A finance professional who understands the family: family firms’ specific requirements for non-family chief financial officers

Non-family chief financial officers (CFOs) are often the first non-family members recruited into a family firm’s top management team. Based on the extant literature and with reference to the resource-based view of the firm, family firm peculiarities can also be expected to affect the requirements family firms look for when hiring non-family CFOs. To analyze these requirements, this paper draws on interviews with family firm owners, chief executive officers and non-family CFOs. Family firms’ specific requirements for CFOs are analyzed along four dimensions, namely education, professional know-how, career path and social/interpersonal skills, and 11 propositions are then developed. The presented findings suggest that family firm owners seek to integrate non-family CFOs with professional non-family firm experience in order to enrich the family firm’s resource pool. In turn, non-family CFOs are required to adapt to the specific governance characteristics prevalent in family firms.