The Chief Financial Officer’s role is to make the business work better, including finance, operations and strategy.
There is no single definition of the modern Chief Financial Officer role. In some organizations, the CFO remains primarily responsible for accounting, financial planning, treasury and tax. In others, the role extends into legal, technology, risk, insurance, collections, strategy and operating functions.
Across my own CFO roles in construction and financial services, I’ve approached the role differently in different contexts. The breadth of exposure to other parts of the business from my vantage point has shifted depending on the needs of the business and my ability to contribute and add value.
The modern CFO has the ability to engage in core business needs, revenue, capital, risk, operating performance and investment decisions. These are functions that ultimately intersect with finance, which gives the CFO visibility and exposure.
The opportunity is to use the expertise and the vantage point of the CFO function to embed more deeply into parts of the business that are non-traditional, with the expressed intention of improving business results.
Sales is one of the areas where the CFO has traditionally reviewed revenue forecasts and pipeline reports, but leaves the fundamentals of the function to sales experts. The CFO should dig deeper to understand how pricing decisions are made, what incentives are driving sales behavior, which customers generate attractive economics and whether the company is optimizing for revenue growth, margin, customer lifetime value or just unstrategic volume. Many of those segments and priorities produce very different outcomes.
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