Finance Lead

Role type: Full-time · Function: Finance · Location: TBD · Compensation: TBD

Role overview

The Finance Lead is a full-time builder role at Safina Ventures. The role exists because owns accounting, cash flow, budgets, compliance, collections, controls, reporting, and financial decision discipline. This is not a passive job description for someone waiting to be told what to do. It is a mandate for an owner who sees the system, understands the stakes, acts with judgement, and closes loops without creating more dependency around the founder or the team.

Role at a glance

• Position: Finance Lead, Full-time
• Function: Finance
• Reports to: Founder's Office
• Primary purpose: owns accounting, cash flow, budgets, compliance, collections, controls, reporting, and financial decision discipline.
• Operating principle: observe the real work, identify the bottleneck, act on the smallest useful fix, document the system, measure the result, and improve again.
• Decision standard: if the work can be decided, decide it; if it can be delegated, delegate it; if it repeats, turn it into a loop; if it is risky, escalate with facts.

Key responsibilities

Own the operating system of the role

• Maintain a clear map of the recurring work, active projects, open risks, key stakeholders, and next decisions.
• Convert ambiguous instructions into concrete outcomes with owners, deadlines, evidence, and follow-up.
• Keep the relevant Notion pages, trackers, checklists, and handovers accurate enough that another capable person can understand the state without a long meeting.
• Remove avoidable manual repetition by creating templates, automations, rituals, scripts, dashboards, or SOPs.
• Protect the team from hidden work, forgotten commitments, unclear ownership, and last-minute chaos.

Deliver the function, not just the tasks

• Understand what the function is meant to make true for Safina Ventures, then design daily actions around that outcome.
• Work with adjacent teams before dependencies become blockers.
• Raise trade-offs early, especially when time, budget, people, safety, quality, or reputation are at risk.
• Turn feedback from users, residents, guests, partners, applicants, or teammates into changes in the system.
• Report progress in plain language with numbers, links, screenshots, or examples.

Build proof and continuity

• Document what changed, why it changed, who approved it, and what should happen next.
• Keep a reliable weekly record of wins, misses, risks, and loops closed.
• Make recurring processes inspectable and teachable.
• Replace heroics with systems wherever possible.
• Leave every handover cleaner than it was received.

What ownership looks like

1. Notice — spot the friction, risk, opportunity, repetition, or unclear decision before it becomes expensive.
2. Assess — gather enough evidence to understand the real problem, not the loudest symptom.
3. Act — make the smallest responsible move that improves the situation now.
4. Coordinate — involve the right people at the right moment, with context they can act on.
5. Document — record the decision, proof, owner, deadline, and next checkpoint.
6. Close — confirm the issue is resolved, adopted, delegated, automated, or deliberately killed.

Decision rights and boundaries

Should act independently to

• Improve the working system inside the role without waiting for permission on every small decision.
• Create or refine trackers, templates, SOPs, dashboards, scripts, briefs, and checklists.
• Follow up with stakeholders and push work forward when ownership is already clear.
• Flag weak signals, incomplete information, repeated delays, and quality gaps.
• Stop doing work that has become performative, duplicated, or disconnected from the outcome, after documenting the reason.

Must escalate before

• Making commitments that create new legal, financial, hiring, partnership, safety, access, or public-facing obligations.
• Sharing private data, resident information, financial details, internal strategy, or sensitive incident context outside the approved audience.
• Changing a live system that another team depends on daily.
• Approving material spend, discounts, compensation, vendor commitments, or exception policies.
• Taking action where safety, privacy, compliance, reputation, or founder intent is genuinely unclear.

Ideal candidate

• High-agency operator who moves from ambiguity to useful output quickly.
• Builder mindset: creates systems, loops, and proof instead of only sending updates.
• Strong written communicator who can make messy context legible.
• Comfortable with Notion, AI tools, spreadsheets, trackers, and lightweight automations.
• Calm under pressure and direct about risk.
• Good judgement with people, money, time, quality, and reputation.
• Willing to do unglamorous work when the system needs it, while still improving the system so the same work does not stay manual forever.

Non-negotiables

• No hiding bad news. Reality must reach the right person early.
• No vague ownership. Every important item needs an owner and next action.
• No undocumented critical process. If it matters, it must be findable.
• No performative busyness. Output, proof, and loops matter more than hours occupied.
• No avoidable dependency on the founder for decisions that can be made responsibly within the role.

How we work — the Universal Role Standard

Every role at Safina Ventures runs on founder mindset, not employee mindset. In short, if you do the same manual work two weeks running, that is a loop you owe the company, not a routine to settle into. You are measured by loops built, hours freed, decisions improved, quality raised, risks reduced, and problems solved. Every contract runs through an 11 day non-paid trial, a 111 day probation with 11 hours notice either way, and a 1111 day long-term commitment.

Success in this role

• The function is more reliable, measurable, and easier to operate than it was before.
• Recurring work has owners, standards, and documented loops.
• Decisions happen closer to the work, with fewer unnecessary escalations.
• The team can see the current state without chasing scattered context.
• Risks are raised early and resolved with proof.
• The role creates leverage for the founder and the organisation, not more management load.

Suggested performance measures

• Loops closed per month and hours saved through those loops.
• Quality and timeliness of weekly reporting.
• Percentage of key processes documented and actively used.
• Number of unresolved items without owner, deadline, or next step.
• Stakeholder response time and follow-through reliability.
• Evidence that decisions improved because of data, documentation, or better system design.

Operating rhythm

1. Daily — inspect the live work, clear blockers, update the source of truth, and close the next obvious loop.
2. Weekly — review outcomes, misses, risks, metrics, and decisions needed from leadership.
3. Monthly — kill stale work, improve recurring systems, and identify the next leverage point.
4. Quarterly — reassess whether the function is still designed around the right outcomes.

What this role is not

• Not an assistant role that waits for instructions.
• Not a reporting role that describes problems without changing them.
• Not a specialist silo that ignores how the work affects the wider Safina Ventures.
• Not a place for hidden context, private to-do lists, or heroic last-minute saves.