"We are a sports brand doing £6m, about a third of it wholesale, and we have just signed a two year kit deal. When should we hire a CFO, and what should we hire?"
The trigger is not a revenue number. It is when the cash decisions land weekly and the numbers behind them are late or contested. For most sports brands that happens between £3m and £10m of revenue, and the first version is usually fractional. Hire a CFO before the ledger is clean and you pay CFO rates for cleanup.
The quotes I hear run from £2,000 a month to £150,000 a year. The gap is not quality. It is scope: a bookkeeping retainer with a senior title, a genuine fractional brief, or a full time seat with a team under it.
Sports brands are not one business. Kit and apparel, equipment, teamwear and nutrition sit in the same sector with different balance sheets. A kit brand carries size curves and wholesale terms. A nutrition brand carries shelf life and subscription churn. The hiring question is the same. The trigger points are not.
What follows is the version I give founders on a call, checked against the rules in force in October 2026. Every number in the worked example is synthetic and labelled as such.
What is the short answer?
Revenue is a poor trigger on its own. A £3m brand selling wholesale and running a club deal needs more finance firepower than an £8m brand selling one product on one channel. What matters is the number of decisions that carry cash, and whether the person making them has time and clean numbers.
Here is the order that works in most sports businesses:
Fix the ledger first. The close, the stock reconciliation, the channel P&L and the aged debt should be true and on time before a CFO touches them.
Put a controller layer in place. That can be an existing finance manager, a promoted management accountant, or your outsourced team with a tighter brief.
Go fractional before full time. Two days a month is usually enough to build the model, challenge the range and stock decisions, and own the funding conversation. Most £3m to £10m sports brands do not have 220 days of CFO work a year. They have 24.
Hire full time when the work is permanent. A capital event, a second entity, a lender covenant, an acquisition or an exit creates a seat that needs someone in it every day.
Get the structure right. Employer National Insurance, VAT on fees, off-payroll rules and the audit threshold all change what the hire really costs. More on those below.
What does a CFO do that your accountant does not?
The confusion comes from four different jobs being given the same title in a small business. They answer different questions.
| Role | What they own | The question they answer | How they are paid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bookkeeper or outsourced team | Bookkeeping, purchase and sales ledgers, payroll, VAT returns | What happened, and did we file it? | Monthly fee |
| Accountant | Statutory accounts, Corporation Tax, compliance | Are the accounts right and on time? | Fixed fee |
| Financial controller | Management accounts, controls, stock, reconciliations | Are the numbers true, and how fast? | Salary |
| CFO | Pricing, cash, funding, investment, board reporting | What should we do next, and why? | Salary or day rate |
Your accountant is the record. Your controller is the truth and the timing. Your CFO is the decision. In a £5m sports brand the controller layer often does not exist, and the founder is doing that job at 11pm with a Shopify export. A CFO exposes that gap rather than fills it. Put a £140,000 salary on top of a five week close and the first quarter goes on reconciliation archaeology.
That is not a reason to avoid the hire. It is a reason to sequence it. We set out the controller question in more detail in financial controller vs accountant for a £5m brand.
What are the real triggers for a sports brand?
Five signals come up again and again. None of them is a revenue milestone.
The wholesale book gets big enough to need credit decisions
Once wholesale passes about a fifth of revenue, you are running a credit function whether you admit it or not. Terms of 60 to 90 days, sale or return on some ranges, season cut offs, and a handful of accounts that matter more than the rest.
On £2.1m of wholesale at 78 days, about £449,000 is sitting in someone else's bank. Whether to chase it, insure it, factor it or fund it is a CFO call. So is the credit limit on the next club account. The margin comparison sits in our guide to wholesale vs D2C margin.
Sponsorship and kit commitments outrun the season
A two year kit deal is committed cash before a single unit sells. Add ambassador fees, activation, free kit and the sample budget, and you have a block of cost that does not flex with demand. Someone has to model what happens if the club changes division, the athlete's season ends in March, or the activation underdelivers.
That someone also has to decide how the commitment is spread across the year in the accounts. A multi year fee paid up front is not an expense on day one. It is a prepayment that unwinds across the seasons it covers. If that schedule lives in your head, you have a trigger.
