How a Fractional CFO Filled a Sudden CFO Gap at a Profitable Series B and Became Too Valuable to Let Go

Taylor Crane is the founder of Fractional Jobs, a matching service for fractional executive talent. In this case study, Taylor sat down with Misha Tsidulko, CEO of Hearth, a vertical SaaS and fintech company for home-improvement contractors, to learn how working with a fractional CFO helped his team through a leadership transition and well beyond it.

Misha Tsidulko is the CEO of Hearth, a vertical SaaS and fintech company building tools for home-improvement contractors, the roofers, plumbers, and HVAC pros who keep homes running. Hearth has around 200 employees, is profitable, and raised its Series B several years ago. The leadership team runs deep, with a COO and heads of engineering, sales, marketing, people, and finance. When their VP of Finance transitioned out, Misha needed a senior operator with skills and experience on par with the rest of the leadership team, and fast.

What began as an emergency stopgap unexpectedly became a finance partner valuable enough to keep around long after the full-time replacement arrived.

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A Finance Gap, Overnight

Hearth runs a data-driven, operationally focused business, and Misha’s closest partner in that work is whoever leads finance. When their VP of Finance left, he needed a replacement immediately.

“To hire someone at the level and with the specific skill set and experience I was looking for was going to take time to do it right ,” Misha said. “It was going to be a very important hire, yet we couldn’t afford to have no one in the seat until we found the right leader. So the problem I was trying to solve was getting the right person in here as quickly as possible.”

He didn’t deliberate for long. Asked how much time passed between the vacancy and his decision to bring in a fractional hire, Misha said, “For me it was maybe an hour. Things happen and you have to solve them. I’m used to going into crisis mode, so I decided to run down as many paths as I possibly could.”

One of those paths was Fractional Jobs. “I thought of Fractional Jobs because I know how talent-dense that network is,” he said. “It felt like a great opportunity to at least have a stopgap while we found the right full-time person.”

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Why a Stopgap, Not a Rushed Hire

Misha ran the full-time search in parallel, working with his internal recruiter off a carefully built profile of the ideal candidate. He also took a couple of conversations with CFO-as-a-service agencies, which didn’t land. But the fractional route solved a specific, hard-won lesson about hiring.

“One of the things I’ve learned in my career is that making decisions under false urgency is typically a bad thing to do, certainly when it comes to hiring,” Misha said. “Whenever you hire someone because you feel like you need to fill a role, it almost always doesn’t work out. Having a really smart, capable, vetted fractional person takes that pressure off and gives you time to make the right decision for the business.”

His concerns about fractional hiring were modest, and mostly reversible. “You’re always concerned about, is this really the right person?” he said. “But the downside wasn’t that bad, because the second person Fractional Jobs introduced me to was really good too. So I felt like I had a backup if the first option didn’t work out. It’s a reversible decision.” 

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Why Fractional Jobs

Misha had been tracking Fractional Jobs on LinkedIn. “You’ve done a great job posting and keeping it top of mind,” he said. When he engaged, a few things stood out.

“First was the personalized approach. We met, you asked a bunch of insightful questions, and you immediately understood exactly who I was looking for,” Misha said. “Second was speed. In the next few days you came back with a short list of people who were really good, and speed is everything, especially for a startup.”

The third was what made it click. “The quality of the candidates was fantastic. I was super surprised,” he said. “That was the aha moment for me. This is truly a talent-dense network. I’m going to be using this in the future too.”

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Why Andrew

Misha interviewed four candidates. Andrew Vernik stood out because he showed up already understanding the business.

“Andrew came bearing insights on our business model,” Misha said. “He’d worked with SMB SaaS and done fintech, so it was, here are the problems you’re probably running into, have you thought about this? I got the feeling, this guy gets it. He’s going to have a battery pack included. He’s not just going to do reporting, he can be proactive, insightful, and provide leverage, which is exactly what I’m looking for.”

The process ran through several conversations with Misha and the team, including the company’s executive chairman, who is deeply finance-driven.

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Keep the Trains Running, Then Level Up

Andrew came on under a retainer that landed around 30 hours a week in the early months. Availability, one of Misha’s initial concerns, never became an issue. “He was always present,” Misha said.

His scope climbed in stages. “Step one was, keep the trains running on time: unit economics, commissions, all of that,” Misha said. “Step two was, how do we improve what we have? He’d come to me and say, I think we can do this better, I think we can automate this, I think this person is super smart and under-resourced, you should have them take this on.”

From there it kept compounding. Andrew helped hire and onboard the eventual full-time finance leader, took on special projects, and grew into a broader role on the team. “He’s become one of the tips of the spear in the organization around how we use AI,” Misha said.

