As a CPA, I think in Excel. I think in debits and credits. I’m not used to thinking in color and squiggly lines. So over the past year, I’ve been sympathetic as I’ve watched growth-stage founders try to scale the finance function in their business. Because it doesn’t always add up. 

It turns out that building a finance team to keep pace with a growth-stage company isn’t simple math. What’s practical at Series A, breaks down at Series B and C, and what works for an enterprise company is usually either overkill and/or too expensive. 

Beware the Scalability Trap

Here’s what I see happening: a company raises its Series B. Revenue is climbing, operations are getting complex, and suddenly, the “Fractional CFO” it hired 18 months ago is actually just an accountant. The natural reaction? Hire a controller or CFO.

When you hire one person, you get that one person’s knowledge and experience. What happens when you need inventory expertise for your supply chain issues? Or when trade spend deductions are eating into your margins? What about when you’re preparing for due diligence and need specialized reporting? When should I upgrade to Netsuite? Can I afford to hire an SVP of Sales? How much can I afford to spend on customer acquisition? 

Either your new hire doesn’t have that expertise, or they’re spending weeks trying to figure it out … instead of focusing on things they’re great at. Meanwhile, you’re paying full-time salaries for specialized knowledge you’re only using occasionally.

Consider the Pitfalls of Traditional Finance Hiring 

I don’t need to tell you that the market right now is unpredictable. Tariffs are shifting overnight. Funding rounds take longer. Customer demand fluctuates. If you’re a growth-stage company, your finance needs aren’t constant or consistent: sometimes you’ll need intensive forecasting support, sometimes you’ll need audit preparation, and sometimes you’ll need cash flow optimization. 

With traditional hiring, you have two options: either you’re paying for capacity you don’t always need, or you’re scrambling when specialized needs arise. And what if that one specialized person leaves? I’ve seen companies lose months of momentum because their controller departed right before a funding round, taking all the institutional knowledge with them. That puts you back to square one, with knowledge gaps and dead time while you recruit and onboard someone new.

This is why Propeller’s growth-stage services are designed for flexibility, continuity, and cost-effectiveness.

• Scale up or scale down. Propeller can add or remove resources as needed. Clients don’t pay for excess capacity or bear the cost of maintaining a team during slower periods.
• Don’t worry about knowledge gaps, switching costs, ball drops, or dead time. Propeller clients get continuous coverage, no matter how your team changes.
• Propeller’s steady-state teams are 20 to 35% less expensive than hiring W2s internally, and have the expertise to identify cost savings equivalent to paying for themselves.

Don’t Settle for Guesswork When You Can Have Experience

Many of our growth-stage clients come to us under pressure: they’re backfilling departing team members, or realized they’ve outgrown their existing finance team and need to level up quickly. The challenge with hiring finance team members at this stage is that very few people who you can actually afford have the actual experience you need. They might be technically competent, but they don’t know the benchmarks and playbooks, and they haven’t yet developed the contextual wisdom and career confidence to be prescriptive about giving you guidance.

What were other companies at your stage doing when they hit $30 million in revenue? How do other companies in your space typically structure their logistics investments? Without some pattern recognition, you’re making critical decisions based on limited data points, gut instinct, or guesswork.

Founders are used to the fact that building a company often feels like navigating blind. But at the growth stage, the stakes get higher. Should you invest in that new 3PL? How much can we afford to spend on customer acquisition? How much of our cash do we need to commit to inventory and AR growth next year? How do you structure reporting for your new board requirements? These are hard questions to answer for an entry-level hire who’s figuring it out as they go, and that might be a risk you can no longer afford to take.

Since Propeller works exclusively with startups along the continuum, we “get” what it’s like to be a startup at every stage. We know how it is to build the plane while flying it, move fast (without breaking things), and learn from your experiments. But after 17 years and 250 full-time employees, we’re no longer a startup. Sure, we’re still learning and applying new knowledge every day, but now we’ve got the experience, wisdom, and over-qualified staff our startup selves could only wish for.

