Howdy Guys -

I am looking for some advice or possible leads.

I have been a CFO of a small to medium sized business for the last 5 years. Prior to that I was the Director of Finance there and prior to that I worked a regional publicly traded commercial bank as an analyst. The firm has been anywhere from 20-120 people over the last 8 years. Revenue has been $150-250MM. We have primarily focused on real estate development, but we have had some private equity esque investments and ran a GC.

My pay has always been good and probably out of market and is not the reason I am looking to leave. I am struggling with guiding a small business where there are three different owners of the business that are all active in the business and have different goals. They can't come to consensus, haven't let me implement any sort of corporate governance, and I usually end up playing arbiter. It has lead to multiple years of zig-zag leadership and now we are feeling the inevitable market crunch. I have had to significantly shrink the team and take on tasks that do not align with my compensation.

The business would be in a world if hurt if I left and I would probably be taking a pay cut, but I feel like my work life balance and sanity would return.

I don't have my CPA, but have managed an accounting team of up to 12 people at one time producing consolidated reports and being audited by a large multinational audit firm. My strength/comfort zone is probably more on the FP&A and capital markets side more than accounting, but I have tons of experience in both. I have also managed our corporate insurance, investor relations, bank relationships, and HR.

I know I can be valuable to a small business/ownership group, but also think I would do really well working for a much larger firm under an experienced CFO or alongside a controller to sit in a Director of Finance type of role.

If anyone has any thoughts, advice, or leads, that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Edit to add that I'm in DFW.

Sounds like you don't want to stay but maybe I misread?

If you had a mind to stay, maybe prying your way into an equity position is the next move. I'm currently at a family run/owned biz in the area at just about the same size revenue wise. One thing I've realized in the last couple years is every time I think the owner's don't recognize my value - I'm proved wrong. They recognize it, they just don't voice it. Not sure how forward you have been with your owners but you might be surprised at their openness to let you in on the equity discussion. One (much easier) way to get there is a phantom stock plan. At its most simple, it's a promise to pay you X% of valuation at an exit. You can make it more complicated to where you are entitled to an LTIP at some much larger % of growth from a baseline. This requires a current valuation so that's the only piece that get's a bit more complicated.

Or if you're set on leaving - I would look at staying long enough to get your CMA if you don't already have it. I'll assume you don't qualify currently to sit for the CPA if you haven't done it already. That's the boat I was in. I probably studied 20 - 30 hours for the CMA but I really just relied on experience alone to pass the two parts of the exam. I think that will help your jump to the next spot - particularly if you are looking to go into a larger company.

Staying on the FP&A side of things, I spend most of my time with tools like PowerBI and Powerapps Flows doing process automation. That may also be a timesaver with respect to those tasks you've taken on that you did have someone doing. My rule of thumb is it's worth automating if the upfront time investment is less than 3x the amount of time I think it will save me annually. I probably have an FTE worth of automation working currently - my close cycle is monthly and it takes me about 3 hours even without a softclose. The automation is pretty much a weekly softclose.

With respect to PowerBI - the visualizations are a huge help for owners and managers who have a certain lense they view the business through. It sounds like you are faced with 4 lenses...yours + 3. If you can get some dashboards in place that they can all agree measure important metrics, then you don't have to have them all in the same room to get your perspective and guidance passed along effectively. I've got all of our dashboards mobile accessible and our owners use them mostly on the weekends when they are hanging out together (mom, dad, brothers). I build the appropriate guidelines into those dashboards so it's like I'm there on the weekend even when I'm not.

Really appreciate the thoughtful response!

I'll definitely look into getting a CMA cert.

It's funny you bring up power BI. I struggle with investing the time to build something because I have done different dash boards / executive summaries over the years and they typically do not get used.


I'll probably circle back with you when I have a moment to read and respond to your message from a computer later this week.

Thanks!

You should be in a good position to find something, DFW has a ton of high-level accounting positions vacancies. I would recommend the CMA, as it open doors and to be honest, some non-accounting people don't understand it and are impressed with letters after you name. For the record I have a CMA. Best of luck, my only advice is be 100% sure ready to leave as the next stop can be worse. I have jumped from one spot to not so great spot before.

