When to hire a CFO

In my experience a first CFO in an Australian startup lands around Series A or B, at roughly 50 plus staff and $10m plus ARR, though complexity is the real trigger. Before that, most founders need a Head of Finance or VP Finance at $200k to $250k.

The rule: the right level, on time, specced for 12 to 24 months out

Every CFO timing question I get comes back to one rule. Hire the right level of finance person, at the right moment, and spec the role for where the business will be in 12 to 24 months, not where it is today. Founders break that rule in three ways, and they are not the same mistake. Story Recruitment’s study of 194 funded Australian startups, which dates every finance hire against the company’s announced rounds, shows each one.

The first mistake is the one founders expect me to warn them about, and it is real. At Series A what most of them actually need is a Head of Finance or a VP Finance, at roughly $200k to $250k: someone operational who builds the engine room, manages cash and gives you the visibility you do not have yet. The second and third mistakes get less airtime, and they end the same way as the first: a search you have to run twice.^[3]

For the full title mix, how often a CFO is later added above the first hire, and where first hires came from, see what Australian startups hire first, and what comes next.

Before the raise, outside help. After it, the hire

The standard advice says hire your CFO to close the round. I see it the other way round. Before a raise, founders often bring someone in to support the process and get the house in order before they go to market, and that is very often a fractional or outsourced CFO. In my view the internal hire earns the most in the six months after the money lands, when the forecast has to stand up in front of a new board and the capital has to deliver what it was raised to deliver.

The data shows why no single rule fits everyone. Across the funded Australian startups we tracked, the split is close to even:¹

The sector split, the round-by-round clock and the method are on the study page: when Australian startups make their first finance hire.

What a CFO does, and what they do not

A CFO is more than a senior accountant with a bigger title. The ones who change a business use the numbers to move it forward, where a scorekeeper reports them accurately after the fact. There is a clean line between the finance leader who scores and the one who builds.

The best description of the job I have heard came from Rob Shore, CFO of Retail Food Group, on The CFO Track. He put it like this: a CFO should never be the true industry expert in the business. “At Retail Food Group, there is no way I am the best person to advise on making a doughnut. But what you have to do is translate from the technical side to numbers and back.” The value is in understanding how the business makes money, which KPIs matter, and being able to carry that between the board, the investors and the floor.

That is why a controller and a CFO are different hires, not different titles. A controller owns accurate, timely reporting: the close, compliance, clean numbers. A CFO owns what you do with them. Ben Watiwat, who has scaled finance at SafetyCulture and Immutable, framed the gap between the two exactly: “People eke out through the controllership role, but the broader commercial side is the key element to land the senior role. You need that blend of both. Yes, this is accounting, but how do you make this business better?”

The signals you need a CFO

Revenue is the signal everyone reaches for, and it is the weakest one on its own. What actually moves the decision is a cluster of these, showing up together.

Tom Hunter's view: The signal I trust most is the founder's own calendar. Most founders aren't coming from a finance background, and as I said on Builders & Doers, “if they're spending time on things that isn't their expertise or they don't necessarily love doing then it starts to get more than I'd say maybe 20% of their day. I'd say that's probably a reasonably good trigger.” (Builders & Doers, September 2026; video at 3:35) The hardest thing a founder can admit is that they've become the bottleneck. You can't engineer your way out of that. It's a capacity problem and it's solved by hiring. So if you're the cleverest person in your company and also the busiest, take it as the sign to start building the team around you. (LinkedIn, July 2026)

If you are earlier than this and working out the first finance hire rather than the CFO, I broke that decision down separately.

The close breaking is the clearest signal of all

When the numbers stop arriving fast enough to act on, you have outgrown your finance setup. Rob Shore described walking into a business with three divisions that were not integrated, an ERP only one of them actually used, and books that took thirty days to close. “You are moving from businesses that would close their books thirty days after the month finished, and they have suddenly got to do it in five. And they have got to be able to forecast how the results are going to go in the future.” That gap, thirty days down to five, is the difference between finance that reports the past and finance that shapes the next decision.

There is a right order to fixing it, and it is not a shortcut. As Rob put it: “You do not jump to AI solutions. You go through these stages of getting your data in order, getting your controls in order and getting your systems in order.” A CFO who has done it before knows that sequence. It is a large part of what you are paying for.

A raise is a real trigger, and the work starts after it

A live or imminent raise is one of the strongest triggers for senior finance help, and raises now come round faster than founders plan for. Ben Watiwat is blunt about it: the old idea that you have two years of runway so you start raising at twelve months does not hold, because a raise takes longer and investors are pickier. At Immutable he was refinancing the bank every year and running a capital raise roughly every eighteen months while the business grew from 50 to 2,500 people.

The part founders miss is what happens after the money lands. “The moment you have raised a round, expectations reset to zero. Anything you did prior to that raise does not count.” And diligence is not a once-every-few-years event at a fast-growing business. Alexey Mitko, who built finance from scratch at Eucalyptus before it sold for $1.6 billion, told me they raised almost every six months in the early days, so “diligence was a thing you would do almost constantly.” When an investor asks for a metric mid-round and no one owns the model, you are reconstructing it under pressure. So if a raise is the trigger, get experienced help on the numbers before you go to market, fractional if the permanent seat is not ready yet, and plan for the permanent hire to be in the seat for the months after the money lands. That is when the model, the board and the investors all need one owner.

