Director, Client Finance

Director, Client Finance

Location: United States-Remote

Strategic Finance Leadership Role

Position Overview

The Director, Client Finance is a strategic leadership position tasked with ensuring financial integrity, operational governance, and strong economic performance throughout the entire client lifecycle—from RFP initiation to project closeout. This role collaborates closely with Client Services, Project Management, Finance, Delivery, and Leadership teams to manage client profitability and client compliance. This role will report directly to the CFO.

The Director is responsible for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing client financial outcomes. This includes revenue, margins, and profitability to ensure alignment with organizational goals and supporting continuous improvement initiatives.
This is not a transactional accounting or billing role. Instead, the Director, Client Finance serves as a commercial partner and leader for client operations — translating delivery realities, staffing dynamics, and client economics into actionable insight, governance, and decision support.
The ideal candidate brings experience in all commercial aspects successfully managing a client portfolio for a media advertising agency. Exposure to Pharma clients is preferred.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Planning & Forecasting

• Partner closely with Finance on monitoring revenue recognition and pacing to approved scope

• Own revenue and margin forecasting methodologies, assumptions, and forecast accuracy

• Ensure CRM is accurate and up to date

• Adhere to governance models, escalation thresholds, and operating cadences to proactively manage financial risk

• Forecast demand, staffing pressure, and margin exposure across the business

• Build scalable reporting and decision frameworks that improve visibility and accountability

Client Financial Performance

• Lead interpretation of client-level financial performance, including pacing, burn, margin health, and delivery efficiency

• Translate project management inputs, scope signals, staffing realities, and delivery risks into clear financial insight

• Identify early warning signs related to margin erosion, scope creep, delivery inefficiencies, or commercial risk

• Develop clear financial narratives and decision tradeoffs for leadership and account teams — not just reporting data

• Distinguish between timing shifts, scope changes, estimation gaps, and operational inefficiencies

• Surface recurring trends and lessons learned to improve pricing strategy, forecasting accuracy, and delivery systems

• Provide leadership teams with actionable insights that support timely intervention and stronger business outcomes

Contract Compliance & Commercial Oversight

• Oversee financial governance of MSAs and SOWs to ensure consistency, clarity, and reduced commercial risk

• Partner with Client Services and leadership teams during SOW development and client presentations

• Ensure commercial assumptions align with operational realities, resourcing, and delivery expectations

• Ensure standards, guardrails, and governance processes across client contracts and commercial engagements are followed

Pricing Strategy & Commercial Modeling

• Support and evolve, in collaboration with CFO, the agency’s master pricing model, including scope-to-hours, cost, margin, and pricing methodologies

• Maintain and refine economic assumptions tied to staffing structures, utilization, delivery models, and service mix

• Analyze pricing effectiveness relative to realized delivery outcomes and profitability

• Partner with CFO to define margin guardrails, discounting logic, and commercial risk thresholds

• Partner with Client Services on pricing builds, scope changes, contract expansions, and commercial negotiations

• Support client procurement conversations alongside Client Services, New Business, and Leadership when needed

Capacity Planning & Delivery System Management

• Partner with business unit leaders to create staffing models and workforce plans aligned to business demand

• Manage utilization and throughput expectations grounded in operational realities

• Identify systemic delivery constraints, inefficiencies, and operational bottlenecks

• Recommend improvements to staffing structures, delivery models, and scope assumptions

• Build staffing and scenario models tied to pipeline activity and future business growth

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years of experience in progressive client finance roles

• Experience within a media agency, or project-based environment strongly preferred

• Proven experience managing financial governance processes and scalable operating models

• Strong understanding of pricing strategy, resource planning, margin management, and delivery economics

• Ability to synthesize financial, operational, and delivery data into strategic recommendations

• Strong executive communication skills with the ability to influence senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams

• Experience partnering with Client Services, Delivery, Finance, and Leadership teams in fast-paced environments

• Advanced Excel/modeling capabilities and comfort working within data-heavy environments

• Strong analytical mindset balanced with operational pragmatism and business judgment

• Knowledge of Wrike and CoPilot

Success in This Role Looks Like

• Improved forecast accuracy and financial visibility across client engagements

• Earlier identification and mitigation of margin and delivery risk

• Disciplined pricing, scoping, and commercial decision-making

• Stronger alignment between staffing models, delivery realities, and client economics

• Increased accountability and consistency in financial governance practices

• Clear executive-level insight that supports profitable, scalable growth

Why This Role Matters

As the agency continues to scale, the Director, Client Finance will play a critical role in helping the organization operate with greater rigor, predictability, and commercial discipline. This role will help bridge the gap between Finance, Client Services, and Delivery — ensuring strategic decisions are grounded in operational and financial reality while enabling the business to grow profitably and sustainably.

Interested?
Apply by submitting your resume and a brief note outlining your healthcare or media experience.

Underscore Marketing is a woman-owned, independent agency specializing in life sciences. Since 2002, we've helped clients gain a competitive edge through bold, data-driven promotional strategies that deliver measurable results.

Our team comprises media, strategy, and omnichannel analytics experts who thrive on collaboration, innovation, and results. When you join Underscore, you become part of a dynamic environment where your ideas matter, your growth is supported, and your work helps elevate brands in a competitive healthcare landscape.

If you're passionate about making a difference and want to be part of a team that values integrity, creativity, and results, if that sounds like you, we invite you to share.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
Underscore is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We believe that diversity drives innovation and success, and we welcome candidates from all backgrounds to apply.