What Canadian Owner-Managers Need to Know About Recruiting a CFO
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 […]
Is Your CFO Ready for the Next Recession?
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Challenge of Recruiting a CFO in a Small Town
Companies based in small towns located far from major population centres face unique difficulties in recruiting qualified people in general, and find it especially difficult to recruit qualified executives. The Only Game in Town In many cases, if the company in question is of any size, they’re the town’s biggest single employer and the neighbouring […]
What’s in a Name: Vice President of Finance, Director of Finance or Controller?
Once you’ve made the decision that you need a qualified professional to head up your finance function, the next decision is determining how much horsepower you actually need in your CFO. And in order to do that, you need to realistically assess not only how much technical horsepower is required to handle the job but […]
Placement Agencies vs. Executive Search Firms: How You Pay Determines How You Play
In the early days of the recruitment industry (which wasn’t all that long ago), it was easy to distinguish between the two very distinct types of recruitment firms – placement agencies and executive search firms. Placement agencies were used for hiring junior and clerical staff, and executive search firms were retained to recruit executives. As […]
Are you hiring a CFO? Calculating Compensation Within Private Companies
Hiring a top notch CFO, someone who will advance your company’s agenda and business objectives, requires strategic thinking on a number of fronts, not least of which is compensation. Not only will a well thought out compensation plan bring the best candidate to the table, it will align your CFO properly with your company’s interests. […]
Taking the Average (and Bad) CFO Hire Out of Play
Companies going to market to recruit a financial executive can trip over any number of small snags. Recruiting an executive tends to be more complicated than most business endeavors due to the large human component involved in the transaction. Even after all the tangibles have been addressed, like education, technical qualifications, and industry experience, you […]
LinkedIn’s Limitations When You’re Looking for a New VP Finance
The perception exists that social media in general and LinkedIn in particular, are the solution to every recruitment question. While it’s true that LinkedIn is a very useful site and an important tool for anyone involved with recruitment, it’s not the solution to every recruitment problem. Two Ways to Use LinkedIn LinkedIn has two main […]
How Not to Search for a CFO
A year or so ago I got a call from the CEO of a $50mm roofing contractor who needed to hire a new CFO. The CEO was the son of the founder of the firm, and had been at the helm of the family business for about five years. Dad had ostensibly retired but still […]
Taking Counter-Offers Out of Play
Let’s take a hypothetical situation where you’re the CFO of a thriving micro-brewing company (since we’re being hypothetical, we might as well have some fun). Your controller resigned a couple of months ago, giving you two weeks’ notice and you’ve been busy trying to fill their chair ever since. And now, finally, after a long, […]
The Value of Benchmarking in Recruiting a VP Finance
Nerd Alert! When you google the word “benchmark”, the very first definition that pops up is: a standard or point of reference against which things may be compared or assessed. And after it runs through all of the alternative definitions (which are not to be confused with alternative facts – they may be similar but I’m […]
When Your CFO Hire Goes Bad
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of hiring someone through a recruitment firm who didn’t work out, no doubt you ascribed the blame to your recruiter. Which may be fair but then again, it may not be. After all, if you’ve been around for any length of time in business you’ve probably hired someone on […]
A Primer on Recruiting CFOs
A few months ago I was meeting with a prospective client, the owner-manager of a consumer products manufacturer, to talk about recruiting a CFO for their organization. It was an important hire for the company but from what I could tell from my initial discussion with the owner-manager, from a recruiter’s point of view, it […]
Why Some CEOs End Up Habitually Hiring the Wrong CFOs
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 before precipitously jumped ship. When I ask why they want […]
The ABCs of DIY CFO Recruiting
It’s axiomatic in executive search circles the quality of the hiring authority’s decision is a direct function of the quality of the short list they interview, which in turn is a function of the number of candidates canvassed. If you use an executive recruiter to recruit your next CFO, you will be accessing a very […]
