A finance director resigns on a Tuesday and gives four months' notice, and now someone in that business has a countdown clock they didn't ask for.

I've sat across the table from enough business owners going through this to know the first instinct. Panic a little, ring the usual recruiter, ask for a shortlist of finance directors who look exactly like the one who's leaving. But most of the time that's the wrong move, because the person who's leaving probably wasn't hired that way either.

Something in the market this week made that point better than I could. Forterra, the building products group, announced its new chief financial officer on 28 July. She's not coming from another CFO seat, she's currently group financial controller at Genuit Group. Before that she'd already done two stints as a CFO, at JELD-WEN Europe and at Doncasters.

Her title on paper had gone backwards, her experience hadn't.

The outgoing CFO, Ben Guyatt, is leaving on 31 October, so Forterra had a defined runway of a bit over four months. Most companies don't manage that well. According to Russell Reynolds Associates' Global CFO Turnover Index 2025, global CFO appointments hit 316 last year, 12% above the seven-year average and up 10% on the year before.

It's not a blip, it's a sector where the top seat changes hands constantly, and where the businesses left scrambling are the ones who never built a shortlist before they needed one.

Job Titles Lag Behind Real Experience

Titles are sticky and slow to change, but capability moves faster. Someone gets made financial controller at 34, does the job well for six years, quietly picks up board-level exposure, runs a refinancing, and sits through two audits from the other side of the table. And their title still says financial controller because nobody's created a CFO vacancy for them to step into.

Forterra just closed exactly that kind of gap.

And it's the same gap most SME finance functions have no process for finding, because they're not running searches. They're reacting to a resignation letter, usually a short one, usually arriving on a day nobody had planned for.

How Long Does It Actually Take To Replace A Finance Director?

Longer than four months, in most cases I've handled personally. A proper finance director search, done well, tends to run five to seven months from brief to start date once you factor in notice periods on both sides. Forterra's timeline was tight enough that they'd clearly had someone in view already, or built a fast, targeted process around a specific type of candidate rather than a generic shortlist.

Most businesses don't have that luxury.

They wait until the finance director actually resigns before they start thinking about who could do the job. By the time a shortlist exists, three of the five months are gone on interviews, referencing and negotiating notice periods. And the business is left running its year-end, its bank covenants and its board pack on an interim basis, hoping nothing goes wrong before the new person walks in.

What Should A Business Actually Look For In A Successor?

Not a job title. Look at what the candidate has actually done under pressure, not what their business card called them while they were doing it. A financial controller who has run a refinancing, managed an audit from the client side, or presented to a board is doing CFO-level work under a smaller title, and that gap between title and capability is exactly where the best successors are hiding.

Specialist recruiters earn their fee here, or should.

The job is building a live map of who's ready two rungs below the title everyone's worried about, before the resignation letter lands rather than after. Proper finance director succession planning means knowing three or four names before you need one, not scrambling to find them once the notice period clock has already started.

I had a client last year lose a finance director with six weeks' notice and no successor lined up. We placed someone quickly, because we already knew three financial controllers in the region who'd outgrown their current seats and were ready to move up. It wasn't luck. Just legwork done before the phone rang.

Building Your Own Shortlist Before You Need It

You don't need a vacancy open to start this. Ask your current financial controller, financial planning and analysis manager, or commercial finance manager where they see themselves in three years, and you'll learn more from that answer than from any org chart. Some want the top job. Others would rather it went to someone else, and that's useful information too.

We've pulled together a broader guide to planning senior hires before you need them, if you want the fuller version of this thinking.

And if the honest answer is nobody internal is close yet, an external view helps most right there. Not to fill a role that doesn't exist yet, but to know who's out there, what they're worth, and how long it would realistically take to get them through the door if your finance director gave notice tomorrow. Knowing that in advance is the whole point.

We have roughly this conversation with clients before there's a role to fill, not after. If you'd rather know what your finance leadership succession actually looks like than find out the hard way, we're happy to talk it through, no pressure and no vacancy required.

And when the seat does need filling, our finance recruitment team runs searches like this every week, built around real capability rather than a job title on a CV.

If you're the one eyeing that next step up from financial controller to finance director, by the way, it's worth having a look at what's out there too. Our latest finance roles are worth a browse even if you're not actively looking. It rarely hurts to know what the market's paying.

Forterra had four months' notice and used it well. Most businesses get less warning than that, which is why the map needs building now, and not later, while there's still no pressure attached to drawing it.