Portfolio Chief Financial Officer — Writing Instruments Platforms

The mandate

An investment-backed portfolio of writing-instrument manufacturers is combining acquired businesses that serve different price segments and distribution models. Their financial reports are individually usable but do not yet support comparable decisions on product investment, working capital or integration benefits. The portfolio CFO will hold enduring finance responsibility across the businesses, preserving useful local knowledge while establishing a common control and performance framework.

The appointment is permanent and open-ended. An initial eighteen-month agenda includes portfolio reporting, an acquisition-finance playbook and transparent tracking of approved integration benefits. Forty-eight staff report through business finance leaders rather than a newly centralised transaction factory. Mumbai is the base, with regular manufacturing and distribution reviews to understand inventory, tooling and dealer settlement economics in each business before imposing common measures.

The CFO owns financial integration priorities, portfolio policy and finance leadership appointments within approved organisation plans. Investment approval, acquisition signing and material capital restructuring remain with the board. Each business chief retains product and operating decisions. The role must distinguish a genuine integration benefit from a transfer of cost between entities, and should resist standardisation that makes reporting convenient but destroys economically useful differences between brands or channels.

The ongoing output is a portfolio finance system that can absorb another acquisition without recreating controls from scratch. It will connect deal assumptions to actual financial performance and identify when the original investment thesis needs revision. Legal diligence opinions, product engineering and sales-force integration are excluded from the CFO's direct ownership. Their financial implications still require clear evidence, named specialist input and explicit treatment in recommendations to the investment board.

What you will own

• Establish portfolio reporting that reconciles entity books and comparable performance measures, recording where product or channel economics justify different treatments instead of forcing every acquired business into a misleading uniform format.
• Decide finance integration priorities after acquisition, sequencing opening-balance evidence, approval controls and reporting dependencies so the portfolio gains oversight without disrupting essential local processing or dealer relationships.
• Build an acquisition-finance playbook that connects diligence findings to post-close owners and verification, ensuring material assumptions about inventory, working capital and margins remain visible after the transaction team leaves.
• Challenge claimed integration benefits against attributable cash and cost evidence, distinguishing real improvement from intercompany reallocation or one-off timing effects before reporting progress to the investment board.
• Recommend portfolio working-capital actions using brand and channel characteristics, balancing stock availability and product complexity against funding needs rather than applying an identical inventory target across dissimilar businesses.
• Develop business finance leaders who can operate within portfolio controls and contribute informed challenge, with succession coverage and review routines that allow the platform to expand without concentrating all judgement in one executive.

Candidate qualifications

• Be a Chartered Accountant with 22–28 years of finance experience and prior CFO accountability in manufacturing or consumer-product businesses. Evidence must show control of an entity finance perimeter and meaningful involvement in M&A, diligence or post-acquisition integration. A corporate title without personal responsibility for financial decisions across operating businesses will not establish fit for the portfolio role.
• Demonstrate how you converted diligence findings into post-close finance actions. Explain a material inventory, margin or working-capital assumption you verified after completion, including who owned the evidence and what changed when reality differed. This role requires practical integration judgement, not only valuation modelling or familiarity with transaction terminology detached from ongoing financial control.
• Bring manufacturing-costing and commercial cash-cycle understanding relevant to high-assortment products, dealer channels and tooling or production investments. You must be able to compare businesses without concealing useful economic differences. Selection will examine when standardisation improved decisions and when you preserved a local method because the operating model genuinely required it.
• Have led several finance managers or business heads through a common governance framework, including difficult disagreements over benefits or portfolio priorities. Board communication should distinguish realised change from forecast expectation and remain candid about unresolved integration risk. The CFO needs direct operating engagement, controlled delegation and the ability to build capability that survives both acquisitions and changes in individual leadership.

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 15 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-112.