6 Expertise CFOs Want Now to Assist Corporations Develop
It was {that a} chief monetary officer’s major focus was on the standard features of the job: monitoring money move and monetary actions; serving as a controller and accounting skilled; limiting pointless spending; and guaranteeing that monetary selections conformed to straightforward working procedures.
These duties are nonetheless important, in fact, however they’re more and more changing into secondary to the strategic roles CFOs are being requested to play. Because the tempo of enterprise accelerates and expertise advances, the fashionable CFO should take a broader, extra forward-thinking and growth-oriented strategy to the job.
The consulting agency Accenture captured this transformation in a 2022 survey, discovering that typical finance chiefs now spend most of their time spearheading companywide efforts to remodel and optimize enterprise operations, with an emphasis on accelerating income and revenue development.
It’s a brand new actuality that I’ve seen play out amongst fast-growing small and medium-size healthcare companies the place I’ve held numerous management positions. These corporations not solely anticipate you to be a useful CFO, delivering on fundamental accounting duties, in addition they anticipate you to be a strategic CFO, working with the management workforce to discover development alternatives and maximize profitability.
So how do you develop this strategic experience? By way of trial and error, I’ve discovered that the best manner is to focus in your present finance capabilities and duties—these features which might be already inside your purview as a CFO—and elevate them to ship the strategic perception your organization wants.
On this article, I share six areas the place I like to recommend you focus. The event of the abilities I focus on could be utilized broadly to development corporations and employed throughout a large spectrum—by fractional CFOs working with later-stage startups, by interim CFOs in distressed conditions, and even by finance chiefs employed by public corporations.
In the case of increasing and bolstering your present capabilities, I focus on the best areas first. The later ones, particularly company imaginative and prescient, will most likely devour extra of your time, however I anticipate you’ll discover that mastering them is nicely price it to you and your organization. I embrace examples to point out you ways I put every of those ideas into motion.
1. Reporting and Forecasting
Reporting and forecasting are desk stakes for a finance chief. The proliferation of software program as a service (SaaS) and cloud providers has made it simpler and cheaper to combine highly effective accounting methods throughout a company. A useful CFO should be certain that everybody who wants entry to those methods has been absolutely onboarded and is utilizing them, whereas a strategic chief appears for alternatives to delve deeper into the data to floor actionable insights for the group.
I can finest clarify find out how to develop this space by sharing how I demonstrated to at least one firm that absolutely onboarding a workforce is an important step—even for management. I labored for an early-stage healthcare providers firm the place the CEO tracked company financials on an Excel worksheet he saved on his desktop and up to date at night time and on weekends. This follow created apparent issues. First, his shadow financials have been usually incomplete. Second, his follow brought on a disconnect that prevented the finance workforce from growing a routine of updating info and producing helpful and well timed insights for the CEO. With out this routine, the CEO was flying blind when it got here to gross sales and profitability decision-making.
After I joined, I helped the corporate standardize all of the accounting, operational, and monetary reporting templates, and the chart of accounts. The corporate and I then agreed on a reporting calendar for when the finance workforce would give the CEO and board the most recent earnings assertion, steadiness sheet, money move assertion, and customer- and product-level segmentation. That report additionally recurrently offered info on the efficiency of particular person departments, evaluating the figures for every with that division’s price range, forecast, and prior-year numbers.
We didn’t cease with standardizing companywide reporting, nevertheless. We leveraged the data to suggest operational modifications that will enhance areas of monetary underperformance. This not solely freed up the CEO’s nights and weekends, but in addition gave us strategic perception into the corporate’s operations whereas lowering the administration workforce’s nervousness and stress beneath the earlier fragmented reporting system.
2. Monetary Planning and Evaluation
The following logical step for a strategic CFO is to search for methods to use standardized databases and quantitative abilities in monetary planning and evaluation. FP&A is often used to provide data-driven solutions to monetary and operational efficiency questions going through any side of the corporate. Some are routine analyses, similar to evaluating the present interval’s efficiency to the prior one’s, whereas others are advert hoc analyses similar to calculating the return on funding for a brand new gross sales enablement expertise platform. A strategic CFO makes use of the identical processes and will deal with among the identical questions as a useful CFO however takes a extra proactive strategy.
After I joined a pharmaceutical producer as CFO, I discovered that few of the corporate’s senior leaders knew which buyer, product, or geography generated the very best development or income. This grew to become an issue when the corporate needed to rapidly enhance profitability. After implementing fundamental reporting enhancements, I performed a complete profitability evaluation of the corporate’s a number of enterprise and buyer segments to start to reply broader strategic questions.
Utilizing FP&A enterprise intelligence instruments like Microsoft Energy BI, we pinpointed the sources of the very best development and the best earnings and losses. We then broke them down by product class, product SKU, buyer, enterprise unit, and geography. However we didn’t simply produce a report that sat in colleagues’ inboxes. We looped in cross-functional groups to assist us design, develop, and glean insights from the studies, and hosted in-depth conversations with govt leaders of every useful space about industrial and operational modifications that will maximize monetary efficiency.
Inside a short while, the corporate had a holistic understanding of which segments contributed earnings. Simply as necessary, we had full alignment amongst senior leaders that we must always give attention to essentially the most worthwhile segments. This technique allowed us to just about double the corporate’s profitability in lower than a 12 months.
3. Danger Administration and Mitigation
If finance leaders thought threat administration was simply an administrative footnote to monetary oversight, then the COVID-19 pandemic and breakdowns in international provide chains upended that false impression. At present, CFOs should take a task in pushing groups throughout the group to make threat assessments and recurrently deal with questions of mitigation. On the identical time, they should see threat administration by way of the prism of alternative, searching for the place it creates potential industrial openings.
