Profile
Fractional CFO & Strategy Advisor
Rhine-Neckar Region · DACH
I am Philipp Siegert, Fractional CFO and Strategy Advisor operating under the Structure First brand. I work with VC-backed startups and growth companies across the DACH region on financial strategy, scaling and M&A. Before that I was CFO and Managing Director of Klarsolar (FT Top 200 Fastest Growing Companies Europe 2024) and led the exit to E.ON in 2025. I started my career in investment banking at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in London, advising on transactions with a combined volume of more than €20bn.
What I do today bridges those worlds: investment-banking discipline in the financial structure, operational experience from hypergrowth, and the kind of focus a founding team needs in order not to get stuck inside its own growth.
Key Facts
Engagement model
Fractional CFO on a retainer basis
Target clients
VC-backed startups, growth companies, PE portfolio companies
Industries
Tech, energy, financial services
Region
DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland)
Location
Rhine-Neckar / Remote
Experience
Over 20 years in finance, strategy and M&A
Track Record
Twenty years between investment banking, listed corporates and a hypergrowth startup. Each station left something I now bring into client mandates.
2020–2025
CFO & Managing Director
Built the finance organisation from the ground up, led Series A and growth-stage financing, and ran the exit process from investor outreach through closing.
2019–2020
Director M&A
Sell-side and buy-side mandates with a focus on strategically relevant transactions in the German mid-market.
2011–2019
Head of M&A & Corporate Strategy
Corporate strategy and M&A for a listed financial services group. Responsible for acquisitions, carve-outs and strategic shareholdings.
2005–2009
Investment Banking Associate, M&A
Investment banking craft inside a focused FIG boutique. Modelling, valuation, pitch and closing processes at institutional level.
Methodology
Four principles I apply in every mandate. They emerged from twenty years in practice, not from a whitepaper.
Build structures for the company you want to become, not only for the one you are today.
Structure First is not bureaucracy. It is the operational foundation that makes fast growth sustainable: processes, KPIs and reporting that hold up from Series A onwards.
Every manual decision, every improvised hire, every undocumented process gap is a loan against the future.
The structural inefficiencies that build up when fast growth is pursued without enough systems infrastructure. Relevant from around 20 to 30 employees, critical at Series A.
Validated assumptions first, sensitivities second. Not the other way around.
Rigorously validate the assumptions in the financial plan before modelling scenarios. Most CFOs hide a lack of clarity inside scenario modelling. Base Case Discipline reverses that order.
Never track more than seven KPIs at the same time.
Three to four cash-flow survival metrics, two to three customer and operational health signals, one strategic growth KPI. More KPIs lead to decision paralysis, not to better steering.
AI amplifies structures. Bad ones and good ones.
Framework for AI-ready finance organisations: clean data foundation, integrated systems, human oversight loops, scalable processes, regulatory compliance.
What I Stand For
Growth without structure creates value only briefly. The structures that carry a company later need to stand before the next growth wave, not after it.
One validated assumption beats three scenarios. Seven focused KPIs beat twenty dashboards. Investor readiness is a question of clarity, not of volume.
Financial models, dashboards, process documentation, reporting structures. The goal is always that the structures keep working without me. That is not a side effect, it is the core of the approach.
I do not bill by the hour. A retainer gives you planning certainty and gives me the freedom to focus on your topics instead of timesheets.
30 minutes to put your situation into context and to check whether working together makes sense. No pitch, no buzzwords.