📬 Quiet quitting (but you're the CFO?!)

Standard recipe for a slow close: hire a controller, drag everyone onto [insert legacy software here], then throw bodies at the problem. 

Boulder Care’s SVP of Finance skipped that noise and led with tech instead. Now, the close takes 6 days instead of 20. One in-house accountant, and analysis that used to eat up a whole day takes a matter of minutes. 

TLDR: Slow closes aren’t a people problem, they’re just cosplaying as one.

💡 Stuck on some CFO BS and want help? Send me your questions, and you might just see yourself in next week’s Mailbag. Submit anonymously using the button below:

Here’s what’s on the menu:

Now, let’s get into it.

F_Puskas from Toronto

Have you experienced burnout? If so, what triggered it, what did it feel like, and how did you get out of it?

I’m asking as an early-stage startup Head of Finance where overwhelm can feel like BAU. I’ve been reading your two-part CFO burnout series, which really resonated, and I suspect your candid answer would help a lot of finance leads.

I love the clarity of your writing. Keep up the great work.

Mr Puskas,

I’m glad the piece I recently published on CFO burnout (researched and written by my wonderful reporter Tim) resonated with you.

The short answer is yes, I have, absolutely. Most CFOs I know have experienced some version of it at one point too.

It is not talked about enough. And when it is, the advice is normally weak: discuss it with your boss, say ‘no’ more often, re-prioritize your work.

As anyone who has been in the eye of the storm will know, that kind of advice is at best ineffective, and at worst will make things harder.

My burnout story came in my last CFO role. It was a multi-year turnaround slog of financial and operational restructuring, cultural rewiring, and constant cash flow turmoil. I loved it, but it was tiring. I also had some unexpected family health issues right in the middle of it.

You can keep going while burned out for quite a long time. Soldiering on at 85% of your best (which might still be better than your predecessor at 100% so no one notices), while you layer more scar tissue into your physical and mental health.

That is why Tim and I felt this was an important piece to write.

So, what did I learn from my own experience, and how did I get out of it?

I hope that helps.

And as you have named yourself after the Hungarian legend, and the Puskas Award is for the best annual soccer goal, I am sharing my favorite goal:

TLDR: Burnout is not fixed by saying no. Build support, protect recovery, and rest properly after brutal roles.

Mr Q from Galway, Ireland

We are close to finalizing a full exit for our mid-market software and services company. I’ve done most of the heavy lifting as CFO, running full vendor DD pre-deal, preparing all investment materials and coordinating advisors and senior leadership. All good so far!

We have workable offers, but they are slightly under my aggressively ratcheted LTIP, which will mean way less upside for me! Should I try and renegotiate, given my key position, or have I left it too late as we enter exclusivity? Am I better proving my worth to the acquirer and not causing a major issue?

Mr Q,

I’m missing a little context here, mainly how the business is owned and governed. The answer changes slightly depending on whether this is PE-owned, family-owned, founder-owned, or part of a corporate group.

The key question is who you are really negotiating with. The CEO? Chair? Sponsor? Founder? Remco? And also when the LTIP was set.

If the LTIP was agreed years ago, your owners will probably say you knew the rules of the game. You had the chance to help drive value, and the outcome is the outcome. That may feel harsh, but it is a reasonable argument.

If the thresholds were set more recently, and your role has been heavily weighted toward preparing and executing the exit, then I think you have a stronger case. Especially if market testing has now shown the value range is acceptable to shareholders, but awkwardly sits just below your payout line.

Either way, I would probably not go crashing into trying to renegotiate the whole LTIP. Rather, I’d opt for something more subtle. 

But I do think it is worth raising, carefully and respectfully. Not as a threat. Not as “pay me or I’ll make this difficult.”

Based on what you describe, I think you are more likely to have success asking for a transaction or retention bonus tied to getting the deal closed (+ a post close retention period.)

You have done the heavy lifting so far, but there is still a lot of value at risk. Exclusivity is not the finish line. There will be confirmatory diligence, SPA negotiation, completion accounts, leakage, working capital, debt-like items, systems questions, management presentations, buyer requests, and all the other charming little deal goblins that appear once everyone thinks the hard bit is done.

