GrowCFO Show

Catherine Clark leads GrowCFO's mentoring team. One thing Catherine discusses regularly with her CFO mentees is how to create more thinking time. Finding the space to think is so important in so many areas. In particular thinking time impacts the quality of the decisions you make.

So in this episode of the GrowCFO Show we're going to talk about decision making and lack of thinking time:

Why is thinking time important for you as a CFO what can you do to increase your perspective and enhance your performanceHow can you reduce the stress that comes with lack of time to think things through.

What are the main issues Catherine explores with her mentees?

The lack of thinking time comes up under a number of different guises. The main issues that Catherine explores include:

Proving you can think and act strategically as a leaderBalancing the day to day with strategic focusBeing stuck in the weeds and unable to see the bigger pictureA struggle to communicate succinctly

The good news is that there's plenty you can do to better equip yourself. Lets take a look in more detail.

Why is thinking time important?

Clarity of thought gives you a wider perspective. It reduces overwhelm, and allows you to focus on what matters.

You need to make smarter decisions. The right decision is critical particularly in times of change. You can add greatest value to the business by making more of the right decisions. Doing more of the day to day rarely adds value.

You are likely finding yourself in a period of huge change. The last 12 months has seen many businesses rethink the way they operate. Its often been a financial imperative so the business survives, and you the CFO have been more involved than ever before in the new ways of doing business.

Not only is your business model changing, so too are customer expectations. Your relationship with employees and how they work has changed, and will likely change again in the new normal. Ongoing change will mean you need to continually adapt your business strategy. You will need to make critical decisions quickly.

Pressure to perform impacts thinking time

Some pressure is good for you, focussing your mind. This motivates you to take action. Too much pressure can do the exact opposite. Too many hours leads to a drop in performance. This pressure will impair attention, your ability to multi task and your ability to think clearly. Your decision making ability suffers.

Stress narrows your focus and perspective. The fight or flight instinct kicks in. Everything looks worse than it is. You forget the resources you have at your disposal and the possibilities available to you.

Catherine finds that this is the key area most people need to focus on. Catherine and I explore this in much more depth in the audio recording and give a number of strategies you can use to both reduce stress and create space. Listen in to find out more.

Find out more about GrowCFO

If you enjoyed this podcast you can subscribe to the GrowCFO Show with your favourite podcast app. The show is listed in the Apple podcast directory, Google podcasts and many others.

GrowCFO is a great place to extend your professional network. You can join GrowCFO as a free member today and take part in our regular networking events and webinars. 

Premium members also have access to our extensive training centre. Here you can enrol in our flagship Future CFO or Finance Leader programmes. 

You can find out more and join today at growcfo.net

Susana Serrano-Davey is an experienced finance leader, mentor and coach. She even ran her own business for a while. Susana is joining the mentoring team we have here at GrowCFO. On this podcast I catch up with Susana to find out more about her. I also asked her "What makes a good finance leader?"

About Susana Serrano-Davey

Susana is a Spanish national, and currently lives in Marbella on the Costa Del Sol. She is a Chartered Accountant and a PwC alumni. Her experience includes roles in financial control at Tui Travel and CFO at Cash Converters Espana. You can find out more on LinkedIn.

What makes a good finance leader?

Susana has been, and still is, a CFO. She has worked with many senior finance people. She mentors both business leaders and finance leaders. Who better to ask "What makes a good finance leader?"

Naturally, Susana gave me some good answers. Her initial take was around what makes you the CFO special:

Pursue your own authenticity and build on what you have.

Don't be afraid to bring skills that aren't on the traditional list of finance leader skills

Understand who you are in addition to all the training you have. This will help you to shine

A good finance leader knows his strengths and plays to these. You will know things you are weak at, and you need to recognise these. Theres nothing wrong with delegating or outsourcing things you don't like doing or aren't strong at. Even core finance skills. The GrowCFO competency framework identifies 45 areas. You can't be equally strong in all 45, that's just about impossible.

