As a start-up, making your first finance hire is a major step towards long-term growth and profitability. It’s an exciting time for your business - but it can also be a confusing one.

Let’s run through the basics of making your first finance hire, and explain how you can secure the right talent at the right time.

When should you make your first finance hire?

Start-ups regularly outsource their finance functions during the early stages, which makes sense. Since growing businesses are usually smaller outfits with low revenue, there isn’t as much support needed from a finance perspective. The main goal at this point is to raise money or boost revenue, and external consultants can offer guidance here.

Once a seed or pre-seed round is raised, a portfolio CFO/Head of Finance is often the preferred option - this will be someone who can spend one/two days a week with your business in-house to support further fundraising, financial modelling, and process implementation.

However, once you’ve reached late-seed/Series A funding, this is where a full-time finance hire will become increasingly important.

What type of finance hire will you need?

The ‘right’ finance hire for your business will vary depending on your needs. For example, some businesses will require senior support (i.e. a CFO) fairly quickly, such as FinTechs dealing with the FCA or capital-intensive companies facing aggressive fundraising targets.

In saying that, most businesses can continue to leverage portfolio CFO services and bring in a Financial Controller/Finance Manager to streamline operations, set up robust processes, and create a well-oiled finance function.

Either this person will gradually take on additional responsibilities until they’re able to own commercial finance/FP&A, or a more senior full-time Finance Director/CFO will be recruited to drive commercial growth and take your company forward.

Below is a snippet of a Finance Organisational Chart we use here at Harmonic. Here you'll find information including duties and salaries (based on data from over 44,000 candidate salaries). If you would like a copy, please drop an email to Jack at [email protected].