I read CFO content every week because I want to see if anyone is writing what I actually needed to read when I was in seat. Twelve years in, the answer is still mostly no. There is a specific pattern to why the content fails, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

The four types of bad CFO content

1. The CFO.com listicle

“The 7 KPIs Every CFO Should Track.” “5 Trends Reshaping the Finance Function.” “10 Ways to Prepare for a Recession.” These pieces are written by content marketers, edited by content marketers, and blessed by a byline from a vendor’s VP of Finance who spent 20 minutes on a call with the writer. The KPIs listed are always the same seven KPIs. The trends are always the same five trends. The recession advice is “build a scenario model” with no example of what that actually looks like.

The tell is that you can substitute any industry into the piece and it still reads the same. A “manufacturing CFO” article and a “SaaS CFO” article that use the same seven KPIs and the same three quotes from the same three vendor executives are giving you nothing.

2. The Big-4 white paper

These are usually 24 pages, glossy, and produced by a global research team. They have executive summaries with pull quotes. They have “figure 3.2” with a bubble chart of respondent data. They cost real money to produce and they say almost nothing operators can act on.

The core problem: the audience for these white papers is not operating CFOs. It is buyers of Big-4 consulting services. The white paper exists to give the Big-4 partner a reason to send an email that says “I thought you would find this interesting.” The content itself is a lead-generation artifact. The recommendations are always some version of “invest in the modernization of your finance function,” which is exactly the service the Big-4 firm sells.

3. The LinkedIn top-10-KPI post

Comes in two flavors. Version one is a self-styled fractional CFO with a large following posting “The 12 Metrics Every SaaS CFO Should Track” with a chart image. Version two is a former Big-4 senior manager posting “10 Lessons I Learned as a First-Time CFO” as a numbered list with an inspirational close.

Both are optimized for engagement, not for helping anyone. The 12 metrics are the same 12 metrics that appear in every SaaS finance tool’s landing page. The 10 lessons are the same 10 lessons everyone learns. The comments section is other consultants agreeing with the poster in the hope of getting a follow back. Nobody in the seat is picking up a single implementable idea from this content.

4. The vendor webinar

“Join us for a fireside chat with three leading CFOs on the future of finance transformation.” The three CFOs are customers of the vendor. The fireside chat is a scripted product demo dressed up as a conversation. The “future of finance” is always a description of the product’s roadmap. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of one of these knows that by minute 20 the moderator is asking questions like “and how has [vendor product] changed the way you close the books?”

There is a place for vendor content, but this format has been so overused that any operator with pattern recognition tunes out the moment the moderator says “with that, let me hand it over to our first guest, who leads finance at…”

Why the content is bad: the structural reasons

• The writers have never been in the seat. Content marketers, PR teams, and analysts write most of what shows up in the CFO trade press. Their access to real CFOs is limited to 30-minute vendor-sponsored interviews. You cannot produce specific, useful content on a job you have not done.
• The economics of ad-supported publishing punish specifics. CFO.com and its peers monetize traffic. Traffic comes from search. Search rewards keyword coverage across broad topics. A 2,500-word “8 Key Trends” article ranks. A 900-word “here is the exact reforecast bridge I used last quarter” article does not.
• Vendor sponsorship shapes the topics. If your top three sponsors sell FP&A software, close software, and treasury software, guess what the topic list looks like. It is not a coincidence that “AI in the close” is everywhere right now.
• LinkedIn rewards volume over depth. The algorithm favors people who post daily with high engagement. That format is incompatible with writing something that took you three days to think through.

What I want to read instead

If I could dictate the CFO content ecosystem, here is the shortlist of what I would want to see written and read.

1. A real 100-day plan from a portfolio-company CFO, with the actual document. Not a “framework.” The two-page document they sent the deal partner in month three of their tenure, with names and numbers redacted where necessary.
2. An honest reforecast walk from a business that missed plan by 15 percent. With the assumptions, the sensitivities, and the way it was presented to the board. Including the parts where the CFO got the pushback wrong the first time.
3. A real QoE-to-actuals bridge from month four of a new deal. With the deltas explained, including the ones that made the CFO look bad.
4. A “how I priced my equity” story from a first-time portfolio-company CFO. Including what they got wrong and what they would negotiate differently next time.
5. A specific covenant amendment ask, from the memo the CFO wrote to the lender. Including the negotiation back-and-forth over the following three weeks.
6. A hiring rejection story. “I made an offer to this candidate, they said no, here is what I learned about how I run a process.”
7. Postmortems on specific decisions. “I moved to a new ERP mid-cycle and it took twice as long as I promised. Here is exactly what I would do differently.”

