CFO PERSONA: LENA – THE STRATEGIC ARCHITECT

Lena didn’t set out to become a CFO—she set out to help business owners make sense of chaos. She wants to solve business problems and help make SMBs better. After cutting her teeth at a regional CPA firm, she joined a bootstrapped professional services firm as their first finance hire. The founders were brilliant in their field, but financial visibility was nonexistent. Over five years, Lena helped them scale from $3M to $20M, implementing systems, creating dashboards, navigating pricing pivots, and ultimately preparing them for a successful private equity exit.
Lena’s value isn’t just in what she builds—it’s in what she’s willing to say. She doesn’t shy away from naming the hard truths: misaligned pricing, underperforming departments, or a CEO’s blind spots. She believes candor is the highest form of care. When others dance around the issue, Lena leans in. Her role is to move things forward—not just track the past.

How Lena Shows Up

• The bridge between vision and viability
• A calm, strategic presence in messy situations
• Speaks ‘CEO’ and ‘GAAP’ fluently
• Focused on valuation, scale, and decision support
• A mentor to in-house finance leaders—helps Controllers and senior accountants elevate to the next level
• Not afraid to challenge thinking and push for bold action

Passions

• Business Storytelling – turning complex data into clear, actionable insights.
• Entrepreneurial Coaching – helping founders make confident, data-driven decisions.
• Valuation Strategy – mapping the path from present state to maximum enterprise value.
• Leadership Development – enjoys coaching rising finance talent inside client organizations as they scale

What Others Say

• Colleagues: “The person you want in the room when the stakes are high.”
• Clients: “A CFO who speaks like a founder—and calls out what’s holding us back.”
• Friends/Family: “The calm in the storm—always honest, always prepared.”

WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR (LENA HAYES TYPE):

We’re looking for someone who thrives at the intersection of financial strategy and entrepreneurial leadership. This is the person who sees beyond the numbers and helps business owners actually make better decisions—someone who brings calm clarity in high-stakes moments, who isn’t afraid to name the hard truths (even when it’s uncomfortable), and who naturally takes the long view on growth and valuation. They’re energized by working with fast-growing founder-led businesses and they know how to turn financial noise into strategic insight. If you know someone who builds models that drive action, guides pricing strategy like a partner, and gets fired up about scaling cleanly, we want to meet them.
You must take this assessment to move forward in the process:

Please refer the Job description for details