At the bottom of this post you’ll get a quick round up on who’s taking the CFO seat at PE-backed companies. Scroll down for the latest from Emids, Engageware, and Azira.

I still have flashbacks to this one meeting from seven years ago.

I actually remember the wall paper. It was dark purple.

We'd gathered to talk about sales efficiency. The CRO was there. The CFO was there. We’d assembled a wicked expensive hourly rate.

The sales ops team stood up to present their findings. They claimed a CAC Payback period of 11 months, and heaped praise on the Sales team’s momentum from the last quarter. FP&A interrupted them, asking to jump to their section of the deck, where they had a CAC payback period of 16 months.

The purple wall paper started to feel kinda nauseating.

The CRO is looking at the CFO. The CFO is looking at the CRO. And the two teams are going back and forth, trying to solve a denominator issue in real time.

We spent the entire meeting arguing about whose number was right. And you can probably guess where this story goes… we were both wrong. The real answer was that the data shouldn't have lived in two places to begin with.

This is what happens when data lives in silos. Sales ops builds their models using the data at their finger tips, making assumptions for any gaps they (inevitably) stumble into. FP&A builds theirs, with all the correct cost data (burdened down to the two Venti Starbucks coffees the VP of sales expensed at Sales Kickoff), but they are operating off of gaap revenue numbers instead of the latest bookings figures.

Both teams mean well and are trying their best to answer the bell and impress their bosses. And what’s worse is both teams are “technically” correct based on their inputs. It’s not a math issue.

Yet we still end up in a room where sides are defending alternate versions of reality while leadership sinks into the bushes like Homer Simpson.

I was talking to Maria Izurieta, CFO of Huntress, a hypergrowth cyber security company serving SMBs. She’s a serial CFO for successful PE backed companies, and was introduced to me through our mutual friends at JMI Equity. Maria has a term for the fix that I'm absolutely going to steal (and put on a bumper sticker): forward deployed data.

The idea is simple, but the execution is hard (NGL, really really hard… bring a hard hat to work kinda hard). You centralize the data team so there's one source of truth - one denominator, one definition of CAC, one revenue figure everyone agrees on.

But you don't keep that team locked in a finance ivory tower, pulling reports when people ask nicely.

You embed them.

Maria has analysts dedicated to sales. Analysts dedicated to marketing. Analysts dedicated to support. They sit in the same Slacks (thoughts and prayers if you use Teams), attend the same standups, learn the weird acronyms each team uses for their biz.

They still report up through finance so the data stays clean and governed. That’s where all sales, finance, and production data is housed. But they're deployed in a way that is forward thinking… they’re in the business, working directly with the people who will need the data to make decisions.

The alternative to fully deployed comes via two failure modes you've probably lived through:

Forward deployed is the third (and best) option. The truth is centralized, while the delivery is distributed. We’ve broken the paradigm. We’ve split the attom.

Forward deployed data is both a people exercise and a systems exercise. Systems are seemingly straight forward, but complicated to rig up. People are… well, people are just messy.

And you can't just pick one. You could have the cleanest data architecture in the world - single source of truth, every metric defined in a glossary that would make PwC cry.

But if the people consuming that data don't trust it, don't understand it, or can't get to it when they need it (timeliness!), you've built a splendid cathedral that no one visits.

At the same time, you can have the most embedded, collaborative, cross-functional data team on the planet. Analysts in every standup, great relationships across the org. Your rev ops person and CRO go wake surfing on weekends.

But if they're all pulling from different systems and copy and pasting into a shared google sheet that gets updated 10 minutes before the meeting starts, you're back to the Spider Man pointing meme in six months.

I'm not going to try to teach you how to solve this at scale in a single newsletter post. But I can tell you how to start at a micro level: pick one team and give them one business analyst.

Not "reach out if you need anything” empty platitudes type partnership. A real human who joins their communication channels, sits through their pipeline reviews, and knows everyone’s name.

Before they build anything, have the “big fight!” meeting. Get in a room and fight about definitions. Seriously. Go at it!

Write it down somewhere ugly like a Notion page that no one will ever read again but everyone agrees to. The point is writing it down and building agreement.

Then, let the analyst actually embed. And I mean embed.

They should know which reps are sandbagging their forecasts. They should know that one engineering manager always leaves data pipelines running over night. They should be able to smell when the CS support tickets are running too hot.

This isn’t to spy - it’s to help course correct and allocate resources at the right time, using live data.

Here's a mistake I've made: I embedded a finance person in marketing and only had them meet with the CMO. Big miss. You need to go at least one level deeper - ideally two. The person who reports into the VP of Demand Gen who reports into the CMO? That's where the ground truth lives.

The CMO knows the strategy. The IC running the campaigns knows which channels are actually working and which ones just look good in the attribution report. Your analyst should be getting coffee with those people. Or at least on a first-name-basis Slack relationship where they can ask dumb questions without it becoming A Thing.

Another disclaimer. I’ve also seen this go awry when companies hire a "business analyst" and then treat them like a reporting jockey.

That's not forward deployed. That’s just indentured servitude within another department.

The real job is pattern recognition plus context.

That's only possible if the analyst has been in the room absorbing the context that doesn't show up in the data… yet. They are forward deployed, and ahead of the numbers.

You'll know it's working when the team stops asking for data and starts asking for opinions. When they ping your analyst before they make a decision instead of after, and they need some fuzzy data to justify what they’ve done. You know you’ve made it when the VP gets annoyed that your analyst is out on PTO because they've gotten used to having a thought partner in the room.

That's one team. Then you do it again with the next one.

In this episode of Run the Numbers, I sat down with Maria Izurieta, CFO of Huntress, to unpack what it really means to lead finance as a connective tissue across the organization. Drawing on experience across VC-backed, PE-owned, and public companies, Maria shares how she balances impact versus perfection, builds trust through small wins, and helps teams move from transactional finance to insight-driven decision making. We dig into data transparency, centralized BI, partnering with sales and marketing on revenue, and why the best CFOs unblock friction instead of becoming the “no” department… all while bringing a deeply people-first lens to scale.

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