Before You Hire Another Finance Person, Read This

Your business is growing. Things feel messy. Sound familiar?

Perhaps reports are constantly late, cash flow feels like a mystery, your bookkeeper is never doing enough, or you’re tired of being the person who has to flounder when an unexpected surprise fire errupts (which happens way too often).

To you, the obvious answer seems to be: “I need to hire someone.”

But first, take a breath, know that you can overcome this challenge, and ask yourself this one thing instead:

“Do I actually know what problem is that I need to hire this person to solve?”

Your success hinges on understanding that more help ≠ an automatic fix.

There are 5 questions to ask yourself before hiring.

1. What is actually breaking? (Pain point)

2. What is the source of the problem? (People, systems, or processes)

3. What specifically do I need help with? (Someone to advise, implement, or get in the daily weeds)

4. What would success look like in 90 days? (Results help define good alignment)

5. What do I still need to understand? (Not the nuances of accounting, but what are the right questions to ask and places to look)

Here’s what you may need instead of more help:

1) The RIGHT help that aligns with the pain point you are trying to alleviate.

Ok, so what kind of sorcery is needed to ensure alignment magically happens? Do not - I repeat - do not, go out there and simply ask for help finding “a bookkeeper” or “a CFO” or “a CPA.” You will hire someone with that title, but you can also end up with a completely different skill set than what you really need.

Hire for the role. Not the title.

Examples:

• Title - bookkeeper

• Role - accounting data input, including AP and AR, paying approved bills, and reconciling bank statements

• Why this matters: Many founders expect forward-looking insights from their bookkeeper and are often frustrated by a bookkeeper’s predominantly backward-looking results. Traditionally, that IS the role of a bookkeeper, and other roles can often be better suited for forecasting, projecting, and analyzing.

• Title - CFO

• Role - fractional CFO experienced in seed fundraising preparedness and execution

• Why this matters: The term “CFO” has been used more loosely in recent years. You don’t want to end up paying a CFO pricetag for a bookkeeper! Ensure you vet experience and competency for higher-stakes roles and the specific results you are looking to achieve.

• Title - CPA

• Role - multi-state and federal income tax preparer, including quarterly tax estimate calculations

• Why this matters: CPA is a license, not a role. A CPA can prepare taxes, but many do not. A tax preparer can be a CPA, or they can also be an EA (enrolled agent).

2) Better systems that support you and your team to work through the pain point effectively.

This one may seem obvious, but this is actually a common founder blind spot. You might have a tech stack that appears to be working efficiently, but have you stepped back to view the end-to-end processes that flow through each tech piece? Are you aware of the hidden gaps or redundancies that could still be occurring?

My guess is, you probably have not done this. It’s more of a set-it-and-forget kind of deal. It fixed a pain point, so you’re trusting that system to do what it was intended to do. Until it creates another pain point that wasn’t visible during the trial period, and now it’s creating an entirely new set of headaches to overcome… again.

This can be especially true if we face shiny object syndrome, which I can admit to being a victim of myself! The more your business grows, the more people you interact with and rely on, the more cumbersome it will be to unwind a system that actually doesn’t suit your needs once you’ve dived into it completely.

Most of the little, “Surprise! We missed this and we actually need something else” moments come well after implementation, once you’ve invested precious time and resources, once it’s live in your real day-to-day operations.

Go heavy on the due diligence for critical opertional systems. Test out every possible scenario. Try to find potential loopholes, hang-ups, and errors. Figure out how to mitigate them, and if you can’t, ask yourself whether those pain points will break the process as you scale or if you need to find a better solution now.

3) Improve processes that have become outdated, outgrown, unreliable, or simply no longer align with current business needs.

Even if you have the right people, and use better systems, inefficient processes will still put a damper on your growth potential. Here’s some examples:

• You hire a bookkeeper, but never set expectations for deadlines or deliverables

• That pricey CFO/advisor can’t produce reliable forecasting because the books aren’t up-to-date

• You bring on an EA or VA to take some of your mental load, but they can’t onboard fast enough because you never documented anything

• You hire a controller, but they can’t utilize any time-saving integrations because you won’t budge on the accounting software you’ve been with for a decade

• Your sales team, delivery team, and finance team all work from different systems, and the data redundancy is making your team flounder

You continue hiring more people and adding more tech solutions in a constant game of catch-up, but all along, the only thing you needed was to revamp your processes. It’s highly likely that simply making a small tweak with the resources already in place will yield the results you need.

Hiring is not the problem. Hiring without clarity is.

You may absolutely need to hire another finance person. But before you pull that trigger, make sure you know what role they are filling, what problem they are solving, and what successful results should look like.

Because you can outsource the work, but you can’t outsource your awareness and lead with confidence.

If you’re not sure what your next hiring move should be, The Confident Ledger™ Community is the perfect place to ask me about it.