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The Transition That Didn’t End

Hearth hired a full-time VP of Finance about nine months after Andrew started. The original plan was for Andrew to wind down, but that didn’t happen.

“The transition was so extraordinary, there was no tension, no ego, that we kept trying to find ways to have Andrew stay,” Misha said. “He’s so insightful, so productive, and he understood our business and ramped so well. He’s a person you want on the team. So we slowed the wind-down, and now we use him for special projects and as needed.” Andrew owned onboarding for the new hire and was a big part of the interview process.

That standing relationship has paid off in ways Misha couldn’t have planned. “One of my executives had to go on emergency leave this quarter, family stuff, and Andrew was tagged in because he knows their area, he works hard, he’s AI-pilled, and I trust him,” he said.

Andrew has also become a visible force in Hearth’s AI push. “We have a demo day every two weeks where anyone can show what they’ve built,” Misha said. “This week Andrew, who’s not even a full-time employee, said, ‘I want to present.’ He showed how he built an agent that takes something that used to take five hours and does it in five minutes.

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The Biggest Wins

When we asked Misha about Andrew’s biggest contributions, he said, “I had Andrew fly out a few times for executive planning, and he was such a great addition to the dynamic of the executive team. His feedback is encouraging but really strategic, the kind that brings the team together. He almost indirectly coached me.”

The most measurable win was on the company’s economics. Andrew helped transform Hearth’s sales motion into a more leveraged model, growing the inbound sales team that drives the majority of revenue while improving unit economics. “Our unit economics have grown significantly,” Misha said. 30-day payback is now well over 100%, which is especially rare for a low-ACV SMB SaaS motion.”

He also took on the unglamorous, high-impact work. Andrew re-architected the company’s payments stack toward a payment-facilitator model that reduced risk and improved economics, and he strengthened key partner agreements in ways that flowed directly to the bottom line.

Then there was the cleanup no one else wanted. Hearth’s revenue operations had been running on years of cobbled-together infrastructure: a tangle of Salesforce and marketing-ops systems that, in Misha’s words, “everyone was too scared to take on.” Andrew led a major audit, looked at it from first principles, and made recommendations the right stakeholders could actually act on. The result was new talent and upgraded infrastructure.

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Misha’s Take: Fractional as a Hack

What surprised Misha most was the combination of speed and quality, especially set against the alternative. “Hiring in general is tough and expensive,” he said.

His advice to other founders is to use fractional executives as a resource. “It is 100% a card you should have in your pocket and something you should deploy as part of your arsenal,” Misha said. “The ability to execute the mission of a startup comes down to people, and hiring the best people is tough. Having a network to access like Fractional Jobs feels like a hack, and it’s a critical part of my people arsenal.”

‍If this case study resonates with you, and you want to bring in a fractional CFO like Andrew, or any other kind of fractional leader, learn more about how Fractional Jobs can help connect you to the right person for the job. You'll be working with Taylor directly.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Q: What is Hearth?

A: Hearth is a vertical AI SaaS and fintech company that builds tools for home-improvement contractors such as roofers, plumbers, and HVAC pros, helping them win more jobs and improve their margins through estimating, payments, customer financing, and workflow software. The company has around 200 employees, is profitable, and is now going AI-first.

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Q: How did Hearth find the right fractional CFO for their needs?

A: Hearth worked with Fractional Jobs, a white-glove search service for fractional and contract hiring. After an intake call, Fractional Jobs returned a strong short list within a day or two, and Hearth hired one of those candidates as its fractional CFO while running a full-time search in parallel.

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Q: Why hire a fractional CFO instead of rushing a full-time hire?

A: Hearth’s CEO wanted to avoid making a senior hire under false urgency, which he considers a common way that hires go wrong. A vetted fractional CFO filled the gap immediately, kept the finance function running, and removed the pressure to rush, giving the company time to find the right permanent leader.

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Q: What does a fractional CFO do for a later-stage startup?

A: In this case, Andrew Vernik kept core finance operations running (unit economics, commissions), found and automated improvements, helped interview and onboard the full-time finance leader, re-architected the payments stack, led a major revenue-operations audit, and helped reshape the sales motion to improve unit economics. He later stayed on for special projects and became a leader in the company’s adoption of AI.

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Q: What was the biggest measurable result?

A: Andrew helped transform Hearth’s sales motion into a more leveraged model that grew the inbound sales team while improving unit economics. The company’s 30-day payback reached well over 100%, a strong figure for a low-ACV SMB SaaS business.

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Q: How can I hire a fractional CFO?

A: If you want to bring someone like Andrew in to lead finance at your company, learn more here about how the Fractional Jobs network can help.