‘Let’s push it to next quarter’ is the most expensive sentence in finance hiring
Picture the scene. You’re the CFO of a SaaS scale-up. Revenue is lumpy. Cash is tight. The board wants investment in growth, but the numbers don’t feel stable enough to add headcount.
So you delay. You tell yourself you’ll revisit the hire next quarter when there’s more clarity. You’ll manage for now. Stretch the team a bit further. They’re resilient. They’ll cope.
Except ‘coping’ has a shelf life. Month-end starts slipping. The forecast cycle turns into a scramble. Errors creep in. Your FC is working evenings and weekends just to keep the lights on. The strategic work you were hired to do gets shoved to the side because you’re spending your nights fixing the basics.
The board starts asking why the numbers don’t feel reliable. You’re working harder than ever, but the output is going backwards. Like running on a treadmill that someone keeps turning up.
This is timing risk.
The right decision at the wrong moment
Timing risk isn’t about making bad decisions. It’s about making good decisions too late. And by the time you act, the cost has already compounded.
You see the pressure coming. You know the team is stretched. You know the FC is doing the work of two people and running on fumes. You know FP&A needs strengthening before the next board cycle. But the business is moving fast, there’s no airtime to stop and think about team design, and hiring feels like a distraction from the fire you’re currently fighting.
‘Let’s push it to next quarter’ becomes the default. And suddenly the right decision has landed in the wrong moment.
The person who needed support six months ago is now burnt out. The process that should have been fixed is now embedded as ‘how we do things’. The error that should have been a one-off has become a pattern. And the trust you had with the board is being rebuilt from a weaker position.
Why CFOs delay (and why it makes perfect sense at the time)
This isn’t about poor judgement. Most CFOs who delay hiring do so for perfectly rational reasons.
Cash is tight. Every headcount decision has a direct P&L impact. You’re expected to run lean, and the pressure to demonstrate cost discipline is real, especially in investor-backed businesses where every new hire gets scrutinised like it’s a capital expenditure.
You don’t have time to hire properly. And here’s the cruel irony of timing risk… the busier you are, the less time you have to solve the problem… and the more desperately you need to solve it. A proper hire takes time. Briefing, meeting candidates, assessing, negotiating. When you’re already drowning, that feels like being asked to build a boat while treading water.
You’re not sure what you need. The role isn’t fully formed. You know you need help, but you’re not sure whether that’s a senior FC, an FP&A Manager, or a Finance Business Partner. So you wait until the picture is clearer. Except the picture gets muddier, not clearer, the longer you wait.
And sometimes, you just hope it’ll sort itself out. That the team will find their rhythm. That the pressure will ease next quarter. It rarely does. Weeds don’t stop growing because you ignore them.
What timing risk actually costs
The cost of hiring too late is almost always higher than the cost of hiring slightly too early. And it compounds faster than most people expect.
When you wait until someone is burnt out, you don’t just lose their performance. You lose their goodwill, their engagement, and often the person themselves. The best people don’t wait around for things to improve. They leave. And then you’re hiring to replace, under pressure, from a standing start. That’s the expensive version of the same hire you could have made six months ago.
When you wait until processes have broken, fixing them takes three times as long because you’re unpicking bad habits that have become ‘normal’. The team has adapted to working around the problem, like a river finding new channels around a blockage. Changing that takes more than a new hire. It takes time and trust.
When you wait until the board has lost confidence, every hire thereafter is under a spotlight. The freedom to make a considered, strategic decision has been replaced by urgency. And urgency leads to compromise. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a CFO make a rushed hire that creates a bigger problem than the one they were trying to solve.
The early warning signs
Timing risk has some clear tells.
You keep saying ‘we’ll sort it next quarter’. If you’ve said this twice about the same problem, the window is already closing.
Your best people are quietly picking up the slack. They’re not complaining yet, but the workload is unsustainable. By the time they do say something, they’ve already updated their LinkedIn profile. Trust me on that one.
You’re doing operational work that should sit below you. If you’re fixing month-end errors or building the board pack yourself, that’s not dedication. That’s a timing signal.
The same issues keep appearing in slightly different forms. A missed deadline becomes a late report becomes a forecast error becomes a board question. The root cause hasn’t changed. You just didn’t act on it early enough.
What to do about it
Start by being honest about where the pressure is building. Not where it’s already broken, but where you can see the cracks forming. That’s your window. Once the wall has fallen over, you’re not hiring… you’re rebuilding.
Design the role before you need to fill it urgently. Have a clear picture of what 90 to 180 day success looks like so that when you do pull the trigger, you’re not starting from scratch.
Build a relationship with someone who understands your world before you need them. Whether that’s an internal HR partner, a trusted recruiter, or a peer who’s been through the same stage of growth. The worst time to start that conversation is when you’re already on fire.
Timing risk is the entirely human tendency to kick the can down road when the present is already overwhelming. But in scaling finance teams, the cost of waiting compounds fast. Every quarter you delay, the problem gets more expensive and the solution gets harder.
When was the last time you delayed a hire and paid for it later?
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Timing risk compounds. The longer you leave it, the more it costs.
I’ve built a free scorecard that helps CFOs spot where the pressure is building across five human risk areas, so you can act before ‘next quarter’ becomes too late. It takes less than 3 minutes. Straight to the point…
