Group Chief Financial Officer — Automotive Retail Inventory and Dealer Capital

The mandate

A multi-city automotive-retail group is opening a group CFO seat as vehicle inventory, after-sales operations and new dealership commitments begin competing for the same borrowing capacity. Local profit statements show healthy contribution, yet interest, demo-vehicle ageing and manufacturer settlement timing make cash returns less consistent. The board needs a continuing executive owner of capital, not an additional reporting layer. Your opening twenty-four-month agenda will establish dealership economics that survive changes in sales incentives and allocation conditions.

The business operates sales and service outlets through several entities, with distinct inventory facilities and manufacturer support arrangements. You will connect vehicle identification-level inventory records to funding drawdowns, sales delivery, incentive eligibility and eventual cash receipt. Used vehicles and service parts require different ageing and valuation decisions; they cannot be controlled through a single stock-days target. Expansion proposals must incorporate ramp losses, workshop utilisation and property commitments before a location is described as self-financing or strategically necessary.

As group CFO, you control the finance organisation, lender communication and the financial approval architecture across thirty-eight colleagues. Dealership controllers retain local operating knowledge but will work to common evidence standards. You can alter stock-funding allocations and approve commercial exceptions within delegated limits. New property commitments, guarantees to other entities and acquisitions require board consent. Sales leadership owns customer relationships and pricing execution; finance determines the evidence needed for discounts, financing subsidies and incentive accruals to enter a defensible margin calculation.

Success means each dealership can explain its cash return after inventory finance, service absorption and all contractual support costs. The lender pack must reconcile with stock records rather than rely on last-minute certificate preparation. You will be expected to build successors for local control roles and develop a three-year capital plan with clear stop/go gates for expansion. This is open-ended employment in Mumbai, with structured outlet visits that keep the executive close to operations without replacing the authority of dealership management.

What you will own

• Determine vehicle-stock funding priorities by age, variant demand and committed delivery evidence, establishing a weekly allocation decision that prevents slow inventory from absorbing capacity needed elsewhere.
• Reconstruct dealership contribution after manufacturer incentives, financing subsidies, used-car reconditioning and workshop overhead, giving operating leaders a margin bridge they can interrogate transaction by transaction.
• Approve the finance assumptions for outlet expansion cases and recommend release gates based on demonstrable workshop absorption, actual lead conversion and attainable inventory turns rather than presentation targets.
• Establish lender reporting controls that trace financed vehicles to custody, sale and facility repayment, escalating title or stock-count exceptions before they become certification breaches or disputed collateral.
• Set used-vehicle and parts provisioning standards with independent ageing evidence, separating recoverable refurbishment expenditure from discounts that merely postpone recognition of an already impaired economic position.
• Negotiate the structure and tenor of inventory and property funding, quantifying group support obligations and presenting refinancing alternatives before any contractual cross-default clause is accepted.
• Build dealership-controller capability through practical cash and margin reviews, reserving senior escalation for material judgement rather than requiring head-office approval for every routine accounting correction.

Candidate qualifications

• Have eighteen to twenty-two years of finance leadership with demonstrable automotive-retail or comparable inventory-financed network experience. Describe a stock allocation or funding decision you owned that changed cash performance, including the operational resistance, source-record weaknesses and lender conditions involved. A history of consolidated accounts without exposure to outlet economics is insufficient for this seat.
• Bring senior accounting judgement and a robust professional finance qualification or equivalent demonstrated expertise. You must distinguish contractual incentive entitlement from commercial expectation, reconcile stock finance to physical custody and understand why workshop profitability, used-vehicle valuation and new-vehicle margin require different control evidence and escalation thresholds within the same retail group.
• Evidence direct lender and owner engagement concerning working-capital facilities, covenants and expansion funding. Explain how you challenged an apparently profitable growth proposal when funded inventory or property commitments made the economics unacceptable. Your contribution should include documented alternatives and a decision outcome, rather than attendance at financing meetings led entirely by another executive.
• Demonstrate leadership of geographically dispersed finance teams without erasing local commercial judgement. You should have built controller accountability, resolved material reconciliation failures and protected reporting integrity when sales incentives rewarded volume over cash. The role also requires measured judgement around related-party support, confidential owner information and the boundary between financial approval and customer-facing commercial decisions.

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 9 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-002.