At its heart, business is about relationships. How and with whom you interact can make or break your organization, and that starts with a small business owner’s most important partner: its Chief Financial Officer, or CFO.

A good CFO manages your business’s finances; a great CFO is a trusted ally who works with you to ensure the financial growth and success of your business. The difference comes down to understanding how to work with your CFO effectively.

In part one of our series, we covered the importance of:

• Establishing a safe space where honest communication is encouraged and expected
• Allowing your CFO to conduct an in-depth and holistic analysis of your business
• Working with your CFO to identify priorities for your business and its rate of return
• Asking your CFO to communicate their findings and interpretation in terms you can understand

In part two, we continue exploring how small business owners can maximize their relationships with their CFOs:

Work with your CFO on both long- and short-term visions for the future.

After helping you understand the current state of your business, your CFO can also help you forecast its future. This is accomplished in a few steps:

• Begin by having each of you separately create a long list of business wants and needs. This is where both the business owner and CFO can brainstorm a wishlist of requests and desired changes.
• Next, carve out time with your CFO to compare each of your wishlists and put together a 3-year vision. This long-term plan incorporates up to 15 objectives or goals for that period.
• Finally, work with your CFO cut down your 3-year vision into a 1-year vision. This is your focused plan for the coming year that incorporates no more than 3-5 objectives. While it’s tempting to begin with a 1-year vision, it’s best to start broad and then whittle it down to your top objectives, moving the other goals to years two and three. This ensures that realistic and achievable goals balance your big sky thinking.

A note about this process: if a business owner hasn’t done this before, they can get hung up and feel they have to get their 1-year and 3-year visions perfect. Understand that you can play around with it, but you must have the discipline to write it down and hold each other accountable. 

Partner with your CFO to develop and roll out a plan for your 1-year vision.

This is where the rubber meets the road, and you create a roadmap for success in achieving your 3-5 objectives for year one. Here’s what your plan should include:

• Strategies = What you want to accomplish. For example, a business that has been growing very fast may have an inconsistent level of customer service, so their strategy for that year might be “consistency.”
• Tactics = How you’ll get it done. Create specific tactics for each strategy, listing initiatives and upcoming projects. 
• Execution = Who will get it done. Assign tactics to specific team members using an accountability worksheet to monitor progress. 
• Timeframe – When each tactic will be completed. List deadlines and milestone markers to stay on track.
• Key measurements/results = How you’ll determine if you’ve accomplished your objectives. Be sure to include an overall picture of achieving your goals as well as smaller key results that are attached to tactics and whether or not they were effective.

A note about key measurements and results: With so much data floating around, it can be challenging to know which measurement is most relevant. That’s why key results are so important. For instance, say you’re running a marketing campaign, and your marketing team tells you the campaign had 50,000 impressions. That’s good, but what may be more relevant is knowing how many people clicked through to your website. And if 1,000 people clicked through, how many of them converted to a sale and how much was the sale? 

Most business owners don’t know which number to measure, but their CFO can help them with that, which will protect and grow their business. A CFO’s job is all about connecting the dots to see the company holistically, looking not only at the money and spend but the impact and outcomes of the spend. 

And once you’ve developed your plan, make your CFO an integral part of its execution and measurement. Include him or her in the communication of the 1-year plan to the entire team. Also important is allowing the CFO to be part of monthly check-in meetings to evaluate how your business is tracking against its plan and to make adjustments as necessary.

Bringing it all together

Remember, business is about relationships. When you invest the time to strengthen and deepen your relationship with your CFO, they can become an invaluable partner with whom to collaborate, ensuring the financial growth and success of your small business.