Finance Transformation
From Founder to Finance Leader: What Crossing That Line Teaches You
1 February 2025
I spent twenty years as a founder and CEO. I built businesses, employed people, navigated crises, made the decisions that kept things going when they should have stopped. That included rebuilding a business after wholesale collapse. I was also the CFO throughout, because in a founder-led business, the financial decisions are always yours whether or not you have the title. The moment when businesses need a Finance Director is often the moment the founder recognises they cannot carry that weight alone.
Moving into a finance leadership role inside an established organisation is a different experience. The skills transfer. The context does not. And the gap between them is more instructive than most career conversations acknowledge.
What founders bring that most finance leaders do not
The most valuable thing a founder carries into a finance role is the understanding of what it costs to be wrong.
In professional services, in audit, in the finance function of a large organisation, errors are serious but they are contained. There are controls, reviews, sign-off processes. The consequences of a mistake are professional and reputational.
In a founder-led business, errors in financial judgment can end the company. A cashflow model that is too optimistic means you run out of money. A pricing decision that compresses margin means you cannot cover fixed costs when volume falls. A working capital call you did not anticipate means suppliers do not get paid and supply chains fail.
That experience produces a different quality of attention to financial detail. Not more cautious, necessarily. More grounded in the commercial reality of what the numbers mean.
What the transition teaches you about organisations
Large organisations are genuinely different from founder-led businesses, and not only in the obvious ways.
Decision-making is slower and more distributed. Processes that a founder would change in an afternoon require stakeholder alignment, governance approval, and implementation planning. This is frustrating if you approach it as bureaucracy. It is understandable if you approach it as risk management at scale.
Finance functions in larger organisations often have significant institutional knowledge embedded in informal practices. The way things are done is not always written down, and the reasons things are done that way are sometimes lost. Coming in with a founder’s instinct to redesign what is not working requires knowing what you do not yet know, which takes time.
The question the transition forces
Crossing from founder to finance leader in an organisation you did not build forces a useful question: where does the value you add actually come from?
In a founder role, the answer is everything. You are the strategy, the operations, the finance, the culture. The identity of the business is partly your identity.
In a finance leadership role, the answer has to be more specific. It is the quality of the financial insight you bring to commercial decisions. Understanding what a Finance Director actually does at this level becomes essential. It is the standards you set for the function. It is the transformation you deliver in the systems and processes. It is the relationships you build with the people making the decisions that matter.
Finding that answer clearly, and building toward it deliberately, is the work of the transition. The founder instinct is to do everything. The finance leader’s job is to do the right things.
What I would tell someone making the same transition
The commercial instincts you built running your own business are genuinely valuable. Do not leave them at the door because the role title says finance.
The pace is different. Work with it rather than against it.
Build relationships before you build change. Understanding why things are done the way they are done is not a delay to transformation. It is a prerequisite for transformation that lasts.
And the skills that got you through a business crisis, the ability to make decisions under pressure with incomplete information, to communicate clearly when the news is difficult, to hold a team together when the environment is uncertain, those transfer entirely. They are the ones that matter most. I am open to the right senior finance opportunity where that combination of commercial and financial experience delivers real value.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW), former founder and CEO of two international businesses, and a finance transformation specialist with Big 4 training and UCD diplomas in Change Management and Leadership.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW), Big 4 trained, with twenty years of experience building and running international businesses. She specialises in finance transformation, ecommerce operations, and digital strategy.