For those who left big 4 to join a startup, are the hours still crazy? (60+) I’m on the fence leaving my b4 tax job (70k) to join a startup (100k+). Would be a jump from TCII to Senior Accountant. Seems like finance team is very small, 10 people or so. Also company is only 6 months old but has ~50mm in funding. Any insight is appreciated!
I’ve worked for a couple of startups. Left Big4 for a startup that I ended up leaving because they tried to change my role vs what I was hired to do and their accounting was a mess. The earlier in the process they are, the longer hours you’ll be putting in if they have fast growth business. But even still you have to nail down processes & controls as well as keeping up with a scale model. But if you have a 10 person team, dependent on that breakup, it might not be bad at all. Generally they’re more barebones (5 max). For reference, I left an analyst job where I was working maybe 40 hours a week to be a senior accountant and average 50-60 as a standard. But accounting is literally me and the controller. Finance is maybe like 7 of us and they grew too fast while never having accountants before us.
My advice would be to figure out what everyone else does and how they’re planning on scaling as well as what areas you are expected to be responsible for. That will give you a ballpark of hours.
It really depends. I joined a startup with only 2 people in accounting at the time but the work life balance was incredibly good. I never worked past 5pm because everything was already very efficiently setup.
I’ve typically seen startup hours be 9am-10p Mon-Fri. Year round
10 people finance team is huge, especially for 50MM. I had 5, including the CFO, for 500MM.
Mentor
Hours are still going to be bad usually. Are they giving you equity?