The stages, and what to hire at each one

Here is the ladder I walk founders through. The numbers are Australian high-growth ranges quoted as base, with superannuation on top at the rate the ATO sets, and they are guides, not gates. A capital-heavy fintech hits the CFO threshold earlier than a lean SaaS business on the same revenue.

First finance hire: usually late seed to Series A

This is a Head of Finance or a strong financial controller, not a CFO, and it is not a bookkeeper either. Your first finance person is the one who builds the infrastructure the business grows on: the reporting frameworks, the compliance structure, the systems that let you fundraise, acquire and scale without losing control. It is the hardest hire a founder makes, and not because good candidates are rare. It is because most founders do not come from finance, so they cannot assess what good looks like. They end up writing a job description on guesswork and asking an AI what a Head of Finance should cost.

One thing to get right at this stage: a Head of Finance is not two jobs in one. If the brief asks for strategic oversight and decision support and the month-end close and the payroll and the reconciliations, you have written two roles. Pair a Head of Finance with a bookkeeper or accounts assistant underneath them. They are too expensive a resource to have running AP.

I set out what each salary band buys, from a senior accountant with a controller title up to someone who has built the function before.

The fractional CFO stage: usually between the two

There is a gap between a business that needs more than a controller and one that can justify a full-time CFO salary. A fractional or interim CFO fills it well: senior judgement two or three days a week, often through a raise, without committing to the full-time hire before you are ready. The trap is staying fractional after the business has outgrown it: once finance is the bottleneck on hiring, board reporting and capital planning, the arrangement has become a liability.

I went through when a fractional CFO works, when it does not, and what it should cost.

First CFO: Series A or B, roughly 50+ staff, $10m+ ARR

This is the point where finance needs to lead, not report. A raise is live or coming, the board wants a forward view, and the founder can no longer be the person who owns the model. This is also where the difference between two CFOs on paper becomes real money. I recently mapped the market for a scale-up and had one candidate at $260k with eighteen months as a CFO, and another at $350k with thirteen years. The $350k CFO has seen three downturns, led four capital raises and survived two failed system implementations. They know what breaks before it breaks. Sometimes you want the hungry $260k hire who will grow with you, and sometimes you need the $350k hire who will not make expensive mistakes. The point is to know which one your next stage needs before you start.

A useful sanity check: by the time the first CFO lands, the business usually already has a bookkeeper, an assistant accountant and an FC or Head of Finance in place, sometimes with a fractional CFO alongside them. The Head of Finance or FC is typically the first operational finance hire, and the full-time CFO arrives on top of that structure at Series A or B, not instead of it.^[1] If none of that exists yet, you are probably a stage earlier than you think.

Business model moves that threshold more than most founders expect. A capital-intensive fintech, especially in non-bank lending or payments, needs a finance leader around Seed or Series A, because finance is integral to the product itself. Deep tech carries heavy inventory, R&D and grants while the product can be seven or more years away, so a $30 to $50 million Seed round can justify a CFO on its own. A single-jurisdiction SaaS business sits at the other end: a financial controller inside and a fractional CFO outside can carry it a long way.

Whatever the stage, hire for where the role needs to be, not for the problem in front of you. The now in a growing business is short-lived, and a hire scoped only to today’s mess is outgrown before they finish probation. Give the person enough scope to build the role themselves as the business changes around them. The salary band moves with the business too. Budget for the role the growth creates, not the role you are advertising.

Hiring a CFO too early is an expensive mistake

Founders worry about hiring late, and they should. But the early CFO hire is the one that surprises them on cost. A CFO with nothing strategic to do will build process the business does not need yet, or leave. Either way you have spent $300k of salary and a year of runway to learn you needed a Head of Finance and a good fractional. Wait for the signals in the table above to show up together, and you hire once, into a role that has real work in it.

Why the search looks nothing like a job ad

The best finance leaders are almost never on the market. The pool of people who have built and scaled a finance function from scratch in an Australian startup, and want to do it again, is small, and the best of them are not on Seek. They get approached directly, through networks and people who know the market, so if you are running an advert the candidates you actually want are gone before you are ready to call.

It also matters what those people are choosing on. When we polled the Story network for our Q3 2026 State of the Market report, the most attractive founder trait for a CFO was a clear vision at 46.9%, followed by trusting the team at 32.7%. Only 7.1% cared whether the founder was financially literate. You do not need to out-finance your finance hire; bring clarity of direction and the willingness to let them own the function, because that is what the best of them are choosing you for.^[2]

That is what a mapped, relationship-led search is for. On my CFO searches it averages about three weeks from the brief meeting to a signed contract, through three stages: a first conversation, a case study built on a real finance problem in the business, and a coffee. That does not happen from a job board. It happens when the reach and the trust are already there.

If you want the detail on how a retained finance search runs and what to ask before you brief one, I wrote that up.

For the traits that separate a good CFO from a great one, see what makes a great CFO.

This is the founder side of the question. If you are the candidate weighing up whether the CFO seat is your next move, I wrote that up separately.

Common questions

These guides set out how we see it, drawn from the searches we run and the finance leaders we work with. They are general information about the market, not financial, accounting or legal advice, and they are no substitute for advice on your own circumstances.