Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance.

One of the most consequential decisions you will make as a first-time public CFO is sizing your finance function for the company you are becoming, not the company you have been. Transitioning to the public markets means every line item is under a microscope. Over-building your team ahead of scale destroys operating leverage and creates a cost structure that is incredibly difficult to defend in front of institutional investors. On the flip side, under-building creates massive execution risk at exactly the moment when execution risk is most visible to the market.

When planning your headcount, you must use revenue-band benchmarks, not aspirational headcount targets. According to Gartner’s 2026 Finance Spend and Headcount Key Metrics, the baseline benchmarks are clear:

The right benchmark is not the overall median but the peer group at your expected post-IPO revenue scale. But allocating that headcount correctly across your departments is where strategic leadership takes over. The process-level spend distribution provides the right-sizing framework for where to allocate, not just how much. Based on the same Gartner research, here is how a public-ready finance team distributes its most critical strategic resources:

• Accounting & Reporting (23%): This is the infrastructure function. When staffing this team, the quality of the people and processes matters as much as the headcount.
• FP&A (20%): This is the function that will be most visible to investors and analysts in the first year of public company life. It is often underweighted in business unit finance organizations.
• Treasury (7%): The complexity of treasury increases substantially for a newly public company managing a public debt structure, a broader investor base, and the proceeds of the offering.
• Investor Relations (3%): Despite representing a small but structurally important allocation, IR is the function most likely to be absent or undersized in a first-time IPO finance organization.

While these four functions drive your roadshow narrative, the remaining 47% is just as vital. That balance covers standard transactional operations like tax compliance, internal audit, and the order to cash and procure to pay engines that keep your working capital flowing. Size these functions using exact peer benchmarks. Every dollar of structural finance cost that exceeds the peer median is a story you will have to tell investors.

When scaling up for a liquidity event, which specific finance function do you see organizations chronically under-resource the most? 

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