Last year I conducted interviews with dozens of CEOs about their onboarding experiences; one theme kept surfacing: there are often surprises, and those surprises are often financial in nature. I heard from leaders who discovered their reserves were not what they had been told to expect. I heard from leaders who built out program-level profit-and-loss statements and discovered that programs everyone assumed were profitable were actually in the red. Getting the finances right, and getting them right early, matters for new CEOs and for CEOs who have been in the seat for years.

I had my own version of this surprise when I walked through the door at APS. My CFO had just accepted a great offer from another society, a genuine step forward for her career. I was happy for her to take it. But it also meant the position was open. I have a strong controller, and she has kept things running, but she has been doing it with two hats on for a while now. So we have been running a search, in this case for a chief financial and administrative officer, a CFAO.

The CFAO role is not like most other chief-level hires. Most vice presidents and chiefs run a single function. They are responsible for one part of the organization, and their view of the business is shaped by that function. The CFO, or the CFAO, is usually the exception. Alongside a CTO, this is often the only chief whose view spans the entire organization. That difference changes the nature of the partnership with the CEO. It is not the same relationship you have with a chief who runs one functional unit. It is closer to a peer who sees the whole business the way you do, from a different angle.

That different angle is what makes the complementary-skills question so important in this search. Most nonprofit CEOs do not come up through finance, so they obviously need financial strength in this hire. However, the complement isn’t limited to finance. In my case, my training and background are in science and communications. My financial training has come mostly on the job. While I can read a nonprofit spreadsheet and find my way around a budget, I don’t have expertise in financial modeling or different types of business models. These are skills I need to find in my staff team, especially the CFO or CFAO.

Every CFO I have brought in has taught me something new. Early in my career, I was taught how to actually make sense of financial statements, not just read them, but understand what they were telling me. Next was how to build strategic budgets rather than treat budgeting as a compliance exercise. The third lesson was how to communicate financial information clearly to a board, which is a different skill than understanding the information yourself. The most recent is how to take the data our programs generate and turn it into information I can actually use to make decisions: pulling out trends, knowing what to compare against what, and knowing how to look outside our own organization for benchmarks.

I sometimes get pulled toward mission thinking in a way that can soften my read on a program’s financial reality. A good CFO brings a harder-nosed lens to the question of how we actually generate revenue and how our programs perform financially. That has never felt like a tension between us. It has felt like exactly the kind of balance the role is supposed to provide.

My search is still open. Whoever comes through that door will need to partner well with my existing team. They will also need to complement me specifically as I look at ways to diversify revenue that I have not pursued before: mergers or acquisitions, membership restructuring, and other approaches. That is a different kind of partnership than the one that taught me to read a balance sheet. It is one built for where the organization is headed, not just where it has been.