Wayfair's CFO made the finance team smaller - and the company got stronger.

Everyone tells you the opposite. More growth, more headcount, more systems. Most founders I meet are one stretched controller away from saying it out loud: "We just need to hire more finance people."

Usually, that instinct is wrong. And it is wrong in an expensive direction.

Complexity, not capacity

I have spent two decades in business transformation across pharma, telecoms and FMCG, and the pattern repeats everywhere from £10M founder-led firms to global groups:

Complexity is rarely a sign you've outgrown your systems. It is usually a sign that nobody ever simplified them.

Finance functions don't drown because the work grew. They drown because the workarounds grew - every quick fix, inherited spreadsheet and just-for-now report calcifying into the way things are done. Adding people to that doesn't fix it. It staffs it.

I have walked into finance functions carrying twice the headcount they needed and half the clarity. Every time, the fix started with deleting things, not hiring.

The £200K reflex

Do the arithmetic on the instinct. A capable finance hire at the level founders reach for in this moment - a finance manager or junior FD - costs £60-90K. The "proper CFO" version of the reflex costs £150-200K+ before the recruiter's fee.

That money buys you more hands. It does not buy you fewer spreadsheets, cleaner data or reports anyone reads - the new person inherits the same mess with less context. Six months later the function is bigger, more expensive, and exactly as blind.

The four checks

Before any finance hire, run these four checks. They take an afternoon.

1. Count the spreadsheets

If your "system" is fourteen linked workbooks that only one person understands, headcount won't save you. Simplification will. (If you just thought of the person - that's the point.)

2. Find the rework

How much of your team's month is spent rebuilding the same numbers because nobody trusts the last version? Reconciling versions of the truth is not finance work. It is a process failure wearing a busy face.

3. Ask what the board actually uses

Most finance teams produce reports nobody reads, in case someone asks. List every recurring report; ask which changed a decision in the last quarter; kill the rest. Clarity comes from fewer, better numbers.

4. Map the dependencies

If one person's holiday breaks your reporting, you don't have a team. You have a single point of failure wearing a team's job title. That is a design problem, and it stays a design problem at any headcount.

When hiring IS the answer

Sometimes the checks come back clean: processes simple, reports used, no rework, no single point of failure - and the team is still underwater. Then yes, hire, and do it properly. Growth genuinely does create finance work.

But run the checks first, because the order matters:

  • Simplify then hire, and the new person joins a designed function and multiplies it.
  • Hire then simplify, and you pay a salary to help maintain the mess you were about to delete.

Wayfair didn't cut for the sake of it. They simplified, then performed. Leaner beats bigger when the lean version is designed rather than under-resourced.

Key takeaway: "More finance people" is the £200K answer to a question you haven't asked yet. Run the four checks - spreadsheets, rework, unread reports, dependencies. What they usually reveal is a function that needs less complexity, not more salary.

The question isn't "can I afford more finance headcount?" It's "what would I have to simplify before more people would even help?"