About WhiteSpace

WhiteSpace helps clients radically improve their ability to navigate complex decisions. We develop AI-powered, custom-built applications that enable better and faster decision-making, with use cases spanning energy, manufacturing, logistics and health. We are a fast-growing scale-up (~€6M revenue, ~30 people) with an international, diverse team based in The Hague. We are direct and transparent in how we work, no black boxes, in our software or in our numbers. The role is based on an employment contract (Management Team position), 3–4 days per week;

The role

WhiteSpace has recently completed a transaction and now operates within a holding structure backed by a long-term (evergreen) investor, with an ambitious growth agenda. Leadership is organized in four lanes: Sales, Technology, a founder-led lane combining innovation, new ventures and client-facing engineering, and Finance.

The CFO holds the Finance seat and is the neutral keeper of the numbers and of governance across all four lanes — with full visibility of pipeline, utilization and backlog, and even-handed in cost allocation across internal and client-facing work. The role owns finance end-to-end and the people function alongside it, and acts as sparring partner to the leadership team and the founder: stress-testing plans, quantifying trade-offs, and challenging commercial and cost decisions on their contribution to profitability, not revenue alone.

The finance function has not kept pace with the company’s growth or with the demands of the new ownership structure. The first months are therefore a build, with full mandate: institutionalizing financial control, reporting and planning largely from scratch — and from there, running and refining a function that grows with the group. This is a permanent position of three to four days per week, based in The Hague with hybrid working. The CFO reports to the leadership team and the founder, with periodic presence at the Board of Directors.

Key responsibilities

• Financial control & reporting: monthly close on accrual basis, management dashboard (revenue, cost, cash, margin), shareholder reporting to a fixed contractual cadence, rolling cash-flow forecasting, cash-buffer monitoring and deferred-consideration tracking;

• Planning & modelling: the group financial and business plan (set up jointly with the investor), a multi-scenario P&L and cash-flow model, the scaling model behind the growth strategy, annual budgets and quarterly reforecasts;

• Commercial & cost scrutiny: project profitability, utilization, day-rate realization and revenue per head; pipeline-weighted forecasting; staff-vs-freelance economics; arm’s-length intra-group pricing so internal work does not erode margins; a standing mandate to flag work that adds revenue but not EBITDA;

• Governance & incentives: contract and legal governance (standardized customer contracting, freelancer agreements, insurance including cyber); design and administration of incentive and compensation frameworks — bonus schemes with profitability-gated payouts, commercial incentive attribution, long-term incentive and leaver-provision administration; company-wide timesheets;

• HR & people operations: owns the people function and runs it as efficiently as possible — a lean setup with outsourced payroll and smart use of providers, hands-on where needed; compensation and benefits policy; compliance with Dutch employment law including freelancer classification (DBA), statutory workplace requirements, highly-skilled-migrant and 30%-ruling monitoring, and work-related cost scheme (WKR) calculations; recruitment and onboarding processes that support the growth plan;

• Tax & compliance: periodic assessment of applicable tax regimes (e.g. innovation box) and tax/payroll compliance posture, together with the external accountant.

• Subsidy applications & Corporate insurances.

Candidate profile

• Operator-CFO with a track record in the €5–20M scale-up range, ideally in professional services or project-based businesses; interim or portfolio CFO experience is a plus;

• Has worked under fund or PE ownership: investor reporting to fixed cadences, deferred-consideration mechanics and covenant monitoring are familiar territory;

• Hands-on: has personally built a monthly close, management pack and multi-scenario model in a lean environment, supported by an external accountant. Comfortable being the entire finance function on day one;

• Fluent in project-business economics: utilization, day rates, project margin, revenue per head, pipeline-weighted forecasting;

• Experience designing and administering incentive and compensation frameworks (bonus schemes, commissions, long-term incentive plans);

• Knows how to run HR lean in a Dutch, internationally staffed environment: solid working knowledge of Dutch employment law and payroll, pragmatic about what to outsource and what to hold;

• A sparring partner, not a bookkeeper: builds and stress-tests the financial architecture behind the strategy, pushes back with numbers, and is blunt, independent and politically neutral across all parts of the business;

• Dutch and English proficiency required.