So, I would say something like this:

“We’ve now been through the prep and have a clearer sense of where the market is for the business. Based on the offers we are progressing, it looks like the value is in a range the owners are comfortable with, which is great. But it also leaves me in a fairly lukewarm position on my LTIP. Given there is still a lot of work to do to land the deal, particularly from finance, I wanted to discuss whether we could agree something that better aligns me to the final stretch. Maybe a transaction bonus tied to successful completion, potentially with some post-transaction retention attached if that would be valuable to the buyer.”

That is a reasonable conversation.

You are not reopening the whole compensation framework. You are saying: “There is still a lot to execute, I am central to it, and I would like my incentives to reflect that.”

Float it first with whoever is most friendly and has real influence. CEO, Chair, sponsor, operating partner, whoever is most likely to receive it well and advocate for you.

And yes, be careful. You are late. If you make this feel like ransom, it might backfire. But if you make it feel like sensible alignment around deal execution, you have a shot.

Good luck grabbing the bag, Mr Q.

TLDR: There might be a better path to the bag than renegotiating the LTIP. Ask calmly for a deal completion or retention bonus.

Charity fd from London, UK

As a CFO, how did you decide where to invest your time—particularly beyond a core (say) 8–6 working day?

As a relatively new Finance Director (and the most senior finance person in the org), I'm conscious of an almost endless list of worthwhile things that could be done, but have neither enough time nor budget to do them all.

Beyond dealing with the genuinely urgent/essential, how did you approach prioritization? Did you consciously apply some form of cost-benefit analysis to e.g. opportunities, projects, people development, process improvements, strategic work, etc., or was your approach more intuitive?

Related to that, how did you manage the tension between work vs non-work? At what point did you decide that the marginal benefit of working another hour was outweighed by the value of logging off?

Looking back, is there anything you wish you'd spent more time on—or less time on—earlier in your CFO career?

Thanks for the question, Charity fd.

My instinct is that you are thinking about this too much like a CFO.

“Marginal benefit of working another hour.”

“Investing your time.”

I get it. They are useful frames. But before you start building a personal time allocation model like some insane human capital budgeting exercise, I think you need to start with principles.

First, set yourself some rules.

Target working hours. Protected family time. When you exercise. What time you stop checking your emails. Whatever really matters to you outside work. But, be specific.

I am not naive enough to say you will never break these rules, but you still need to know what normal should look like.

Then say those rules out loud to your partner, or whoever sits on the other side of the trade-off. A commitment made out loud is much harder to wriggle out of than one you keep in your head.

You will still break the rules sometimes. Probably fairly often. But at least you have a baseline. You know what good looks like, and you know when you are making a conscious exception, rather than accidentally letting the job eat your life.

Then the question becomes: how do you get more leverage from the time you are willing to give?

The answer is always ‘team first’.

Anything that strengthens your team should sit near the top of your priority list. Hiring, performance management, directing, retaining, motivating, clarifying roles, raising standards. A good hire will leverage your time 10 times better than a bad one. A stronger team is the only real way out of the endless list of worthwhile things that could be done.

After that, focus on the things that make those people more effective. Tools, processes, cadence, reporting discipline, cleaner data, better close, sharper planning, fewer manual workarounds. This stuff compounds.

The hard bit, of course, is doing this while also keeping the wheels turning and dealing with the urgent stuff. That is where judgment comes in.

I would not over-focus, at least early on, on the giant long-term wins. Sure, a new ERP might help… in three years. The steering committees will kill you in the meantime.

Instead, ask a simpler question: what would make next quarter smoother, cleaner, faster, or less dependent on you?

Which actions increase the impact per hour of your time, and reduce the amount of work that only you can do?

Looking back, I have never regretted moving too soon on things that build the team and genuinely strengthen the function… only the other way round.

Good luck.

A few of the biggest stories that CFOs should pay attention to. This is also the section you might not want to see your name in.

Finance veteran takes over as McDonald’s President

McDonald’s new president for the US business started with the company in an entry-level finance role 26 years ago. And with the CEO citing ‘execution issues’ for weaker performance in the US in a recent earnings call, it points to where he will be expecting his new president to focus.

SEC launches new accounting investigative team

Despite heavy deregulation, the SEC is bolstering it’s firepower for digging into core financial reporting cases.

ICYMI, here are some of my favorite finance/business social media posts from this week.

Let me know what you thought of today’s Mailbag. Just hit reply… I read every message.

In this month’s playbook, we are trying something a little different, a deep dive into the financials of Manchester United. You can read part 1 here

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