Can resilience be a strategy? 

Brex CFO survey data says it is now. Tariffs, AI, and global uncertainty have made adaptability the next competitive edge. 

CFOs are building for 10 scenarios at once and need tech that can keep up.

But 69% say their finance stacks are too complex to move fast, and many are actively adapting to make flexibility, automation, and speed their new KPIs.

Find out which strategies your peers are using to become more agile.

Download the survey results.

Just because a finance team is big doesn’t mean it’s mature. In fact, it’s often a sign the opposite is true.

In the first week of this series, I shared the story of my first BU CFO role. A $1B revenue division growing at speed. The finance operation was basic, held together by thirty people scattered across multiple sites.

When I started explaining what I wanted to change, I didn’t get much pushback. Most of the team gave off a “phew… about time” kind of energy.

“Great, they’re bought in,” I thought.

But then came the problem. No one could execute to the standard I expected. I asked for a forecast model, and what came back was fine, maybe a six out of ten.

Same with month-end. I wanted to accelerate the close, but there was no one with the capability to make that happen, despite the willingness.

When I pushed back, they said they didn’t have time to do anything better. Probably true, but it didn’t take long to see it was a crutch.

Meanwhile, I noticed everyone could cover everyone else’s role, holiday cover, ad hoc swaps, that kind of thing. Sounds nice in theory.

But that was the problem. What I really had was an army of capable generalists. People who could do a bit of everything, but nothing at the level we needed. No one was a nine out of ten at anything.

I didn’t need a forecaster who could also file tax returns. I didn’t need a treasury manager who could step in for a site controller. I needed people who were exceptional at one or two things, not average at ten.

That’s when I knew a lot of my people were going to need to change. Many were good, loyal operators, but they didn’t have what it would take to build real FP&A, cut the close by five days, or implement a new ERP.

And they were never going to get there.

The people muscle I needed now was a completely different design from the one that had worked for the past decade.

Welcome to part three of this five-week series on scaling a finance function.

This week, we’ll move one step further up the maturity curve to Stage 3 “Specialized.” That takes us from a team of generalist finance pros to a team of specialized sub-functions: reporting, FP&A, treasury, and more.

At this stage, we move beyond the Minimum Viable Finance Function (MVFF) and towards something that looks like a fully formed finance team.

Instead of a small group of generalists covering broad patches, finance now begins to divide by domain. Specialists start to take ownership of specific areas such as reporting, FP&A, treasury, and systems, each with clearer accountability and focus.

It’s a bigger engine, so picking the right moment to upgrade and the right order is crucial.

By now, you’ll typically have a full-time finance leader building out a team of specialists.

Instead of three triathletes who can do everything reasonably well, you now need a swimmer, a cyclist, and a runner, taking the whole race as a relay. Each great at their discipline, but working in sync.

And it’s about more than just people. Specialist people will need specialist tools to do the job. You will be rapidly upgrading software and processes throughout this transition.

Finance starts to feel less home-spun and more embedded in the business. Done right, while the team as a whole becomes more important than ever, each individual becomes less critical because structure, process, and specialization begin to do more of the work.

At this stage, the role of the CFO changes, too.

You can no longer be the lone fixer. You have to become the architect of a team of fixers. The job now is to design how the pieces fit together, not fill all the gaps yourself. You are leading specialists who are capable in their own right, but the real leverage comes from how they connect.

This is where the CFO’s value shifts from doing most of the work to building the system that does most of the work.

Businesses can run perfectly successfully at the ‘Managed’ stage, and never need to move as far as a Specialized finance function. And many do. It is totally plausible to build a business that reaches $10m+ in revenue and multiple millions in EBIT on a very simple finance function of a few generalists.

The goal isn’t to get up the finance maturity curve, it’s to build the best business you can and pick the level of finance maturity that suits that.

Here are some signs that stage 2 maturity ‘Managed’ is enough for your business:

It’s not always clear when it’s time to move from a Managed to a Specialized finance function. The boundary is wide. And much like the shift between the first two stages, it’s easy to confuse being busy with being broken.

The real question is: Are you out of capacity, or just not executing the current model well enough? Is it a resourcing problem, or is it time to change the model entirely?

