Today's controller is yesterday's CFO — Pete Boyes

Pete Boyes has been the modern CFO from inside the chair, then above it. Three CFO stops — ID Analytics (acquired by Symantec), SOASTA (acquired by Akamai), and Zego (acquired by Global Payments, where he stayed on as GM of the integrated business) — sat on either side of a decade as a tech investment banker. He's now an Operating Partner at Thoma Bravo, working hand-in-hand with portfolio CFOs. His clearest single framing of how the role has changed: today's controller is yesterday's CFO.

The structural driver is the SaaS subscription shift. New-logo growth used to carry the equity story; today, retention metrics, cash management against extended customer lifecycles, and lender-facing dashboards (ACV, ARR, gross retention) anchor the CFO’s external work. The accounting load that filled the original CFO chair has migrated down to a controller who is bigger than the controller of 15 years ago. That migration created room for the modern CFO to scale upward — into renewals, legal, HR, and operations — often as the #2 executive in the company.

What “operationally focused” actually means#

The scope expansion isn’t abstract. Concretely, in most SaaS companies Pete works with, the renewals team rolls up to the CFO. Often legal does. Often HR does. Often parts of operations do. The modern CFO, in his framing, is the COO in everything but title — the business partner to the CEO who carries everything the founder hasn’t kept on their own desk.

The hiring filter he runs at the VP, director, and senior-analyst levels makes the philosophy mechanical. His first interview question, regardless of the role: how good of a communicator are you? Can you sit with an engineer and discuss the product? Can you spend a day with customer support listening to calls? The modern finance function isn’t a silo banging away at models. It’s a cross-functional utility, and the people who staff it have to be wired for that.

The controller of today is a CFO 15 years ago in some ways. They're doing two-thirds of the work that CFOs did 15 years ago. That allowed the CFO to become more modern — renewals, legal, HR, certain operations all underneath them.

The triple headwind#

For ten years the modern CFO was effectively a growth CFO. Cheap capital, low interest rates, public markets paying for top-line — the job was to drive expansion and tell the story. Pete’s diagnosis of the current moment is that the environment has reversed simultaneously across three vectors. He calls it the triple headwind.

A lackluster macro environment. Drastically higher interest rates — material for the debt-financed software businesses that fill most of his portfolio. A tough funding environment that has closed the easy round-up path. Most modern-era CFOs have weathered one or two of these at a time. Rarely all three at once.

The implication is structural, not bearish. Profitable growth is the operating mode now. The CFO muscles that atrophied during the cheap-capital decade — cost cuts, layoffs, vendor renegotiations, price increases in an inflationary environment — are the muscles needed next.

We're facing today a lackluster macro environment, drastically increased interest rates, and a tough funding environment. You kind of have almost triple headwinds.

The PR test and the integration mantra#

Pete’s M&A craft is where the operator and advisor stations of his career sharpen each other. He runs every portfolio deal through three filters.

One: the PR test. Before any acquisition, write the press release first. One page. If the CEO can’t articulate the deal’s why in that format, the strategy isn’t ready. The PR test surfaces vague rationales before they become acquired companies.

Two: executive buy-in before close. Bring functional leaders into diligence sessions — not as observers but as participants. They’ll own the integration when it lands because they helped design it. The leaders who get told about the deal at close are the ones who roll their eyes at the integration plan three months in.

Three: do the integration fast. The lesson Pete keeps relearning: every post-mortem on a slow integration ends with we should have done this way sooner. Nobody ever says they’re glad they waited 18 months to combine sales orgs.

On integration, lessons learned here is — do it fast, do it faster, do it fastest. Do it soon, do it sooner.

What to listen for#

The full episode runs longer on Pete’s first-100-days framework (stakeholders → functional reviews → team-and-systems evaluation → recommendation to the board), the CEO-CFO partnership question he asks every two or three weeks (“what can I take off your plate?”), and his sharper observations on hiring across finance — the best finance people aren’t siloed model-builders; they’re cross-functional utilities. Pete’s three-word descriptor is Motivated. Competitive. Dad. Listen at /podcast/ep-007-pete-boyes; for the longer conversation across the catalogue, see /topics/modern-finance-function or /topics/ma.