At some point in the life of a growing business, someone says it out loud.
We probably need a CFO.
They are usually right about the need and wrong about the shape of it. Because the question that follows is almost always “who should we hire”, when the more useful question is “what is the work, how much of it is there, and what level does it actually require”.
Those are different questions, and answering the second one honestly changes the answer to the first.
What a full-time CFO is really for
Let me start with the case against my own position, because it matters.
A full-time CFO is the right answer when the role is genuinely full-time. That usually means one of three things. There is a substantial finance team that needs leading day to day. There is structural complexity that never lets up, such as multiple entities, multiple currencies, a live M&A programme or listed-company reporting obligations. Or the business is at a scale where the CFO is not just a finance leader but one of the two or three people running the company.
If that is your business, hire a CFO. Nothing in this piece applies to you.
The trouble is that most businesses reaching for a CFO are not there yet, and they end up buying a full-time solution to a part-time problem.
The seniority trap
Here is what usually happens.
A business decides it needs a CFO and sets a budget. The budget is real money, and it is a stretch, so it lands somewhere below what a genuinely experienced CFO commands. The business then hires the best person that budget reaches.
That person is frequently excellent. They are also, very often, someone who has never done the specific thing the business needs doing. They have not taken a company through a funding round. They have not rebuilt a pricing model that was quietly losing margin. They have not sat opposite an investor whose job was to find the weakest number in the plan.
So the business has bought five days a week of capability it does not need, and has not bought the two days a month of judgement it does.
That is the trap. Not cost. Seniority.
The arithmetic, honestly
Take a business considering a full-time hire. By the time you add employer’s National Insurance, pension, bonus and recruitment fees, the real annual cost is meaningfully higher than the headline salary. Call the fully loaded figure whatever it is in your sector, then ask two questions.
First, how many days a week is there genuine CFO-level work? Not finance work. CFO work. Board-facing strategy, funding, pricing architecture, capital allocation, the decisions that carry real consequence. In most businesses under £20m turnover, the honest answer is one to two days a week, and often less between events.
Second, what happens to the other three days? They get filled, because good people fill their time. Usually with work a financial controller could do more cheaply and, frankly, better.
A fractional arrangement lets you spend the same money on a materially more experienced person, for the days where that experience actually changes the outcome.
The risk nobody prices
There is a second cost that rarely makes it into the business case: the cost of getting it wrong.
A CFO hire that does not work out is not a three-month problem. Recruitment, notice periods, the months before anyone admits it and the months after while you replace them can easily consume a year. In a business at a decision point, that year is expensive in ways that never show up on the P&L. Rounds get delayed. Decisions get deferred. Momentum goes.
A fractional relationship carries a fraction of that exposure. If it is not working, you know quickly and you can change it quickly.
Why “with the right partner” is doing a lot of work
Everything above only holds if the arrangement is a genuine partnership. Fractional support done badly is worse than no support at all, and there is plenty of it about.
The failure mode is familiar. Someone arrives, produces a document, and leaves. The document is competent. Nobody owns what happens next. The business is no better placed than it was, and now has a report nobody reads.
So the test is not whether someone is fractional. It is whether they behave like they are accountable for the outcome.
Continuity. The same person, in your business, over time. Not a rotating cast. Context compounds, and a partner who was there for the last three decisions is worth several times one who is meeting your numbers for the first time.
Ownership, not advice. Advice ends when the meeting ends. Ownership means the person is still there when the plan meets reality and something has to change.
Willingness to disagree with you. A partner who only confirms what you already believe is an expensive mirror. The value is in being challenged before an investor, a lender or a board does it for you.
Access between the scheduled days. Real decisions do not wait for the day in the diary. A partnership that only exists on Tuesdays is not a partnership.
Honesty about scope. A good partner will tell you when you have outgrown the arrangement and need to hire. If they cannot see the point at which they should be replaced, be careful.
The pattern that usually works
For most growing businesses the sequence looks like this. A strong financial controller or finance manager running the day-to-day. A fractional CFO providing the strategic layer above them. And a clear-eyed view of the point at which the strategic layer becomes a full-time job.
That last part matters. The goal is not to be fractional forever. It is to have the right level of judgement available at the right cost, until the business genuinely needs it every day.
At which point, hire a CFO. And by then you will know exactly what you need one for, which is a much better position to hire from than the one most businesses start in.
Matt Window FCMA, CGMA is the founder of Valkrest. He has been a co-founder and CFO, securing £14m in funding and helping scale a business to over £100m in global revenue, alongside senior finance and commercial roles across major global organisations.
Valkrest provides ongoing strategic finance partnership so decisions stay grounded as the business grows.
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