Our Director of Finance has been with us for five years and is a perfect culture fit, but as we have scaled from five million to twenty million in revenue, the financial reporting requirements have become highly complex. She gets and wants the seat, but she simply does not have the cognitive capacity to handle the advanced treasury management and forecasting we now need. How do we resolve this GWC mismatch without losing a great team player?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is one of the hardest situations an owner will face, but you must make the right-seat call for the health of the company. A perfect culture fit who lacks the capacity to do their job at scale is still in the wrong seat. If you leave her there, she will eventually burn out, make costly financial mistakes, and hold the entire organization back.

To resolve this GWC mismatch, you must be honest and compassionate. Have a direct conversation and explain that the complexity of the finance seat has outgrown her current capacity. Because she is a great culture fit, your goal should be to keep her in the company by finding a seat that she actually does GWC.

This usually involves splitting the finance department into two distinct seats on your Accountability Chart. Create a new, high-level Chief Financial Officer or VP of Finance seat to handle the advanced treasury management, strategic forecasting, and tax planning, and hire an experienced external leader for it. Then, move your current Director of Finance into a Controller or Accounting Manager seat that reports to the new CFO. This new seat will focus on the transactional bookkeeping, billing, and monthly reconciliations that she already does exceptionally well. This keeps a valued culture fit on the team while bringing in the strategic capacity the company needs to scale.