When to Hire a Fractional CFO

Hiring a full-time CFO when you don’t need one is an expensive mistake. The average salary for a permanent CFO sits at £150,000+ per year and that’s before bonuses, benefits, and overheads. For many SMEs, that’s simply not viable.

That’s where a fractional CFO comes in. Sometimes called a part-time or portfolio CFO, this is a senior finance leader who works with your business on a flexible basis. Instead of being locked into a costly full-time hire, you get access to the same level of expertise for the hours, projects, or growth stages that actually demand it.

A fractional CFO can help you:

• Shape long-term strategy with clear financial insight

• Build scalable processes before growth kicks in

• Provide board-level confidence to investors and lenders

• Step in during key transitions — from funding rounds to expansion

In short, you get the same expertise at a fraction of the cost. But when is the right time to bring one on board? We recently asked CFOs on social media that exact question.

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Pre-scaling

Almost half of CFOs agree that the smartest time to bring in support is before growth kicks in. This is the stage where your business is stable, you’re generating revenue, and you know opportunities are on the horizon but you haven’t yet accelerated into a scaling phase.

Laying the financial groundwork early means you avoid the common traps SMEs fall into when growth arrives: stretched cash flow, poor visibility on margins, and systems that buckle under pressure. By introducing a fractional CFO at this point, you gain the confidence that your processes and structures won’t just keep up with growth, but actively enable it.

At this stage, a fractional CFO can:

• Build robust financial models to test different scenarios

• Ensure your reporting systems are not just accurate, but also investor-ready and scalable

• Identify weaknesses in your operations or cash flow before they snowball

A well-prepared SME will scale faster, raise investment more successfully, and withstand growing pains better than one that has left financial strategy as an afterthought.

Rapid growth

Growth brings complexity. Cash flow tightens, headcount increases, and strategic decisions come thick and fast. 42% of CFOs recommend hiring during this stage because growth can quickly expose weak financial foundations. What worked when you were a lean, nimble operation may no longer cut it. Without clear financial insight, it becomes all too easy to chase the wrong opportunities or allow profitability to slip through the cracks.

A fractional CFO during rapid growth can:

• Provide clarity on which opportunities are worth pursuing and which should be parked

• Manage investor relations, fundraising rounds, and banking relationships with authority

• Keep a tight grip on working capital so growth doesn’t outpace your cash reserves

With their input, leaders can focus on making confident, informed decisions, rather than relying on gut instinct alone. It’s the difference between riding the growth wave with stability — or being pulled under by a lack of visibility.

Post-growth stabilisation

A small minority of CFOs said the best time is after growth has slowed. Here, the challenge is not how fast you can grow, but how efficiently you can operate. Costs, margins, and processes take centre stage. For many SMEs, this is the point at which they realise they could have extracted more value from their earlier growth if financial oversight had been stronger from the start.

A fractional CFO can:

• Streamline costs and improve margins

• Benchmark performance against industry standards

• Refocus strategy to ensure long-term sustainability

While valuable, bringing in a CFO at this point can sometimes feel like playing catch-up. The lesson from other SMEs is clear: financial leadership is most powerful when used to enable growth, not just optimise it afterwards.

Crisis points 

Only 9% of CFOs believe that a crisis is the “right” time to bring in expertise — and for good reason. By the time you’re in crisis, options are limited, and decisions are often reactive rather than strategic.

If you’re already facing cash flow shortages, investor pressure, or spiralling costs, a fractional CFO can certainly step in to steady the ship. They can renegotiate terms, rebuild forecasting, and identify where immediate cuts need to be made. But the reality is that many of these steps could have been avoided altogether with earlier intervention.

The real danger of waiting until crisis point is that you’re no longer steering the business on your own terms. Instead, you’re making short-term survival decisions. A fractional CFO can help navigate that situation, but ideally, they would have been engaged long before the storm arrived.

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Why fractional makes sense

If your CFO would spend most of their time on finance admin, you’re overpaying. If you only need high-level strategy a few hours a week, you’re overpaying. If your financial structures aren’t complex yet, you’re overpaying.

A fractional CFO solves these problems by giving you exactly what you need, when you need it. You gain the benefit of a highly experienced financial leader, one who has often worked across multiple industries and scaling journeys, without carrying the full-time cost.

For SMEs, that balance is game-changing. It gives you the confidence to scale, the insight to impress investors, and the control to keep growth sustainable. And it does so without draining cash that could otherwise fuel innovation, hiring, or expansion.

Hire a fractional CFO with The Finance People

The best time to hire a fractional CFO is usually earlier than you think. Whether it’s building the systems before scaling, navigating the complexities of rapid growth, or tightening operations after expansion, having the right financial leadership in place is one of the smartest moves an SME can make.

Waiting until a crisis rarely pays off. By then, your options are narrower, and the cost of mistakes already made can be significant. Instead, the businesses that thrive are those that see financial strategy not as a safety net, but as a growth enabler.

Want to see how this works in practice? Explore our case studies to discover how a fractional CFO has helped SMEs like yours scale with clarity and confidence.