Most business owners ask this question for the first time somewhere between $2M and $10M in revenue.
The team has grown. The numbers have grown. The decisions have grown with them. And somewhere along the way, the gap between what your accountant tells you in May about last financial year and what you actually need to call on this Tuesday has turned into a real cost.
So you start looking, and the titles all blur into each other: CFO, fractional CFO, virtual CFO, advisory accountant. The job descriptions overlap. The price points don't. And the outcomes vary more than most owners realise.
Here's how to think about it.
The signal you actually need one
It's rarely a revenue number. Revenue is a lazy proxy that tells you the business is bigger, not that the financial side of it is straining.
The real signal is the moment the numbers start running you instead of the other way around. You feel it as:
- Cash being tighter than it should be in months you thought were strong
- Decisions made on instinct because the data shows up too late
- Big calls on headcount, pricing or capex sitting unmade because no one has modelled the impact
- A nagging feeling, underneath it all, that you're flying without instruments
If two or more of those are true, the financial side of your business has moved past the setup that got you here. That's the trigger, not the line at the top of the P&L.
What a CFO actually does
A CFO is not a senior accountant. The work is structurally different.
An accountant tells you what happened. A bookkeeper records what happened. A CFO tells you what's likely to happen next and what to do about it.
In practice, that includes:
- A rolling forecast that connects sales, margin, capacity and cash
- Pricing and margin work that protects profit as revenue grows
- A view on capital structure so you can fund growth without giving away the business
- A reporting cadence the leadership team can actually use
- Pressure-testing the big calls before they get made, not after
It's a thinking partner role with the numbers as the lens. The output is better decisions, faster.
Full-time CFO: when it's right
A full-time CFO makes sense when the role can genuinely keep a sharp operator busy five days a week. That's usually a business doing well north of $20M, with enough going on to keep that seat fully loaded.
Below that threshold, full-time can be a mismatch. You either underpay and end up with someone the role is too large for, or you pay properly and the role isn't there to fill. Either way, you've bought capacity you can't use.
Fractional CFO: the middle ground
Most $1M to $20M businesses land here, and rightly so.
A fractional CFO works with you on a regular cadence, usually one to four days a month. Embedded enough to know the business, not carrying it on their shoulders. The right one brings senior-grade thinking without the senior-grade salary.
In practice it looks like:
- Monthly reporting and forecast review with the leadership team
- A structural plan that updates as the business moves
- Regular calls for the decisions that matter: pricing, hiring, capex, debt, deals
- Coaching for the in-house finance person or bookkeeper so the day-to-day runs cleanly
It works because most owners at this stage don't need a CFO every day. They need a CFO for the decisions that matter, and a clean operating rhythm for everything else.
The third option most owners miss
Sometimes you don't need a CFO title at all. You need an advisory firm that works the way a CFO would, with a team behind it.
That's the model BJT runs. The numbers get owned, the forecast gets built, the decisions get pressure-tested, and the compliance still gets handled by people who know your business. One relationship covers the ground that would otherwise sit across a bookkeeper, an accountant and a fractional CFO.
For a lot of owners, that's the simpler answer.
How to choose
Three questions worth pressure-testing before you commit to anything:
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Is this full-time work, or peak-and-trough work? If you can see peaks coming (a raise, a sale, a restructure) with quieter stretches between them, fractional or advisory will serve you better than a hire who sits idle in the gaps.
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Do you want a hire, or a relationship? A hire sits inside the business, on your payroll, with all the management that comes with that. A relationship sits beside it, with outside-eyes accountability and the flexibility to scale up or down as things change.
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Where's the bottleneck right now? If it's data and rhythm, an advisory model fixes it fast. If it's a transaction with a hard deadline, a fractional CFO with deal experience earns their keep. If it's the financial leadership of a business already past $20M, you probably want to hire.
Most owners I work with land on relationship over hire, and stay there for years. The work compounds. The trust compounds. The numbers start informing decisions instead of just reporting them.
A starting point
If you're sitting in this question right now, you're already past the point where the answer is "leave it for another year."
A good first move is a financial diagnostic: two to three weeks of work, end to end, that tells you exactly where the business stands and what the next twelve months should look like. Whether you go full-time CFO, fractional or advisory after that is a much easier call once the picture is in front of you.
For the companion piece on running the numbers properly day-to-day, see Know Your Numbers.
