Adding value: A CFO’s perspective

Your Strategic Business Partner activities provide you with a fantastic opportunity to add value to your business.  This requires you to work closely with your Board, management team and wider business on an ongoing basis.

During this video extract from a Strategic Business Partner workshop, experienced CFO Ian Simpkin provides some examples of how a Strategic Business Partner can add value to your business:

The CFO has an opportunity to look at everything across the business to determine where you can add value to improve the overall results of the business.  Your unique financial perspective and knowledge of the company data allows you to generate ideas for value creation and to improve the quality of decision-making across your business. 

There are many examples of how you can add value to your business within your Strategic Business Partner role, including the following:

a) Helping your team to determine the best location for your manufacturing facility.  This may require you to consider a range of factors such as language, cultural, available talent, cost and tax rates.  Each of your C-Suite members may have different perspectives on this, given their differing areas of focus.  As a CFO, you will need to be able to pull these views together to help reach a balanced consensus.  One approach is to produce a summary of the key consideration factors and to apply a weighted average against each of their levels of importance to highlight the overall front-runners.

b) Considering how best to improve sales margins across various geographies.  You could review sales volumes over a period of time to determine which of your business partners are making the most profits.  This knowledge allows you to identify opportunities to restructure partnership agreements and corresponding sales commission plans to create a significant saving for your company.

c) Suppose your revenues unexpectedly fell significantly over night due to a significant change in market conditions.  You should work closely with your HR team to determine a variety of different cost saving methods to keep the business running.  This includes generating and assessing the impact of each available options, such as adjusting working hours and reducing general costs.  Such activities may help you to outperform the competition during the crisis.

These are a few examples of how you can add value to a business by providing your unique financial perspective.  There are a huge number of other ways that you can create or preserve value, many of which may be specific to each company’s individual circumstances.

Assess your skills

Write down a few examples of how you have recently created value within your role.

Brainstorm ways in which you could help to improve the quality of people’s decision-making across your business.

Generate new ideas for how else you could create value within your company.