How To Organize Your Finance Team

As a CFO, you are responsible for optimizing the financial performance of your company. This role used to be mostly about accounting, compliance, and financial reporting. For the modern CFO it encompasses so much more, such as driving business strategy, optimizing operational performance, and decision-making leadership. Building a team to support all of these responsibilities can be daunting.

Whether you’re an aspiring CFO or just beginning to think about how to build a successful finance org, here are the three most important things to get educated on.

#1 Map Your Finance Team to Your Business

The number one rule is to map the Finance team to the business, not vice versa. Trying to shoehorn the business into the wrong Finance structure is a recipe for disaster which manifests in unhappy business partners, shadow “finance” teams, and ultimately poor financial results.

Think about value creation (such as revenue growth) versus risk mitigation (such as expense management). A common mistake is expenses are usually easier as they are more deterministic and controllable. But expenses are finite, while revenue theoretically is unbounded, and if you continue to create value you can continue to capture profits.

#2 Align Financial Team Strengths to Key Business Needs

The Finance team needs to build to align strengths to critical areas of the business and no two businesses are the same. For some businesses perhaps, billing is very complex, for other businesses maybe it is the global footprint, for yet others maybe it is being very active in corporate and business development. Whatever the case is for your business, make sure the Finance team is overweight with strengths in those key areas.

#3 Collaborate With All Areas of the Business

Finally, in addition to the primary business or product teams, the Finance team needs to collaborate very closely with other corporate functions such as Operations, People, Legal, and IT teams in order to be successful.

The Ideal Finance Org Chart

From the top down, orient your team to support the business needs and add strategic value to the business objectives. The finance team can serve as the nervous system of the business transmitting critical information (financial performance) throughout the entire organization. Good financial decision making usually translates to good general decision making for the business.

From the bottom up your team should provide a solid foundation for the business to operate including compliance, statutory reporting such as tax, paying people and vendors on time, etc.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tj1ZySBtTPoGbwg8YHZL0593YVsR5BIuDhDVqmckwXk/edit#slide=id.p

The sum is greater than each of the parts

Finance at a high-growth tech company is a tremendously large potential problem space. It is impossible for the CFO to master expert-level details in every area. Instead, as CFO, you need the breadth to have working knowledge of all of the areas, such that you have sufficient strategic understanding to know how the various areas interact and influence the other areas. You have to be able to identify and engage with experts in each area to problem solve.

Most CFOs will have deep subject matter expertise in a few areas that can then be complemented with other experts as the CFO builds out their Finance team. Fortunately there are fantastic experts in each of these functional areas, so as CFO your job is to recognize the need, identify great experts, and make them successful.