Group Chief Financial Officer
- Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Posted 4 days ago
About the role
Who We Are
Catalyst Capital is a profitable, bootstrapped holding company building a diversified financial services group - education, publishing, software, wealth and tax planning tools, investment products and proprietary trading technology - funded entirely from its own operating cash. We have never taken outside capital.
The cash engine is Decentralized Masters, a DeFi education business that went from zero to 150+ people, 4,500+ paying members and roughly $48.6M of FY26 revenue at ~25% earnings before tax in four years. That engine funds everything else on this page.
In build over the next 18 months
- A lifestyle community membership - consumer membership economics, distinct from education.
- A business mastermind on the Hampton model - high-net-worth peer community, recurring and relationship-led.
- A regulated investment fund. The capstone. AUM reporting, investor relations, NAV calculation, fund administration, audit and regulatory infrastructure. At most companies this alone is a full-time CFO mandate.
A single education business at this revenue and margin commands a private-market multiple in the mid single digits of earnings. A diversified group - education, publishing, software, wealth and tax planning tools, investment products and a regulated fund, each valued on its own sector methodology and connected by real shared-services and synergy architecture - is a fundamentally different asset.
Closing that gap is the job. Concretely, you will:
- Build the sum-of-the-parts valuation framework across every business unit, with a defensible methodology and comparables set for each.
- Structure each entity so that it maximises its own multiple, and structure the group so the whole is worth more than the parts.
- Take the group from founder-run reporting to institutional-grade financials that survive a quality-of-earnings review and a full due diligence process.
- Take the group to market early - deliberately ahead of a formal process - and convert what buyers and advisers tell us into operational change while there is still time to act on it.
- Build the group equity story and the materials that put it in front of institutional buyers, and run the process alongside the CEO and advisers.
- Design the employee incentive architecture at group level, so the people who carry each unit are aligned before a transaction rather than after it.
- Stand up the regulated fund and the investor infrastructure behind it.
- Protect and improve the economics of the cash engine while all of the above happens. If DM slows, none of the rest matters.
You are not being hired to close the books. A Finance Manager reports to you and owns day-to-day financial operations - the monthly close, the accounting system, payroll, reconciliations, deferred revenue schedules and the chart of accounts. Beneath them sit a Financial Controller and an Accounting & Payroll Specialist.
What You Will Own1. Enterprise Value & Capital Events (Primary)- Own the sum-of-the-parts valuation model: the methodology, comparables and defensible assumptions for each business unit, and the roll-up into a coherent group valuation.
- Identify and drive the highest-value levers to increase group enterprise value - margin, retention, revenue quality, recurring mix, entity structure, and the synergy story between units.
- Take the group to institutional readiness: three years of clean, comparable financials per entity, a quality-of-earnings-survivable position, a populated data room and a diligence-ready control environment.
- Build the group equity story, the information memorandum and the management presentation, and be credible in the room with institutional buyers and their advisers.
- Run the capital event process alongside the CEO and external advisers - buyer engagement, diligence management, negotiation support, and the post-transaction reporting obligations that follow.
- Design the holding-company structure: which entities sit where, in which jurisdictions, and why - with counsel and tax advisers.
- Select and implement the group ERP and consolidation platform. Own the selection criteria, the sequence and the delivery.
- Build shared services where they create real margin and demonstrable synergy value, and resist them where they destroy unit-level clarity.
- Set intercompany and transfer pricing policy across a group where one entity generates leads, another converts them, a third delivers the product and a fourth manages money - across the UAE, the US and potentially Europe.
- Produce unit-level P&Ls that roll up cleanly and let leadership see which businesses earn their capital.
- Own the framework that decides where the next dollar of operating cash goes - paid media, headcount, software build, fund seed capital, acquisitions or reserve - with an explicit hurdle rate and time horizon for each.
- Allocate across assets with genuinely different return profiles, risk characteristics and payback periods, and defend the trade-offs to the CEO with a model behind them.
- Own group headcount and cost strategy. Be the person who can say no, with numbers.
Required, not optional. The group is funded by performance marketing and will be for the foreseeable future.
- Own CAC, LTV, LTV:CAC, ROAS, CPQC, contribution margin and cash payback by funnel, offer, channel and cohort.
- Own the front-end versus back-end monetisation model, and the timing mismatch between media spend today and payment-plan collections over twelve months.
- Improve pricing and offer-ladder economics across low, mid and high ticket.
- Model cohort behaviour, renewals, churn, refunds, chargebacks and payment-plan default — and build them into the forecast rather than discovering them later.
- Set the media spend guardrails that keep the group liquid in a bad month without capping a good one.
- Lead jurisdiction and structure selection for the investment fund with counsel - DIFC, ADGM or otherwise - and own the trade-offs.
