-go. For a smaller
company, hiring a part-time or flexible
CFO will allow you to leverage senior,
experienced professionals, without going
through the cumbersome and costly
process of hiring through a recruiter.
If you believe that your company is
ready to hire its first CFO, flexibly, visit
Juggle Jobs to post your job for free and
receive a curated shortlist of high-quality
candidates - all within 24 hours.

Hire your first CFO on Juggle Jobs

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Romanie Thomas
Founder & CEO
romanie@juggle.jobs
www.juggle.jobs