A strong chief financial officer (CFO) is the most crucial thing to hiring and retaining essential in hiring and retaining top talent for successfully managing a high-growth journey.
FREMONT, CA: CFO served on the boards of directors of several high-growth companies while working as a partner at a growth equity investment fund that invests in European enterprises in the digital sector. These scale-ups deal with a variety of high-growth difficulties. Hiring and keeping great personnel is one of the biggest challenges. An excellent chief financial officer is one of the top skills required for successfully managing a high-growth journey (CFO). For this reason, frequently discuss what to look for in a (new) CFO on the board. These conversations typically conclude that we need a strategic and commercial CFO who can successfully drive growth.
CFO Acts as a Partner to the Whole Organisation
Organisations are in serious trouble if the CFO restricts themself to being a bookkeeper and a cash manager, which typically entails becoming a roadblock on the way to sustained high development. Strong CFOs differ from others. They accept their position as a growth enabler and partner with the entire company. They quickly lead essential dialogues, collaborate with all other departments, and form cross-functional teams that produce common objectives and coordinated strategies. Strong CFOs enquire about what they can do to assist other groups in making informed decisions. They train other departments on data-driven decision-making, key performance indicators (KPIs), and investing. They have great leadership qualities and actively expand the company predictably and efficiently.
CFO has a Deep Understanding of the Entire Customer Journey
Without a thorough understanding of the company and the customer journey, CFOs cannot argue with other departments about how to run the organisation. Commercial CFOs are, therefore, client-focused, spend time in the market, comprehend what clients anticipate, and know what each department needs to accomplish to thrive.
Actuals’ are Essentially in Line with Budgets
Strong CFOs promote bottom-up financial planning, involve all departments in budgeting and forecasting, and ensure that procedures support growth plans. Strong CFOs ensure that accurate figures are essentially in line with budgets and forecasts, although budgets and forecasts are merely estimates of how the future might develop.
Good Accounting, Reporting, and Controlling Processes
It is observed that many scale-ups deal with pointless accounting and reporting concerns and do not measure the proper KPIs at the granularity necessary to properly direct the firm.
Typical tech scale-up themes like revenue recognition and capitalisation of development expenditures turn into audit issues far too frequently, even though the accounting and reporting topics can vary from firm to company. Strong CFOs stay away from it. They adopt generally accepted accounting principles, foresee reporting and audit concerns, and support seamless and prompt accounting closes.
CEOs can guide the company on the proper path by examining the evolution of key KPIs, including customer lifetime value (CLV), customer acquisition costs (CAC), and payback period. Strong KPIs can help persuade investors to fund scale-ups and acquirers to make an acquisition. All pertinent KPIs must be provided and appropriately calculated for this. Strong CFOs make sure the accounting team creates detailed charts of accounts that can be used to extract all pertinent KPIs, and the controlling function closely monitors them.
