Day in the life of
CFO – Howard Katzenberg
Working as a CFO is very exciting. You work with and analyze every part of the company, and get to see how all the pieces fit together. It’s certainly not as siloed as other functions.
The primary responsibility of a CFO is crafting the company’s financial goals and working with other departments to achieve them. This includes implementing real-time monitoring of performance, having direct and effective conversations with other business leaders at the company, and developing an excellent finance team to assist in execution. Other CFO responsibilities include financial and investor reporting, budgeting, fundraising, and just being a thought partner to the CEO.
On a typical day, CFOs will handle numerous activities in these areas.
Pros
There are a lot of pros to being a CFO. For analytics junkies like me, you get to go deep and see the “how” and “why” aspects of business performance. It’s also a very objective function – numbers don’t lie, so you’re able to get feedback on what’s working and not in real-time.
Cons
The biggest con to entrepreneurial CFOs like me is not being on the frontlines and helping to drive revenue or customer success. There was definitely some envy I had as CFO of my marketing, sales, and product colleagues. That said, I tried to be a value-add to these groups by being extremely prolific at empowering them with data/analytics and non-intuitive insights about their teams’ performance that would help them do their job better.
Advice to aspiring CFOs
- Read analyst reports of similar public companies. They teach you how to be objective and help you keep track of industry developments. You can also quickly discover the most important operating and financial metrics in your industry.
- Become obsessed with your business’s unit economics. Understand the levers of your pricing model and customers’ sensitivities to changes. Be an expert on what comprises your cost of goods sold too. Become an expert and discuss with teammates how your costs will go down over time. Develop strong relationships with the folks responsible for managing the unit economic drivers; they will confide in you their challenges.
- Understand the sales process for customers. Drill into what drives their purchase decisions. What does the customer journey look like? How long does it take? How can it be optimized? Sales teams love finance professionals that show empathy and are great thought partners to them.
- Build your own simple model of your business. I give this advice to anyone interviewing for a CFO position at another company. You’ll get a clear insight into the key levers in their financial model.
- Learn how to pull your own reports. Don’t rely on BI teams. Learn to pull your own reports and dashboards and develop the expertise to double-click and get to the answers. When you show up to meetings with the answers, while everyone else has the questions, you’ll impress everyone!
- Learn all aspects of financial operations. If you’re on the Accounting side, seek exposure to FP&A, and vice versa. Regardless of your formal role, all finance staff aspiring to be finance leasers should understand the accounting rules governing their industry, understand what happens during a month end process, how the company budgets and makes spend decisions, and the company’s most important KPIs.
- Master the tools of the trade. Whether it be Google Sheets, Looker, NetSuite, Anaplan, or the host of new SaaS platforms servicing finance teams, understand which are best and can create efficiency and better collaboration for your teams.