For instance, from 2017 to 2020, I used to be liable for a gaggle of corporations that imported important parts for medical merchandise to China or assembled them there. The businesses loved cross-border, lower-cost arbitrage and constantly expanded gross margins for a few years. Nevertheless, after I joined, I may see operational, regulatory, and macroeconomic dangers on the horizon. We engaged senior leaders in thought-provoking quarterly discussions to anticipate attainable hazards so we may dedicate assets and take motion to mitigate essentially the most urgent materials dangers. The groups constantly highlighted the attainable operational and monetary dangers of cross-border commerce limitations disrupting important part shipments.
This proved prescient when a commerce conflict flared up between the US and China in 2018. As a result of we have been ready by way of our threat planning, my group of corporations was in a position to reduce provide chain disruptions by leveraging backup part sources in different components of Asia and Europe. Integrating threat administration into the corporate tradition allow us to not solely cut back or neutralize dangers, but in addition restricted influence on the underside line, creating industrial alternatives for our gross sales and advertising groups to extend market share. We continued reliably delivering merchandise and options whereas our rivals have been nonetheless dealing with disruptions.
4. Digital Transformation
It’s routine for a CFO to ask division heads to do extra with much less. Finance chiefs can paved the way by doing so themselves, inspecting methods to automate back-office operations to free workers from repetitive duties whereas saving money and time. Automation may help the finance division because it offers with the fixed cycle of labor spiking inside tight timetables: month-to-month closes, pressing evaluation requests, and the crunch interval round mergers and acquisitions. Being perpetually in need of fingers and hours inevitably results in excessive ranges of stress.
I discovered how mandatory this transition was firsthand. After a reorganization at a worldwide manufacturing agency, my finance workforce was staffed with simply two enterprise analysts. This lean workforce was liable for reporting and analyzing monetary outcomes for 25 portfolio corporations each month inside two enterprise days. It merely wasn’t possible for 2 folks to finish this spreadsheet-based copy-and-paste venture inside 48 hours. Automation was the one resolution.
We invested a small quantity into robotic course of automation to deal with routine reporting processes and restructured the workforce’s strategy, serving to the 2 analysts turn into specialists in enterprise intelligence and visualization programming. Utilizing these applied sciences, the 2 have been in a position to full the reporting duties in a single working day. They used the time they saved to undertake evaluation and work with enterprise leaders to enhance the reporting with actionable insights.
Seizing on these learnings, our company improvement groups took the same strategy: They automated their month-to-month outreach, permitting them to contact 10 occasions the variety of potential acquisition targets and thus domesticate a bigger accomplice pipeline.
5. Expertise and Tradition
One precious manner a CFO can take a extra strategic function is by changing into extra immediately concerned in recruiting and cultivating expertise. As a substitute of simply advising HR on staffing necessities, a strategic CFO will accomplice with HR to create alternatives to convey high-performing monetary expertise into the group.
As an illustration, I as soon as helped recruit a really gifted govt to a small healthcare machine manufacturing firm that my agency owned, though I knew we have been going to promote it throughout the subsequent 12 months. We requested this individual to hitch because the vice chairman of finance, stabilize the corporate, and efficiently full the sale—though we didn’t have a selected function lined up for him afterward. This could have been a tough promote had we not approached this candidate with transparency, honesty, and a dedication to retaining him in a senior function.
A 12 months after the sale, we delivered on the dedication and he grew to become CFO of our largest portfolio enterprise. Three years later, he was promoted to be the holding firm finance chief, overseeing all portfolio corporations.
As CFO, taking an lively function in growing a high-potential finance chief meant I used to be contributing to the corporate’s long-term technique by serving to to safe an worker who may steer the corporate in a post-sale future. Whereas all of this transpired within the finance division, others in several useful areas seen and adopted comparable approaches to recruiting and cultivating high-potential expertise in gross sales, advertising, operations, and expertise.
6. Strategic Planning
Corporations worth the laborious knowledge and empirical mindset {that a} finance chief lends to strategic planning. The CFO can use this as a chance to contribute to the transformation of an organization’s industrial targets or capabilities, as an example, by championing acquisitions or introducing partnerships to increase aggressive benefits.
I had the chance to place this into motion whereas working with an rising markets cardiovascular diagnostic firm that made coronary heart displays. The corporate had aggregated terabytes of coronary heart rhythm knowledge by way of the 1000’s of units it had bought. This knowledge was a novel asset, however the firm didn’t use the data for any industrial functions. As CFO, I thought of any giant supply of distinctive knowledge as a possible alternative in a world the place SaaS enterprise fashions could be commercialized rapidly.
I challenged the workforce to make use of that knowledge as the premise of an analytics service whereas defending affected person confidentiality. After months of improvement with native software program companions, the workforce unveiled a brand new service to hospitals to offer real-time monitoring, evaluation, and alerts if the software program detected irregular rhythms in a affected person. The service deepened buyer relationships and added a extremely worthwhile income stream.
With larger visibility and deeper insights in regards to the firm, the strategic CFO develops a perspective about what merchandise, capabilities, and M&A alternatives can create transformative worth for his or her firm. But it’s necessary to remember that what really elevates your contribution to a development firm comes right down to management.
The demand on companies to fulfill targets is immense, particularly as macroeconomic pressures rise and enterprise capital, non-public fairness, and public market expectations for monetary efficiency proceed to climb. Corporations want management, and leaders should ship development. The strategic CFO is uniquely empowered on this respect. When the fashionable CFO rises above their useful duties and gives precious strategic insights, they may help their firm rework and develop for the long run.