If you are weak at something you might develop yourself and become mediocre. On the other hand, if you are strong at something and like doing it you can develop yourself to mastery. Which is the better use of your own limited personal development time?

What makes a good team leader?

Can a finance leader be good without being a good team leader? Susana thinks not. You need to invest time in your team. What makes a good finance leader be a good team leader?

Susana gave us some pointers:

understand their strengths and weaknesses

Difficult to do when the typical CFO has back to back meetings and a never ending to do list.

Don't believe you have all the answers. Listen to your team, they often know what's going on better than you do. Have a vision, but be prepared to modify this. Take your team on a journey, as long as you are moving forward you don't need to worry too much about the ultimate destination.

Be aware of your personal style, and be aware of the culture of your team or organisation. You can't change your personality but you can tone certain things down where necessary.

What makes a good finance leader a good co-pilot for the CEO?

To be a great CFO you need a first class relationship with your CEO. You need to be a true business partner with the CEO. This means going well beyond just looking after the financial numbers. It means going further than just giving a finance perspective on things.

A great CFO will understand the business, and will bring commercial insight along with his finance skills. You will need to compliment the skills the CFO has, so that your joint skills are rounded.

We discussed how you build this commercial acumen. Susana has some great insights, and to find out more then listen to the audio recording of the full show.

Find out more about GrowCFO

If you enjoyed this podcast you can subscribe to the GrowCFO Show with your favourite podcast app. The show is listed in the Apple podcast directory, Google podcasts and many others.

GrowCFO is a great place to extend your professional network. You can join GrowCFO as a free member today and take part in our regular networking events and webinars. 

Premium members also have access to our extensive training centre. Here you can enrol in our flagship Future CFO or Finance Leader programmes. 

You can find out more and join today at growcfo.net

Abu Ali is a partner in a Newcastle based corporate finance boutique, WilliamsAli. He provides strategic M&A and funding advice to business owners and investors.

Abu joins Kevin Appleby on the GrowCFO Show to explain the role of a corporate finance advisor, and the value that working with an external specialist can bring to your business.

About Abu Ali

Abu Ali qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Teeside based Clive Owen & Co. He soon left the world of audit to pursue a career in corporate finance. He gained his initial experience with Ryecroft Glenton Corporate Finance before moving on to become a director at Baldwins.

Running is own practice was always Abu's ambition, and in early 2019 he became one of the founders of Leathers Corporate Finance. In April 2020 Abu and his partner Phil Williams exercised an option to complete the buy-out of Leathers Corporate Finance. This included a full rebrand to Williams Ali and relocation to new offices within Newcastle. 

WilliamsAli offers a focused, high quality service to help businesses and their shareholders realise their ambitions.  The team has extensive deal experience acquired over many years. They take a leading role in transactions. These include business sales, MBOs, acquisitions, private equity transactions and fundraising.

What is Corporate Finance?

Corporate finance includes a wide range of activities. Abu talked through the variety of activities he supports. He advises a variety of different people. These include:

Shareholders on the sale of their business.Management teams on Management Buy-Outs.Acquirers on the identification and purchase of acquisition targets.Business owners on company valuations.

Abu tells us that it's not just about giving advice. There are many more practical activities he gets involved in. These include:

Helping business owners prepare their business for an exit.Helping entrepreneurs prepare business plans to attract the funding needed to start up or develop their existing business. This might be in the form of equity, debt or grant funding.Assisting companies in defining and documenting their corporate and growth strategy.

Who is corporate finance for?

Raising funds for clients is a major part of Abu's role. But Abu doesn't just work with businesses that need to find funding. Some of his clients are very well funded. Clients may be looking to make acquisitions, and have funds available. Identifying the right acquisition becomes the challenge.

Abu spends about half his time helping businesses to sell. People typically don't know what their business is worth . They also don't understand the process of selling and need help. Working with these clients Abu becomes an extension of the management team. He often takes a project management role from start to finish of the transaction.