Here are some things to watch for:

But remember, many of these symptoms can also appear in a business where finance just isn’t performing. You might simply have a crap fractional CFO, the wrong tools, or a function that’s lost focus.

It can become self-fulfilling. A finance leader struggling to execute Stage 2 well might convince themselves that the answer is a new FP&A hire, a senior controller, or a shiny piece of software when the real problem is leadership.

The key question is whether the business has changed, or whether it’s just the volume that’s increased. A Managed finance function should be able to handle more of the same, but it will struggle with more and different.

This was exactly the case in the BU CFO role I mentioned earlier. The incumbent team had executed the Managed stage brilliantly. In fact, so well that they’d managed to hang onto the business’s coattails all the way to $1B in revenue. Kind of astonishing.

But the truth was the business was at least five years overdue in moving to a specialized model. Finance had become a bottleneck, but no one could see it. Inside their narrow definition of what finance was, it looked like a well-oiled machine. In reality, they had just become the most precision-engineered slide rule. But what the business really needed was a calculator.

Geeky side note - I remember my Dad showing me his old slide rule when I was a kid and being fascinated (dweeb). It’s easy to forget how beautiful they were. Look at this thing:

If moving to a Managed function is about buttoning down your financial operations and accounting, this is about making that smoother, but more about adding broader capability: 

But these are just the things to do. They come naturally if you build the right muscles - and build them at the right pace.

Let’s break down each of those muscles and what it takes to shift from second to third gear.

Using the same framework as the last two weeks, let’s break down what it takes to build the three muscles - People, Tools, and Data - that unlock a Specialized finance function.

The People Muscle

There are lots of people questions to answer at this stage, more so than at any other.

But one decision matters most: the CFO.

Last week, we left off with the idea that a capable fractional CFO is usually the best model to take a business from Manual to Managed. So it’s natural to think that moving to a Specialized function means hiring your first full-time CFO.

But that’s not quite right. In most cases, the shift from part-time to full-time CFO will happen during the Managed stage. Somewhere in the middle, the function reaches a point where finance needs more rhythm, more coordination, and more leadership.

For some businesses, that means persuading your fractional CFO to give up the rest of their portfolio to come on full-time. For others, it means going into the market, hiring a full-time specialist CFO.

Either way, the decision should be driven by a need to advance the function, not just to handle more volume.

As reporting and forecasting become more sophisticated, a full-time CFO helps define the rhythm and cadence of the business before you build a specialist FP&A team. That’s why I see the move to full-time CFO as happening before you reach the gate between Stage 2 and Stage 3. Specialization only works once someone is in the driver’s seat to orchestrate it.

So what kind of CFO do you need?

The profile isn’t radically different from a good fractional CFO. You still want a broad generalist who understands your sector and stage. But now, that CFO needs a bend toward one specialism that really matters for your context.

VC-backed? You want a fundraising bias.
Bootstrapped? A cashflow monster.
Targeting a PE exit in three years? Find someone who’s done it before.

The role of the CFO shifts dramatically at this stage. You’re still very much a player-coach, reviewing key balance sheet recs, getting hands-on with cashflow, and dipping into FP&A. But now you’re also managing a growing portfolio of specialists. The real skill is learning to flex your time and focus between doing and reviewing.

Beneath that CFO, the specialist sub-functions start to take shape. At the simplest level, you’ll have an accounting and reporting team and a finance or FP&A team. Depending on your structure, you might also add specialist roles in M&A, treasury, costing and pricing, or investor relations. There’s no single template. The design should reflect the business model and what truly creates value.

At this stage, flatter is better. If what you need is a costing accountant and an FP&A analyst, resist the temptation (initially at least) to hire a “Head of FP&A” with an analyst beneath them. If you are trying to create FP&A in the business from scratch, hire one capable specialist for each, have them report directly to you, and let them duke it out for the lead role over the next 12 months.

The exception is in the controllership function, where you want someone who can own as many of the inward and backward activities as possible.

I’ve written before about how to think through the sub-function split of a finance team: How to Build a Finance Team.

The key point is that you’re now hiring finance specialists.

Then comes the hard question: What happens to the generalists you built the team around during the Managed stage?

If you’ve done it right, they’ll be loyal, understand the business deeply, and set the cultural tone for the team. Ideally, you’ve been developing them along the way, helping them build the skills to grow into specialist roles.