- Stand up the operating infrastructure: fund administration, NAV calculation, audit, fee and carry mechanics, subscription and redemption processes.
- Build investor reporting infrastructure capable of serving hundreds of investors on a reliable cadence.
- Own regulatory compliance across the group: UAE regimes including VARA and ADGM where applicable, FTC and advertising-claims compliance in marketing, securities considerations across the investment products, and the regulatory perimeter around the wealth and tax planning tools.
- Own rolling 13-week and 12-month cash forecasts at entity and group level, and the liquidity view across the whole structure.
- Optimise working capital - processor reserves and holdbacks, refund provisions, receivable ageing on payment plans.
- Own banking, merchant accounts and payment processors: redundancy, concentration risk, chargeback ratios and cost of processing.
- Set treasury policy for digital asset exposure: custody, counterparty limits, stablecoin policy, valuation and controls.
You are not expected to be a lawyer. You are expected to own the function so the CEO does not have to.
- Own the relationship with, and the budget for, external counsel, auditors, tax advisers and transaction advisers across jurisdictions.
- Own the corporate calendar across every entity - filings, licences, renewals, tax deadlines. Nothing lapses, particularly not during diligence.
- Own commercial terms on major partnerships, vendor, affiliate and talent agreements; legal drafting stays with counsel.
Requirements
What You Must BringRequired
- 10-20 years in finance, including 3+ years as CFO, Group CFO or VP Finance with full P&L and balance sheet accountability.
- Direct, hands-on experience of a transaction. You have been on a sell-side or minority sale process and can describe what you personally built - the model, the CIM, the data room, the diligence responses - and what went wrong.
- Multi-entity holdco or portfolio experience. You have run finance across several unlike businesses, not one company with divisions, and you can explain how you consolidated and how you allocated between them.
- Sum-of-the-parts fluency. You can value a software business, a subscription publishing business, a services business and a fee-earning investment business, and explain why each methodology is the right one.
- Performance-marketing economics. You have owned unit economics in a business spending meaningful money on paid acquisition - CAC, LTV, payback, front end versus back end. Required. Not the defining filter, but a candidate who cannot do this cannot protect our cash engine.
- Multi-jurisdiction experience with real consolidation, ideally including the UAE, the US and Europe.
- Experience owning the relationship with external counsel, auditors and transaction advisers.
- Fully conversant in both IFRS and US GAAP, and able to defend technical positions under scrutiny.
- A prolific, demonstrable user of AI tools in finance work - you can show us what you have built or automated.
- Financial services depth - you have worked across at least two of publishing, education, software, wealth management or fund management.
- You have structured or operated an investment fund: jurisdiction, administration, NAV, fee and carry mechanics, investor reporting.
- PE-backed or PE operating experience - you understand how institutional buyers think and what they discount.
- Crypto and digital asset exposure. You do not need to be a trader, but you cannot be squeamish about the asset class.
- Subscription accounting and deferred revenue depth across high-ticket, payment plan and recurring products.
- Your entire career has been in large corporate environments with no exposure to founder-led, high-growth or PE-backed businesses.
- You have never been close to a transaction and would be learning the process on our timeline.
- You have never treated paid acquisition as a strategic cost lever.
- You need six months to ramp before you add value.
- You prefer slow-moving, consensus-heavy environments, or you fold when a founder pushes back.
- You do not want legal, regulatory and corporate affairs coordination in your remit.
- You want to build a large team before you have personally fixed the numbers.
- You are not actively using AI tools in your work today.
- Direct communicator who challenges the founders with data, in the room, in real time.
- Equally credible with a PE partner and with a media buyer. Both conversations happen in the same week here.
- Entrepreneurial and comfortable in ambiguity - you build the answer rather than wait for the brief.
- Zero tolerance for sloppy reporting, in your team or in yourself.
- Builder mentality. Comfortable in the model and in the detail when it matters.
Benefits
What We Offer
- Competitive base, depending on transaction and holdco experience.
- Performance bonus tied to enterprise value creation, not just operating margin.
- A transaction bonus on a successful capital event - the upside here is material and it is the point of the role.
- Equity participation under the C-suite framework, structured so you have skin in the game before the event rather than after it.
- UAE-based roles are tax-free, which materially changes take-home pay.
- Direct access to the founders, a peer relationship with the Group COO, and genuine authority over how capital is deployed.
- An inherited finance team, so you are building the architecture rather than clearing a backlog alone.
If you are a divisional CFO looking for a bigger version of the job you already have, this is not it.
If you have built the financial architecture that made a diversified group worth substantially more than the sum of its operating profits - and you want to do it again, from profitability, with your own mandate - we should talk.