What Canadian Owner-Managers Need to Know About Recruiting a CFO

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Any finance executive who’s had experience with large corporations and who’s also worked for an owner-managed company will tell you that they are two very different things. The scale is smaller, management styles are different, support systems often much more ad-hoc – the list goes on. These differences are important to acknowledge because recognizing these […]

The Perils of Playing Job Board Roulette

People who post positions on sites like LinkedIn tend to fall into two camps. Those who expect their posting will result in a selection of qualified candidates and those who post the job hoping against hope that they’re going to luck out. The people in the first camp tend not to have a lot of […]

Top Qualities to Look for When Hiring Your First CFO in Canada

Understanding the Role of a CFO Hiring your first Chief Financial Officer is a pivotal moment for your business, especially if you’re an owner-manager who’s built the company from the ground up. Most of the owner-managers I’ve worked with over the years come from backgrounds in sales, operations, or engineering—not finance. This lack of financial […]

Is Your CFO Ready for the Next Recession?

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There’s an old saying that goes: “Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” That line could also apply to recessions except that unlike the weather, there is something you can do about a recession to mitigate the negative impact it could have on your company. And a good CFO can go […]

Why You Haven’t Pulled the Trigger on Hiring Your First CFO

There’s a very common arc to the story of how most owner-managers come to decide to hire their first CFO. Accounting 101 Pretty much all big businesses start out as small businesses. And pretty much every owner-manager I’ve ever met knew exactly what was going on in every aspect of their business back in the […]

What You Need to Know About Hiring Your First Controller

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My practice specializes in recruiting for the top financial position for Canadian, mid-market, primarily owner-managed companies. I work with companies as small as $5MM in revenue and companies as large as $300MM in revenue. If I had to pick the sweet spot of my market, where more than 70% of my searches come from, it’s […]

10 Things to Expect from Your VP of Finance

The career path to owner-manager typically follows one of three arcs. They have a background in sales, they have a background in operations/engineering, or they were born into the business. The path almost no owner-manager follows to owning their own business is finance and accounting. And since pretty much all businesses start out as small […]

Finance Recruitment is Not a Group Effort

Let’s imagine that you’re the CFO of a largish, successful, auto parts manufacturer located somewhere in Markham. You’ve recently done a bit of reorganization and you need to hire a controller for one of your divisions. You spec out the job and decide that you need to hire someone with a CPA, preferably from the […]

Avoiding the New CFO / CEO Disconnect

Every now and again I’ll have a finance executive ring me up and ask me to find them a new position when they’ve only been with their current employer for a matter of six or eight months. They’re almost always well-regarded professionals who’ve never precipitously jumped ship before. When I ask why they want to […]

Wanted: CFO

Job Description: Solve My Problem Take a look at the various CFO job descriptions you see on LinkedIn. There may be a couple that tell a good story about the company and give a nuanced description of the position and the challenges involved, but for the most part, CFO job descriptions are fairly generic. They […]

Why You Need to Recruit a CFO Who’s “Been There, Done That”

If you’re an owner-manager who needs to recruit a CFO, it will most likely be for one of these three reasons: You already have a CFO and that person has just resigned. You have a CFO that you’re dissatisfied with and want to replace. You’re hiring your first ever CFO. Btw, I want to clarify […]

A CFO Asks: Why Am I Striking Out in Interviews?

Straight Answers to Real Questions Question: I like to think that I’m a pretty well-qualified financial executive. I’ve got an MBA, I’m a CPA CMA and I’ve been a very successful VP Finance / CFO in three different companies over the past fifteen years. My resume shows that I’ve progressed through a number of challenging […]

What You Need to Know About Being a CFO Headhunter

I have a very specialized practice recruiting CFOs for small and mid-sized Canadian companies. The majority of my clients are owner-managed, and the revenue range of my client base tends to fall between $25 million and $250 million. Recruiting a CFO for a $75 million owner-managed company is different than recruiting one for a $750 […]

How to Hire the Right CFO for Your Start-up Company

If you are fortunate enough to own a company with revenues of $250 million, you may have issues with your CFO but you’re not struggling with the question of whether or not you should hire a CFO. If you happen to own a company with revenues of $2.5 million, you’re not struggling with the decision on whether […]

Recruiting a Major League VP Finance for Your Aspiring Triple “A” Team

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Every big company used to be a small company. Some of the biggest names in business, Apple, Amazon, Disney and Harley Davidson (among others), literally started out in their founders’ garage. And as these companies evolved from start-ups to market disrupters to market dominators, their executive teams not only became larger but much more sophisticated […]

What Exactly Does a Controller Do?

As an owner-manager, you should pose the question as What exactly should my controller do? What your controller actually does and what they should be doing may be somewhat different things. The complexity of any controller’s job is going to vary as a function of your company’s size and complexity. But generally speaking, the controller […]

Five Great Questions to Ask a Search Firm Before You Engage Them

Your Director of Finance quit a few weeks ago and you’ve done the usual referral/job posting dance and have come up short. So you decide to bite the bullet and hire a recruiter. And now the question is: what recruiter should you hire? How do you distinguish one recruitment firm from the other? After all, […]

What’s the Difference between a CFO and a Controller?

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Owner-managers who are thinking of either upgrading their head of finance or hiring a qualified professional to head up the accounting function for the first time often aren’t aware of the distinctions between the various titles associated with that position. Let’s say you’re an owner-manager attending a networking event full of industry peers who you […]

CFO Resumes 101

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Straight Answers to Real Questions Question: I’m currently the CFO of a $150MM food processing company. I’ve been with my current employer for six years, and previously, I’ve had twenty years’ experience in various industries including food service and consumer goods distribution. I decided to start looking at the market for a new position a month […]

Ten Great Interview Questions to Ask Prospective CFOs

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When you started the CFO recruitment process, you put a lot of thought into what you wanted to accomplish by hiring for this position. You identified the key issues, threats and opportunities your new CFO would be addressing, and you have a good idea of the challenges your business and your CFO will be facing […]