It comes down to headroom and capability. Some people will grow with the business. Others won’t.

In that $1B division I mentioned earlier, we had to move from Stage 2 to Stage 4 fast, within a couple of years. Most of the generalists didn’t make it. But a few stood out and became indispensable. As I brought in more capability around them, they learned quickly, and their cultural grounding helped the new hires find their way through.

And that’s not to say you’ll still have no more generalist roles in your team. You will. They just won’t hold the most critical seats. And that’s fine.

The Tools Muscle

Specialist people need specialist tools.

You’ll still be spreadsheet-dependent beyond your core systems (who isn’t?). But your modeling and analysis should start to become more intelligent, more sophisticated, and more dynamic. It needs to be built to handle product and channel complexity.

Things like proper margin by customer, channel, or product become both important and possible once you have the right skills in the team. The same goes for your monthly close, cash management, and variance bridges, all of which start to demand more structure and repeatability.

Underneath it all, this will probably still live in a spreadsheet. Specialist models built on generalist software, if you like…

You might have a few use cases so critical and repeatable that they justify dedicated tools, but during this transition, your focus should be on building them right before you build them fancy.

Some would argue (in 2025) this is the stage where “vibe-coded apps” start to earn their keep. I’m not there yet, and I wouldn’t be betting the farm on that at this stage of maturity. Don’t be too clever. Just build stuff that works. I’m also conscious that if you’re reading this in 2030, that sentence may not have aged well.

Your ERP is still the backbone of the finance stack. There will come a time to plug in FP&A tools, or even replatform the ERP, but this is likely too early. Your team isn’t mature enough yet to take on that level of change successfully.

Your controls, though, need to mature fast. Some things get easier. Segregation of duties becomes natural as the team grows. But others need designing. Delegated authorities and decision rights are top of that list.

If your goal is to finally unhook the founder from making every decision (which, at this stage, it should be), that transition needs hands-on management. It won’t happen by accident. You’ll need to coach, support, and slowly earn the founders’ confidence. They’ll only let go once they believe you’ve got it.

It only takes one big screw-up to get hit with an “I told you so” followed by the founder reasserting control over every price change and payment run.

So make sure you do have it.

One trick I’ve used: quietly insert yourself into the review process. For example, if pricing used to be founder-approved, start by shadowing those reviews. You should know their judgment well enough to act as their filter. Put guardrails in place. Maybe sales can adjust pricing within a defined range, but for a while, have those changes pass your desk, too. Even if that’s not what the process formally says. Be the safety net for the “dumb mistake.”

The data muscle

In the Managed stage, the goal was to take a small number of crucial data streams and use them wisely.

In the Specialized stage, it’s about building a machine that can handle a broader range of data sources reliably and consistently. We’re still not in advanced analytics or data-science territory, but this is the point where the business has to get good at managing and governing data.

Data governance is almost impossible to build retroactively. It was arguably the hardest part of my Stage 2 to Stage 4 speed run. And if I’m being honest, we never fully nailed it. We were able to improve control and governance around the most core master data - the stuff needed to make sure the machine runs well. But the alpha here is all in the metadata. That requires more judgment and discipline - it’s hard.

It’s both a process and a culture thing. Treating business data like a first-class citizen is something you either do or you don’t.

You can learn it, and this is when it starts. That means:

You don’t need to be world-class in these things right away. It will take time, but this is the right time to get serious about it, because Stage 4 & 5 are totally out of reach without these things humming.

At this stage, cross-functional things start to break. Silos form naturally. No one intends them to. It just happens as functional leaders are brought in and start doing their thing. Ownership of data pipelines becomes as important as the numbers themselves. If you don’t define who owns reconciliation and reporting integrity, chaos follows.

Get these basics right now, and it’ll pay off tenfold later. And if you as the CFO of a Specialized function aren’t driving that every day, it won’t happen.

To wrap up, here are some common traps to avoid as you shift from generalist to specialized finance function:

Stepping from a small team of tight generalists to a more distributed team of specialists is hard, and probably the single biggest step change in the maturity journey.

The habits you build now don’t just determine how quickly you reach a capable, specialized function. They also decide whether Stages 4 and 5 are realistic goals or just pipe dreams.

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Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need.