THE FAIRWAY REPORT

Helping your clients navigate the financial rough.

Quarterly CFO insights for bankers, CPAs & M&A attorneys  ·  Fall 2026

Hi —

Year-end always sneaks up faster than owners expect, and this year the conversations I keep having aren't about the P&L — they're about the team. Specifically: who do you need next year, and are you actually asking the right people before you decide.

Here are three things worth having on your radar this quarter.

THE MARKET READ

What I'm watching heading into year-end

Right now, the owners I'm working with are starting to scope 2027 — and the smart ones are doing it before Q4 closes out, not after. The starting point is always the same question: is next year going to be a bigger production year than this one, a smaller one, or roughly flat? That answer should drive every headcount conversation that follows, not the other way around. I'm seeing more owners loop in their head of HR, office manager, or ops lead specifically to scope which roles the pipeline actually requires — and just as often, which existing employees need to be elevated or developed rather than replaced by a new hire.

What I'd be watching: if a client is planning 2027 headcount without first mapping it to their actual sales pipeline, they're guessing, not planning.

FROM THE CFO SEAT

Growing doesn't automatically mean hiring

Here's a mistake I see every year around this time: an owner sees revenue climbing and assumes the fix is more people. Sometimes it is. Often it isn't.

The better question is where the team's actual capacity tips over — the point where the number of clients, orders, or projects in motion exceeds what the current team can absorb without quality or speed slipping. That tipping point looks different in every business. For one owner it's client count per account manager. For another it's units shipped per warehouse employee. For a services firm, it's active engagements per consultant. Whatever the metric, year-end is the moment to actually nail it down — not guess at it again next Q3 when everyone's underwater.

Once that capacity picture is clear, headcount planning splits into three separate conversations, and owners often collapse them into one. First: who on the current team is ready to be elevated into more responsibility next year. Second: which junior or newer employees need real development so they have a growth path and don't walk. Third — and this is the one owners avoid — whether there's a replacement decision that's overdue, where someone isn't going to get the business to where it needs to be in 2027 regardless of how much they're developed.

This is also exactly the moment to bring in whoever owns the numbers — a controller, accountant, or outsourced CFO. They're the ones closest to the spending trends and the real cost of a hire, and they can tell an owner what the business can actually support before HR starts writing job descriptions.

The question I'd ask your client: "If your team hit its current capacity ceiling tomorrow, do you know which three roles you'd add first — and which one you'd fix internally instead?"

BY THE NUMBERS

$48,000

Q4 is also the natural window for fixed asset decisions that actually need to get made — not just ones that would be nice to make before the calendar flips. The tax impact is easy to underestimate. Take a hypothetical: a business plans to purchase $150,000 in equipment before year-end — machinery, vehicles, technology infrastructure, whatever the operation requires.

That's not a rounding error — it's $48,000 that either stays with the business or doesn't, depending on timing and how the purchase is depreciated. The actual treatment (full expensing vs. multi-year depreciation) depends entirely on the specific asset, the business's tax position, and current tax rules — which is exactly why this is a conversation to have with a tax professional in Q4, not after the year closes.

One caution: the tax savings alone shouldn't drive the purchase. I see owners rush a Q4 equipment buy purely to capture the deduction, without stopping to ask whether the cash outlay makes sense right now. A $48,000 tax break isn't worth it if the $150,000 purchase leaves the business tight heading into January. Tax savings and cash flow have to be weighed together, not one instead of the other.

The takeaway: a fixed asset purchase made in December instead of January can be the difference between capturing a deduction this year or waiting twelve months for it — but only when the purchase itself already made sense on its own.

I'm not a tax professional, and none of this is tax advice — the right treatment depends entirely on your client's specific situation, which is exactly why the tax professional conversation above matters.

WORTH A CONVERSATION

Worth a conversation when a client is planning meaningful growth for next year but hasn't yet looped in their accountant or tax advisor on headcount timing or year-end fixed asset purchases. Growth plans and tax plans are usually built by different people on different timelines — and by the time they're compared, the year-end window to act on either one is already closing.

If you have a client navigating something similar, I'm always happy to be a second set of eyes. Sometimes a 20-minute conversation is enough to figure out whether there's actually a CFO problem to solve.

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