It’s funny how the “back to school” feeling lasts well beyond your school days. After a summer hiatus, we get back into work mode with new energy, long to-do lists, and a fresh sense of optimism. It’s not quite a new pencil case, blank rough book, and box-fresh school shoes. But it’s not far off.

We have that feeling at Pitch Hill, even though we’ve been busy throughout the summer. It’s an unusual (but encouraging) feeling for a recruiter. Carving out family time by the holiday pool remained a priority, of course. But there’s no escape from email and MS Teams meetings when so many opportunities are live.

The assignments we’ve been working on also have a “back to school” vibe, with companies, investors and CFOs taking the chance to audit their finance and strategic capabilities for the new term, and recruit accordingly. (Think of it like picking the right stationery to go in that new-term pencil case: which calculator do we need? What types of pen?)

In one case, we’re helping out a founder whose greentech business is expanding fast. He’s kept it lean, but doing everything himself is starting to hurt him and the business. A lead investor got us in to help him decide what he should delegate – and recruit accordingly.

Then we’re looking for a CFO and a numbers-savvy GM for a buyout. It’s another transition company, running a heritage business with limited growth, while spinning up adjacent expansion options. Really interesting stuff.

In both cases, a like-for-like hire (either with the existing finance lead, or someone with similar company experience) is a non-starter. The situations are close to unique and require rapid evolution, so it really pays to dig around for the right candidates.

Too often people think it’s safe to nab someone with mid-cap quoted experience for a growth business, for example, figuring they’ll be ideal when the company gets big. But getting there, on a steep earnings trajectory, is a very particular challenge. And getting in a seasoned mid-cap CFO might not offer value for money (even if they’d take the role… and could do it well). When you look around, with a good network, you can often find precisely the right blend of skills and experiences – rather than hiring a “type”.

To stretch the back-to-school theme, it’s a bit like picking A-level options. You have to triangulate your interests, your abilities and the eventual benefits those subjects will bring you, not just go with your gut. That’s what professional, personal recruitment brings to the party: getting to know all three elements in each engagement for just the right result.
- Ray Nicholls

Things to do...

***Now...***
**Payroll: dull.** But important. Happily HMRC has delayed changes to the Real Time Information on employee hours until 2026. It’s a breather for finance teams. But staying fresh on Making Tax Digital is something to check today. It's not going away.

***Next...***
**Reeves’s roadmap.**
In the Budget on 30th October Rachel Reeves promises a “tax roadmap for business” to boost investment confidence. But the PE guys are worried about CGT and carried interest.
Nerd out on her options at the IfG.

***Later...***
**Hire an apprentice.**
There’s a (mild) trend away from uni as a default for young people. Apprenticeship in the finance function
is increasingly viable. Call Pitch Hill for your strategic hires; maybe go school-leaver for your juniors?

Lies, damned lies, and...

$32.8bn (each)

The art to recruitment isn’t throwing a generalised job spec at a bunch of LinkedIn contacts – especially not for FD and FC positions with company-specific needs. And when you get exactly the right people for key roles, you can run a leaner finance function, or even board.

Just ask Luca Maestri. The CFO of Apple is stepping down from the role next year (note to Apple: if Kevan Parekh, the guy you’ve been grooming for years as his successor, doesn’t work out, you know where to find us…). In his decade atop the finance function, Apple’s market cap up has gone up 1,000% (to $3.5trn), and gross margin from 37% to 47% - plus he oversaw a $1 trillion share buyback plan. But he’s managed it with an ultra-lean team.

“We always believe that quality is more important than quantity,” he said in 2017. “We run the company very lean... with [a finance function] about half the size of some of the companies that I worked for before, [that] were like a tenth the size of Apple. I have an investor relations group of two people. [The team] that manages $230bn [now down to only $62bn!] of cash is a group of seven. We really believe that if we have the right people we don't need a lot of them.”

Maestri is modest. He has no headshot on LinkedIn, his Wikipedia page is painfully short, and he rarely gives interviews. Analysts said he’d “enabled essential investments and robust financial discipline,” and were encouraged that successor Parekh was a disciple of both him and CEO Tim Cook, offering continuity. As Maestri said: “I tell my guys in finance, I don't want you guys to ever benchmark [us against] anybody else, because you can only get bad ideas.”

(Maestri’s rare full chat from 2017 is on YouTube – it was at the Italian consulate, so there’s a lot of chat about Italians rather than CFO stuff.)

On trend

PE gets a back-to-school vibe

Private equity has long been a driver of deal activity in the UK, more than anywhere bar the US, arguably. It’s an engine for transformation, too, helping businesses out of unloved corporate ownership, building new companies and facilitating mergers. That creates openings for finance folk, as both strategic and operational requirements change.

The quarter-point interest rate cut this summer has given a jolt to the deal-doers, offering some daylight on debt pricing. According to Pitchbook, “Deal value in Q2 was the strongest it had been in two years and marked a sharp bounceback following a dismal Q1.” That’s backed by record levels of fundraising – so expect more deals in H2 and 2025.

There’s a “but”. The stat many are looking at is exits (see below); the ability of funds to churn cash and find buyers (especially non-PE buyers) for assets remains poor. Pitchbook again: “Median holding times increased, going from five years in 2018 to 6.4 years in H1.” Sales below £25m are doing OK, but big deals just aren’t finding exits, even with buoyant public markets. (In fact, take-privates remain much more robust, despite the high multiples.)

In short: the in-demand finance folks are going to be adaptable and ready to get to grips with new situations quickly. Even long-held assets might need transformation to dress them for exit in a sticky market.

Words from the wise

**Build a dashboard (just don’t look at it very often)**

Ever since ERP really got going, tech companies and consultancies have been peddling dashboards. But this month a short post on programmer Terence Eden’s blog really summed up the problem with trendy dashboards quite nicely.

He was musing on clients who ask him to make one for their business: “Usually, this causes technologists to roll their eyes. They have a vision of a CEO grandly staring at a giant projection screen, watching the pretty graphs go up and down, and making real-time decisions about Serious Business. Ugh! What a waste of time!”

But, he stresses, that's not what a dashboard is for... or why a director really wants one. “A dashboard shows that you have access to your data,” he points out. “And that is a huge deal. If you are able to successfully build a dashboard, that means you have demonstrated that you have the ability to get

Live data
Historic data
Comparative metrics
Access to multiple databases
External data sources
...and a dozen more things.”

Surfacing data – rather than having it trapped in spreadsheets – is the key. A dashboard shows you’ve thought about where data is, in what formats, that it’s consistent and comparable, and can be checked quickly. But checking it often (much less in "real time") is a fool's errand. I remember one retail CFO saying his biggest personal challenge in the sector was learning to ignore the daily take.

Tear yourself away from the dashboard’s graphs – and you can enjoy the fact that they’re possible thanks to a great finance engine that’s there when you need it.

Passé meme of the month

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