FriendlyAg said:

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It's funny you bring up power BI. I struggle with investing the time to build something because I have done different dash boards / executive summaries over the years and they typically do not get used.

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From my experience, where I messed up originally was spending the time to build the perfect dashboard. I was trying to put myself in a position to hit a homerun when really all I needed to do was get on base.

Here's what worked....I started building dashboards that I thought might be 50% complete in my mind. I would present those and request feedback...REALLY REALLY request feedback. A lot of times the ownership group would ignore most of the dashboard except for maybe one or two things. Their feedback was along the lines of, "I didn't even know you could get the data like that (or for that issue)...Could you do X Y or Z?"

It was the question, "Could you do....?" that made the adoption so much easier. Once I was building dashboards based on their requests rather than my presuppositions adoption skyrocketed.

Good to see the CMA being mentioned. I took and passed that back in the mid 90's or so. I always thought it was a good well rounded certification. The only issue is that many people have no idea what it is, and you always have to explain it to everyone. I wish it would gain more traction on an overall basis.

Sims said:

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FriendlyAg said:

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It's funny you bring up power BI. I struggle with investing the time to build something because I have done different dash boards / executive summaries over the years and they typically do not get used.

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From my experience, where I messed up originally was spending the time to build the perfect dashboard. I was trying to put myself in a position to hit a homerun when really all I needed to do was get on base.

Here's what worked....I started building dashboards that I thought might be 50% complete in my mind. I would present those and request feedback...REALLY REALLY request feedback. A lot of times the ownership group would ignore most of the dashboard except for maybe one or two things. Their feedback was along the lines of, "I didn't even know you could get the data like that (or for that issue)...Could you do X Y or Z?"

It was the question, "Could you do....?" that made the adoption so much easier. Once I was building dashboards based on their requests rather than my presuppositions adoption skyrocketed.

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This.

Your 80% is probably everyone else's 100%.

Automated flows and PowerApps are also a great primer to understanding other tools and patches to supercharge your productivity/reporting/data manipulation.

Besides, no one likes full sentences and 15 bullet points on a ppt slide; same goes for dashboards.

All the data is there; determining each shareholder's interest and interpreting said data is the strategic part.

Good luck with whatever you decide.

The grass isn't always greener, but only you know you've exhausted enough chances and need to move on.

MD1993 said:

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You should be in a good position to find something, DFW has a ton of high-level accounting positions vacancies. I would recommend the CMA, as it open doors and to be honest, some non-accounting people don't understand it and are impressed with letters after you name. For the record I have a CMA. Best of luck, my only advice is be 100% sure ready to leave as the next stop can be worse. I have jumped from one spot to not so great spot before.

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Where you seeing these high level accounting vacancies? Not in dfw, but curious the industries/companies you're seeing this at?

SnowboardAg said:

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MD1993 said:

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You should be in a good position to find something, DFW has a ton of high-level accounting positions vacancies. I would recommend the CMA, as it open doors and to be honest, some non-accounting people don't understand it and are impressed with letters after you name. For the record I have a CMA. Best of luck, my only advice is be 100% sure ready to leave as the next stop can be worse. I have jumped from one spot to not so great spot before.

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Where you seeing these high level accounting vacancies? Not in dfw, but curious the industries/companies you're seeing this at?

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Of the last 5 retained search folks I've heard from, the vacancies are pretty broad industry wise. A couple in CPG manufacturing/packaging, healthcare, RE Development.

I've also heard from a few audit partners/assurance peers. Seems like they are trying to pull more experienced industry folks back into the public fold even without public experience early on. Dunno if that is just anecdotal or a more widespread industry trend.

Now with any luck, what I think is high level, you think the same. The title game in accounting and finance is getting a bit weird lately. Director positions looking for 5 years of experience, Managers looking for 10, Controllers with 20 years experience looking for 125k in pay...I get a bit lost, frankly.