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

When a CEO tells me they need better financial visibility, I’ve learned to slow down.

Sometimes it’s true. Often it means something else entirely: there’s a decision they don’t want to make yet, and more reporting is a respectable way to postpone it.

Here’s the pattern I see most often. A CEO brings a problem to finance because the problem showed up in the numbers. Margin is down. Cash is tight. The forecast keeps missing. So finance gets asked to analyze it, model it, build a dashboard for it.

But the numbers are where the problem became visible. They’re almost never where it lives.

I was once brought into an apparel distributor in covenant default. The bank was threatening to take control of the business or push it into bankruptcy. About as financial as a crisis gets.

The actual cause was shipping charges and procurement overages.

Nobody had renegotiated the freight contract in years, and purchasing had drifted well past what the business could carry. That’s not a finance problem. No amount of reporting would have fixed it, and no CFO could have solved it alone. It got fixed by renegotiating contracts and restructuring the operation.

At a SaaS company, the problem presented as soft revenue and inconsistent margins. Underneath it was pricing and packaging that had never been standardized. Every deal was a one-off, leakage was structural, and finance could describe it beautifully without being able to change a single contract.

This is what I mean when I say most CEOs don’t have a financial problem. They have a pricing problem, a procurement problem, an accountability problem, a capital allocation problem. Finance is where it surfaces, because finance is where everything eventually surfaces.

Your CFO can tell you precisely what’s happening and what it costs.

They can’t decide to reprice the product, fire the vendor, or kill the business line.

That’s your job, and no dashboard is going to do it for you.

CEOs, what problem came to you as a finance problem and turned out to be something else?

#TheAccidentalCFO #CFO #CEO #Leadership #INERSEC