A CFO at our May roundtable described working through a CEO change in the previous six months.
The old relationship had been built on years of mutual trust. The new one was still forming. The pack hadn’t changed.. the numbers hadn’t changed. But the board meetings felt different. Heavier. More careful.
That story closed the session, and it reframed everything that came before it. We’d spent an hour on headlines, pre-meets, and who writes what. Underneath all of it sat the same theme. The board pack is only ever as good as the relationships around it.
The CFO and the CEO
“The first thing I look for in a new role is a CEO I can work with. Number one. Everything else comes after that.”
That came from one of the most experienced CFOs in the room, and nobody pushed back.
Another attendee had lived the opposite. A CEO who saw only upside, and a CFO who was the lone voice naming the risks. The pack read ‘risk, risk, risk’ and the board meetings were combative. A better pack wouldn’t have solved it. The fix came from finding middle ground in conversation before anything went to the board.
Same house, same walls. But when the foundations shift, the doors start sticking, and nobody can quite say why. That’s what a leadership change does to a board pack. The document reads differently, even when the numbers are the same.
The chair, on your side of the table
In PE-backed businesses, the chair is appointed by the sponsor. They hold the sponsor’s trust, they’ve sat on portfolio boards before, and they know the rhythms of the relationship.
Building your own relationship with them, separately from the CEO, is one of the most valuable moves a CFO can make in their first 12 months. Not behind the CEO’s back. Alongside them.
One attendee described what happens when the CEO and chair haven’t quite gelled. The CFO ends up caught between two senior voices still working each other out. The pre-meets feel awkward. The corridor conversations don’t quite flow. And the pack gets read more carefully than it was written.
The advice from the room was patience. CEOs and chairs in PE-backed businesses are often very different personalities to the finance leader. More experienced, more generalist, more comfortable with grey areas. Finance people, by training, see things in black and white. Some of what feels like friction is just two people working each other out.
When it doesn’t work
Kirkland West’s 2025 analysis of CFO turnover in PE-backed businesses puts it bluntly. When the CEO-CFO relationship lacks trust, friction escalates quickly and often ends in premature leadership change. Russell Reynolds puts average PE-backed CFO tenure at around 2.5 years, roughly two CFOs per deal across a typical five-year hold.
In that context, the board pack stops being a quarterly document and becomes a running scorecard on a relationship.
The CFO in the room who’d seen this most often described the work the same way every time. Build the relationship before the pack matters. Have the difficult conversation in private before it ends up in the document. Treat the chair as an ally, not an audience. And when something isn’t working, name it early, in a small room, before it becomes a board-level issue.
The real KPI
Across this series we’ve covered balance, early warnings, and handing the pen back to the business. All useful. None of them the point.
The CFOs who described the lightest board cycles weren’t the ones with the sharpest models or the cleanest reporting cadence. They were the ones who’d built the relationships around the pack. With the CEO. With the chair. With the wider exec team.
When those relationships are working, the pack does its job. When they’re not, you can reformat every page and the doors still stick.
Trust doesn’t show up on the page. It’s what the page is always trying to communicate.
And a final question worth sitting with. If your CEO changed tomorrow, how much of the board’s confidence in finance would still be standing?
This is the final part of our series drawing on the May roundtable, ‘Board Packs and the Narrative That Lands’. Part 1 covered the balance problem. Part 2 covered why a yellow flag in April beats a red flag in June. Part 3 covered who should actually write the pack.
The PE CFO Roundtable runs monthly. Free, peer-only, Chatham House Rules. Coming up: ‘Team Resilience & Removing Heroics’ on Thursday 13th August, 12:30pm on Teams.
Register at www.core3.co.uk/pe-cfo-roundtable