How do you find a buyer for your business?

You can't put a "for sale" sign up outside your business. Selling can often be a covert process to maintain confidentiality. Abu often finds that its necessary to make sure staff, customers and suppliers don't know a business is for sale until the right time in the process. Often the right time might be when the deal has been done.

Research is very important. Abu will spend a lot of time identifying potential buyers and developing a short list. To do this Abu needs to be well networked, and able to talk to his network about any opportunity he has with discretion.

The network that Abu has built is different from one you would typically build as a CFO. This is one reason why a business with a very strong CFO might still engage a corporate finance advisor.

Find out more about GrowCFO

If you enjoyed this podcast you can subscribe to the GrowCFO Show with your favourite podcast app. The show is listed in the Apple podcast directory, Google podcasts and many others.

GrowCFO is a great place to extend your professional network. You can join GrowCFO as a free member today and take part in our regular networking events and webinars.

Premium members also have access to our extensive training centre. Here you can enrol in our flagship Future CFO or Finance Leader programmes.

You can find out more and join today at growcfo.net

Ajmal Mian and Kevin Appleby discuss the future of the high street and the impact this will have on the CFO on the GrowCFO show

Paul McKoen is a very experienced CFO. His career has given him experience in a number of industries and includes just about every aspect of the CFO role. We talk through Paul's career, and highlight a some interesting experiences of the CFO needing to make an impact very quickly in a new CFO role.

Paul talks about the times where a fresh pair of eyes and some cross-industry experience made a real difference to his new employer. It's quite a journey!

Paul McKoen qualified at the Ford Motor Company

Paul started his career at Ford where he gained his CIMA qualification and spent 11 years in finance, including an overseas role in Cologne. During this period, Paul worked his way up to middle-management grade.

Paul experienced first-hand the huge impact of the introduction of technology solutions and the evolving effect that this can have on the finance role.

The vast majority of Paul's experience has been on-the-job training. For example, learning from bosses, peers and other role models.

Paul has experienced many new CFO roles

During his career, Paul has experienced many new CFO roles and Finance Director roles. These include divisional roles at Serco, Vertex/United Utilities and Balfour Beatty.

Paul has also performed group CFO roles at Tradaq, B&M Retail, Value Retailer and Silentnight Group.

Within these roles, Paul achieved many milestones such as delivering fundraising, acquisitions and successful company exits.

Adding value within a new CFO role

During one of Paul's new CFO roles, he supported the CEO to determine why they were losing too many bids to competitors. This involving challenging the business and providing a new set of eyes regarding what was actually happening.

For example, Paul carefully reviewed the assumptions being applied towards costing analysis and pricing. Accordingly, Paul identified a flaw in their assumptions that significantly reduced their pricing going forward.

In summary, don't be afraid to ask the obvious questions and to challenge the answers provided.

Making an impact in a new CFO role

Paul previously took on an interim CFO to support a fundraising process. The investors had challenged management due to concerns that their profit forecast was overstated by £3 million.

Paul compared the sales forecast figures to the actual figures during the previous few years.

Accordingly, he identified that the sales team were over-forecasting sales numbers by £10m. Applying a 30% margin resulted in a profit overstatement of £3m.

This is a good example of how you can gain strong experience very quickly within a new interim CFO role.

How to approach a new CFO role

During your first 100 days, CFOs will have an up-front honeymoon period. This provides you with a fantastic one-off opportunity to spend lots of time with people and to ask the stupid questions.

You are likely to identify some quick easy wins during these discussions to make an early positive impact within your new CFO role.

GrowCFO's Future CFO Programme covers how to approach a new CFO role within Module 9 called Your first 100 days.

Paul has a strong example of this from one of his previous new CFO roles. He spent the first few weeks asking everybody what does and doesn't work. His findings identified various outdated strategies that were now causing a negative impact within the business. These insights allowed the business to adjust their approach and double sales during the next few years. This is a great example that shows the benefits of providing a fresh challenge within a business.

