Director, Client Finance

The Director, Client Finance is a strategic leadership position tasked with ensuring financial integrity, operational governance, and strong economic performance throughout the entire client lifecycle—from RFP initiation to project closeout. This role collaborates closely with Client Services, Project Management, Finance, Delivery, and Leadership teams to manage client profitability and client compliance. This role will report directly to the CFO.

The Director is responsible for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing client financial outcomes. This includesrevenue, margins, and profitability to ensure alignment with organizational goals and supporting continuous improvement initiatives.

This is not a transactional accounting or billing role. Instead, the Director, Client Finance serves as a commercial partner and leader for client operations — translating delivery realities, staffing dynamics, and client economics into actionable insight, governance, and decision support.

The ideal candidate brings experience in all commercial aspects successfully managing a client portfolio for a media advertising agency. Exposure to Pharma clients is preferred.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner closely with Finance on monitoring revenue recognition and pacing to approved scope
• Own revenue and margin forecasting methodologies, assumptions, and forecast accuracy
• Ensure CRM is accurate and up to date
• Adhere to governance models, escalation thresholds, and operating cadences to proactively manage financial risk
• Forecast demand, staffing pressure, and margin exposure across the business
• Build scalable reporting and decision frameworks that improve visibility and accountability
• Lead interpretation of client-level financial performance, including pacing, burn, margin health, and delivery efficiency
• Translate project management inputs, scope signals, staffing realities, and delivery risks into clear financial insight
• Identify early warning signs related to margin erosion, scope creep, delivery inefficiencies, or commercial risk
• Develop clear financial narratives and decision tradeoffs for leadership and account teams — not just reporting data
• Distinguish between timing shifts, scope changes, estimation gaps, and operational inefficiencies
• Surface recurring trends and lessons learned to improve pricing strategy, forecasting accuracy, and delivery systems
• Provide leadership teams with actionable insights that support timely intervention and stronger business outcomes

Contract Compliance & Commercial Oversight

• Oversee financial governance of MSAs and SOWs to ensure consistency, clarity, and reduced commercial risk
• Partner with Client Services and leadership teams during SOW development and client presentations
• Ensure commercial assumptions align with operational realities, resourcing , and delivery expectations
• Ensure standards, guardrails, and governance processes across client contracts and commercial engagements are followed
• Support and evolve , in collaboration with C FO , the agency’s master pricing model, including scope-to-hours, cost, margin, and pricing methodologies
• Maintain and refine economic assumptions tied to staffing structures, utilization, delivery models, and service mix
• Analyze pricing effectiveness relative to realized delivery outcomes and profitability
• Partner with CFO to d efine margin guardrails, discounting logic, and commercial risk thresholds
• Partner with Client Services on pricing builds, scope changes, contract expansions, and commercial negotiations
• Support client procurement conversations alongside Client Services, New Business, and Leadership when needed

Capacity Planning & Delivery System Management

• Partner with business unit leaders to create staffing models and workforce plans aligned to business demand
• Manag…