Finance Transformation
When to Hire Your First Finance Director
1 November 2025
Most businesses hire their first Finance Director too late. By the time the decision is made, the finance function has been running beyond its capacity for a year or more. The accounts are behind, the reporting is unreliable, the MD is spending significant time on financial management that should not require their attention, and the business has been making decisions without the financial insight it needed.
The signals that the hire is overdue are usually visible well before the hire happens. The business grows through them, assuming the problem will be managed some other way, until it cannot be. These are the finance functions that fail at scale.
The signals that you need one
You are making significant decisions without reliable financial information. If the MD or CEO is making investment decisions, pricing decisions, or hiring decisions based on gut feel or rough estimates because the financial information is not available in time or is not trusted, the business is carrying a risk that a Finance Director would eliminate.
The month-end close takes more than two weeks. A close that consistently runs past the middle of the following month means the business is operating in the dark for half of every month. The causes are usually process and systems problems that a senior finance leader would fix. Understanding what a Finance Director does makes it clear why this is a leadership hire, not a headcount one.
The bank or investors are asking questions you cannot answer quickly. A business that has external funders or is seeking funding needs to be able to answer financial questions with confidence and speed. If producing an answer to a straightforward financial question requires a week of work, the finance infrastructure is insufficient.
You have more than one legal entity or are trading across borders. Multi-entity structures and cross-border operations create complexity in consolidation, transfer pricing, VAT, and statutory compliance that requires senior finance expertise. This is not bookkeeper territory.
You are planning a significant transaction. Fundraising, an acquisition, a management buyout, or a trade sale all require the finance function to be in order and to be represented at a senior level. Attempting a transaction without a Finance Director is significantly harder and riskier.
The founder is spending more than a day a week on finance. Every hour a founder or MD spends on financial management is an hour not spent on the things only they can do. If financial management is consuming meaningful time at the top of the organisation, the return on a Finance Director hire is immediate.
What to look for
The right Finance Director for a growing business is not the same profile as the right Finance Director for a large corporate. The growing business needs someone who can build, not just manage. Someone comfortable in ambiguity, capable of working without a large team behind them, and willing to be hands-on as well as strategic.
Big 4 training is a strong foundation. Operational experience in businesses of a similar size and complexity to where you are going, not where you are now, is the differentiator. A Finance Director who has only worked in large, well-resourced environments will struggle in a business where they have to build the infrastructure themselves. The challenge of inheriting a finance function that was never properly built requires a different skill set.
Part-time or fractional first
For businesses that are not yet at the size where a full-time Finance Director is clearly justified, a fractional FD engagement is a pragmatic option. Two or three days a week of senior finance leadership, combined with a well-managed bookkeeping function, covers most of what a growing business needs at a cost that is substantially lower than a full-time hire.
The fractional model also allows the business to develop a relationship with a specific individual before committing to a permanent arrangement. If the fit is right and the business reaches the scale where full-time is justified, the transition is straightforward. If it is not, the arrangement ends without the complexity of a permanent hire.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) available for senior finance leadership roles and fractional FD engagements with ambitious businesses.
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.