Is the business that’s trying to hire you ready for a CFO?

Organizations can’t track their finances on vibes alone (unless they’re Enron—and you’ll recall how that worked out). The same goes for deciding when it’s time to hire their first chief of finance.

It’s a tantalizing prospect: A startup is growing, and it’s in need of its first CFO to take control of its finances. But some companies give out the CFO title “too easily” without thinking through what they really need from a finance leader, according to Ash Athawale, SVP of Robert Half’s executive search practice. Before jumping at such an opportunity, CFOs need to “make sure the company is ready for you,” he said.

Athawale also advised that founders ask themselves, “Where are we at this stage?” before hiring a CFO. Does the role they need to fill align with the skill set of a CFO, or are they actually seeking a “glorified controller or an accounting manager?”

The key difference, according to Athawale, is if the startup needs someone to track the current state of its finances or if they need a finance leader who’s more forward-looking. When a client tells him they “‘need to start looking at planning the future,’ that is a good sign.”

Here for the long haul. Truck Parking Club, a startup that connects truck drivers with parking spaces (think Airbnb, but for 18-wheelers), announced in early May that it hired Victor Westerlund as its first CFO.

Evan Shelley, founder and CEO of Truck Parking Club, told us he’d been working with a fractional CFO for about a year before hiring Westerlund. “Our finances were becoming more complex, and in order to get a handle on them, we needed someone full time,” Shelley told us.

The company, which was founded in 2022 and employs about 40 people, recently passed 5,000 parking locations across the US. It plans to reach 10,000-plus locations and achieve between $15 million and $20 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of the year, he added.

Westerlund joins Truck Parking Club from Stax Payments, where he was VP of finance and “helped build the company’s financial operations from the ground up,” according to a news release. Westerlund said he was intrigued by Truck Parking Club’s business plan and the team of experts Shelley assembled.

He intends to build up the finance function without being a roadblock on Truck Parking Club’s route to growth. His first weeks were about learning the current processes and identifying any gaps “in order to set ourselves up for scale.”

“I think some of the problems that are smaller headaches today that we can deal with become massive migraines a couple of years down the road,” he said. “[I’m] coming in at a good point where you can identify those little gaps now, fix them, and then two years later we’ll be very thankful that we’ve done it.”

Westerlund said one of his priorities is reorganizing Truck Parking Club’s data collection—which includes bookings, trucker members, and properties—to build client data cubes or track retention metrics.

“We have a lot of that in place today, but I think there’s ways to look at it that are the norm for finance professionals, if it’s being locked down [and] reconciled to the income statement; everything’s ticked and tied,” he said. “I’m working with the CTO on building that infrastructure out.”

Zoom out. Athawale said firms like his sometimes clash with small to midsize companies over whether they actually need a CFO. One solution, he said, is to bring in an interim CFO who can then identify how close the client is to needing someone full time. Sometimes, the interim finance chief will discover the company is still a couple years away from needing someone full time.

Some organizations are also too readily handing out the CFO title, yet aren’t ready to give their candidate all the responsibilities, like signing checks, and appropriate compensation, such as company equity, he said.

“A CFO becomes critical when [an organization] reaches a growth inflection point,” Athawale said. “You’re at that stage, and [you say], OK, we need strategy, we need a bigger team, we need financial planning and analysis, and we need investor relations, and we need one person who can manage all of that. Then, you need a CFO.”