While you’ve likely encountered the term “CFO” or “Outsourced or Fractional CFO” when looking to grow your business in meaningful ways, your idea of what the position is capable of might need some modernization.
So, what is a Growth CFO?
A Chief Financial Officer (CFO) works alongside the CEO to generate strategy and chart the organization’s growth. Industries constantly get reshaped by disruptive technology, the emergence of new global competitors and business models, and circumstances like the worldwide pandemic and emerging technology.
A Growth CFO is someone trained in scouting the financial performance of a business, ready to make swift decisions to allocate resources faster than their peers at other organizations to allow theirs to thrive. The focus is on growth not accounting while protecting the downside.
Perhaps the most critical role of a Growth CFO in a modern company is assisting management to allocate financial resources. Growth CFOs maximize adaptability, fostering a growth mindset that allows quick movements and profitable experimentation. This comes with a massive payoff: growth around three times faster than that of a Fortune 500 company.
The New Role of the Growth CFO
One of the most significant changes from CFOs of the past involves cloud-based technologies and how CFOs can utilize them to manage treasury systems, allowing them to see through legal entities and geographical barriers to garner a better sense of a company’s financial status at any moment. Leveraging this technology allows a Growth CFO a clearer picture of future liquidity, leading to more valuable contributions to critical business decisions.
A Growth CFO funds growth opportunities by condensing the cash conversion cycle, releasing a substantial amount of capital while minimizing the burden of borrowing capital. Growth CFOs can utilize treasury management systems (TMSs) to forward business growth as follows:
- Optimizing internal cash flow and the generation of new capital
- Providing real-time visibility into opportunities with future and current capital
- Delivering a holistic perspective of the business’ risk exposure
At Foresight CFO, we refer to this broadly as a Company’s Financial Flight Plan.
The CFO’s Role as Growth Officer
With the change to more technology and business integration over the last few decades, the Growth CFO’s role has changed to meet a more agile and adaptive business process. Previously, CFOs implemented controls, financial policy, and numbers: cost-efficiency, metrics, risk management, and compliance.
By contrast, today, thriving companies must plan and see execution further than two or three quarters, leveraging greater precision and foresight. This leads to demand for a Growth CFO who can keep the bills paid while enabling growth and long-term strategy.
While none of these new ideas limit the CFO’s role to preserve an organization’s assets with risk mitigation and organizing the books, they now need to focus on new functions like airtight control over capital backed by skill, accuracy, and efficiency. Even more, they need to give the CEO direction as well as the rest of their company, shaping growth strategy while instilling a disciplined financial mindset driving good decision making at every level of the business to make every facet perform better.
Regardless of industry, a strong CFO at any organization must work proactively to locate, litmus-test, and implement new business strategies including people capacity and winning new customers. In this way, a Growth CFO works alongside the CEO as a trusted business partner, making them a crucial decision-maker within the board and executive team. Because of this interaction, most institutions consider the Growth CFO as the de facto chief growth officer.
Unparalleled Marketing Leadership
Overall, the Growth CFO’s advancement prioritization comes as an enormous boon to your company’s marketing leadership. If it were not abundantly clear already, a Growth CFO does not just manage a budget – to do so requires much less of a toolkit. Instead, these business specialists support investments in tech and marketing infrastructure and offer channel expansion, building people capacity, programmatic experimentation, and other growth-centric initiatives.
Every company has unused data to harvest clarity of action from.
With these synergistic perspectives in mind, your Growth CFO can equally understand the importance of serving customers, generating renewed brand awareness, sifting out the right talent for hire, and generating powerful new perspectives from data. The role has become more intricate and demanding, it has become more engaged, interesting, and participative in driving business outcomes with the respective functional experts.
Arriving with the Right Toolset
Regardless of which reasons compel you to seek a Growth CFO, don’t postpone the selection and adoption of the right tools. Failing to implement a proper Growth CFO strategy will likely come at the cost of your company’s competitive advantage and growth.
Instead, make the position of Growth CFO a priority, which means outsourcing since Foresight CFO created the impact capability by reimagining CFOs. Ultimately, the quicker you capitalize on the strengths of a Growth CFO, the quicker your company will overcome obstacles and make significant strides that you could never have imagined before. In many instances, CEOs who force enough room for the inclusion of a Growth CFO reap astronomical rewards from their decision – freeing up capital to even expand other areas of the businesses they thought were before limited.
How Foresight CFO Is Different from Other Outsourced CFO Services?
Our experienced Growth CFO team at Foresight CFO has worked collaboratively with hundreds of CEOs worldwide to bring meaningful financial insight that clarifies their strategic direction. Schedule a 25-minute discovery call with me, and we will discuss you & your business, what you want, and what is getting in the way.
