WD-40's "New CFO" Is Really a Promotion, a Search, and an Empty Chair

There is a headline floating around this week: WD-40 names a new CFO. It is, in an important sense, ahead of the facts. WD-40 Company has not named a new chief financial officer. The company's search for one is still open, and the person who currently holds the job is still in it, because the company has not actually replaced her.

Here is what happened. On June 4, WD-40 (ticker WDFC) filed an 8-K announcing that its CFO, Sara Hyzer, is going to stop being CFO. But she is not resigning or retiring — she is being moved into president of the Americas, the company's biggest operating division, which accounted for 52% of net sales in the fiscal third quarter. She keeps the CFO title until a successor is named. The company has started an external search for that successor, and as of its latest disclosures none had been announced.

So the headline runs three deal-steps ahead of reality. The "new CFO" is actually the old CFO moving up and out of finance; the actual new CFO does not exist yet; and the search is external, which is WD-40 quietly telling you that its own finance bench did not obviously contain a successor it trusted with the job — even as it hands finance's most senior person the keys to the operating side.

While Hyzer waits, somebody has to be contractually on the hook for the numbers. This is the part that is sort of beautiful. Under Sarbanes-Oxley, the CEO and the principal accounting officer have to sign the certifications of the financial statements, and the person who carries the PAO title is the named officer whose signature appears on the line. When a CFO leaves the chair without a successor, a company does not just leave the seat empty; it designates a different officer to be the signer.

That is what the controller is for. The board designated Nicholas Giordano, the corporate controller who joined WD-40 in 2014, as principal accounting officer effective June 29, 2026, and he becomes chief accounting officer and PAO on that date, at a $250,000 base salary. For the stretch where the company has no permanent CFO, Giordano is the person whose name is attached to the certified numbers. That is not glamorous; it is plumbing. But it is the financial machine running in the interim: whoever certifies gets the exposure.

None of this is happening because something is wrong, and that is worth being precise about. In the fiscal third quarter, WD-40's net sales rose 24% to $195.1 million, operating income jumped 47% to $40.3 million, and adjusted EPS came in at $2.33. The Americas — the division Hyzer is about to take over — grew 29%. This is a company that has raised its dividend for 25 consecutive years and trades at around 30 times trailing earnings. Investors treat it like a boring staple, and mostly it is.

A CFO story is worth more than a routine personnel note exactly because of that. WD-40 is a growth-by-discipline machine: one hero brand, relentless distribution, steady price increases. At a premium multiple, the market is paying for the machine to keep humming with minimal surprises. The CFO is the person whose job includes telling the market what the numbers are going to be. When that role changes — and its holder walks out of finance entirely, at least for now — the investor exposure is management continuity, not operating weakness. The quarter says nothing about trouble. But there is now an open chair at the top of finance, filled for certification purposes by a controller, while the board looks outside.

The specific thing to watch is narrower than "is the company doing well," which it clearly is. It is "who signs, and who is next." If the board names a strong external CFO quickly, this is a quiet reshuffle — a promotion, a tidy handoff, a stock that keeps compounding, with Hyzer still the top of the org chart on the operating side. If the external search drags, the discount the market applies to unsettled management continuity becomes the whole story. In the meantime, the CFO of WD-40 is Sara Hyzer, who is, oddly, also the president-to-be of roughly half the company. Sometimes the headline is the least settled part of the event.