Succession Planning for Finance Leadership Roles

Over the next few years, more finance leaders will retire, get recruited away, or decide it’s time for something else, and most companies will find out how thin their bench really is right when it happens. This post covers what a real succession plan for finance leadership needs to include, and why most plans stop one layer too high.

Most Succession Plans Only Cover the Top Seat

Ask a CEO if they have a succession plan for their CFO, and many will say yes, at least loosely. Ask about the controller, or whoever’s next in line after that, and the answer gets a lot vaguer. That’s backwards. The CFO is one departure. The layer underneath — controller, assistant controller, the senior accountant who’s been quietly running half the close process for three years — is where most of the real disruption risk sits, because there are more of those roles and less formal attention paid to them.

Deloitte’s CFO Signals survey found that close to a quarter of CFOs said their company didn’t have a formal plan to replace them, and the gap was even wider at some of the largest companies surveyed. If that’s true at the CFO level, where at least someone is usually thinking about it, the odds that a mid-sized company has a real plan for its controller or accounting manager are not great.

What an Unplanned Vacancy Actually Costs You

The Timeline Is Longer Than People Expect

A senior finance search rarely wraps up in a few weeks. Between defining what the role actually needs, sourcing candidates who fit both the skills and the culture, and running a real interview process, a controller or CFO search often stretches into months. During that stretch, someone still has to close the books, manage the bank relationship, and keep the audit on track. External CFO hiring has been at a 10-year high recently, which is a decent sign that many companies are hitting this exact wall: no ready internal option, so they’re starting from zero when they can least afford to.

Familiarity Isn’t the Same as Readiness

Here’s where a lot of internal succession thinking goes wrong. A controller who’s been solid for years starts to feel like the obvious next CFO, mostly because everyone knows and trusts them. But being trusted and being tested are different. Has that person ever run a lender conversation? Presented financials to a board or ownership group under real pressure, not a rehearsed update? Made a call on something with no clean answer? If the honest answer is no, you don’t actually know if they’re ready. You just haven’t found out yet that they’re not.

Building a Bench, Not Just a Backup Name

Map the Roles That Actually Matter

Start by listing every finance leadership seat where a vacancy would genuinely hurt — not just CFO and controller, but any role where one person is quietly load-bearing for the whole function. Then, for each one, name who could step in for 90 days without the wheels coming off. If that list has blanks, you’ve found your actual priorities. Most companies skip this step and jump straight to grooming one person for one role, missing where else the org is exposed.

Give People Real Exposure, Not Just a Title Bump

Development that actually prepares someone looks less like a training course and more like real reps: let the controller sit in on the next lender call. Have them own a piece of the board deck instead of just building the slides someone else presents. Put them in the room during the audit close meeting, not just on the prep work beforehand. None of this needs to be formal or expensive. It needs to happen before the day they’re forced into the deep end.

Write It Down and Actually Revisit It

A plan that lives in your head isn’t a plan; it’s an intention, and intentions don’t survive a sudden departure. Put names next to roles, note the gaps and put a recurring date on the calendar to revisit it, because the right answer six months from now might not be the same person it is today. Roles change, people change teams, someone you were counting on takes another offer. A plan that never gets revisited quietly goes stale, unnoticed, until the moment it matters.

When the Bench Isn’t Deep Enough

Sometimes there’s no honest internal answer, and that’s not a failure; it’s just reality for many finance teams that are lean by design. A ten-person accounting department doesn’t always have a controller-in-waiting sitting there, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. The mistake isn’t lacking an internal successor. The mistake is not admitting it until the seat is already empty. Companies that handle this well start building an external relationship before they need it, so that when the time comes, they’re not starting a search from a standing stop while also trying to keep the close on schedule.

Talk to Burchard & Associates Before You Need To

Whether you’re mapping out who’s next in line internally or you already know a role is going to need an outside hire, it helps to have a search partner who knows the St. Louis accounting and finance market before the vacancy shows up, not after. Reach out to Burchard & Associates to talk through what your bench actually looks like right now.