The stock buy becomes a bet on a size curve
Sports inventory is a range and size decision, not a unit decision. Get the middle sizes wrong and you sell out of the best sellers while the tail goes to markdown. Get the launch timing wrong and you carry kit into the wrong season at the wrong price.
A CFO does not pick the range. They price the risk: how much stock the business can carry, what the markdown provision should be, and which range earns its shelf space. FRS 102 requires stock at the lower of cost and estimated selling price less costs to complete and sell, so the provision is a judgement someone has to own.
You are running three channels with one set of numbers
Direct, marketplace and wholesale each carry different fees, different return rates and different cash cycles. If your P&L shows one blended gross margin, you cannot tell which channel is funding the others. A CFO builds the channel view and then makes the call on where the next £100,000 of stock goes. Our guide to how a sports brand should structure its P&L shows the layout.
Someone outside the business wants a number you cannot produce
A lender asks for a 13 week cash forecast. An investor asks for three years of monthly numbers that tie to the accounts. A buyer asks for normalised EBITDA and a stock provision you can defend. If any of those requests causes a panic, the CFO conversation has arrived, whether or not you feel ready.
What does a first CFO cost, and what has to come back?
Illustrative example. A sports brand with £6m of revenue, a 46% gross margin, £600,000 of EBITDA, £1.4m of stock, and £2.1m of wholesale at 78 days. None of these are client numbers. The point is the shape of the maths, not the exact rate you will be quoted.
| Option | Illustrative annual cost | What you get | Fits when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full time CFO | £143,250 | Roughly 220 working days, owns the function | £10m+, a capital event, multiple entities |
| Fractional CFO | £21,600 | Two days a month, model and challenge | £3m to £10m, or ahead of funding |
| Financial controller | £72,410 | Close, controls, stock, management accounts | The numbers are unreliable and a CFO is early |
| Your current outsourced team | What you pay now | Ledger, VAT, management accounts | Under £3m, one or two channels |
The full time number is £120,000 of salary, £17,250 of employer National Insurance at 15% on everything above the £5,000 secondary threshold, and £6,000 of pension at 5%. That is £143,250 before you buy a laptop. The Employment Allowance for 2026/27 is £10,500, but most brands with staff are already using it against the rest of the payroll, so do not net it off this hire.
The fractional number is two days a month at £900 a day. Rates move with scope, but the shape holds: 24 focused days is enough to build the model, run the range review and sit in the funding meetings. It is not enough to run a finance team.
Now the return. These are the three levers a first CFO normally pulls in a sports brand, shown at deliberately modest settings.
| Lever | Illustrative change | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Stock | £1.4m down by 10% | £140,000 of cash |
| Wholesale debtors | 78 days down to 60 on £2.1m | £103,562 of cash |
| Gross margin | One point on £6m | £60,000 of profit |
| Total | £303,562 |
That total is 2.1 times the full time cost. It is also the honest argument for going fractional first, because none of those three moves needs 220 days of a senior person. They need a clear owner, a decent model and someone with the authority to challenge the range and the credit terms.
Put the break even another way. The full time hire costs 2.4 points of gross margin on £6m, or £311,000 of extra revenue. The fractional hire costs 0.36 points, or £47,000. That is the difference between a hire you can justify with numbers and one you are hoping works.
Should you hire full time, go fractional, or promote your controller?
Fractional first for most brands between £3m and £10m. You get senior judgement without a permanent salary, and you find out whether the problems are strategic or just messy. A good fractional CFO should leave behind a model your team can run without them. If the model only works when they are in the room, you have bought a dependency, not a function.
Full time when the work is genuinely daily. A funding round, a lender covenant, an acquisition, a second entity, a factory move, or an exit process will absorb a full time person and pay for them. So will a finance team of four or more, because at that point someone has to manage it.
Promoting your controller is the option founders underrate and overuse. Underrated when the controller wants the strategic work, has the range, and gets proper support. Overused when a good management accountant is given a CFO title, no development and no cover for the close, and ends up doing the same job with a bigger diary.
The most common bad hire I see is a big company CFO at a £4m brand. They build a board pack nobody reads, a forecasting process the team cannot feed, and a cost base that assumes a finance function which does not exist. Six months later the founder is back doing the numbers, and paying for a title.
If you want the shape of an ongoing fractional arrangement, our fractional CFO service page sets out how the engagement works. The same decision logic for a different vertical is in when a supplement brand should hire its first CFO.
