Practice
CFO search for private equity-backed companies.
The CFO is the appointment a sponsor can least afford to get wrong. It is also the one where the brief is most often written for the wrong job.
The job is defined by the deal, not the company
Two businesses of identical size and sector can need completely different finance leaders, because what the CFO has to survive is the transaction rather than the industry.
A carve-out needs someone who has built a function from nothing on somebody else's clock. A buy-and-build needs someone who can close the books while the entity list changes every quarter. A turnaround needs someone who will tell a lender the truth early. A business approaching exit needs someone whose numbers hold up under diligence from a buyer paid to find the holes.
Write the brief from the company and you get a competent finance director. Write it from the deal and you get the person who can actually do the next three years.
Where the hard ones are
The appointments that go wrong are rarely the obvious ones. The risk tends to concentrate in three places.
The founder's finance person. Often loyal, often capable, and almost never built for investor reporting. Replacing them is a judgement about the business rather than about them, and it tends to be delayed longer than it should be.
The over-qualified hire. A listed company CFO who has never operated without a shared service centre, a treasury team and an investor relations function. The title reassures the board. The first month tells you.
The second CFO. The hire made after the first one did not work. By then the plan has slipped, patience is short, and the brief gets written in reaction rather than from the plan.
What we look for
Evidence, specifically. Not that someone has held the title, but that they have done the thing this deal requires.
- A function stood up or rebuilt, with the dates.
- A close shortened, or made reliable, and by how much.
- Acquisitions integrated, including what went wrong.
- A covenant renegotiated, a refinancing run, a lender kept close.
- A diligence process survived, from the sell side.
When to start
The brief is easiest to write while the deal is still being done. Sponsors who begin during exclusivity have time to disagree about what the role actually is. Sponsors who begin at completion are already recruiting against the clock, and the first casualty is usually the specification.
Coverage and languages
UK, Benelux, DACH and the Nordics, working in Dutch, English, German and French. Language fit matters more than most London firms allow for. A Dutch manufacturing business will interview a CFO in Dutch regardless of what the job description says.