Category: The Accidental CFO
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The Accidental CFO — Budget Season Starts This Week. Mine Takes Three Weeks.
“Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance.” Somewhere on your calendar there is a two-day planning offsite, and a template is already circulating. I’ve run this cycle across businesses from $50M to $2.5B. Three things are wrong with it. It takes too long. Not six weeks. At most companies it runs three or four…
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The Accidental CFO — The Two Weeks I Spend Not Fixing Anything
“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…
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The Accidental CFO — The Question That Broke My Consulting Reflexes
“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…
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The Accidental CFO — The Shift to “Human + Agent” Finance Teams
“Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance.” If your finance analysts are still doing routine bank reconciliations by hand, you are going to lose your best talent. For decades, the standard operating model in corporate finance was a brutal 80/20 split: teams spent 80% of their time manually gathering, cleaning, and organizing data,…
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The Accidental CFO – AI Hallucinations Are Now a Balance Sheet Liability
“Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance.” The era of viewing artificial intelligence purely as an abstract technology experiment is officially over. Today, AI risk is no longer just an IT problem—it has become a direct, quantifiable threat to your corporate balance sheet. If your team is deploying AI models that hallucinate data…