What has to be fixed before a CFO is worth hiring?
Five things. If three or more are missing, fix them first or write them into the CFO brief as the first 60 days.
A close inside 10 working days. If the management accounts land on the 25th, every decision is made on last month's news. Ten working days is achievable in a £6m business with a clean ledger.
Stock accuracy by SKU and size. Not a value that roughly ties. A count you trust at line level, because the range, markdown and buy decisions all depend on it.
A channel P&L. Revenue, platform fees, fulfilment, returns, creator costs and contribution, by channel. Blended margin hides the channel that is losing money.
A 13 week cash forecast. Weekly, rolled, with the stock payments and the VAT bill in the right weeks. This is the single most useful document a first CFO can own.
A commitments schedule. Sponsorship, kit deals, ambassador fees, wholesale terms, lease obligations and any minimum order quantities, all in one place with dates and cash amounts.
One more item belongs in the brief. FRS 102 changed for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2026. Most leases now go on the balance sheet as a right of use asset and a lease liability, and revenue recognition has moved closer to IFRS 15. If you have a warehouse lease and wholesale terms with a right of return, that transition lands in your first CFO's lap.
What should the first 90 days look like?
Days 1 to 30. Rebuild the management pack. Channel P&L, gross margin by range, stock by size and age, aged debtors, and a close calendar with names against each step. Reconcile the wholesale ledger account by account.
Days 31 to 60. Build the 13 week cash model and the commitments schedule. Take the next stock buy to the model rather than to a feeling. Review pricing on the top 20% of SKUs by contribution, and the credit terms on the top five wholesale accounts.
Days 61 to 90. Three scenarios: base, down 20% and up 30%. A funding plan tied to the cash model. A board pack that fits on two pages, with one page of decisions needed and the numbers behind them.
Put that in the engagement brief as deliverables. If a proposal has no deliverables, no dates and no named owner, it is a consultancy retainer with a CFO title on the invoice.
What are the tax and structure points to get right?
Employer National Insurance. The rate is 15% for 2026/27, and it starts above the £5,000 secondary threshold. A £120,000 salary carries £17,250 of employer NI before pension. Budget the whole package, not the salary line.
VAT on fees. A fractional CFO's fees are standard rated at 20%. If you are VAT registered you recover it, so compare net fees. If you are not registered, the gross number is your real cost.
Off-payroll working. Many fractional CFOs work through their own limited company. If your brand is a small company, the worker's intermediary decides the employment status, not you. Once you are no longer small, the determination becomes yours and you have to issue a status determination statement. "They have a limited company" is not an answer. Check the position before the contract starts, not after.
The audit threshold. A company can claim audit exemption with at least two of three: turnover up to £15m, assets up to £7.5m, and 50 or fewer employees. Those tests apply to financial years beginning on or after 6 April 2025. A lender or investor can require an audit in the facility or investment documents, and shareholders holding 10% can request one in writing. Near the line, the reporting burden steps up and the case for a CFO gets stronger.
FAQs
When is a sports brand too small for a CFO?
Under about £2m to £3m of revenue, a full time CFO is usually a poor use of cash. A controller plus a good accountant covers compliance and control. If you need senior finance for a specific project, such as a fundraise or an exit, buy a fractional CFO for that project rather than a permanent seat.
Can a fractional CFO sign off our statutory accounts?
No. Statutory accounts and any audit are separate from the CFO role. Your accountant prepares and files the accounts, and a registered auditor signs the audit report if one is needed. A fractional CFO can own the management pack and the schedules the auditor works from, which usually makes the audit cheaper and faster.
Should our CFO be a company director?
Usually not at first. A director has legal duties and personal liability, and a fractional CFO can attend board meetings and own the model without being appointed. If you do appoint one, treat it as a governance decision with proper advice, not as a way to make the finance hire feel more senior.
The Close
A CFO is not a grown up you hire to make the numbers stop being scary. It is a seat you fill when the decisions get bigger than the time you have to make them.
Get the order right and the hire compounds. Ledger, then controller, then a fractional CFO with a written brief, then full time when the work is permanent. Get the order wrong and you pay senior rates for a cleanup project, then wonder why the numbers still arrive late.
If you are weighing up a first CFO hire and you cannot say what the first 90 days should produce, book a call.