Crain Currency: The Increasing Preference for a Great CFO: The Status Inversion Inside Family Office Hiring
Trish Botoff and Hunter Guice discuss why the chief financial officer position is hard to fill, and why it’s the role families should hire first.
"After a liquidity event, the first person a family office should hire is a CFO or family office leader.” - Hunter Guice, Partner
Crain Currency recently spoke with Trish Botoff, founder and managing partner, and Hunter Guice, partner at Botoff Consulting, about the increasing demand and recruiting challenges for family office CFOs. The full article also features Linda Mack, founder of Mack International and strategic advisor to Botoff and Brian Adams, president of Mack International. Here are some highlights from their discussion:
According to Crain Currency, search consultants and compensation researchers now describe the chief financial officer as the hardest position in the structure to fill — and increasingly, the one families are told to hire first.
More than a third of family offices in Botoff Consulting’s 2026 Compensation and Talent Planning Survey reported recruiting challenges in the past year, with larger offices reporting even greater difficulty. Trish noted that 62% of participants reported staffing trouble, specifically in finance and accounting. Hunter attributed these challenges to fewer accounting graduates, an aging workforce, rising tax and reporting complexity and AI raising the bar on the skills the job now demands.
The CFO remains the least compensated executive position at the total direct level, having edged past the COO on base salary while trailing at total direct, according to Botoff Consulting data. Though that is starting to change —the share of family office CFOs receiving a long-term incentive payment has nudged up in the last year: 30 percent in 2023 and 2024, then 32 percent in 2025.
Linda draws a distinction between a "tactical CFO" – the recorder of the numbers – and a "strategic CFO," who understands investments without being an investor and estate planning without being the attorney. That combination, she notes, is "very needle in a haystack," which is exactly what makes it expensive.
Brian’s advice to families building out a family office is to prioritize a strong CFO or general counsel before investment hires, since a strategic CFO's tax and cost savings can substantially exceed what an investment team delivers in basis points over a benchmark.
Read the full article in Crain Currency (subscription required).
Firms interested in purchasing a copy of Botoff’s 2026 U.S. Compensation & Talent Planning Trends Report can find more information here.