Chief Financial Officer of a Private Equity Portfolio Company
A CFO appointment at a private equity-owned consumer business, completed in nine weeks against an exit-bound timeline that required a specific kind of finance leader for a specific moment.
- Duration
- 9 weeks
- Completed
- November 2025
- Lead Partner
- Isabella Rosenthal
The brief
A private equity-owned consumer business in year four of its hold period engaged us to appoint a new Chief Financial Officer. The previous incumbent had been the operating partner’s preferred CFO from year one and had run the early-cycle integration and operational discipline with great effect. The new role was different — a year, perhaps eighteen months, from sale process, with the financial story that would matter for buyer diligence still to be properly written.
The brief was tightly drawn. A genuine exit-experienced CFO from a comparable business, ideally one who had run buy-side diligence themselves and therefore understood what was about to be done to them. The kind of CFO who can build a finance organisation that survives the question “show us your underlying numbers.”
The work
We took nine weeks. The candidate pool for genuine exit-experienced consumer CFOs at this size is small — perhaps thirty people in the UK at any moment — and we know most of them. The structured part of the work was less about finding candidates than about understanding which were authentically available and which were finishing their own hold cycles.
We presented a shortlist of five at week six. The selected candidate had run the CFO function at a comparable business through both a refinancing and a successful sale, and had — usefully — twice declined approaches from other portfolio companies in the same year, which clarified what would be required to recruit her.
The outcome
The new CFO has been in role for six months. The first investor diligence work has been completed. The finance team has been substantially strengthened. The exit process, when it begins, will be run by someone who understands what is being asked of her.
Why it matters
Functional leadership search at the senior end of private equity is unforgiving in its specificity. The candidate pool is small, the timing is exact, and the brief is rarely as clear as the operating partner first believes. The work is to clarify it before the search begins, and to know the market well enough to move with confidence once it does.