Why companies often won't consider controllers when choosing their next finance chiefs.
Marie Leone, CFO.com | US
March 19, 2007
Controllers couldn't make all the numbers work out for them this time. New research shows that as of April 2006, the number of Fortune 500 CFOs hired from outside of their new companies total 190. While 58 percent were plucked from the ranks of existing corporate or divisional CFOs, a paltry 4 percent were sitting controllers.
That's because controllers are rarely viewed as CFO material outside their own companies, according to research was released on Monday by executive search firm Korn Ferry International at the CFO Rising conference in Orlando. Rounding out the survey of external CFO hires, 17 percent of big company finance chiefs were chief executive officers and general managers immediately before being named to the CFO...
News & Articles
Part-time CFOs For Hire: A New Venture Connection
Seasoned liaisons available. For any startup board seeking money, expertise, and a firm hand at the helm, a new idea has appealing momentum: Enlist the services of one of a growing corps of part-time CFO consultants. Most offer at least 20 years of financial and accounting experience. They have worked their way up the ladder, rising through the ranks, experiencing mergers and IPOs, losing jobs, and watching industries rise and fall. They are the seasoned professionals who allow the bright-eyed innovators to run a company while they act as a liaison between their entrepreneurial boss and additional funding. Business has never been better for part-time CFO consultants, thanks to the tidal wave of venture capital ($35.6 billion in 1999), pouring into startup firms.
An important reality check. The part-time CFO provides much needed financial skills such...
Can A Part-Time CFO Upgrade Your Firm’s Finances?
Seasoned liaisons available. For any startup board seeking money, expertise, and a firm hand at the helm, a new idea has appealing momentum: Enlist the services of one of a growing corps of part-time CFO consultants. Most offer at least 20 years of financial and accounting experience. They have worked their way up the ladder, rising through the ranks, experiencing mergers and IPOs, losing jobs, and watching industries rise and fall. They are the seasoned professionals who allow the bright-eyed innovators to run a company while they act as a liaison between their entrepreneurial boss and additional funding. Business has never been better for part-time CFO consultants, thanks to the tidal wave of venture capital ($35.6 billion in 1999), pouring into startup firms.
An important reality check. The part-time CFO provides much needed financial skills such...
Think you can’t afford to bring on a CFO? No problem: Rent one instead.
Arni Halling always considered himself pretty handy with numbers. So in 1998, when his stepdaughter Christine Dimmick asked him to oversee finances at her New York City home products start-up, Good Home Co., Halling, a marketing consultant and former director of consumer promotions for Disney, figured he was up to the job. He certainly had what it took to create a basic accounting and bookkeeping system and get Good Home set up on QuickBooks. And for a few years, that was enough. Selling its line of home cleaning and laundry products through retailers such as Nordstrom and Restoration Hardware, Good Home's sales grew steadily, reaching $2.1 million in 2001.
Then, in September 2002, Dimmick appeared on QVC, the cable shopping network. In one night, she sold some $300,000 worth of merchandise, more than the company had...
Handing Off Finance
Small and midsize companies finally benefit from finance process outsourcing.
Kris Frieswick, CFO Magazine
September 01, 2000
Re'Nu Office Systems may seem an unlikely candidate for financial business process (BP) outsourcing. After all, the Santa Fe Springs, California-based firm generated only $10 million in sales last year and employed a finance staff of five — hardly the profile of a traditional outsourcing client, one that usually signs a large, multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract.
Still, the company, which refurbishes and manufactures office panel systems (the walls that make up office cubicles) needed finance support. Before Re'Nu was acquired in February 1999 by $125 million office-workstation and equipment-marketing firm Business Resource Group, president Leigh Cook says, "We just couldn't provide our new parent with all the types of information that it wanted as fast as it wanted with the...
CFO Magazine
START ME UP
Young companies look to part-time CFOs to ignite their finances.
George Donnelly, CFO Magazine
June Issue 2000 : Article
In a rented suite on 23rd Street in New York's Silicon Alley, acting CFO Howard Friedensohn is preparing an investor pitch for WebAppointments.com. The start-up, the brainchild of two doctors and an Internet veteran who saw the potential of using the Web to transform professional appointment-making into a virtual product, has raised about $1 million in private funding so far. Now it's looking for its next $2 million to $3 million before testing the product in Manhattan.
Friedensohn is the numbers guy. But since accepting the company as a client in May 1999, he's also had a hand in shaping and reshaping WebAppointments's business model. Originally, for example, WebAppointments had planned to target the frenetic Manhattan restaurant market,...
Hire Finance
At what point in your company's growth are your bookkeeper and controller out of their league? A look at choosing the right time to hire a CFO, where to find one, and how much you should pay.
From: Inc. Magazine, Jan 1998 | By: Jill Andresky Fraser
Business 101
When should you bring in a CFO? If growth is in your plans, you'll need to time your hire right
At first glance, it looks as if Matthew de Ganon, the vice-chairman and president of K2 Design Inc., in New York City, has little to complain about financially. De Ganon's $4.4-million company, founded in 1993 as a graphic-design firm, began to grow rapidly once it became a Web-site developer. The company attracted attention from venture capitalists and other prospective investors, but K2's founders rejected those investors' restrictive terms....