Dear SaaStr: Our CFO sounds very polished but we are missing the burn rate plan almost every month, and he takes no responsibility for it. What should i do, if anything?
This is a serious problem, and I’d be direct: you need to act on this now.
Here’s what I’ve seen happen a hundred times: A mediocre CFO won’t manage cash properly. They’ll tell you runway is fine when it isn’t. They’ll miss the nuances in the collections process. They’ll let expenses creep because having hard conversations with other department heads is uncomfortable. You’ll wake up one morning and realize you have 6 months of runway instead of 12, and nobody told you because nobody was really watching.
The fact that he’s “polished” actually makes this worse, not better. Polished CFOs are great at sounding confident. They’re great at explaining why the miss wasn’t their fault. But cash doesn’t care about polish. Your cash balance is the most honest number in your business. It doesn’t care about narratives or excuses.
Here’s what you need to do immediately:
#1. Stop delegating cash oversight. This is your job as a founder right now. You need to look at actual cash out each month—better yet, each week. Not the budget. Not the projections. What actually left the bank account? I check this every Monday morning first thing, before anything else.
#2. Get specific about the misses. Is he missing burn because:
- Expenses are running higher than planned and he’s not catching it?
- He’s not tracking actual cash flow vs. accrual accounting (which lies to you)?
- He’s not having hard conversations with other department heads about spending?
- He genuinely doesn’t understand the cash position?
#3. Make a decision. If he’s a mediocre CFO who you’re keeping anyway, you have exactly one option: micromanage him. Weekly cash reviews. He needs to come prepared with exact numbers. No excuses. This is uncomfortable, but it’s better than the alternative.
If he can’t or won’t step up to that level of scrutiny, you need to replace him. Period. A CFO who can’t own the burn rate is a liability when cash matters most—and it always matters.
The hard truth: You can hide from a bad sales hire for a quarter. You can smooth over a lumpy product roadmap. But you cannot hide from your burn rate. When it hits zero, the conversation ends.
Don’t let this drift. Address it this week.
