I've spent seven years as an interim CFO, walking into nonprofits and independent schools mid-transition and walking out again once the work is looking to the future. This is what that in-between space has taught me, about a school, about the role, and about myself.
Part 1: Reading the Subtext
Before I start a new position as an interim, I always ask for a copy of the audit. It gives me a general sense of the size and scope of the school’s operation, a place to orient myself before I walk through the actual door. But an audit is a Polaroid — useful but fixed, showing a scene that’s already changed by the time it's in my hands. What I'm interested in is the moving picture, the one that's been running quietly, often for years, which no one seems to have time to address.
The First Walkthrough
When I arrive, the receptionist greets me enthusiastically: "We're so excited to have you. We believe your experience will be really helpful for us." She means every word, and I believe her. But I also begin making my own observations, ones which only someone with fresh eyes can see so clearly.
I stop in the mailroom first to see what's coming in, what's going out. I check the corners of stairwells. I look in the restrooms. I read the bulletin boards slowly. I stop at a row of framed photos — students mid-laugh, a faculty member holding a trophy, a campus event that, from hairstyles and clothing, looked like it was a few years ago. I ask the person walking with me who they were. "Oh, those kids are long gone," she says. "We just haven't had a chance to update them."
I ask if there is a storage room. Storage is one of the most honest places in a school. Sheets of unused stickers, pads of graph paper with curled edges, juice boxes, and random Starbucks cups packed with sugar packets and stirrers. A broken chair and an extra table. Textbooks from a math curriculum that the school no longer uses. An array of t-shirts, all extra large, from a Fun Run long past.
Every item in that room is a purchase someone approved, a decision that made sense in the moment. What stays with me isn't the spending; it's the keeping. Nobody threw it out, donated it, repurposed it, or sent it home with the kids. It became part of the invisible landscape of what a school hasn’t made time to manage. A candy jar sits on the front counter. I take a piece. Hard candy isn't chewy. It was.
Listening to the Subtext
I learn from people too. Within the first hour, someone asks me, “What do you think about summer hours?” A subtext runs below the question and also the silences. I find out a student’s tuition hasn’t been paid, and no one knows what to say to the family. What a school can't answer tells me as much as what it can.
What I'm listening for underneath the welcome is the informal processes. The workarounds people built when the official process stopped working.
What I'm listening for underneath the welcome is the informal processes. The workarounds people built when the official process stopped working. The lower school timecards quietly corrected every pay period because the system has a bug and no one found time to fix it. 403(b) calculations completed on an Excel sheet after each payroll because the system couldn’t handle necessary nuances. These aren't failures but rather evidence of employees holding something together with the tools they have.
By the end of the first week, I've learned more from those walkabouts and conversations than from anything in the audit. I know how the institution actually runs. I know where the weight has been carried, by whom and for how long.
When I sit down with each person that touches school business, I start with something specific: “I noticed the vendor invoices come directly to you. How did that start?”, or “I noticed the timecard corrections happen every pay period. How does that work?” The underlying question in each case is, “Do you have what you need to do your work?”
It lands differently once someone knows I've been paying attention, once they see the notebook has real observations in it, once they understand I'm not there to correct them. I'm there to help them put down what they've been carrying.
That's usually where something shifts.
Part 2: Identifying and Changing Structural Issues
After a few weeks as an interim CFO, I have found what I often find: accumulation. By this I mean the effects of decisions that made sense at one time and then, layered with other decisions over time, evolved into something more complicated, which long-time employees are too close to see.
Patterns like these don’t correct themselves. They accumulate until a school finds itself making reactive decisions under pressure rather than deliberate ones with a runway.
Some examples: Faculty salaries that far outpaced other schools in the region. Climbing tuition discounts that quietly cut into operational budgets. Nearly 80% of the kindergarten class receiving financial aid awards. A structural deficit — cunning and patient — moving in the wrong direction.
Patterns like these don’t correct themselves. They accumulate until a school finds itself making reactive decisions under pressure rather than deliberate ones with a runway. That’s usually where my work as interim CFO starts. In every engagement, the same question surfaces: Is the school operating for a season or for the generations to come?
Tactical vs. Strategic Interim Assignments
Payroll, bill pay, database integrity and system conversions all matter, and I pay close attention to them. A strong foundation of good data is essential and often can be cultivated when a new business leaders steps in. But the real work is the question underneath the numbers, because that picture stays fuzzy when you’re too close to see the whole frame.
An interim role can be purely tactical. An interim can provide continuity and oversight while a full-time CFO search runs its course. Payroll runs. Invoices go out. Accounts are reconciled. The business office keeps the lights on. Nothing breaks. And nothing is questioned. Everything is preserved, waiting for the new hire to start.
