Profile
Fractional CFO & Strategy Advisor
Rhine-Neckar Region · Remote · DACH
I am Philipp Siegert, Fractional CFO and Strategy Advisor operating under the Structure First brand. I work with VC-backed startups, growth companies and PE portfolio 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.
More on the role and boundaries: What is a fractional CFO?
Key Facts
Education
M.Sc. International Finance, SKEMA Business School, 2005 (top of class)
Academic
Lecturer, guest professor, author of specialist book, member of Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft
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.
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.
Director M&A
Sell-side and buy-side mandates with a focus on strategically relevant transactions in the German mid-market.
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.
Investment Banking Associate, M&A
Investment banking craft at a London-based bank specialising in financial institutions. Modelling, valuation, pitch and closing processes at institutional level.
Methodology
Six 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.
The founder is the first bottleneck of their own growth.
Beyond 30 employees, the same behaviours that built the company begin to slow the next growth stage. The transition happens not through letting go, but through building systems: decision matrices, delegation frameworks and OKR structures that teams can run independently.
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 as well as good ones.
Deploying AI in finance without laying the structural foundation first scales errors, not productivity. The framework defines what must be in place before the first AI integration: a clean data layer, integrated systems and explicit human control points.
30 minutes to put your situation into context and to check whether working together makes sense. No pitch, no buzzwords.