11 May THE BEST PRACTICES OF HIGH PERFORMING FINANCE LEADERS
High-performing CFOs in financial services organizations integrate data-driven decision-making activities across the entire company, changing the role of finance from back-room financial reporters into forward-thinking analysts and trusted advisors. Here’s how they do it and how you can too. In this guide, we discuss the best practices of high-performing finance leaders.
Table Of Contents
BE MORE STRATEGIC
Spend 50% – 80% of your time on strategic versus tactical activities to drive greater impact. Assess which are your most impactful projects and eliminate, or minimize, the effort on the rest. Estimate how much time you spend on specific tasks or processes. You may be surprised – or scared – what you uncover!
SMART AUTOMATION
How do you free up time to be more strategic? Simple automation. It’s not about automating everything – just the right things. Use Excel to itemize your tasks instead of using it for your reporting.
- Rank order all of your routine, time-consuming tasks in Excel.
- Put expected outcomes for each task to help you organize your list.
- Identify your top 1-3 tasks and consider automating one or more of them to free up your time.
HYPER-FOCUS ON METRICS
Now that you have freed up some time, where do you focus? Focus on 125 metrics that are arranged hierarchically (5 top-level metrics each drill into 5 more metrics and so forth) to help you easily uncover opportunities or issues.
How do you know which metrics to focus on? Successful finance leaders have spent time with industry experts to track the right metrics to drive the best possible outcomes.
What are your top 5 metrics? One family-owned real estate investment firm, for example, monitors Assets Under Management (AUM), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Cash-on-Cash, current consolidated cash, Notes Payable, and Net Income Month/Year-to-Date.
PARTNER WITH LINE OF BUSINESS
Expand your impact by helping solve problems (not simply calling them out) across the organization.
SILOED DEPARTMENTS? Get extended teams talking. Identify gaps and opportunities – backed by detailed comparisons for specific departments (e.g., investment types, costs by department, profitability by funds, etc.) – share results, and identify next steps, together.
LOSING OPPORTUNITIES? Evaluate your pricing model with your fellow team leads. Assess if it makes sense to offer static or dynamic pricing based on seasonal demands and/or competitive pressures.
TOO MANY OFFERINGS OR SERVICES? Simplify them. Look to minimize costs through ROI analysis. For example, when one company simplified its offerings, the streamlined list had customers ordering more!
Looking to learn more best practices of high-performing finance leaders? Drop us a line on 011 792 9521, and we’d be glad to guide you.
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