Consulting Firm Hires Interim CFO to Strategically Enhance Financial Performance

The Client 

A provider of personalized technology solutions to accelerate business growth

This proven technology and consulting partner with nearly 500 technology and business consultants and offices on three continents empowers organizations to unlock the power of enterprise data, uncover new opportunities and create innovative, operational cultures that help companies thrive. They have five core practice areas: Salesforce, data analytics, digital experience, engineering, and automation.

The Situation

A Finance Leader to Optimize Financial Performance and Forecasting

As the company looked to set itself for the next growth stage, it recognized the need for a finance leader to provide executive management and the broader finance team with advice on the financial implications of business activities and recommendations to strategically enhance financial performance and business opportunities. 

Onboarding an Interim CFO was identified as the best approach to address this need quickly. However, the CEO of the consulting firm knew all too well that traditional approaches to leverage an executive search or staffing firm would take too long while adding significant overheads. 

They recognized the need for a proven yet creative approach to finding an interim finance leader.

The Solution

Onboarding an Interim CFO On-Demand

After some initial research, the CEO learned about Graphite’s on-demand talent acquisition model that can help companies find interim leaders within 13.5 days. 

The CEO met with their dedicated account manager and shared their expectations around the specific skills they were looking to onboard, expectations around work hours, the duration of the project, and their preference to have the person work in their Chicago office. 

The account manager filtered through Graphite’s network of over 3,100 independent finance experts to shortlist 23 experts that could be the closest fit for the consulting firms’ needs. This was followed by 1-1 assessments of the top 7 candidates. 

After completing the assessment, within 48 hours, the account manager presented the CEO with a curated list of 3 finance leaders who would meet the consulting firm's needs. 

The CEO decided to begin evaluations with two of the proposed experts by leveraging Graphite’s in-app chat and meeting room capabilities. 

After a few conversations with additional executive leadership team members in the following days, the CEO decided to hire one of the experts as their interim CFO. The entire process, from posting the project to getting work started, took 16 days.

The expert brought over 20 years of progressive experience working as part of and leading finance teams at sized companies.

The Results: 

The Interim CFO Builds Robust Financial Reporting Processes Across the Company’s Global Operations

The interim CFO they hired through Graphite took over responsibility for staff, financial forecasting, budgets, risk management, and business plan development quickly after getting started. Over the next two months, she built effective processes to help consolidate financial reports across the company’s global operations in the US, UK, and India.

Having seen the results, the company decided to hire the expert as their permanent CFO 3 months into the project.