An experienced interim looks for what is underneath and does more than just keep the system running. An experienced interim works with the school to build the process that lasts.
My job is to understand current conditions and then build new conditions where the next person can succeed.
The person who held the role before I arrived is rarely the problem. People drawn to this work care deeply. What I find, almost without exception, is the result of limited resources: forced workarounds when the official process stopped working; projects deferred because there wasn’t enough time or money; responsibility absorbed that was never formally assigned.
When there is failure, it usually belongs to the conditions. A culture that didn’t recognize what it was asking. A set of tools that were never adequate for the job. A picture that remained just out of focus. My job is to understand current conditions and then build new conditions where the next person can succeed.
Necessary Conditions for Real Change
None of this works if the school isn’t ready for it. The questions I ask only land when someone is willing to hear the answers. The distance I bring only has value when there’s a head of school or board ready to use it. This isn’t a solution that can be dropped into any situation and produce the same result. I’m part of a conditions story, and so is the school.
The head of school usually knows. She’s been carrying it quietly, sometimes for years, waiting for someone to sit across from her and name what she’s been seeing. Not to fix it for her but to see it with her. When that’s the room I walk into, something becomes possible.
Part 3: Preparing for a New Permanent CFO
The head of school asks me to draft the job description for the forthcoming search for a permanent CFO. I consider the title. A CFO will arrive at the school expecting strategic altitude. A director of finance and operations is appropriate for someone closer to the ground, who finds satisfaction in details of the work. If the title isn’t right, the person stepping into the role is set up to be frustrated.
Reshaping the Role
In schools, “give it to the business office” is a reflex — the place where the hot potato lands when no one else will claim it. Responsibilities that had quietly accumulated over the years began to come off the new job description. Budget reporting, for example, is now automated; it no longer needs a person to carry it.
What remains is the current job. Transactions must be processed, then someone must check them, and after that, a strategic leader can confidently bring numbers into the leadership room. Three functions, not necessarily three people, but all three must exist. When they don’t, the whole system collapses to its lowest available function. The analyst becomes the doer. The strategic leader becomes the analyst. And the head of school is left making decisions on information nobody had time to check.
This is precisely where an interim can be valuable – they can shine a light on extra responsibilities that should be distributed elsewhere.
At one school I worked with, a staff member with capacity to manage fire drills and other safety-related responsibilities said no to the responsibility without a stipend. The head then handed it to the business office, which was already carrying too much. The business officer was now managing fire drills and inventorying emergency supplies, and nobody thought to ask what he wasn’t doing while he was doing all of that. This is precisely where an interim can be valuable – they can shine a light on extra responsibilities that should be distributed elsewhere.
Part 4: When It’s Time To Become an Interim
The work of the business office itself is no longer what draws me in. My attention is pulled to messier work, when the roles are not fully clear, when processes are not fully legible, when the job is still slightly out of focus.
Jean Piaget, the Swiss child psychologist, described two ways people take in new experiences: assimilation, which fits it into existing structures, and accommodation, which changes the structures themselves.
Schools, by necessity, rely on assimilation. Habit is the infrastructure of care. It's how you run a place that resets every August, serves hundreds of families and still remembers which third grader has a peanut allergy. But habit isn't where I do my best work.
My model is readiness, closer to what Piaget would call accommodation than assimilation. Not maintenance and not routine. I come in when the structure isn't clear to the team, to the board, and sometimes to the head trying to make decisions without clean information. I like that moment when the audit rests on the seat beside me, as I sit in a building I haven't learned to read yet.
I feel the greatest rewards from my work as an interim CFO when things become clear to the people who have been closest to them all along. Sitting with a director of finance who has been treating the 403(b) summary plan description like gospel and watching her realize it’s more nuanced than that. Walking a head of school through a cash flow projection until the numbers stop being abstract. The moment when something opaque becomes usable. That shift changes how decisions are made long after I’m gone.
When the processes are running, when the questions coming to me belong somewhere else, when the work becomes refinement instead of discovery, that version needs someone who finds energy there. Someone who wants to make a good process better, season after season, in a place they’ve chosen to belong.
Success for an interim CFO is no longer being needed by a school that once needed you dearly. There is someone who will choose this work, who will take what we built and tend it carefully, who will still be there in five years, knowing every family’s name, belonging to the place in a way I never quite do.
Every school I’ve worked with lives in me in some specific, ordinary memory. A worn sweatshirt. An auction. A quiet donation to a place still doing the work, choosing what it wants to become. I came for that. And when it’s time, I leave for that too.
