By Tom Lazay & Firas Raouf

Every Series A founder knows the grind. You are handling everything: sales, HR, operations, payroll, fundraising, and even negotiating with your cloud providers and lawyers for better pricing. And for a while, that works. But there comes a point where your biggest risk is not competition or product-market fit, it is you.

We have seen it time and again: founders who are still signing every contract, chasing invoices, and handling payroll. Founders who are building dashboards at midnight because the board meeting is in two days. And founders who insist, “We don’t need a finance and ops leader yet.” Six months later, those same founders say, “We wish we had hired one a year ago.”

The Transition from Founder to CEO (You’re Becoming a Bottleneck)

The Series A is the moment your company stops being a project and starts becoming a business. It is also when the founder-CEO’s role changes most dramatically. You go from being the do-everything person to the person building and leading the team that does everything.

At this stage, your priority should not be taking on more work. It should be shedding it. Every week, you should be removing yourself as the bottleneck to growth. That means handing off the tactical work so you can focus on what only you can do: selling, recruiting, fundraising, and steering the company and product strategies.

Focus on Your Unique Superpowers, Shed Everything Else

This is also the perfect time to reflect on your superpower. What are the things you do that no one else can do? Where do you create the most value? Once you identify that, your goal becomes maximizing time spent on it. The rest is fair game to shed.

We often encourage founders to literally make a list of everything they do and sort it into three columns: what they are great at and love doing, what they are capable of but would rather not do, and what they neither enjoy nor excel at. The last two categories form the foundation of the Head of Finance, Operations, and Go-To-Market Analytics job description. That list becomes your roadmap for delegation.

This particular act of shedding your work is not just about delegation. It is about finding your co-pilot.

The Co-Pilot You Didn’t Know You Needed

We stopped referring to this hire as a CFO, even though this hire actually is basically what you’d call an Operating CFO… but we won’t use that title.  The title scares founders because it sounds too corporate, too senior, too finance-focused, and too expensive. Instead, we think of this person as your Head of Finance, Operations, and GTM Analytics, or more simply, your co-pilot. This is the person who keeps the company humming while you are out fundraising, on the road selling, or (one day) actually taking a vacation.

They are neither accountants nor bookkeepers. Those tasks can stay outsourced. This person builds the systems, dashboards, and GTM models that help you see around corners. They pressure-test forecasts, challenge pipeline reports, and make sure you are hiring based on data, not gut feel. They make your board decks run on time, your equity grants get issued, and your fundraising data room sparkles.

And perhaps most importantly, they give you your weekends back.

What Does This Person Actually Do?

Founders often ask, “What would this person actually do?” The answer: a lot. Here is a snapshot of the deliverables, tasks, and responsibilities that fall under a great Head of Finance, Operations, and GTM Analytics:

Finance and Fundraising:

• Build and manage financial models and forecasts
• Pressure-test revenue and pipeline assumptions with the CEO and sales team
• Manage the budget planning process and ensure tight cash management
• Prepare board materials and investor updates
• Own fundraising data room preparation and investor diligence
• Manage cash flow including collections, venture debt processes and financial audits

Go-To-Market Analytics:

• Build and maintain KPI dashboards and sales analytics
• Model lead-to-revenue conversion rates and funnel coverage
• Calculate CAC, LTV, and other GTM metrics
• Work with sales and marketing leaders to forecast bookings and pipeline health
• Identify data-driven insights that inform GTM strategy

Operations:

• Oversee HR operations, benefits, and recruiting coordination
• Manage vendors, contracts, and office and lease logistics
• Implement and manage company systems and tools (HRIS, payroll, expense management, etc.)
• Create scalable internal processes and documentation

Investors, Board, Governance:

• Prepare a bulk of the board materials and ensure timely delivery
• Coordinate option grants and approvals
• Maintain compliance with governance and reporting obligations
• Manage the company’s cap table and Carta (or similar) implementation
• Manage the company’s lawyers

Culture and Enablement:

• Serve as the CEO’s trusted right hand
• Help the CEO manage the executive team’s priorities and cohesion
• Lead with ownership, transparency, and accountability
• Build a data-driven culture where metrics inform decisions

Why Series A Founders Wait Too Long

Founders delay this hire because it does not feel urgent. Sales feels urgent. Hiring engineers feels urgent. Finance feels like overhead. But what is really happening is the founder gets sucked into spending 80% of their time on tasks that only deliver 10% of the company’s value… and they’re becoming a bottleneck to more and more workflows and decisions across the company.

There is also a sequencing myth: that you need to fill every go-to-market role before you hire this one. But we have seen the opposite. The founders who bring on a co-pilot early are the ones who scale faster because they regain their bandwidth to lead.

Many times we have heard founders use the excuse: “we will hire this person after we raise the Series B.” And our advice is always: “No, you should hire this person to help you raise the Series B.”

Full-Time vs. Fractional: What Makes Sense?

Fractional CFOs have become the default choice for startups seeking to reduce costs. This makes a lot of sense at the Seed stage. But in our experience, most fractional CFOs are Controllers who skew heavily toward CPA and accounting backgrounds. They will produce crisp GAAP financials every month, and plug your sales forecast into Excel, but they will generally not build your pipeline model, manage HR, or run fundraising diligence.

And they can get expensive as your finance needs get more sophisticated, often reaching $125K to $250K per year (including bookkeeping) for someone who is also servicing other clients. For a similar cost, you can hire a full-time operator who becomes an integral part of your team and culture. As we often say, “A fractional CFO will not relieve the bottleneck of the CEO.”

The Impact When You Get It Right

We have seen this transition firsthand. One founder resisted the hire for months, insisting their fractional CFO was enough. Eventually, we sourced a full-time Head of Finance and Operations. Within weeks, everything changed. Board decks went out early. The CEO stopped spending weekends on slides. Recruiting accelerated. And when the Series B came around, the new CFO ran most of the due diligence, while the CEO focused on strategic discussions, and pitching the company’s vision and mission.

It was not just a hire, it was a transformation. The company stopped feeling like a startup held together by duct tape and started running like a real business. The CEO recaptured 10-20 hours each week.

What to Look For

Forget the title. Look for someone who:

• Has been in an early-stage software startup before and seen what Series A to Series B looks like.
• Understands the go-to-market engine: pipeline math, CAC, LTV, and forecasting.
• Can model various growth/burn scenarios and present how each of those scenarios might impact your cash runway, fundraising needs, and hiring plans.
• Can manage finance, analytics, HR, office space, and equity administration.
• Is detail-oriented enough to handle the basics but strategic enough to challenge assumptions.

Expect to pay around $175K to $225K base, plus 1 to 2 percent equity. Don’t think of this compensation as a cost. Rather think of it as the fuel to scale the business and accelerate its growth. It is one of the highest ROI hires you will ever make at this stage.

The Bottom Line

As a Series A founding CEO, you don’t just need another set of hands. You need a co-pilot obsessing over the essential operational and financial details that you’re likely eager to shed. Someone who can build structure where there is chaos and data where there is instinct. Someone who lets you focus on being the founding CEO again.

Every founder resists this hire. Every founder later says, “I wish we had done it sooner.” Long live the startup CFO (or whatever title you want to call it).