Helping the next generation

In summary, Paul has had an incredible range of experience during his career. He is keen to share these with the next generation of finance leaders to pass on the key learnings from his many successes.

In addition, Paul has learnt how to solve problems effectively and has developed techniques to help him to relate to other people. He has also learnt how to bounce back from various setbacks. For example, Paul is familiar with the pain of redundancy and how to overcome this.

Paul looks forward to getting more involved within GrowCFO and to positively contribute towards the community.

Paul McKoen is a very experienced CFO. His career has given him experience in a number of industries and includes just about every aspect of the CFO role. We talk through Paul's career, and highlight a some interesting experiences of the CFO needing to make an impact very quickly in a new CFO role.

Paul talks about the times where a fresh pair of eyes and some cross-industry experience made a real difference to his new employer. It's quite a journey!

Paul McKoen qualified at the Ford Motor Company

Paul started his career at Ford where he gained his CIMA qualification and spent 11 years in finance, including an overseas role in Cologne. During this period, Paul worked his way up to middle-management grade.

Paul experienced first-hand the huge impact of the introduction of technology solutions and the evolving effect that this can have on the finance role.

The vast majority of Paul's experience has been on-the-job training. For example, learning from bosses, peers and other role models.

Paul has experienced many new CFO roles

During his career, Paul has experienced many new CFO roles and Finance Director roles. These include divisional roles at Serco, Vertex/United Utilities and Balfour Beatty.

Paul has also performed group CFO roles at Tradaq, B&M Retail, Value Retailer and Silentnight Group.

Within these roles, Paul achieved many milestones such as delivering fundraising, acquisitions and successful company exits.

Adding value within a new CFO role

During one of Paul's new CFO roles, he supported the CEO to determine why they were losing too many bids to competitors. This involving challenging the business and providing a new set of eyes regarding what was actually happening.

For example, Paul carefully reviewed the assumptions being applied towards costing analysis and pricing. Accordingly, Paul identified a flaw in their assumptions that significantly reduced their pricing going forward.

In summary, don't be afraid to ask the obvious questions and to challenge the answers provided.

Making an impact in a new CFO role

Paul previously took on an interim CFO to support a fundraising process. The investors had challenged management due to concerns that their profit forecast was overstated by £3 million.

Paul compared the sales forecast figures to the actual figures during the previous few years.

Accordingly, he identified that the sales team were over-forecasting sales numbers by £10m. Applying a 30% margin resulted in a profit overstatement of £3m.

This is a good example of how you can gain strong experience very quickly within a new interim CFO role.

How to approach a new CFO role

During your first 100 days, CFOs will have an up-front honeymoon period. This provides you with a fantastic one-off opportunity to spend lots of time with people and to ask the stupid questions.

You are likely to identify some quick easy wins during these discussions to make an early positive impact within your new CFO role.

GrowCFO's Future CFO Programme covers how to approach a new CFO role within Module 9 called Your first 100 days.

Paul has a strong example of this from one of his previou...

GrowCFO has created a CFO Competency Framework that covers the key skills required to become an effective finance leader.  This is rapidly becoming the global toolkit to help finance leaders benchmark their skills and competencies against their peer group.  It also acts as a CFO Readiness Toolkit to help the next generation of aspiring CFOs.

During this podcast episode, Dan Wells and Kevin Appleby discuss the purpose of the CFO Competency Framework.  In addition, we discuss how it is helping so many finance leaders to accelerate their learning and development.

CFO Competency Framework's purpose

GrowCFO noticed that there was a huge gap in the finance leader ecosystem.  Nobody had previously produced a global competency framework to help finance leaders benchmark their existing skills against those required to become a CFO.

Senior finance professionals were struggling to identify their skills gaps and to prioritise their most important learning and development objectives.  As many people say, “You don’t know what you don’t know!”

