Portfolio Chief Financial Officer — Partnership Economics and Succession Capital

The mandate

A professional-services portfolio has reached the point where separately negotiated partner arrangements are affecting investment choices more than underlying client economics. Five partnerships share a commercial umbrella but retain different drawings, profit-sharing conventions and collection practices. The new portfolio CFO will create a finance office capable of explaining those differences and financing succession without treating every disputed allocation as an accounting adjustment. This is an ongoing leadership appointment, with the first eighteen months devoted to restoring a common economic language.

The initial work is to distinguish distributable profit from cash that must remain available for working capital, professional indemnity obligations and committed technology investment. Partner retirements are expected over several years rather than in one transaction. You will build a rolling capital account model that links retirement settlements, replacement-partner admissions and realistic collection behaviour. Partners must see the commercial implications before signing new remuneration arrangements; finance must not discover an unaffordable promise after the agreement has been circulated.

The CFO will lead twenty-four colleagues, appoint partnership finance leads within an approved establishment and set the portfolio's reporting timetable. You may approve routine banking and operating expenditure within documented limits, negotiate financing proposals and challenge uneconomic client terms. Acquisition consideration, partner capital changes and guarantees remain reserved for the finance committee. Legal interpretation of partnership deeds belongs with counsel; the role supplies the economic working and ensures that approved decisions are reflected accurately in each entity's books.

By the end of the first cycle, service-line margins should reconcile to collected revenue, partner drawings should follow an agreed liquidity waterfall and every succession commitment should appear in a funded forecast. The second year moves toward acquisition integration and a stronger finance bench, not permanent crisis reporting. Pune is the working base, with scheduled partnership visits and two protected analysis days each week. Employment is open-ended, with progress judged by repeatable decisions that operating partners can understand and use.

What you will own

• Establish a partner-capital ledger that reconciles admissions, drawings, retained earnings and retirement obligations, with disputed balances separately documented before the finance committee considers settlement.
• Decide the portfolio liquidity waterfall using collection volatility, committed investment and contingency requirements, then translate the approved ordering into monthly distribution controls for each partnership.
• Build service-line contribution statements that distinguish partner delivery time, subcontractor expenditure, unrecoverable work and central charges, exposing where apparent revenue growth consumes cash rather than generating it.
• Negotiate banking structures around verified cash flows and legally available security, explaining covenant consequences and cross-entity support obligations to partners before any proposed facility is accepted.
• Set client-credit and work-in-progress escalation rules that preserve professional relationships while making aged unbilled work, disputed invoices and partner-sponsored exceptions visible to accountable decision makers.
• Develop the succession funding plan with retirement scenarios, replacement-partner contributions and stress tests, identifying which commitments require deed amendments rather than optimistic forecasting assumptions.
• Appoint and coach partnership finance leaders against a documented capability map, making portfolio reporting continuity less dependent on the CFO's personal intervention in every difficult reconciliation.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring eighteen to twenty-two years of finance experience with meaningful executive accountability in a professional-services, partnership or closely held multi-entity environment. Show how you personally reconciled competing owners' economic interests without obscuring cash constraints, and provide examples where a revised distribution mechanism remained workable after the original sponsor stepped away from it.
• Demonstrate professional accounting depth, preferably Chartered Accountancy or a comparable rigorous qualification, alongside practical understanding of capital accounts, related-party balances and consolidated reporting. The requirement is an ability to separate accounting profit, legally distributable amounts and available liquidity, not a credential unsupported by difficult judgement under scrutiny from owners and external assurance teams.
• Evidence responsibility for working-capital improvement where senior relationship holders resisted standard collection controls. Explain the invoice, work-in-progress and dispute evidence you used, the commercial concessions you allowed and the exceptions you declined. Experience must extend beyond preparing ageing dashboards to changing the decisions that caused recurring collection leakage in the first place.
• Show financing and succession-planning leadership at mid-market scale, including the capacity to interrogate legal and tax advice without substituting for those specialists. You should have led finance teams through common reporting standards, protected the integrity of confidential ownership information and coached capable deputies rather than retaining every judgement as a personal dependency.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 8 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-001.