A software company scaling toward its next growth phase just spent months lining up its finance chief, months before anyone forced its hand.

Aptitude Software Group, the London-listed finance ERP business behind the Fynapse platform, announced this month that Kenneth Paqvalén will join as chief financial officer and executive director from the twenty-first of September. He arrives with two decades of scaling international software companies behind him, including finance-chief roles at Napier AI, R3 and Matillion. Nobody at Aptitude was leaving in a hurry.

There was no scramble.

No resignation letter on a Friday afternoon. And no interim cover while the board worked out what came next. If you spend your working life around growing UK businesses, this is the interesting part.

Most finance director hires go the other way round. A business grows for three or four years on the back of one good financial controller who never quite gets promoted properly, and then something breaks. Or a funding round stalls because the numbers aren't investor-ready. But more often it's the quiet exit: the person holding the finance function together hands in their notice and takes the institutional knowledge with them.

Only then does the phone call happen.

When does a business actually need a finance director?

Not when the wheels come off, which is when most SMEs make the call. The honest answer sits somewhere around the point where financial decisions start shaping strategy rather than just recording it. A funding round, an acquisition, a move into new markets, or a board that suddenly wants forecasting instead of bookkeeping. If you're already asking the question out loud, you're probably a year later than you should be.

Aptitude's chair, Ivan Martin, was fairly direct about the thinking behind the timing. He framed the appointment as the board making sure the company had the right financial leadership in place ahead of its next growth phase, not scrambling to find it once that phase had already started.

It's a subtle distinction. But it's the bit most growing businesses skip entirely, and it's usually the reason our finance director hiring conversations start later than they should.

What does it actually cost to leave it too late?

More than the salary, usually. Robert Half's 2026 UK Salary Guide puts the finance director pay range at roughly £89,750 to £138,000, rising well past £150,000 in London and financial services. That number is easy to benchmark. The one that actually hurts isn't.

Nobody puts a figure on the six months a business spends operating without proper financial leadership while a deal, a raise or an audit is live. I've sat with finance directors who inherited a mess mid-transaction, trying to rebuild investor confidence while also learning the job in real time. None of them enjoyed the first quarter.

Hiring a finance director well before you strictly need one feels like an unnecessary cost to a lot of founders and MDs. And fair enough, sometimes it is.

But hiring one after you needed one is usually more expensive, just less visible. The cost turns up as a lost deal or a rushed decision rather than a tidy line on the P&L. Kenneth Paqvalén's CV is worth a second look here too, three CFO roles, all at high-growth technology businesses, all involving funding rounds and mergers or acquisitions. Track record counts.

Aptitude wasn't hiring a generalist to keep the lights on. It went looking for someone who had done this kind of scaling before, more than once, and could walk in already knowing what the next eighteen months would demand.

That's the piece a lot of SME searches miss. A finance director job spec that just lists managing the team and reporting to the board will pull in plenty of competent applicants. It won't necessarily pull in someone who has steered a business through the exact growth stage you're heading into. Getting that right takes a search built around where the business is going, not just where it's been.

Why do smaller businesses rarely plan this far ahead?

Because it doesn't feel urgent until it is. A founder running a fifteen-person company doesn't need a full-time finance director, and shouldn't hire one on the off-chance. But there's a gap between "not yet" and waiting for a crisis that most businesses never plan for properly. Most owners miss it.

Interim or fractional finance leadership can bridge some of that gap. Building a relationship with a specialist recruiter before you're desperate covers the rest, at no cost beyond a conversation.

We see this from the other side of the table constantly. A client rings needing a financial controller or finance director inside six weeks because a deal is moving and the finance function isn't ready for it. We can usually help.

But the placements that work best are the ones where the hire is still there three years later, actually shaping the business rather than just keeping it compliant, and those tend to come from clients who started the conversation before the crisis, not during it.

What does a well-timed hire signal to everyone else?

It isn't only about the numbers. A board that hires its finance leadership proactively is telling investors, staff and its own management team that it takes the next stage seriously. Aptitude didn't need to explain this appointment defensively.

Most SMEs will never make an RNS announcement about a finance hire. But the underlying logic still holds at any size. If your finance function is coping today but you can already see the shape of what's coming, a growth round, an acquisition, a founder wanting to step back, that's the moment to start looking properly. Not the moment things wobble.

You can read the full Aptitude Software CFO announcement for the detail on Paqvalén's background and the board's reasoning.

If that sounds like where your business is right now, it's worth talking before the gap opens up rather than after. Take a look at what we cover across our finance recruitment work, and send us the brief when you're ready. We'll help you find someone who has already done the next stage, not just the current one.