Our CFO Competency Framework is designed to deliver many important purposes.

Identify the skills gaps to be addressed by the next generation of finance leaders.Assist CFO job applicants to become self-aware candidates with a proper development plan.Help first-time CFOs to become more impactful within your role.Highlight opportunities for the CFO to create value and achieve your company’s vision.Determine the difference between the CFO role and versus Finance Director or Head of Finance.Filter GrowCFO’s activities to help experienced CFOs to fulfil your annual CPD requirements.Map your competency assessment ratings into online courses, lessons and workshops.Benchmark your competency levels against your most relevant finance leader peer group.

It is no surprise that many finance leaders are already using the GrowCFO Competency Framework to accelerate your career progression.

How did we build the CFO Competency Framework?

GrowCFO has a huge network of aspiring finance leaders, first-time CFOs, experienced CFOs, CEOs, Chairs, NEDs, other C-Suite members, advisors, investors and recruiters.  We held focus groups with representatives from these communities to determine the required competencies for the modern-day CFO.

GrowCFO also consulted with a huge number of GrowCFO members to obtain people’s views and feedback.  We worked with technology experts, graphic designers and programme developers to build a market-leading digital CFO Competency Framework that operates on a self-serve basis.

Following this, we engaged inspirational CFOs to create a huge number of competency lessons that are located within our world-class learning management system.  We have mapped each of our CFO competencies into online training courses and regular workshops.  This allows finance leaders to efficiently generate your tailored learning and development plan to further develop their skills and address their biggest challenges.

https://youtu.be/6Kk9Yz2ax5s

How is the CFO Competency Framework structured?

Our CFO Competency Framework contains three categories: Foundation, Implementation and Impact.  These help you to preserve value, create value and maximise value throughout your role.

Each category comprises three competencies, giving a total of nine competencies across the framework.  These competencies are inter-connected and you will often be using many of these concurrently.

Each competency contains five different skills.  Therefore, the GrowCFO Competency Framework contains a total of 45 skills that are relevant to a typical modern-day CFO.

There is a lot for finance leaders to master and our framework will constantly evolve over time, in line with the ongoing evolution of the CFO role.

Foundation category

The Foundation category contains three competencies: Governance and Control, Operational driver and Financial Planning & Analysis.

These three competencies form the foundation for your future success within the role and are critical towards preserving value within your business.

Implementation category

The Implementation category contains three competencies being: Strategic Business Partner, Catalyst for Change, and Fundraising and M&A.

These competencies represent your ability to deliver the company’s business plan and to create value in your role.  You are likely to be combining your hard and soft skills with a powerful effect.

Impact category

The Impact category contains the following three competencies: Leadership, Commercial mindset and Soft skills.

These contain many of the advanced competencies that really make you stand out as a top-quality finance leader.  These are harder to learn but allow you to maximise the value that you create across your firm.

The nine competencies

The following section provides more insights regarding each competency:

Governance and Control

Governance: Deliver your Board responsibilities and produce Board pack reports. Ensure director compliance and conduct.Risk management: Implement policies and procedures. Monitor control frameworks and oversee committees;Compliance: Perform financial and non-financial reporting. Comply with regulatory requirements such as legal, tax, statutory audit and internal audit/reviews;Closing the books: Optimise your period-end close procedures. For example: process journals, form valuations and make judgements; andTreasury: Oversee cash management and treasury policies. Manage foreign exchange and implement hedging arrangements.

Operational driver

Lead operations: Oversee specific operational activities. For example, Finance, HR, Legal, IT and Facilities;Implement and integrate systems: Identify systems, implement new technology solutions and integrate applications;Optimise processes: Review business processes to determine how best to simplify, automate and streamline their associated activities;Embed finance across the business: Develop relationships across each department and put finance at the heart of the business; andCapture data and create dashboards: Understand what your audience wants. Extract data and report it in the most user-friendly manner.

