When boards buy interim finance help, they buy reliability before they buy strategy

Published: 28.08.2026 | Author: Ray Nicholls | Category: Insight — Boards & Investors

Heidrick & Struggles published its 2026 Skills Index this month, drawn from twelve months of client requests for interim leaders and specialists across enterprise, mid-market, private equity and nonprofit organisations.

One finding is worth sitting with.

The single most requested interim skill across the whole data set is financial controls, accounting and audit. Financial planning and analysis sits third. Ahead of growth strategy. Ahead of strategic planning. Ahead of almost everything an organisation would describe as forward-looking.

When organisations bring in temporary senior help, the thing they most often want is confidence that the numbers are right.

That is not the story the market tells about itself

The prevailing narrative about senior finance has been running in one direction for a decade. The role has moved beyond reporting. The modern finance leader is a strategist, a business partner, a shaper of decisions rather than a scorer of them.

Most of that is true, and I would not argue with any of it as a description of what a good finance leader does when the foundations hold.

The demand data describes a different moment. It describes what organisations reach for when something is wrong, or when something is about to change, and they cannot wait for a permanent answer.

At that moment they do not reach for vision. They reach for control.

Why control outranks strategy in a demand table

Three things seem to be at work, and they are worth separating because boards respond differently to each.

The first is that control failures are visible and dated. A strategy that is quietly mediocre can run for two years without anyone naming it. A month-end that slips, a forecast that misses by a distance nobody predicted, an audit that opens up questions — those arrive on a specific day, in front of specific people, and they demand a specific response.

The second is that control is the precondition for everything else on the list. Growth strategy, cost programmes, transaction planning and systems modernisation all assume a reliable base of numbers underneath them. Where that base is soft, the strategic work stalls or, worse, proceeds on a false footing. Organisations tend to discover this in that order, which is why the reliability request often arrives first.

The third is timing. Control problems surface at exactly the moments when permanent capacity is least available — during a leadership gap, a transaction, a systems change, a funding process. The demand is temporary because the pressure is temporary. It does not follow that the underlying need is.

Two movements underneath the headline

Alongside the demand ranking, the report tracks which skills are growing fastest. Two of them speak directly to what I see in the UK mid-market.

Treasury has roughly doubled. For most mid-market businesses, treasury has never been a role. It has been a set of tasks absorbed by whoever was closest to the bank relationship, usually the Finance Director, alongside everything else. That arrangement holds while facilities are stable and refinancing is routine. It stops holding when lenders become selective, when covenant headroom narrows, or when the cash question moves from a monthly item to a weekly one. A capability that was never formally resourced suddenly needs to exist, and the business has nobody whose job it was.

Post-merger integration continues to climb. That fits the pattern I wrote about recently — that the first two quarters after completion are the period when a board can least trust its own numbers, precisely when the most consequential decisions get made. Longer hold periods and harder deal conditions raise the execution burden on sponsors, and the integration work that used to be absorbed by the existing team increasingly is not.

Neither of these is a story about ambition. Both are stories about capability that was assumed rather than built.

A necessary caveat

This is data from a firm that sells interim leadership, describing requests made to that firm. It tells us what clients asked one provider for. It does not tell us what the whole market needed, and it is weighted towards larger and international organisations rather than the UK mid-market specifically.

I would treat it as a directional signal rather than a measurement. What makes it worth reading is not the precision. It is that the shape of it matches what I hear in conversations with boards and investors, in a market where nobody is publishing that data.

The question this raises for a board

The useful question is not whether to buy interim support. It is what the demand pattern implies about how finance functions get built in the first place.

Most mid-market finance functions are assembled incrementally. A role is added when the pain becomes unignorable. The result is a function shaped by the history of the business rather than by its current requirements — strong where the pressure came repeatedly, thin where it has not come yet.

That works until the business changes shape. Then the thin areas are discovered under time pressure, usually in the middle of something else.

Three things are worth a board asking, and none of them require a hiring decision attached:

Which capabilities in our finance function exist because someone was appointed to provide them, and which exist because someone absorbed them? The absorbed ones are the ones that fail under load.

If our cash position became a weekly board question tomorrow, who owns it? If the honest answer is the FD, alongside everything else, that is a single point of failure rather than a capability.

What would a transaction, a refinancing or a systems change expose? Not in general terms. Specifically, which named person would be doing that work, and what would stop while they did it.

None of that leads automatically to a hire. Sometimes the answer is a defined piece of work with an end point. Sometimes it is a permanent addition below the finance leader rather than a change at the top. Sometimes it is simply naming a risk and deciding to carry it knowingly.

The value in asking is in doing it before the answer is urgent.

The demand data suggests most organisations are asking these questions in the middle of the event rather than before it. That is not a criticism of any board. It is just what the pattern looks like when reliability turns out to be the thing you needed most, and you find out at the point where it is missing.

Source: Heidrick & Struggles, 2026 Skills Index, published August 2026. The full report is available at heidrick.com/interim.

Pitch Hill Partners specialises in placing CFOs, Finance Directors, Financial Controllers and FP&A leaders into growth, PE-backed, turnaround and transformation situations across the UK. If you are a senior finance leader thin king about your next move, or a board looking for exceptional finance leadership, we would be glad to talk.