A VP of Finance at a mid-cap industrial company had been earning between $380K and $420K for four years. He'd changed jobs twice in that period and both moves were lateral. Same level, same function, slightly different industry. He couldn't figure out why the ceiling was there, or how to get through it.
His resume was strong and his performance reviews were excellent. Skills were current. The problem was who he knew, and more to the point, who knew him. What he could actually do never came up.
His entire professional network had been built at his own level. Other VPs of Finance, directors of FP&A, controllers, former colleagues who'd moved to similar roles at similar companies. So when a recruiter called with an opportunity it was always another VP of Finance role, because the people recommending him operated in the same tier he was already in.
The opportunities that pay above $500K are structurally different from the ones below. C-suite roles, equity partnerships, board seats, PE operating partner positions, advisory engagements. Nobody posts those on a job board. They surface through networks that operate at that level. A PE firm looking for an operating partner calls three trusted contacts. A family office hiring a fractional CFO asks their attorney and their wealth advisor, and a board looking for a new member just asks the existing directors.
If you're not in the network that gets those calls, the opportunities don't exist for you. This VP of Finance wasn't in those networks. Nobody had excluded him. He'd just never built relationships in rooms where the conversations happened at a different altitude.
The first move was uncomfortable by design. He joined an advisory board for a PE-backed building materials company and took the least senior seat at the table. For the first few months he said as little as he could get away with.
He felt like a student in the corner of a seminar, and the feeling was accurate. The other board members were CEOs and operating partners twenty years into their own networks. None of them were rude. They were just operating in a conversational register he'd never encountered, referencing deals he hadn't seen and people he didn't know, against a standard of judgment he couldn't read yet.
I've felt that altitude shift myself, sitting in rooms with the private equity sponsors my firm serves. For the first few meetings you're translating in your head, always about a half-step behind. Then at some point you start hearing the conversation the way the people who live in it hear it.
One scene he told me about. In the second meeting the chair turned to him and asked what he thought about a customer concentration question that involved an LBO sponsor's underwriting assumptions. He knew what those assumptions looked like in theory and not in practice. He gave a careful, technically correct answer. And he could feel the room registering that he'd answered one register below the question being asked.
He went home and spent the next month reading every PE deal memo and every investment committee minute and every value creation plan he could get his hands on. At the next meeting he could read the room. The meeting after that, he could speak in the register.
For six months he mostly listened. He contributed financial analysis when it was relevant and he never tried to prove he belonged. Twice in the first year he built elaborate analyses for meetings that turned out not to need them, and left feeling like he'd wasted the week. The tuition for access to rooms like these gets paid in hours of work that may or may not be used. And in the specific embarrassment of being the person who's still learning how things are discussed at the next level. Dollars are almost beside the point.
At month eight one of the board members called him. They were looking for a CFO at another portfolio company. The role paid $525K with equity. He'd never have seen that opportunity through any channel available to someone in his existing network. It came through a relationship built in a room he'd deliberately walked into and then slowly earned the right to stay in.
The evaluation standard is the thing that actually changes. At the VP level people get evaluated on execution. Did you hit the forecast, did you close the books on time, did you build the model. At the C-suite level people get evaluated on judgment. Do you see the things everybody else missed. Can you frame a complex problem for a board, and can you make a decision on incomplete information and be right more often than not.
Writing publicly about your industry, or speaking at the conferences your target network attends, or advising an early-stage company, puts that judgment into the world in a form your resume can't. Writing is the one I'd start with.
The VP of Finance is now a CFO. His compensation is $525K with meaningful equity. The ceiling broke because he built relationships in a tier of the network he'd never had access to, and because he put up with eight months of feeling underqualified while that access compounded. Getting better at finance wasn't the fix.
The skills were always there. He just couldn't get in the room.
List the five rooms you have not yet earned the right to sit in. Pick the smallest first move toward each. Reply with the room and the move.
The VP of Finance here is a composite. The tier problem he ran into isn't.
Ten minutes, whenever suits you.
The Household Diagnostic won't fix anything. It'll tell you which pillar to look at first, which is usually the harder part.
Where is your ceiling right now? Hit reply or leave a comment. I read every response.