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

Last week I argued that most CEOs don’t have a financial problem. They have a pricing problem, or a procurement problem, or an accountability problem, and finance is just where it surfaces.

The fair question that came back was: fine, so what is finance supposed to do about it?

You can’t make a decision that isn’t yours. But you can make not deciding expensive.

Here’s the difference in practice.

The weak version sounds like this. “We have a pricing inconsistency issue across the customer base. Here’s the analysis.” True, well-supported, and completely ignorable. It describes a condition, and conditions can be lived with indefinitely.

The version that moves is: “Every month we don’t standardize pricing costs us roughly $340K in leakage. We’re renewing about forty accounts a quarter, and each one locks the current terms in for another twelve months. So the cost of waiting until January isn’t three months of leakage. It’s three months plus a year of contracts we can’t reprice.”

Same problem. Same data. Completely different conversation.

Delay has a price. It’s almost never on anyone’s slide, because nobody owns the line item called “we haven’t decided yet.”

Three things make this work.

Quantify the run rate, not the total. A $4M annual number is abstract. “$340K a month, starting now” is a thing happening to you while you read this.

Find the compounding. Most delays aren’t linear. Contracts renew, headcount gets hired into the wrong structure, the bad process gets automated. Say what hardens while everyone thinks.

Give it a date. “The decision costs more after November 15” isn’t pressure, it’s information but it’s the information that converts an open question into a scheduled one.

None of this is making the call. The CEO still decides to reprice or not.

It just stops the decision from being free.

When did you last put a number on the cost of waiting and did it change anything?

#TheAccidentalCFO #CFO #FinanceLeadership #DecisionMaking #INERSEC