The common thread: specifics, artifacts, and honest reflection on mistakes. There is no shortage of CFOs who could write this. There is a shortage of publishing venues that will run it, because it does not scale as a content-marketing exercise.

The PCFO brand promise

This site exists because I got tired of reading generic content and wanted a place to publish the specific stuff. Three explicit promises.

1. Written by an operator, not a marketer. Every piece on this site is written by someone who has held the seat being discussed. No ghostwritten “CFO thought leadership.” No sponsored posts written by a vendor’s content team.
2. Specifics over abstractions. If we tell you the first board deck should be 12 pages, we tell you which 12 pages, in what order, and what goes on each. See the board reporting package article. If we tell you to build a QoE bridge, we show you a real bridge. See the add-backs article. If we tell you to hire an FP&A analyst, we give you the actual interview questions. See the FP&A interview questions article.
3. No slop. No em dashes doing the work of a period. No filler words. No “in today’s environment.” No “tap into your finance function’s true potential.” No stock CFO archetype quotes. If a sentence adds nothing, it gets cut.

The four kinds of pieces we publish

What we will not publish

• Top-10-anything unless the list is actually specific and non-obvious.
• “The future of finance” pieces. Nobody knows the future. We know what worked this quarter.
• Sponsored content dressed as editorial.
• Interviews with vendor executives about their products.
• Anything ghostwritten. Every byline is a real person who did the work.

A short manifesto

Finance leaders in the middle market are underserved by the trade press. The best content in the space today lives in group chats, DMs between operators, and the occasional newsletter. This site is an attempt to move some of that content into the open. If it works, other operators will do the same, and the average quality of CFO content will slowly get less bad.

If you are an operating CFO who has a specific playbook, artifact, or postmortem you want to publish, and you do not want your name on it, we can help with that. The point is to get the useful stuff written down. See the first 90 days piece for the format we use.

FAQ

Why not just start a newsletter like every other operator?

Newsletters are great for cadence but bad for reference material. Nobody goes back to an old newsletter issue to look up how to structure a QoE bridge. The site format lets each piece stand as a working reference document. Newsletters can come later.

Is this site anti-Big-4 or anti-vendor?

No. Both play a role. What I am against is content produced by those firms that pretends to be operator perspective when it is really marketing collateral. If a Big-4 partner or a vendor wants to publish specific, operator-useful content under their own name, that is welcome content.

Why so much focus on private equity?

Because it is where the middle-market finance seat has been consolidating for two decades. Roughly 12,000 US companies are currently owned by PE sponsors, and that number is growing. The seat has specific rhythms and expectations that do not translate cleanly from public-company or founder-owned playbooks. That gap is where most operating CFOs need help.

How often will this site publish?

Cadence over volume. Two or three real pieces a month, each of which we would send to a friend taking a new seat. If we do not have something specific and useful to say in a given week, we do not publish that week.

Who is the target reader?

Operating CFOs at $20M to $500M revenue businesses, especially portfolio-company CFOs and CFOs of businesses in a hold cycle. Deputies who want to be CFOs. Sponsors evaluating candidates or benchmarking their existing team. Founders who need to understand what a real CFO seat looks like before they hire one. See when to hire a CFO for the founder angle.

Related reading

• The first 90 days as a portfolio-company CFO: a real playbook
• The PE-backed CFO board reporting package
• Add-backs and QoE: what actually survives
• How PE buyers evaluate a CFO candidate
• The prompt library every CFO should steal

Sources

• Bain & Company Global Private Equity Report 2026, on the count of PE-owned US businesses
• McKinsey Global Finance Function Survey 2026, on time spent by CFOs on high-value versus low-value activities
• Preqin 2026 CFO Talent Report, on the state of the PE CFO labor market
• PitchBook US PE Middle Market Report Q1 2026, on middle-market ownership trends

Written by The Pragmatic CFO. 15+ years running P&Ls and building finance teams across portfolio companies.