“Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance.”

“Walk me through how you’re thinking about this.”

That’s what the client’s CFO asked me. Not a hard question. He wasn’t trying to catch me out.

I’d been a partner for years by then. Run practices. Carried a P&L. Signed things. I thought I already knew what accountability felt like.

But I had just crossed over. I wasn’t advising the account anymore. I was the COO and CFO of it. A $300M finance and accounting operation. 850+ people across seven delivery centers.

And I had built him a beautiful deck.

He wasn’t asking about the number on the page. He could read the number. He was asking whether there was any thinking behind it, or whether I had simply constructed something.

I started a sentence. Four words in, I realized I didn’t have a good ending for it.

Here’s what I’d missed:

Consulting accountability has an end date. You own the outcome, the team, the recommendation. Then there’s a final readout and a next client. The work is the artifact, and you’re rewarded for the quality of the artifact.

Operating accountability doesn’t end. The operation keeps running. Your decision from last quarter is still sitting there, still right or wrong, in seven cities, with 850 people executing against it.

On paper the two jobs look identical. They are not the same job.

So I stopped building decks for a while.

I went and sat in the delivery centers instead. Spent time with the operations people actually running account-to-report, procure-to-pay, order-to-cash. Asked them to walk me through it, which is uncomfortable when you’re the one who is supposed to already know.

That’s where the answers were. Not in the model. In the people doing the work, who understood exactly why the numbers moved the way they moved and had never once been asked.

The lesson I’ve carried for twenty years:

Understanding the why matters more than building the perfect deck.

I was very good at the wrong thing. It took one peer-level question to show me.

What was the question that exposed the gap between what you’d built and what you actually understood?

#TheAccidentalCFO #FinanceLeadership #Consulting #Leadership #INERSEC