Financial Planning and Analysis

Allocate capital: Divide up your company’s financial resources and other sources of capital in a manner that generates the maximum return for your shareholders;Build financial models: Create a short-to-medium term model to forecast your financial performance and KPIs based upon your strategic plan;Create investment cases: Challenge and support investment cases to determine which initiatives to support;Analyse data: Apply your financial perspective and commercial awareness to scrutinise both financial and non-financial data;Manage outcomes: Manage outcomes of budgetary performance during each financial period. Take mitigating action where required.

Strategic Business Partner

Influence strategies: Deliver data-driven insights, generate new ideas and influence the business plan;Support decision-making: Support your teams and facilitate problem-solving. Provide a financial perspective, create collaboration and drive decision-making;Become a critical voice: Challenge the management team and Board. Also, become an influential voice across the wider firm;Manage stakeholders: Be the main point of contact to internal and external stakeholders. Provide regular updates and generate confidence in your business; andBe the co-pilot to your CEO: Work closely with your CEO to communicate and deliver the business plan across your organisation.

Catalyst for Change

Identify profit and cash initiatives: Combine your financial knowledge, commercial awareness and business relationships to identify opportunities that improve financial performance;Oversee and drive business change: Lead and oversee change initiatives that deliver the key objectives within your business plan;Finance transformation: Design and implement a medium-term collection of finance projects that deliver a pillar of your company’s key strategic objectives;Restructure business operations: Deliver significant business change such as merging operations and carving out business units. In addition, consider restructuring teams, integrating new businesses and outsourcing processes; andMonitor effectiveness of change: Regularly monitor the impact of change initiatives against your intended targets and implement any mitigating action to deliver the planned outcomes.

Fundraising and M&A

Identify and evaluate opportunities: Work with your management team to develop your fundraising and M&A strategy. Also, understand the components of value creation, identify opportunities and create investment cases. Accordingly, determine returns on investment and de-risk your activities;Perform valuations: Build valuation models using a range of approaches. Determine valuation ranges and returns on investments. Assess the transaction's impact on your financial model and its value for money;Fundraising: Lead fundraising rounds and negotiate terms. Co-ordinate advisors, manage stakeholders and complete deals;Making acquisitions: Perform a key role in acquiring companies and assets. Lead the deal process, work with advisors and integrate acquisitions; andExit readiness: Implement the necessary actions to prepare your business for an exit and play a key role in the sales process.

Leadership

Lead your finance function: Determine your purpose, structure your finance activities, shape the team and deliver your responsibilities;Become a C-Suite business leader: Enable the vision and set the right pace. Share the bigger picture, monitor activities, collaborate, keep people informed and help people to succeed;Manage people: Determine your people plan throughout the business life cycle. Accordingly, recruit, manage and motivate your workforce. Align your teams and create self-leaders;Drive the culture:

Tanbir Jasimuddin shares his experience with digital finance. Tanbir and his team at family law firm Vardags have recently won an award. Transformer of the year at the Generation CFO Digital Finance Function Awards. He is also an author of white papers for the FP&A trends group.

About Tanbir Jasimuddin

Tanbir graduated with a chemistry degree and qualified as an accountant, then moved into management consulting (Capgemini, KPMG and then McKinsey). He's now back on the coal face. Tanbir is currently the Director of Finance of a small family law firm called Vardags.

How is the family law business at the moment?

Business has been tough as we navigate Covid. For some reason, there’s a reluctance among the general population to initiate divorce proceedings whilst locked down. However, we are optimistic that there will be a strong bounce back. The firm has big growth plans, and 2020 will simply be a small blip on the chart.

