Читать книгу Startup CXO - Matt Blumberg - Страница 38

While Sales, Service, Marketing, and Legal are the areas where a startup CFO can make a big impact immediately, the scope of your responsibilities are company‐wide and you can make Finance a valuable partner to the entire company. Here are some tips on what you can do that will help your company go from average to great.

 Budgeting. For a startup, the budget is used to help determine resource decisions. Sure, it is always helpful to compare actual vs. budgeted revenue (and bookings), but for many startups, the budget is what drives investments in areas like new hires, marketing, and other material spending. And, of course, it is critical to use for cash forecasting. As you progress during your fiscal year, how you are doing against your budget will drive your allowable expenses, especially new hires. So, you will want to establish a formal budgeting process as soon as reasonable. For a startup, the process should include the following:Building the budget. You should work with the other group heads and all those who will have control of spending and sales. Building a simple template for people to fill in sales and spending assumptions as appropriate will make this work much easier.Budget review. Once you have a budget, and have it approved at a Board meeting, you should review it monthly with the team. Transparency with the team and the Board on how you are doing vs. expectations, and why, is a critical part of scaling. This Actual vs. Budget process (AvB) can be used to open up planned investments and hiring or as a revision of expected cash burn.Integrate the budget into processes and systems. For example, working with the HR team to approve new hire requests vs. the budget, or marketing processes around investment in advertising will help Finance be a true partner. And the more you can work the budget and associated analysis into your systems, the quicker and easier your monthly reports can be created.Budget revision. Many startups will need to revise their budgets. Early on, your budgets may only be for two quarters, but you need to track carefully and communicate with the team and the Board on any budget revisions. As you scale, you will want to avoid any material revisions and try to stick to an annual budget process. But one that can be used to take advantage of any opportunities. This is another example of Finance as a partner. If you find something that is working for Sales or Marketing, or a good merger and acquisition opportunity, you don't want to put the brakes on it just because it was not in the budget.

 KPI analysis and reporting. Early on, the CFO is often the owner of any reporting and key performance indicators (KPIs). You can take this opportunity to build a business that uses data to drive decisions and are actionable. You can partner with the appropriate groups like Product, Sales, and Marketing to determine what they are. Additionally, you can help or own the systems that store or measure the metrics. Establishing an effective business intelligence tool early on can absolutely help you as you scale, to ensure that the data you are using for reporting and decision making is consistent and timely. You want people closest to the challenge or problem making the decisions and creating effective KPIs and systems, since all of these are an important part of making sure your company can do this as you scale.

 Company communication. The startup CFO will be the person to communicate financials and other corporate numbers to the company. Often you will want to provide useful sound bites and the implications of metrics/financials that others can understand, not just rattle off numbers. You will also be the key person who keeps the executive team and other leaders informed on basic financials, burn rate, and investment mindset; you will educate the rest of the company on the pieces of financials that are important; and ensure no surprises for the Board/CEO, especially on burn rate and cash runway. In general, it is a good idea to work on your public speaking skills. Some basic things I learned early on was the importance of telling a story with the numbers and taking your time while speaking. Everyone will have an important one or two things to keep in mind that are specific to them. For me, it was to slow down and remember to pause at the right points and to take a breath!

There are a number of other functions a startup CFO may manage or partner with the CEO. Some of the more common ones include:

 Corporate systems. Early on, it is important to establish baseline systems for all corporate functions. This includes creating centralized management of corporate systems, including license management, agreement negotiation, and data sources of truth. A helpful exercise is to maintain system flow chart/map and usage metrics and eventually establish and manage the Business Systems team.

 Corporate IT. The key here is bringing your organization and management skills to the function. Some of the things you will want to do is establish basic purchasing guidelines, depreciation guidelines, inventory management, back‐office email, shared drives, calendar, and other systems. And you will want to properly resource the IT help desk, build IT documentation, and guidelines including security.

 Facilities and real estate. For the startup this is really managing leases, the facilities team, office space, and conference room systems. Some other helpful things to create early on include the office space budget; remote work management, local real estate lawyers (I would have a different law firm for each country) and local rules, and multinational support.

 Human Resources. For many companies the HR function will report directly to the CEO but for some startups the only HR needs are operational. In that scenario you will again be called on for your operational expertise and will partner to help build the HR systems, onboarding processes and basic payroll operations, and to establish health care and other benefits. Often the people and benefit costs are by far the biggest expense for a startup, so it is important to understand all of the pieces. There are also a lot of different regulations by jurisdiction, so make sure to track state business registrations and compliance filings.