Client:
Role:
The Brief
To find a Board level Chief Financial Officer for a late series Fintech who were about to undergo significant growth both locally and internationally. This business had never had a CFO before, and needed an ‘extraverted’ CFO who could perform tasks from fundraising, change and transformation, investor relations and supporting the CEO as a right hand to significantly grow a business through pre and post M&A activities.
Challenge
This business was looking for a broad experienced and dynamic CFO who had played a role at board level previously and could ‘think outside of the box’. Moreover, the geographic area of the search was a small and very tight knit market where ‘everyone knew everyone’, including having pre conceived ideas about the business’s culture.
Approach
As we always do, we worked with the client to create a thorough target site list by covering all relevant industry areas including direct competitors as well as companies that were Private Equity backed and had scaled significantly via M&A in recent years. We then identified the ‘lateral mover’ and ‘step up’ candidates in those businesses and rigorously approached these candidates in order to create a diverse longlist.
Result
Within just 4 weeks, we had a longlist of 8 candidates who were very relevant and possessed the right gravitas needed for the position and business. After spending some time presenting these candidates to the Group CEO, he could not decide on how to reduce this longlist to a shortlist as he liked each candidate in each way, therefore informed us that he wanted to meet every single candidate. At the end of the rigorous interview process we had a first choice candidate and three candidates in the running who were a very close second. The CEO was extremely happy with the candidate that was secured as this candidate matched every professional criteria, fit in culturally and was able to impress a very diverse set of board of directors who all brought very different and thought provoking ideas of what a CFO should look like to them.
