Director, FP&A

About the Role

ZeroTo20 is seeking an FP&A leader to join our growing Accounting & Finance firm. Initially this role will serve in a player-coach capacity, with long term plans for this role to grow into an FP&A practice leader. This role is built for someone who has lived the startup journey themselves, not just observed it from the sidelines, and who can pair the discipline of rigorous financial modeling with the judgment and influence to shape how founders and leadership teams make decisions.

In partnership with our CEO and Practice CFOs you will support the most complex and highest-stakes client relationships in our FP&A practice, while also coaching and developing the FP&A Managers and Analysts who support those engagements. This is both a hands-on technical role and a leadership role: you set the standard for how ZeroTo20 delivers FP&A work, and you build the people who deliver it, eventually just focusing on building and managing the team delivering.

What your day to day may look like

Team Leadership & Coaching 

  • Serve as a player-coach for FP&A Managers and Analysts, reviewing their work, sharpening their thinking, and developing their client-facing skills 

  • Set the standard for financial modeling rigor, analytical quality, and client communication across the FP&A practice working within our defined and set model practices and templates

  • Guide Managers and Analysts on how to turn variance into narrative, helping them learn to tell the story behind the numbers, not just report them

  • Provide hands-on mentorship that helps team members grow into trusted advisors in their own right 

  • Partner with ZeroTo20 leadership on staffing, workload balance, and team development across the FP&A bench

  • Contribute to the frameworks, templates, and playbooks that shape how ZeroTo20 delivers FP&A work across clients 

  • Help refine how the firm scopes, staffs, and delivers FP&A engagements as the practice grows

Strategic Client Partnership 

  • Own end-to-end FP&A relationships with your book of clients, from time to time you may be the senior financial voice in the room

  • Build trust with founders, CEOs, and boards by combining technical credibility with the judgment to know what matters and what doesn't 

  • Translate ambiguity into structure: when assumptions, plans, or timelines don't align, you ask the hard questions and help clients find the answer 

  • Bring pattern recognition from your own time inside venture-backed or PE-backed companies to anticipate what's coming next, not just react to what's already happened

  • Act as a critical point of escalation with all FP&A clients, especially on technical matters. 

Core FP&A Work

  • Architect and oversee operating models, with Analysts and Managers building and maintaining under your review 

  • Lead cash forecasting and runway analysis conversations where the stakes and the sensitivity are highest

  • Manage the monthly FP&A cadence across clients

    • Oversee the monthly close-to-forecast process across your client portfolio, including budget vs. actual analysis and variance review 

    • Lead forecast and variance walkthroughs directly with senior client stakeholders

  • Lead annual planning processes, helping clients build a plan of record that's realistic, defensible, and tied to how the business actually operates 

  • Own quarterly variance reviews against plan and guide the team in identifying what's signal versus noise 

  • Define and refine the core financial KPIs that matter most for each client's stage and business model

Board & Investor Support 

  • Lead board and investor preparation, building and reviewing financial schedules, analysis, and materials with an eye toward the broader business narrative 

  • Coach Managers and Analysts on how to prepare board-ready work, and review their output before it reaches the client 

  • Bring direct experience sitting in or supporting board and investor conversations, not just preparing materials for them

What you bring

  • Depth of Experience: 8-12+ years of FP&A experience, including time spent inside a venture-backed or PE-backed SaaS companies through a real growth or scaling moment, ideally from Series A up to C 

  • Player/Coach: Experience managing or coaching other FP&A professionals, with the ability to operate as a true player-coach, not just a reviewer of work 

  • Art & Science: Both the science and the art of FP&A: the rigor to build and stress test a model, and the judgment and communication skill to know what story it's telling 

  • Trusted Senior Partner: A track record of being a trusted partner to founders, operators, or executive teams, not just a source of numbers 

  • Comfort with Ambiguity: Comfort working through ambiguity and inconsistent inputs, and the instinct to ask the right clarifying question before building anything

  • Communication Skills: Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to flex between technical detail and executive-level narrative depending on the audience 

  • Key Organizational Skills: Organizational range to manage multiple clients and direct reports simultaneously without losing quality on either

Our Tools & Systems

We work within the tools our clients use, which are typically lightweight and startup-oriented. Adaptability matters more than experience with any single platform.

  • Excel / Google Sheets (strong proficiency required)

  • QuickBooks

  • Carta

  • CRM systems such as HubSpot or Salesforce (nice to have)

  • And others, depending on the client

Compensation

The salary range for this role starts at $200,000. We recognize based on the level of hire that this starting point may be below some more senior candidates, we are flexible and would love to hear from you. We will discuss compensation expectations in the first conversation. Our salary data is based on internal and external data. The final offer will vary based on assessment of a candidate's skills and ability and our budget data. 

If this sounds like you, please send a resume with your cover letter as the body of the email to careers@zeroto20.com