The Vardags digital finance team

Tanbir leads a small finance team at Vardags. It's quite a young and relatively inexperienced team but the people are very bright. They are mostly high calibre graduates and several are studying for CIMA qualifications. They were winners of the Generation CFO digital finance function awards last month

Tanbir has transformed finance at Vardags. His challenge is to take away the routine and repetitive tasks from his team and free them up to do more value-adding and challenging work. They are an ambitious bunch and Tanbir needs to give them all career paths that can keep them engaged and grow their skills.

https://youtu.be/QIJjOsKZ8Ow

Developing digital finance

The transformation brought together activity analysis, process improvement and automation. Power BI has been implemented and is one of the biggest tools for providing insight into the business.

Some facts according to McKinsey:

over half of finance processes can be automatedanalytics is vital, and analytics leaders outperform their peers-

These areas are often known as digital finance. Tanbir isn't keen on this term. "We’ve been doing this for a long time. What’s changing is the tech toolkit available to us".

Should finance be the custodians of data?

Maybe that was a good idea in the past, but there's now so much data that one team cant own it all. Data governance is important though. We must make sure there's a single source of the truth.

Does Excel have a place in digital finance?

Tanbir is on the anti-Excel side of the discussion. Excel is flexible and everyone knows how to use it. But it’s a barrier to scaling your data (no controls, no workflow, no audit trail, limited functionality). There was a time when finance was the analytics expert in the organisation. We are still stuck in our spreadsheets, whereas our marketing colleagues have embraced big data

Tanbir's work outside Vardags

Tanbir is building his personal brand within the industry. There are plenty of networking groups out there. He admits to suffering from webinar and Zoom fatigue at the moment!

Tanbir is involved in the FP&A trends group. He's currently working on a white paper for them on data visualisation. Tanbir has also presented for them on topics such as integrated planning and zero-based budgeting

Many businesses have struggled during the past 12 months and need to adapt to ever-changing circumstances.  This may require significant adjustments to their business model and operations to help them survive. A business turnaround strategy can help with this.

During this week’s podcast episode, I asked experienced CFO Baz Bedrossian to share his thoughts.  Baz has strong experience of supporting business turnarounds throughout his various finance leader roles.

What is a business turnaround?

A business turnaround is the reversal of difficult results through fundamental change.  This can take many different forms including refinancing, adjusting pricing and restructuring teams.

What should you do first?

Finance leaders will often be brought into an existing company to implement a business turnaround.  You should start by developing a strong understanding of the business and the team.  For example, determining what makes the people and the business tick.

You are likely to spend a lot of time talking to people.  This includes the stakeholders, Board members, management team and middle management.  These conversations will help you to reach independent conclusions regarding what actually needs to be done.

Avoid changing too many things immediately until you have developed a proper plan.  Your number one objective early on is to determine whether you have the right people, for example in your finance team.

However, you have most likely been brought in to make a big impact, hence your honeymoon period is only a short one.

https://youtu.be/rNgCvz5QAz0

Taking some urgent action

During your up-front review, you will inevitably identify some leaks that need to be urgently resolved.  Therefore, you may need to make a few urgent tweaks whilst building your transformation plan.

Ensure that you have the right skills in place to deliver the essential finance team requirements. In addition, make sure that your team are fulfilling essential duties such as collecting the cash, paying the bills and delivering compliance.

How do you approach solving the problems?

Business turnarounds can take anywhere from 3 months to around 2 years.  You need to ensure that you have the right plan in place when you commence the transformation project.

75% of transformation projects do not meet the timeline or budget.  This is often due to not having the right people available to deliver them, due to the requirements of their ongoing business roles.

Consider how you can free up your existing team.  For instance, simplifying, automating or outsourcing some of your existing activities.

Who should deliver the business turnaround?

It is essential to select the right people to lead and deliver a business turnaround.  Every business has unique circumstances and its turnaround requirements will vary.

Consider the following questions:

Should you free up your best people to deliver it, given their skills and understanding of the business?Does it make sense to employ interim resources to cover the business as usual activities?Would a specialist consultant be better placed to support or lead the transformation project?

Alternatively, you may wish to adopt a combination of the above.  For example, creating a joint team that includes your existing finance team and external consultants.  This provides you with strong business knowledge, specialist expertise and continuity going forward.

