A new CFO can redesign a finance team in 30 days when the mandate is clear, the diagnosis is honest, and the board backs early decisions rather than second-guessing them. In this case, a £150m PE-backed manufacturer did exactly that, and the speed came from preparation, not recklessness.
What follows is an anonymised account of a hire we placed and the first month that followed. Names and identifying details have been changed, but the mechanics are real.
What was the situation the new CFO walked into?
The business made specialist industrial components across three UK sites, with roughly £150m of revenue and a mid-market private equity owner two years into the hold.
The previous FD had grown up with the company. Loyal, well liked, and completely stretched. Reporting arrived late, the monthly board pack ran to forty pages of history with almost no forward view, and nobody could give a confident answer on gross margin by product line.
The PE house had lost patience. A refinancing was eighteen months out, and the numbers underneath the equity story were not trusted. They wanted a genuine CFO, not a bigger bookkeeper.
Why did the board move to a full redesign rather than a tidy-up?
The temptation in these situations is to add one clever hire and hope the rest settles. That rarely works.
The real problem was structural. The team had twelve people organised around tasks that made sense a decade earlier. There was deep transactional cover and almost no analytical firepower. Two capable individuals were doing manual work that a system should have handled, while nobody owned commercial finance at all.
The board understood that adding an FP&A analyst on top of a broken shape would just create another bottleneck. So the brief we agreed was explicit. Hire a CFO who could diagnose the function and reshape it, and give that person air cover to act quickly.
How did the CFO use the first 30 days?
The person we placed had done this before, twice, in manufacturing and distribution. That mattered. Redesign speed comes from pattern recognition, not bravado.
Week one was listening. The CFO met every member of the finance team one to one, sat in on a month-end, and walked all three sites. No decisions, just evidence. By day seven there was a clear map of who was strong, who was misplaced, and where the process was leaking time.
Week two was the diagnosis. The CFO presented a single page to the board. Current shape, target shape, and the gap. Three roles were missing entirely. A financial controller who could actually own the close, a commercial finance lead to sit with operations, and a systems-literate management accountant to kill the manual work.
Week three was the people decisions. Two of the existing team were promoted into roles that suited them far better than the ones they held. One senior person was managed out, respectfully and quickly, because the gap between the role and the requirement was too wide to bridge. Two transactional roles were consolidated as automation was scheduled.
Week four was recruitment and communication. The new roles went to brief with us, the team heard the plan directly from the CFO rather than through rumour, and the first board pack under the new structure was drafted.
What made the redesign stick?
Three things, and none of them were luck.
First, the CFO promoted before hiring externally. Elevating two internal people early bought trust and signalled that this was a redesign, not a purge. It also meant institutional knowledge stayed in the building.
Second, every change was justified against the refinancing. When a decision was framed as "this is what a lender will expect to see," resistance fell away. People will accept hard change when the reason is concrete.
Third, the board held its nerve. There was a difficult moment when the departing senior person had allies, and the temptation to slow down was real. The chair backed the CFO. Speed only works when the mandate is not withdrawn at the first sign of friction.
What did it cost, and what did it deliver?
The redesign was broadly cost-neutral within the year. Two transactional roles came out as automation went in, and that funded the commercial finance hire. This is common and worth stating plainly. A better shape is often not a bigger budget.
By month four the board pack led with a forward view and margin by product line. By month six the refinancing preparation was ahead of schedule rather than a scramble. The equity story had numbers underneath it that people believed.
What is the lesson for CEOs and PE operating partners?
The lesson is not "move fast for its own sake." It is that a strong CFO earns the right to move fast by diagnosing honestly in the first two weeks, and a board earns the result by not flinching in weeks three and four.
If your finance function has grown by accretion rather than design, the fix is usually the shape, not one more hire. And the person you appoint to fix it should have redesigned a team before, because the first attempt is where the expensive mistakes live.
This is the kind of mandate we handle at Harper May, and the candidates who can do it well are a specific, findable group. If you are building out the wider team behind that CFO, our current finance leadership roles show the shapes that tend to work.
Common questions
Is 30 days realistic for redesigning a finance team?
For an experienced CFO with a clear mandate, yes, for the plan and the first decisions. Full delivery takes longer, but the direction should be set and communicated inside the first month.
Should you promote internally or hire externally when restructuring?
Usually both. Promote strong internal people early to protect knowledge and trust, then hire externally for the genuine capability gaps. Doing only one of these tends to fail.
