As the head of a finance organization there is a perpetual battle for your time between tactical issues and strategic initiatives.
Tactical
- Production of Financials
- Audit Support
- G/L Management
- Systems Evaluation/Configuration M&A Analysis
- Process Management
- Financial Model Maintenance
Strategic
- Fund Raising
- Profitability Analysis
- Contract/Pricing Model Standardization
- Managing Business Investment
- Analyzing Avenues for Revenue Growth
Like most successful executives you want to be more strategic, so what stops you?
More than likely you fight one or several of the issues below:
- Your time is consumed in driving day-to-day finance related deliverables
- You fight resistance to change within the finance organization to better support the business
- You are bogged down with staff attrition & management headaches and systems and IT challenges
- Your finance team lacks the skills to generate reports required for doing real business analysis and driving accountability
Many CFOs deal with these problems month after month hoping it will just get better. Other CFOs decide they need to seek help in proactively driving change to break this cycle for the business and their own careers.
Take the case of one small/mid-market company CFO who decided he needed things to change to become more strategic and:
- Engaged consulting services to serve as “change agents” in optimizing business processes
- Moved all F&A systems to the cloud to offload maintenance costs & headaches
- Leveraged mid-market focused F&A firm to handle all tactical F&A activities and reduce local low-value headcount
- Used dollars saved through outsourcing tactical activities to get higher level skills to support management reporting
The result?
Within 3 months, and with no disruption to business operations, F&A processes were optimized, more value was being created from the F&A function for the same spend and the CFOs time was successfully addressing critical strategic initiatives for the business.