Читать книгу Startup CXO - Matt Blumberg - Страница 17

There's no one path to the role of “startup CFO” and it's likely that anyone with that title could have taken one of many paths to get there. Some come from an accounting background, they have a CPA and possibly have experience as a controller, mastering accounting systems, GAAP rules, and providing accurate and timely financials. Other startup CFOs have had experience in investment banking, focusing on mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, and key performance indicators (KPIs) before jumping over to the finance team of a company. And some, like myself, come from an unrelated field. I came to the role of startup CFO from consulting where I learned strategic analysis, competitive benchmarking and, most importantly, helping clients as a partner to solve problems. I also had a two‐year experience starting a company, where a friend and I tried to start a business creating corporate finance software. There were a lot of learning lessons there as well, especially that I should not be a primary coder in the business. Overall an effective CFO has to eventually master all of the basics—the accounting and finance requirements of the role—but often your early days as a startup CFO will focus on where you came from. And more often than not, a first‐time “Head of Finance” has to learn the areas they do not have expertise in on the fly.

Coming from the consulting world, I was missing a lot of the standard skills that CFOs need to have. I had never made a journal entry, never closed the accounting books, never formed a corporate entity in a foreign country, and never managed a cross‐functional team. I had a lot to learn and luckily was able to do a lot of it on the job. But while I was missing some of the standard CFO skills, I had deep experience and skills in some of the hard‐to‐teach things like financial analysis, competitive benchmarking, thinking strategically, and managing transactions. And, I was instinctively drawn to what I now believe is the secret to a great startup CFO: the concept of “Finance as a Partner.”

Most people, both in and out of Finance, think of the Finance division as either a gatekeeper to financial resources, or they think of us as the people who require budgets and justification for internal funding. If you accept the definition that Finance acts only as an approval gate, or a speed bump to getting things done, or a black hole for requests, you're limiting yourself and your team to the bare routine tasks of the role and your organization on a whole will not operate as smoothly as it can. I have always thought that Finance should be a partner to the organization and that mind shift, from making requests to working collaboratively with others both on finance issues but also on general business questions, is critically important for the Finance function and the company.

The other mind shift that is required if you're a startup and you want to help accelerate your company's growth, is that you'll have to constantly look for new innovations, new technologies, new ways of doing things. Too often decisions are made simply because that is the way they were always done and these outdated rules lose their effectiveness. For example, a requirement that people work in the office 40 hours a week was not possible in 2021, given the COVID‐19 pandemic. That's an extreme example, of course, but there are a lot of “rules” that made sense when they were created but lose their effectiveness over time. So, try to let go of these perceived guardrails and rules … and help teach others to do so as well.

Organizations can't scale if investments are not clearly understood or if areas of the business, such as Product and Marketing, suffer from lack of analytic support. If you're not a partner to the business, Finance will be seen as a speed bump, as a drag on growth rather than an accelerator of growth. Being seen as a gatekeeper, as a speed bump, can come from the best intentions of people in your company because they often see Finance as the guardian of cash. Also, since startups are often losing money while they get to scale and figure out their product‐market fit, careful management of cash is a priority. As the CFO in a startup, it's easy to just say “no” to people who want an exception or stick blindly to your budgeted spend. But if you approach the role differently, if you operate as a partner and ask others what Finance can do to help provide them the right information at the right time to make the best decisions, the organization is able to scale much more effectively.

An important part of collaborating with others as partners is to enable other functions to be more self‐sufficient and you do this by teaching them about finance and by helping them learn how to make an effective business case. Most people won't be well‐versed in finance. Some people might even have a fear of finance, and they may think that they're not good with numbers. Your number one job with helping your company scale is to help people learn how to best think about the issues of investing, measuring, making data‐based decisions, and managing financial resources. By taking on the mindset of enabler, of teacher, or helper, the startup CFO can develop a stronger grasp of which systems are needed, where data has to live, what analytic support is required, what types of training are required, and how investments can be made for a greater impact. You should also embrace being taught. Asking questions of other areas to better understand their function and challenges will help make an effective partnership. An effective startup CFO should keep the collaborative “partner” model in mind as they build their team, their systems, and their processes. And strive to create an environment where there are no surprises.