Marc McRoberts

One of the first questions I get is how long the search will take. It is a fair question, and I try to answer it honestly instead of telling people what they want to hear. The real answer is that it depends, but I can walk you through what actually drives the timeline.

A finance search is not one clock, it is a few. There is the time to find and reach the right people. The time for them to decide they are open to a conversation. The time to interview properly. And the time for the person you pick to give notice and start. Each of those has its own pace, and rushing any of them tends to backfire.

Finding the right people is faster when the role is clear and slower when it is fuzzy. If you know exactly what the seat needs and what a fit looks like, the search moves. If the role is still being figured out, we spend time there first, and that is time well spent, because a clear role is what makes everything after it faster.

The candidate side has its own timing. Good finance people are usually employed, so they do not jump. They take a few conversations to get comfortable, they think about their families, they weigh a steady job against an unknown. That is not delay, that is a serious person making a serious decision. The people who move overnight are often the ones you should worry about.

Interviews add time too, and this is where a lot of searches stall, on the company side. When feedback takes two weeks and scheduling drags, good candidates cool off or take another offer. The single biggest thing you can do to speed up a search is to move quickly once you meet someone you like.

Then there is notice. A strong hire almost always owes their current employer two weeks, sometimes more for a senior seat. That is a sign of the character you want, not a problem.

So when someone asks for a number, I give an honest range for their specific role rather than a promise. What I can tell you is that a real search done right takes longer than posting a job and hoping, and a lot less time than the mess of hiring the wrong person and starting over.

For most of my searches, that comes out to three to four weeks from our first call to an accepted offer.

If you have a seat to fill and want a straight answer about what the search really looks like for your role, call or text 262-893-1523 or email marc@mdmrecruitingllc.com.

Most controller interviews cover the resume and not much else. Where did you work, what systems did you use, how big was the team. That tells you where someone has been. It does not tell you how they will handle your books.

Here are five questions I use to get past the resume.

“Walk me through your last month-end close, day by day.” A strong controller can tell you exactly what happens and when, who owns what, and where it usually gets stuck. Vague answers here are a warning sign.

“Tell me about a number you caught that nobody else did.” You want someone who looks for problems before they cost you. Listen for a real example, what they noticed, and what they did about it.

“How would you explain our gross margin to someone outside finance?” Your controller has to talk to owners, managers and bankers, not just accountants. If they cannot make a number clear in plain English, that gap shows up everywhere.

“What would you change in your first 90 days, and what would you leave alone?” Good candidates know that fixing everything at once breaks things. You are listening for judgment, not a long list.

“Why this company, and why now?” This tells you whether they want this seat or just a new one. It also tells you how likely they are to stay.

None of these have a right answer to memorize. What matters is whether the candidate can talk about the real work in a real way. That is the conversation I have with every candidate before you ever meet them.

If you have a controller seat to fill and want people who can answer these questions well, call or text 262-893-1523 or email marc@mdmrecruitingllc.com.

An open controller seat feels like a hole you can live with for a while. You spread the work around, you tell yourself you will get to the search next month, and the business keeps moving. But the cost of that empty seat is real, and it adds up faster than most owners think.

Start with the close. When there is no controller, the month-end close slips. Numbers come in late, and when they are late, you are making decisions on old information. A pricing call, a hiring call, a spending call, all of it gets harder when you cannot trust this month’s numbers.

Then there is the work that just stops. A controller keeps an eye on cash, watches the margins, and catches the small problems before they turn into big ones. When that seat is empty, nobody is watching. A billing error runs for three months. A vendor overcharges and no one notices. Cash gets tight and you find out late.

There is also the toll on your team. When the controller is gone, the work does not disappear. It lands on your accounting manager, your staff accountants, or you. People stay late. Good people get tired. And a tired, stretched team is a team that starts looking around for a job with less stress.

And the longer the seat sits open, the more it costs to fix. A rushed hire made out of exhaustion is how you end up with the wrong person, and a bad controller hire is slow and expensive to unwind. You do not save money by waiting. You just move the cost somewhere you cannot see it yet.

None of this means you should panic and hire the first resume that looks decent. It means the empty seat is not free, and treating the search like it can wait forever is a mistake. The right move is to run a real search now, quietly and properly, so you are not making a desperate hire in three months.

If you have an open controller seat and you are feeling the pinch, that is exactly the kind of controller search I run. Call or text 262-893-1523 or email marc@mdmrecruitingllc.com and tell me about the role.