Chief Financial Officer, PE-backed Commercial MEP Platform Roll-up

Position: Chief Financial Officer, PE-backed Commercial MEP Platform Roll-up
Reports To: Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman
Location: Remote, with residence required near a major airport. Central or Eastern time zone preferred.Position: Chief Financial Officer, PE-backed Commercial MEP Platform Roll-up
Reports To: Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman
Location: Remote, with residence required near a major airport. Central or Eastern time zone preferred.
Travel: Approximately fifty percent, to operating companies across the Midwest and to board and sponsor meetings.
Compensation: Competitive base salary, annual performance bonus, and meaningful equity participation in the platform. Specifics discussed in the first conversation.
Chamberlain Advisors is conducting an executive search for Foundral, Inc., a Midwest platform of union labor commercial mechanical, HVAC, plumbing, process piping and specialty trade businesses. Backed by McNally Capital, Foundral has assembled a group of established, industry-leading operating companies and is pursuing an acquisition-led growth strategy that is expected to roughly double the platform entering 2027 and to carry it to materially greater scale by the end of the decade. The Chief Financial Officer is the platform's first, and will build the corporate finance function that does not exist today while serving as the Chief Executive Officer's principal partner to the Board, the sponsor, lenders and surety providers.
Core Profile: alignment with the following is required to get you in the conversation
Project Controls and Work in Progress (the threshold qualification): You will own project controls outright for a portfolio of long-duration commercial construction and service businesses, and you will do it as a forecaster rather than a reporter. Work in progress and percentage of completion are not a reporting obligation here, they are the instrument you use to see a problem before it reaches the profit and loss: margin fade diagnosed to cause, under and over billings and cost in excess read as leading indicators, project cash flow traced to the jobs absorbing working capital. You will go line by line with operating company presidents who have run these schedules for decades, and be credible doing it. A candidate who intends to learn this on the job does not clear the bar; a candidate who cannot narrate reading a schedule and heading off a loss fails the first screen.
Building the Platform Finance Function From a Standing Start: You will build the platform finance layer that does not exist today. There is no corporate controllership, no platform close, no consolidated reporting standard and no team beneath you on day one. Your first hire is a corporate controller, budgeted to start as soon as possible: three entities consolidate today, and that workload changes materially the moment the next acquisitions close. A VP of Finance follows, and financial planning and analysis behind that in the back half of 2027, already carried in the approved budget. These are your hires to make. Operating company finance leaders sit in their operating companies and report to their presidents today. The chief executive has set no line in the sand, leans toward a straight line to you with a dotted line to the presidents, and has left both the decision and its timing to you. So you begin by setting standards you do not yet command, and compress a close that runs one to two weeks toward a three to four day discipline. You will do the work yourself while you build the bench, including work well below your title. This is construction, not succession, and the first year is measured by what exists at the end of it that did not exist at the start.
Capital Structure, Lenders, Surety and Cash in a Leveraged Platform: You will take ownership of a capital structure the operating companies never carried. Credit agreement compliance sits with one person at one operating company today and does not scale. You will own covenant compliance, lender reporting and the borrowing base certificate that carries your signature, and you will build a cash forecast that reflects how this business actually converts: retainage held against long-duration jobs, billing terms reset where a customer is financing themselves on your working capital, and cash dynamics that differ company by company and job by job. You will manage the surety relationship directly rather than through the broker, carrying cost to complete on bonded work and forward bonding needs, against capacity that is only lightly utilized and is a growth lever rather than a constraint. What is screened here is not how many credit agreements you have read. It is whether leverage, trailing twelve month EBITDA and cash position stay current in your head week to week, so a covenant issue surfaces early rather than three days before the monthly report goes out.
Acquisition Integration, Weighted Ahead of Deal Execution: You will be measured on what happens after the close, not at it. The weighting is explicit at roughly seventy percent integration and ongoing management against thirty percent deal support, and deal count is not a scoring driver. Corporate development owns negotiation, the data room and the quality of earnings; you read the outputs, own the management forecast, run the project and work in progress diligence, and carry closing statement work and post-close working capital. Then you integrate: the people, the processes, the chart of accounts, the systems, and a founder who has never answered to anyone. You will bring first-time sellers along rather than break them, which means answering the why rather than issuing the standard. Expect two to four acquisitions a year, where complexity compounds faster than count.
The Operator-Leader: Presence, Bench and Low Ego: You will be the chief executive's number two and the sponsor's principal counterpart, and you will hold both without a staff to hide behind. You will be a genuinely good boss, screened on whether your lieutenants stayed and grew, because managerial failure is the single most common way this seat has failed before. You will hold a room under scrutiny, in a management presentation, with a lender and eventually with a buyer, and be a plus-up rather than a liability in that setting. You will carry no ego into a platform where everyone wears several hats. You will absorb a sponsor load heavier than the chief executive's own, adapt when the plan is disrupted rather than resent it, and bring problems forward early with a proposed answer attached.
Core Responsibilities & Scope Of Work:
Strategic Leadership, Value Creation and Executive Partnership
Trusted advisor and principal liaison: Serve as trusted advisor to the Chief Executive Officer, the Board and investors on financial strategy, performance and enterprise risk, and act as the primary liaison to the sponsor, lenders and the Board, absorbing a sponsor reporting load heavier than the Chief Executive's own.
Planning and capital allocation: Lead long-term financial planning, budgeting, variance analysis, forecasting and capital allocation, and translate financial and operational data into actionable insight that drives EBITDA growth, cash flow and risk mitigation.
Value creation levers: Understand and actively drive the platform's key value creation levers, evaluating strategic initiatives, investments and acquisitions with a disciplined risk-return approach.
Board and investor reporting: Prepare and deliver concise, insight-driven reporting and board presentations, and support exit readiness including investor presentations and diligence processes.
Project Controls, Planning and Performance Management
Project controls ownership: Own project controls outright across the platform, covering work in progress, percentage of completion, margin fade, under and over billings, cost in excess of billings and project cash flow, and implement controls that proactively assess and mitigate operational risk.
Forecasting discipline: Use the work in progress schedule as a forecasting instrument rather than a reporting obligation, diagnosing margin erosion to cause before it reaches the profit and loss, and work line by line with operating company presidents who have run these schedules for decades.
Performance management: Establish and monitor key performance indicators aligned with the value creation plan, lead enterprise-wide financial analytics and performance management, and partner with operating leaders to improve profitability, productivity and margins.
Working capital and cash: Drive working capital efficiency, pricing discipline and cash flow optimization across accounts receivable, accounts payable, retainage and work in progress, and build a cash forecast that reflects how a long-duration, job-by-job business actually converts.
Financial Operations, Systems and Technology Ownership
Controllership build: Bring corporate controllership into the platform, which is not solved today and is part of this seat rather than an inheritance from it, and oversee accounting, financial reporting, treasury, tax, audit and compliance while producing high-quality, reliable financial statements in a timely manner.
Close, controls and governance: Ensure timely, accurate GAAP-compliant reporting and audit readiness, compress a close that runs one to two weeks toward a three to four day discipline, and maintain strong internal control

Work arrangement
Yes