Unfortunately, the CFO position is often misunderstood or even undervalued in companies, especially in the small ones. However, in these types of companies, it is important to develop and implement strategies for the company grows. Companies must understand how a CFO can positively impact the overall development of business from every aspect. Business strategies are linked deeply with financial strategies, so your business is requiring CFO support for all growing stages.
Gary McGaghey is focused on the people, business processes, and innovative technology that can help you analyze, estimate and optimize the protector role. In that way, you can promote the business and elevate the company’s leadership activities while promoting the value of the CFO organization.
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Target weaknesses of the company
The CFO’s task is to see the weakness of the company and start analyzing them. It is necessary to have an objective perspective that can target the things in the company that is not working effectively and business initiatives that are mostly just losing money.
A CFO needs to estimate numbers because they are clear proof of whether the business is operating properly or not and they provide a real financial situation of the company. When the company has the help of the CFO, it would be easier to see in which areas the company should invest and provide necessary resources. Like that, the CFO will tell where it is necessary to cut losses.
Identify strengths and your competitive advantage
The job of the CFO is to have a deep insight into the company’s strengths as well. His role is to find areas where the business is making a lot of money and where is the company’s biggest ROI. With the knowledge that CFO has, your business can promote those strengths.
Additionally, it is necessary to recognize and understand the competition’s strengths and advantages as well, so you can know which things you need to focus on and which aspects you can improve more. All of these will lead to successful growth. Logically, every company wants to pursue opportunities that can positively impact the business and the profit.
Understand market opportunity
One more thing that CFO must do is help a business to understand the competitive marketplace and how fast it is changing. The key to a successful business is to get to know where are the market opportunities and how the company can take advantage of these opportunities. Therefore, a CFO can step up company strategy by providing you with a clear direction and path on which the company should be faced on.
Think long-term
The mistake that many companies are making is looking for short-term growth initiatives. Even though this can be tempting, this is not the best way to run your business. Therefore, it is better to rethink the choices you are making for the company. A CFO’s job is to look for long-term opportunities.
At the same time, his role is to estimate whether some short-term opportunities can find their way somewhere down the road and be beneficial. It is good to know that financial analysis is very useful when it comes to shaping long-term strategies.
Evaluate management effectiveness
The CFO plays one more incredibly important role in evaluating the management team. He needs to quantify the effectiveness of the team members and assess whether the team is properly positioned to execute the company’s development strategy.
By evaluating everything, he needs to what things need to be changed and what ideas can be implemented in order to achieve better and successful business management.
Maintain customer focus
Companies want to grow their business, however, they do not appreciate and value their existing and loyal customers. For every company growth and higher profit is necessary to have a CFO that will help you with targeting a crucial audience for your business.
The CFO must ensure that the company stays committed to the already loyal client base and at the same time start attracting new customers and extending the overall client base. The company’s goal is to meet customer needs and requirements and satisfy them. Therefore, it is a necessary task to keep up the quality of the offerings you have and invest in customer service. A professional CFO must know how to help you achieve that goal.
Determine the impact of growth initiatives on current employees
A CFO also needs to think about how changes are going to impact current employees and whether or not their roles are going to change as well in order to meet companies’ new goals and innovations. Despite estimating how changes are going to affect the employees, a professional CFO must evaluate how the business process will change as well as whether they are going to be effective.
A CFO needs to provide answers on whether the employees need to take more responsibility for those changes and innovations and whether they have the skills to do their new tasks. If they do not have them, training must be organized, so everyone can manage to do their job without the problem. If a company does not hire a CFO to help shape the company and achieve the growth of the initiatives, the company is generally wasting valuable resources.
Standardize and improve processes
According to statistics, 80% of CFOs are telling that their crucial priority stands for process improvements. This means that all business improvements need to become faster, effective, to return with a higher profit while lowering costs and in the end to provide accurate results. The best way for CFOs to improve and promote all of those business processes is by creating a special culture of constant improvements, engaging owners, as well as assigning accountability for the change that will provide results over time.
A CFO must take the company from its comfort zone and make it try new things. If you do not change anything, how are you going to expect to see some improvements? The more you are risking and try, the better results you can expect to see as the outcome. Therefore, do not be afraid to take advantage of new technologies, software, KPIs, etc.