Rethink the Startup Finance Team

What if instead of hiring one or two people to handle everything, from bookkeeping to audits to forecasting, you could access an entire hybrid team of specialists built for your exact needs? 

That’s exactly what we’ve designed. Imagine a controller as your main point of contact, someone who’s seen companies evolve from pre-seed through hyper-growth. They recognize key patterns, know which levers to pull, and understand what founders and investors are really looking for.

But here’s the difference: when inventory issues arise, automation handles the basics while a specialist fluent in both supply chain and finance steps in to make sense of the bigger picture. . When diligence looms, you get support from experts who’ve guided dozens of companies through the process and know exactly what investors want to see.

This isn’t the “fractional” model where one person splits their attention across ten different clients. It’s a hybrid structure: dedicated resources—whether that’s halftime or full-time equivalents—combined with a deep bench of technical accountants, inventory specialists, CFOs, and trade spend experts. Automation keeps routine processes efficient, while people bring judgement, accountability, and leadership. No single hire could bring that kind of depth affordably in-house, and no automated tool could replicate the context engine our teams provide.

Take our trade spend practice, for example. I don’t think there’s a single firm out there that understands trade spend the way Propeller does. But the tech tools are evolving rapidly and are notoriously difficult to optimize. And none of them automate 100%, so there are some critical functions that still require human oversight and manual support. In bigger CPG companies, a highly effective trade spending team can recover enough through disputes to meaningfully offset the costs for the entire AP and/or AR function!

Insist on an Embedded Team

The most successful growth-stage companies I’ve seen don’t operate in silos, and they don’t depend on any single point of failure. They integrate finance into marketing conversations, operations planning, and strategic decisions. By doing so, they can help predict what’s coming and advise on how to prepare for it. Companies operating this way need finance people who deeply understand the business and have the bandwidth to participate in these broader conversations. This is incredibly difficult to achieve when you’re relying on one person who’s already maxed out on basic accounting tasks, or when you’re relying on traditional finance hiring to provide specialized skills you only need occasionally.

Propeller growth teams embed ourselves directly into your workflow. We integrate into Slack channels, marketing calls, and operations meetings so that automated data flows are paired with human expertise. We don’t want to focus just on finance and accounting; we want to be part of the wider conversation, just like any senior finance leader would be. This ensures a continuity of knowledge, consistent processes, and the accountability of W-2 team members without the rigidity or cost of hiring in-house. 

Leverage Pattern Recognition

Hybrid success isn’t just about capacity; it’s about foresight. Because our teams are embedded across hundreds of growth stories, we see what works and when. That means we can tell a $20M company what levers others at the same stage were pulling to get to $50M. We can flag when revenue growth is outpacing logistics capacity, or when reporting should shift from descriptive to predictive analytics. Automation generates the data; our people translate it into strategy.

And because we’re already building your reporting infrastructure, finance leaders can shift from building reports to analyzing them.

We don’t just know how to structure reports: we also know how to weave the story behind the numbers. It’s not just presenting factual data—it’s translating what those numbers mean for the business. When clients have the right level of detail, they can actually make better business decisions. Combine this with pattern recognition—knowing what other companies are doing, what the market is saying—and it makes leaders incredibly powerful. It turns your growth-stage finance function from a cost center into a strategic asset.

Ask Yourself the Real ROI Question

After working with dozens of growth-stage companies over the past few years, I’ve become convinced that the traditional approach to finance hiring is fundamentally broken for this stage. Traditional finance hiring often assumes you need a body in a seat. But the real ROI comes from asking: What blend of automation and human expertise will make my finance function both scalable and accountable? 

A single W-2 hire may bring reliability but will quickly hit bandwidth limits. Pure automation brings efficiency but misses context and nuance. The future belongs to hybrid teams that combine both: flexible resources, technical expertise, and embedded pattern recognition that grows with you.

When you’re burning through cash and racing toward your next milestone, every financial decision compounds. The real question isn’t whether you can afford specialized finance support, it’s whether you can afford not to have it. 

The companies that figure out the math—by building finance operations designed for the complexities and unpredictability of growth-stage challenges—don’t just scale; they scale with predictability, resilience, and confidence.