Everyone else in your CFO search is paid to say yes.
Two sitting CFOs assess your candidate. The second one has already done the specific job you are hiring for. Neither of us is paid if you hire them.
Not sure what you are hiring yet? An ex-controller and an ex-banker are both called CFO and fail at opposite things. Start with the role.
The red line is the product. Strong résumé, strong interview, and he had never negotiated with a lender. The client had a quarterly covenant test. They hired him anyway, with the CEO holding the banking relationship for a year. Good outcome. They went in knowing.
The problem
Nobody in the room is paid to be right
A contingency recruiter earns nothing if you hire no one. A retained firm is paid either way, but its reputation rides on closing the search. The candidate is selling. And you cannot tell whether their answer on revenue recognition was any good.
What fails a CFO hire is rarely presence or polish, which is what a search process measures. It is technical. They have never sat across from a lender, never owned a close, never done purchase accounting. Or they ran a $400M function with a team of forty and cannot build one from zero.
It has also got harder. The résumé was written with help. The answers were rehearsed with help. If you sent a modelling case as a take-home, that was done with help too. The parts of your process that happen on the candidate's own time no longer tell you much, and most processes are now mostly those parts.
The method
The Ledger Hill Seven
Executive assessment measures leadership. That is a real discipline, and it is not what fails a CFO hire. We score seven finance domains, one to five, against anchors set to your stage and locked before anyone is interviewed.
01 · Close
Technical accounting, revenue recognition, close design, auditors.
02 · Forecast
Driver-based modelling, unit economics, variance that changes decisions.
03 · Capital
Liquidity, working capital, lenders, covenants, the balance sheet.
04 · Systems
ERP, chart of accounts, reporting, what they have actually built.
05 · Fluency
Can they learn your business fast enough to be useful in it.
06 · Function
Org design at your stage. What they keep, what they delegate.
07 · Spine
Will they tell a CEO something unwelcome. Boards and lenders.
Weights are set with you and locked before the interview, so nothing can be reverse engineered to fit a conclusion. Stage fit is scored separately, because a strong candidate at the wrong stage is still a failed hire.
Services
What you are buying
Start here if you are not sure what you are hiring. The wrong kind of CFO costs more than a weak candidate.
- Whether you need a CFO at all. Often the answer is a controller and a fractional, and we will say so
- Which background fits your next 24 months, and which to screen out
- Three to five things this hire must deliver in year one
- Comp structure, and whether your equity story is credible
- A screening rubric for whoever is sourcing
- A working session to talk it through
Credited in full against an assessment within six months.
You have found someone you like. Before you commit $250k a year and your lender reporting, find out what you are buying.
- Scoping call to define what good means here, before anyone is interviewed
- 90-minute technical interview, recorded
- Second interview by a sitting CFO matched to your mandate
- Live case on a real model and board deck. On camera, questions as they go, never a take-home
- Six to eight references, at least three we source ourselves
- Both assessors score blind, before either sees the other's marks
- Written report: scores, where we disagreed, three named risks, a 90-day plan
- An hour on the report with whoever decides. Bring your reservations
Most clients say the verdict is the least useful part. What they keep is the rest. Where this person will struggle, who to hire around them, what to require in the first ninety days. That holds whether you hire them or not.
Single assessor, $8,500, for controller and VP Finance roles.
Second chair for the whole search. We do not source, do not own the pipeline, and are not paid on the close.
- Role definition built from your business, not a job description
- Comp benchmarking, and a screening rubric for whoever sources
- Panel assessment on up to four finalists, specialist matched to each
- Second chair in final rounds, offer-stage counsel, 30/60/90 check-ins
Most companies under $25M do not need a full-time CFO. If that is you, we run the selection on your bookkeeping firm, outsourced accounting firm, or fractional instead.
- Diligence with the people who would serve your account, not the partner who pitches
- The exclusion list in writing, and what last year's clients paid out of scope
- References from clients at your size and complexity
- Contract review: scope, SLA, escalators, who owns your data, how you leave
- Whether they take referral fees from the software and lenders they recommend
Fractional CFO selection, $3,500. Bundled with Role Definition, $4,500.
The assessment named three risks and a 90-day plan. This is where someone checks whether any of it happened.
- Monthly working session with your new CFO against the development plan
- Quarterly written readout to the board
- An outside read on whether the hire is working, from whoever predicted the risks
Never offered before a hiring decision, and never to a client whose candidate scored below threshold.
