The CFO Playbook for CEOs: What the Role Owns and When to Hire

A CFO is responsible for two kinds of work. One is keeping the numbers right and the finance team running: an accurate close, sound controls, planning, treasury and tax. The other is helping the leadership team decide where the company's money goes, from a credit line to an acquisition. Which of the two your company needs most right now shapes who you should hire, and whether you need a full-time CFO yet.

This guide explains what the role covers, how it differs from a controller, the signs that a company needs a CFO, and the choice between a full-time, interim and fractional hire. It ends with a one-page mandate to write before the search and questions for judging candidates.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan co-founded Alpha Apex Group, which is mentioned in this article.

What a CFO is responsible for

A useful way to describe the job comes from Deloitte's four faces of the CFO (opens in a new tab). Two roles are traditional: the steward, who protects the company's assets, ensures compliance with financial regulations and closes the books correctly, and the operator, who runs an efficient finance function covering planning and analysis, treasury and tax. Two have grown in weight: the strategist, who helps set the company's direction, including acquisitions and financing, and the catalyst, who uses the budget to drive change such as cost reduction, procurement and pricing.

Every CFO does some of all four. What changes from one company to the next is which role leads. That is the first thing to decide, because it determines the kind of person you hire.

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An original summary of Deloitte’s Four Faces of the CFO framework. These are complementary responsibilities, not four different job titles.deloitte.com (opens in a new tab)

The skills the job calls for are familiar: strategic thinking, financial expertise, communication, technology, risk management, adaptability and ethical judgment. For the person hiring, the useful question is which of them the next two years will test hardest, and how you will see evidence of it before you make an offer. The interview questions at the end of this guide test several directly: a model the candidate built shows financial expertise, a hard message they gave a board shows communication and judgment, and what they would change in your first quarter shows how they think about systems and the team.

CFO or controller: which do you need first?

The two roles overlap, so it helps to be clear which one the company needs now. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics describes controllers (opens in a new tab) as directing the preparation of financial reports that summarize and forecast an organization's financial position, including the reports regulators require, and often overseeing accounting, audit and budgets. It describes CFOs as the executives responsible for the accuracy of an organization's financial reporting, and assigns raising capital and planning mergers and acquisitions to treasurers and finance officers. In a company without a separate treasurer, expect that capital work to fall to the CFO.

A controller leads accounting, controls and reporting, and may also own budgets and forecasts. The CFO carries executive responsibility for financing, capital allocation and financial strategy, and works with investors, lenders and the board. If your books close late or with errors, a strong controller may solve the immediate problem. If financing and strategic decisions need an executive owner, consider a CFO.

When a company needs a CFO

None of the sources behind this guide sets a revenue figure at which a company should hire a CFO. The better test is the decisions in front of you. These signs suggest that finance has become a leadership job:

• You plan to raise equity or take on debt with covenants and reporting obligations.
• An audit, a sale process or a public listing is on the horizon.
• You are buying companies, or preparing to be bought.
• The board or investors want a forecast they can hold the company to, and nobody owns it.
• Cash is hard to read: large customers pay on long terms, some prepay for the year, and the bank balance no longer tells you whether you are profitable.
• The CEO is spending hours a week on finance questions that someone else should own.

The cash sign is the easiest to miss. In a 2025 interview I described how big customers paying net 60 or net 90 (opens in a new tab) can stretch a growing business, and how, without the tools or the understanding, you can't tell an unprofitable month from a customer who is slow to pay. A customer who prepays for a year creates the opposite trap: cash that is not yet earned. Someone has to own that visibility.

If the company reports to the SEC

At a US operating company that reports to the SEC on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, the CFO seat carries personal obligations. Under the SEC's rule 17 CFR 240.13a-14 (opens in a new tab), the principal executive and principal financial officers must each sign a certification for each quarterly and annual report the rule covers (Forms 10-Q and 10-K for a US company), and the signature cannot be delegated by power of attorney. Federal law, 18 U.S.C. 1350 (opens in a new tab), adds a written statement from the CEO and CFO that each periodic report containing financial statements "fairly presents, in all material respects, the financial condition and results of operations".

For a company subject to Form 8-K (opens in a new tab) Item 5.02, a principal financial officer's retirement, resignation, termination or appointment generally requires disclosure within four business days. If the company plans to announce an appointment publicly by other means, it may delay that filing until the announcement day. A company outside SEC reporting makes none of these filings. If you plan to list, look for a CFO who has signed these certifications before, or has run the reporting behind them.

Full-time, interim or fractional

Not every CFO need is a permanent hire. Russell Reynolds Associates (opens in a new tab), which tracks CFO moves at companies in major stock indices, notes that where the right capabilities are not available internally, boards may search externally or use an interim appointment "to maintain continuity while evaluating longer-term options".

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

The guide to fractional CFO firms compares providers and how they charge.

Write the mandate before the search

Writing a good brief for a CFO starts with understanding the function well enough to define it. I learned that the hard way. I went through several painful finance hires (opens in a new tab) before I learned the function myself, including taking finance courses. After that, when I looked for a fractional CFO in 2025, I knew what to look for. You don't need to be able to do the CFO's job. You need enough competence to define it and to judge the person you hire.

A one-page mandate does that. Write it before you brief a CFO search firm or meet a candidate:

The 90-day line matters most. A new CFO's first quarter should produce something you can check: a cash forecast you trust, a close calendar the team meets, a clear view of the finance team, and one recommendation on the decision that triggered the hire.

How to judge CFO candidates

In 2025, most new CFOs at large listed companies were new to the title: of the 316 CFOs appointed in the indices Russell Reynolds tracks, 57% were first-time CFOs. Its advice is to assess first-time candidates "not only for technical readiness" but also for judgment, learning agility and leadership capacity.

So you are often judging potential, and the best evidence is what a candidate can show you. That is why, when I was looking for a fractional CFO, I wanted to see their model. A candidate who can walk you through how they would forecast your business, and what they would need to trust the numbers, is showing you the job.

Ask the strongest candidates to present a short board update from figures you share under a confidentiality agreement. It tests communication and judgment in the way the role will.

If you wrote the mandate today, which of the four roles would lead, and could you say what success looks like after the first quarter?