CFO, PE-backed Commercial MEP Platform Roll

Position: CFO, PE-backed Commercial MEP Platform Roll-up

Reports To:

CEO & Executive Chairman

Location:

Remote

Travel:
Approximately 50%, 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…