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

I talked myself out of it several times.

In 2012 I left Accenture to become a CFO for the first time. People assume the scary part was not knowing how to do the job.

I knew how to do the job. That was never the question.

I’d spent five years at Accenture as a Commercial Director — one of eighty worldwide, which is a polite title for being the CFO and COO of the firm’s largest engagements. $300M+ operations. Contract renegotiations, recovery plans, P&Ls in real trouble.

Accenture is where I learned to be a CFO.

What I had never done was do it without Accenture.

Here’s what nobody tells you about leaving a firm. A firm is a net, and not a metaphorical one. There’s a partner above you. A methodology somebody else validated. A brand doing a quiet amount of persuading before you open your mouth. If an engagement goes sideways, there’s another engagement. The firm absorbs it.

The seat I was taking had none of that. A $150M business unit, a CEO who had just started, and a P&L that was already underperforming before either of us arrived. No partner to escalate to. No next engagement. Whatever happened was going to be mine.

That’s what scared me. The chair, not the work.

So I found reasons not to go. They were good ones. The timing was wrong. The business was in worse shape than the deck suggested. I was trading something that had taken most of my career to build for something that could be over in eighteen months.

All true. I went anyway.

What I understand now, and couldn’t see then, is that the net was never protecting me. It was insulating me.

I had no idea how much of my track record was me and how much was the name on the card. You can’t find that out from inside a firm. The structure is built so you never have to.

If you’ve left a big brand for a seat where the result was unambiguously yours, what did you learn in the first year?

#TheAccidentalCFO #CFO #Leadership #Consulting #INERSEC