Whatever the answer, you will need to be closely involved throughout.

Impact of business turnaround on people

Struggling businesses have a huge emotional impact on people.  At times, things can look very difficult for companies, which can cause the workforce huge distress.

As a finance leader, you need to stay very close to people, keep them informed and communicate effectively.  You need to treat people in the way that you would like to be treated.  This involves providing them with ongoing support and reassurance during difficult times.

Taking people on the journey

Implementing a business turnaround initiative is very challenging.  It requires strong leadership and soft skills, which you are often not taught during your career.  You need to bring along your team to understand what you are trying to achieve.

Baz recommends the following three top tips:

Honesty – always be transparent with people.Communication – do this again and again and again.Clarity – clearly state what we are trying to achieve for the organisation.

Making hard decisions

People do not like change and you will have to make some hard decisions.  Implementing change will require people to let go of things that they don’t want to.  Existing employees may consider some discretionary spending to be essential when it actually isn’t.

It can be very challenging to let people go and this needs to be managed carefully.  You need to be sensitive to everybody concerned and also ensure that your actions do not have a negative effect on everybody else.

Always talk about things from a company perspective and how it will help to improve the company.

Final thoughts

Do not try to change everything during your transformation project.  Often, some of the smaller changes can make a big difference.  Be realistic with your objectives and ensure that everything is achievable based on your available time and resources.

GrowCFO covers these topics in more detail during our lessons on change management and finance transformations.

GrowCFO are launching our 2021 finance systems survey to share technology insights from your community. This will help finance leaders to embed technology solutions into your business operations. In addition, this will help you to act as a catalyst for change across your wider firm.

Technology offers more opportunities to streamline business processes and to evolve finance functions. This is driving the automation of most routine manual activities.

During this podcast episode, I asked Chris Tredwell for his insights given his lead role within GrowCFO’s Future of Finance Function events.

Finance Systems Survey overview

Each year, GrowCFO run a high profile finance systems survey to help finance leaders. Its purpose is to collate knowledge and insights regarding how you use finance systems and other software. Therefore, the survey should help you to maximise the effectiveness of your finance function.

Prior to launching this survey, we dedicate significant time towards obtaining membership feedback regarding which topics to feature in the survey. This includes organising focus groups, hosting individual discussions and collating direct feedback.

What the 2021 survey covers

Based upon the feedback received, this year's survey will collate feedback from your finance leader community to answer the following questions:

Which finance systems are the most popular in the marketplace?Which finance systems are the most appropriate for certain types of companies based upon their size and complexity?What percentage of companies are using cloud-native products?How do finance leaders prefer to purchase and implement their finance systems?How long do companies spend on implementing their finance systems?Do you need third party support to implement each finance system?What is the cost of implementing each finance system?How sophisticated is each finance system?How good is each system at dealing with foreign exchange and generating consolidated financial information?Which other systems have you implemented into your finance system?How did you integrate third party software?Which future innovations will you implement into your finance function?What are your biggest challenges towards replacing your finance system?Which technologies will best support you with remote working?How long does your financial close take?How long does it take to produce your monthly management report pack?Are you able to easily access and extract data from each finance system?

Completing the finance systems survey

The survey is located in the cloud and takes around five minutes to complete by clicking here. We will collate responses during the next 4-6 weeks until we have strong representation across each of the most popular finance systems.

Reporting the results

We will present the 2021 finance systems survey results during a special Future of Finance Functions event and will provide Q&A opportunities for all of our members.

GrowCFO will aggregate the survey results into a detailed report, which details each of our key findings. This will focus upon the above topics and will be published within your GrowCFO website.

We shall also share high level summaries on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and will produce a podcast to talk through the results in more detail.

Please complete the survey

Please take five minutes to complete the finance systems survey here so that GrowCFO can help you with these essential topics and also benefit the wider finance leader community. Thank you in advance for your support.