Independence
Independence is a claim. Here is what backs it.
- The fee is fixed at engagement. It does not change with our conclusion or your decision.
- No placement fee is payable to us by anyone. Not you, not the candidate, not a recruiter.
- On a Search Partner engagement, the last payment is triggered by the search concluding. End it having hired nobody because our work showed none of them were right, and we are paid in full.
- No assessor may recruit or hire an assessed candidate, anywhere, for twelve months.
- Both assessors score blind. Where we disagree, the report says so rather than averaging it away.
- The rubric and weights are shared with you before the candidate is interviewed.
- Your second assessor is named to you, with their background, before we begin.
- Candidates consent in writing and can request a copy of the report.
- We publish our annual rate of not-matched verdicts. An assessor who never says no is not assessing anything.
Who this is for
Three kinds of buyer
Founder-owned
$15 to $75M, hiring a first real CFO. You can interview them fine. You cannot tell whether the technical answers were good.
Independent sponsors
You know what good looks like. You have no operating bench, and retained search does not fit the deal economics.
Searchers
First finance leader post-close. Ask us first whether you need a CFO at all.
About
Who does the assessing
Ledger Hill is led by a sitting CFO who has built or rebuilt finance functions across roughly fifteen companies, from lower-middle-market businesses to platforms at real scale. Several of those years were spent across a private equity portfolio, standing up finance and reporting in businesses that had never had either.
The current seat is a multi-site, private equity backed operator in Los Angeles. Margin expansion, an acquisition programme, a systems rebuild, credit facilities, a close cycle cut roughly in half.
The bench is a small group of sitting CFOs with specialist depth. Acquisition integration. Technical accounting and audit exposure. Lender negotiation and refinancing. Systems rebuilds. Your second assessor is chosen from it to match what your business needs, and is named to you before we start.
Questions
The ones worth asking
Why not use a $50 online CFO test?
As a pre-screen, sure, though an unproctored remote test is worth much less than it was two years ago. It will catch anyone who cannot read a balance sheet. It will not tell you what to do when your fixed charge coverage is forecast at 1.18x against a 1.25x test in July. That question has no answer you can bubble in, and it sorts candidates in about ninety seconds.
Candidates use AI now. Does that break assessment?
Most of it, and the take-home case is the clearest casualty. Send someone a model to fix and give them two days, and you are testing the tools. What still works is a live conversation with someone who knows the work. The signal was never the first answer. It is the third follow-up. A model will explain revenue recognition well. It cannot give you this candidate's memory of the auditor who challenged their position, what the adjustment was worth, and what they would do differently now.
Is this not what my recruiter does?
Your recruiter assesses the person. Presence, track record, fit, motivation. That is a real skill and it is not the one that fails. Nobody assesses the finance, because doing it credibly takes someone who has run a finance function at your stage. Recruiters are welcome to recommend us. They are never paid for it, and we are never paid by them.
Do I get a report, or do we actually talk?
Both, and most clients remember the conversation. The report is deliberately careful. It scores against evidence and names what could not be assessed, because it is a document about a named person that your board will read. The conversation is where the useful mess lives. Your worries, how the gaps interact with your business, whether the mitigations are realistic, and where your own read should outweigh ours. You know things about your company that we never will.
What if you tell me not to hire the person I like?
Then you learned it for $13,500 instead of eighteen months. You may hire them anyway. Plenty of clients do, with the risks named and mitigated, and it is often the right call. What you will not do is find out in month fourteen.
Do you guarantee the hire works out?
No, and be sceptical of anyone who does. This measures demonstrated capability, verified track record, and stage fit. It does not measure chemistry with your CEO or how they respond to a crisis you have not had yet. A strong score is necessary, not sufficient. The report always names what we could not assess.
What is it like for the candidate?
They consent in writing first, including to references beyond the list they give us. They are interviewed by two sitting CFOs, which strong candidates tend to find a relief. It is usually the first conversation in the process where someone understands what they actually do. They can request the report. Several have.
Can you do this for a controller or VP Finance?
Yes. $5,500 for a controller or VP Finance, $3,500 for a director. Most clients come back for these once the CFO they hired starts building a team.
Get started
Start with the report, not the pitch
The fastest way to judge whether this is worth $13,500 is to read one. We will send a full sample assessment, redacted but complete, with no call required first.
Request the sample report Book 20 minutes