Great Cfo Quotes

A company like GM is a finance-driven company who always has to live up to financial expectations. Here we look at it the other way around—the product is successful when it’s great, and the company becomes great because of that.” (This mirrored what Musk had told me earlier in the day: “The moment the person leading a company thinks numbers have value in themselves, the company’s done. The moment the CFO becomes CEO—it’s done. Game over.”) Von

Entrepreneurship is management. And yet, imagine a modern manager who is tasked with building a new product in the context of an established company. Imagine that she goes back to her company’s chief financial officer (CFO) a year later and says, “We have failed to meet the growth targets we predicted. In fact, we have almost no new customers and no new revenue. However, we have learned an incredible amount and are on the cusp of a breakthrough new line of business. All we need is another year.” Most of the time, this would be the last report this intrapreneur would give her employer. The reason is that in general management, a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly. Both are significant lapses, yet new product development in our modern economy routinely requires exactly this kind of failure on the way to greatness. In the Lean Startup movement, we have come to realize that these internal innovators are actually entrepreneurs, too, and that entrepreneurial management can help them succeed;

We believe the great CEO’s of today should have the brain of a CFO, the heart of a storyteller, and the soul of an activist. That is how they are able to use the power of purpose to fuel both growth and social impact.

have found three very simple ways to do this in my own startups: Recognize greatness. When people are recognized for their hard work, they feel truly cared for and seen. Learn who they are and who they want to become. Simply put, know something about your people beyond the skills and experience on their résumé. What are their hobbies and interests? What gets them excited? And, most importantly, what are they looking for? Where do they want to take their career, and how does the startup fit into that? Focus on their continuous development. When you know who people are and where they want to be, then you can look for ways to develop them in that direction. For example, let’s say that you hired a part-time bookkeeper, but you learn they really want to be a CFO one day. You can look for a project to delegate to them and say, “Would you be open to developing a budget for this?” In that way, you’re helping them gain the skills they’ll need as a CFO.

imagine a modern manager who is tasked with building a new product in the context of an established company. Imagine that she goes back to her company’s chief financial officer (CFO) a year later and says, “We have failed to meet the growth targets we predicted. In fact, we have almost no new customers and no new revenue. However, we have learned an incredible amount and are on the cusp of a breakthrough new line of business. All we need is another year.” Most of the time, this would be the last report this intrapreneur would give her employer. The reason is that in general management, a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly. Both are significant lapses, yet new product development in our modern economy routinely requires exactly this kind of failure on the way to greatness. In the Lean Startup movement, we have come to realize that these internal innovators are actually entrepreneurs,

Hire software, not humans. People are expensive. Software is not, usually because a lot of it is VC-subsidized in the name of growth. Take advantage of this by using Pilot or Bench instead of hiring an accountant or a CFO. Use Gusto to run payroll and benefits in five minutes. Because you are putting off hiring, you will also save money on all of the people-managing roles in your company, like an HR person and an office manager (see below). You may be surprised how far you can get with cheap software tools. For example, you can hire a human being to follow up with new customers every time someone signs up for your service or you can use automation tools like Zapier to send a follow-up email and to add those new customers to a queue to call later.

In November 2011, Adobe’s CFO, Mark Garrett, told dozens of Wall Street analysts that he was going to try as hard as he could to make his company’s revenue earnings fall as quickly as possible. It was an understandably tense call. Adobe was going to stop selling its enormously profitable Creative Suite software in boxes and move to a digital subscription model: “The faster earnings fall, the better off we are as a company and the better off you are as investors, because millions of people paying us every single month is very compelling from a revenue perspective.” The overall revenue wasn’t going away, it was simply being pushed out into the future, and Garrett’s team took great pains explaining why and how they planned to accomplish that transition.