Most founders delay hiring financial leadership until they’re deep into a fundraising round or facing a compliance issue. By then, it’s often too late to fix months — or years — of poor financial practices.
Here’s the reality: you don’t need a full-time CFO on day one. But you do need CFO-level thinking from the moment your business starts generating revenue.
The Cost of Waiting Too Long
We see it regularly at Bayswater Financials. A startup with strong product-market fit approaches investors, only to discover their financials are a mess. Revenue recognition is inconsistent. Expenses are mixed with personal spending. There’s no cash flow forecast, no financial model, and no clear picture of unit economics.
The result? Weeks or months of clean-up before they can even begin the fundraising process. In a competitive market, that delay can be the difference between closing a round and losing momentum.
What CFO-Level Thinking Actually Means
This isn’t about hiring someone to do your bookkeeping. CFO-level thinking means having someone who can answer questions like:
- What’s our monthly burn rate, and how many months of runway do we have?
- Which revenue streams are actually profitable?
- What does our financial model look like for the next 18 months?
- Are we structured correctly for tax efficiency?
- What will investors want to see in our data room?
These aren’t questions you should be answering for the first time during a pitch meeting.
The Outsourced CFO Model
For most startups, the answer isn’t a full-time hire at AED 40,000–60,000 per month. It’s an outsourced CFO — a senior financial professional who works with you on a fractional basis.
At Bayswater Financials, our CFO advisory clients typically engage us for a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. They get access to experienced professionals who’ve worked with dozens of startups and understand what investors, regulators, and banks expect.
When Should You Start?
The honest answer: as soon as you have revenue. At minimum, you should have professional financial management in place before any of these milestones:
- Your first fundraising round
- Hiring your 10th employee
- Expanding to a second market
- Reaching AED 1 million in annual revenue
- Applying for a bank facility
The Bottom Line
The startups that raise successfully and scale efficiently aren’t the ones with the best product — they’re the ones with the clearest financial story. A CFO helps you build that story before you need to tell it.
If you’re a founder thinking about your next raise or simply want to get your financial house in order, reach out to our team. We’ll help you figure out what level of financial support makes sense for where you are today.