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

Tuesday, I wrote about the question that ended my life as a consultant. A client CFO asked me to walk him through my thinking, and I discovered I’d built a deck instead of an understanding.

Here’s what I do differently now.

For the first two weeks of any new role, I don’t fix anything.

That’s harder than it sounds. You’re brought in because something is broken. Everyone knows it’s broken. There is enormous pressure to arrive with a plan, and the fastest way to look competent in week one is to fix the obvious thing everyone is pointing at.

Resist it. The obvious thing is rarely the expensive thing.

So I listen instead. Not in scheduled one-on-ones with the leadership team. With the people actually doing the work — the collections analyst, the billing coordinator, the person who builds the invoice run every month and has opinions about it that nobody has ever asked for.

Two examples of what that turns up.

At one company, a conversation about how contracts get billed led to a forensic audit of the customer base. We found $5 million in revenue that had been delivered and never invoiced, across 22 accounts. It wasn’t hiding. Nobody had gone looking.

At another, I learned we were giving Professional Services away for free. Not discounted. Free. It had become custom, and custom doesn’t show up as a variance. Every system in the building was working exactly as designed.

Neither of those was in the reporting pack. They couldn’t be.

The numbers tell you what happened. They almost never tell you why it happened — and why is where the money is.

Two weeks is not a long time. It is a rounding error against the cost of confidently solving the wrong problem for a quarter.

Fix things in week three. In weeks one and two, ask people to walk you through how they’re thinking about it, and then actually listen to the answer.

What’s the most expensive thing you’ve found in a conversation that no report would ever have shown you?

#TheAccidentalCFO #FinanceLeadership #First90Days #InterimCFO #INERSEC