Controller

AE Landscape Borders•Nashville, TN

38d•$150,000 - $180,000•Hybrid

About The Position

AE Landscape Borders is a decorative concrete landscape border company operating out of seven offices across Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina. We went from nothing to roughly $20 million in annual revenue in five years, and we're building toward $100 million over the next three to four. Our accounting has been handled externally, and it's been handled well. But an outside firm can close your books — it can't sit in a Monday leadership meeting and tell you why the Fort Wayne crews ran 400 basis points below plan last month. As we scale, we need that capability in the building. This is the first in-house senior accounting hire in company history. You will report directly to the CEO. We want to run this business the way a sophisticated buyer would expect it to be run — long before anyone asks us to prove it. That means books that close fast and stay clean, unit economics we can defend line by line, and a finance function that produces numbers our operators actually use to make decisions. Right now we don't have that. You'd build it.

Requirements

Progressive accounting experience, including time as a Controller, Assistant Controller, or Accounting Manager
Multi-location operating experience — you've closed books for a business with distributed branches, field crews, or service territories, and you know why that's harder than it sounds
Job costing fluency. You've owned percentage-of-completion, WIP, or project-level margin in a construction, contracting, field services, or home services environment
Experience with financial diligence or institutional-grade reporting — a quality of earnings process, a lender or investor reporting package, a sponsor-owned company, or an audit you personally carried
A demonstrated record of compressing a close cycle. Tell us the before number and the after number.
Strong Excel and a real command of your accounting systems — not just data entry into them
Comfortable being the only accountant in the room and the person leadership turns to for the answer

Nice To Haves

CPA (active or inactive) — strongly preferred, not required if the operating experience is there
Public accounting foundation, especially audit
Experience with QuickBooks
You think in unit economics, not just financial statements. A closed book that nobody acts on is half a job done.
You can explain a margin problem to a general manager who has never read a P&L, without condescension and without jargon.
You're using AI tools in your actual work today — reconciliation, variance narratives, flux analysis, data cleanup, first-draft memos — and you have opinions about where they help and where they'll get you in trouble. We're an AI-forward company and we expect this role to build leverage with these tools, not just tolerate them.
You want to build something rather than maintain something. There's no playbook here yet. You'd write it.

Responsibilities

Full-cycle accounting for a multi-entity, multi-state, seven-location business
Month-end and year-end close, reconciliations, and the accounting calendar
Job costing, WIP, and margin analysis at the crew, branch, and region level
Cash management, forecasting, and working capital
Budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis with the CEO and operating leaders
Multi-state sales/use tax, payroll tax, and compliance coordination
Internal controls, accounting policy, and process documentation
Systems: accounting stack, field/ops system integrations, and the reporting layer on top
Partnership with our external CPA firm on tax and advisory
Building and eventually leading the accounting team as we grow