The Role of CFOs in Strategy, Planning and Development

More so than just fulfilling that traditional financial supporting role, the role of CFOs in strategy, planning, development, and decision-making processes has become more active and more specialized.

There are many things that play a role in your business’s profitability and longevity. One of the most important determiners of success is what your decision-making strategy looks like. It can be easy to fall into that all too common business trap…believing you can do everything yourself.

This is where CFOs come in.

While you may be able to handle the pressure at the start up stage, it is not maintainable in the long run to do everything alone. As your business grows and becomes more profitable, your risks increase in line with your growth.

Understanding Your Business Needs

As we enter a new year, it is the perfect time to reassess your business strategies and decision-making processes. As businesses have adapted to the changing global situation, one thing is clear; the ones that are thriving, are doing so by picking and choosing the best and most specialized talent to drive growth, profitability, and longevity in a way that reactionary businesses aren’t.

In fact, businesses that understand their needs are not or cannot be met within current operating structures, find their revenues increased by up to 25% when pulling in the right external talent to drive new ways of doing things within the company.

The Many Hats of a CFO

CFOs have unique and far-reaching skills that take them beyond the realm of just being ‘the money people’. A good CFO will be able to ascertain the needs of your organization and see where they might best fit to provide you the custom support you need. This could look like:

• Mediator- working to convince different parts of the organization to adopt and support new plans and strategies.
• Facilitator- managing the implementation of the new strategies/decision-making processes.
• Moderator- impartially prioritizing the allocation of resources and development strategies.
• Creator- actively creating new strategies and plans to improve business health.
• Leader – providing guidance, direction, and insights to help bring a business back to a healthy position.

Transformative Business Practices

Whether you are a business or a Non-profit, money is at the core of your ability to operate. Whether dependent on sales or charitable donations, without cash, no organization can survive for very long.

Who better then to help guide your business’s decision making, than the CFO that knows the full financial picture? Using your CFO just to crunch numbers and provide you with raw data, is a waste of the enormous potential and insight you could gain from having it translated by them into meaningful and actionable ways to improve productivity and profit.

If your current CFO or accounting team is not producing data in a way that enables you to see clearly see your performance nor do they provide expertise on business decisions to improve your metrics, you may want to find a better solution.

Only 58% of businesses use a decentralized and uncoordinated approach to data collection and analytic analysis. But almost 80% of businesses cite the need for clear measurement of financial information. This disparity leads to a giant mismatch between the available data, and how effectively it can be understood and used to improve the organization at all levels.

Time To Get Real?

Having an advisor with an unbiased opinion is one of the best ways to ensure your business’s decision-making strategies are as effective as possible. You need someone that can be trusted to tell you when things aren’t going as well as they could be. You need a CFO who can use their knowledge and experience working for many other businesses to improve the capacity of your own.

Here at Part Time CFO, we want to help you create the best and most effective decision-making strategies possible. With our help you can tailor the way you do things to specific and talented operators that will work tirelessly to improve the areas of your business that need support. More than our skill with data management, our years of experience across the diverse field of business can provide insight like no other. We look forward to hearing from you. Contact Us