How do you actually become a CFO?

The most common question I get (be it late-night at a conference, in a mentoring call, or on Linkedin) isn’t from a banker or a recruiter. It’s from a thirty-something controller or FP&A lead, asking the same question: “How do I actually become a CFO — and where do I learn all of this?”

I’ve answered that question a few times - but this does not scale (which is a big no-no in startups). Two years ago, I started writing it all down, and as I’m not omniscient, I picked co-authors and peer-reviewers, so that the result mirrors best practices. The result is a 500-page book that launches in German next month with thirteen co-authors. The short version fits in a blog post.

Here are the five answers I keep coming back to.

1. Optimise for the gap in your toolkit, not the title.

Most aspiring CFOs ask the wrong question. “What role do I take next?” assumes a very clear career ladder still exists - which it does not. In rapidly changing external conditions, career path need to change with them.

The modern CFO role can span as much as 10+ thirteen disciplines: accounting, controlling, data, legal, tax, treasury, funding, risk, IT and systems, people & culture. The CFO seat now expects a breadth that traditional controllership alone no longer provides, depending on the need of the company, CEO, and invesotry.

Most candidates arrive deep in two or three of those disciplines and thin in the others, which must not be a hindrance if well manged. Career planning, properly done, is choosing the next two gaps to close, and the team to support the CFO on delivering in areas where they themselves are no experts and will never become such.

Closing a gap is mundane work. A six-month rotation into a treasury team. Shadowing the data lead for a quarter. Owning an audit cycle end-to-end. In my own case, the year I spent close to the data team produced more career leverage than any controllership rotation. The trick is to make the gap-closing visible — write about it, present it internally, become the person colleagues ask. The next role then finds you.

2. The two gaps everyone underestimates.

If I have to bet, it’s these two.

People & Culture. In any scale-up, half a CFO’s calendar is organisational design, compensation, and hiring approvals. Almost no one trains for it. McKinsey’s long-running work on what differentiates top CFOs has consistently flagged talent and organisational leadership as the most under-developed area among finance leaders. The candidates who fix that gap early move faster.

Data & Systems. Spreadsheets are the past. Today’s CFO owns the data model that runs the company — or someone else owns it, badly. Learn SQL well enough to argue with your analytics lead. Understand your ERP and CRM as systems, not as cost lines.

At Series B and beyond, I’d hire a P&C-fluent FP&A lead before a second controller.

3. Build your own board before you sit on one.

The single highest-ROI investment of my career has been a small group of senior CFOs I can actually call and exchange with - many of them, initially, in the German chapter of the CFO connect group. Communities like CFO Connect, FP&A or HR networks and the infamous “Female Finance Circle” I co-founded in 2025 are where these relationships lie today and have quietly replaced the consulting industry’s grip on peer benchmarking. Bring something to every conversation (a useful template, an honest war story, a warm introduction) and you’ll receive plentiful in times of need.

The conversations I’ve had in that group have saved me from at least three avoidable mistakes (and the value of even one avoided mistake at CFO level is a multiple of any executive coach I could hire). A first-time CFO without a personal advisory board is operating blind.

4. The unsexy skills that compound.

Two skills carry disproportionate weight, and almost no one practises them deliberately.

Clear writing. Board memos win or lose on prose, not on the model behind them. Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle (“big” answer first, then supporting points, then details) is the closest thing good communicators have to a universal style guide, often employed by consultants. Use it well - and train your team to do, too.

The discipline to say no. CFOs say no for a living. To projects, to hires, to acquisitions, to founders who want one more round of dilution. Saying no well, which means with reasons and an alternative path is the job. Practise it early, when the stakes are small. Say no to projects, to decisions, to costs and say YES to the person bringing the question, their concerns, and their personal grief about the decisoin.

A third habit underneath both: protect your own bandwidth.

The job is a decade. I run every day — sleep, calendar discipline, and a no-meeting morning block are non-negotiables. The decisions in week 50 have to be as sharp as the ones in week 1. Burnout in the CFO seat is rarely dramatic; it’s a slow erosion of judgement, and by the time you notice, you’ve already shipped the bad call. Defend your time and standards.

5. When to actually take the seat.

The right CFO seat in the wrong company will end you: your emotional well-being, your nerves, your track record, your reputation. Russell Reynolds’ research on CFO transitions has consistently shown that first-time CFOs who fail rarely fail on technical grounds. They fail on alignment, most often with the founder/CEO.

Diligence the founder the way you’d diligence the company. A short list of soft factors I actually check before accepting a CFO seat:

• Reference calls with two former direct reports of the CEO - not the LinkedIn references, but former employees, former investors, industry contacts. Ask about behaviour, the good and the bad habits, and how to steer them well. Value alignment is key for a fruitful collaboration when crisis hits.

• How the founder talks about people who have left the company. Most informative single signal.

• Whether the previous CFO was pushed, left, or burned out and on speaking terms or not.

A first CFO seat in a misaligned company is worse than a fifth controller year in the right one: stay patient. Good finance folk are needed in recession, and are needed in hypergrowth, and will most definitely NOT be replaced by AI.

The method, not the answer.

There is no single path to the CFO chair. There is a method: name your gaps, close them in order, build the network, choose the seat carefully.

For the longer version — and for what each of those thirteen disciplines actually looks like inside a scale-up — the German-language playbook is out in July with Schäffer-Poeschel.

For everyone else: my LinkedIn DMs are open. Send me your version of the question.

Further reading:

• Spencer Stuart (2020), European CFO Route to the Top 2019. Retrieved 19th of May (source)

• McKinsey (2016), Are today’s CFOs ready for tomorrow’s demands on finance? Retrieved 19th of May (source)

• McKinsey (2018), The new CFO mandate. Retrieved 19th of May (source)

• Jack McCullough (2019), The secret of Rockstar CFOs. Absolutely Abby Press or online available via (source)

• Russell Reynolds, When the Stakes Rise: Global CFO Turnover Index 2025 Report. Retrieved 19th of May (source)

About the author

Dr. Veronika von Heise-Rotenburg is CFO of everphone, the Berlin-based Device-as-a-Service company (~200 employees, ~€100m revenue, https://everphone.com/de/ ) She serves on the supervisory board of BAWAG Group and is the editor of Finanzmanagement in Start-ups und Scale-ups (Schäffer-Poeschel, July 2026), the first comprehensive German-language reference for scale-up finance leaders. Reach out on LinkedIn.