GrowCFO Show

In April 2020 GrowCFO undertook a major finance systems survey. Dan Wells surveyed the entire GrowCFO membership, so the survey combines the experiences and opinions of several hundred CFOs. The GrowCFO membership includes CFOs from many industries and a whole range of business sizes. The finance systems survey gives us a great independent view of the landscape. Who took part in the Finance Systems Survey? Good spread of responses across sector, industry and size 32 different accounting systems represented 29% Single Entity Organisations V 71% Multi-Entity Organisations 27% Single Currency V 73% Multi-Currency Organisations What finance systems are GrowCFO members using? Startup / Small Business – majority will complete implementation inside 1 month / Mostly self service implementation without support (Less than £1,000) Xero is dominant. Quickbooks, Sage 50, Free Agent less so Mid-Sized Businesses – majority will complete in 1-3 months / Needs support to implement by the provider (£10,000 – £100,000) Aqilla and Netsuite performed well. Financial Force, SAP Business One, Microsoft Dynamics and InforSunsystems less so. Enterprise Businesses – majority over 6 months to implement with many > 1 year / Help required typically from a Third Party (£250,000 +) Workday and SAP Hana performed well – Oracle ERP less so – Unit4 not representedA number of people still only using Excel (Not just startups) To what extent are businesses using a cloud solution? 70% suggested using cloud products / 26% suggested using On-premise: with remote access / 4% suggested using On-premise: without remote access We suspect this is misleading as some have answered cloud despite using known on-premise (hosted) solutions. Highlights the mis education of true cloud. The ability to access remotely does not necessarily imply a cloud solution. What does the finance systems survey tell us about quality of software? 66% of responders rated their software’s sophistication lower than 7 64% of responders with multiple entities say their software cannot manage consolidations 43% of responders with a multi-currency requirement said it performed average at best 30% of responders had done no integration yet Of those that had done integration,, Expenses, CRM, BI, Excel were most popular Only 42% people felt they would be using their system again in 5 years 11% would not recommend their solution to anyone! 92% of responders can access the software remotely (cloud or remote access to on-premise) Only 50% of responders get automatic updates 25% of responders rated their finance system a 5 or less with respect to it how closely it meets their current requirements / 46% 8 or above 10% currently looking to replace Of the 16 mainstream systems reviewed, only 7 performed 7 or higher for ‘Meets Requirements’ Its generally accepted that you’re doing well if your system does 80% of what you need it to. Once you are doing more outside your system than inside, its a true sign you need to make a change. What does the survey tell us about the future? The top 5 innovations responders plan to implement in the years ahead are: API Integrations Advanced Business Intelligence Workflows Mobile Expenses Cloud Technology Only 5% suggested they would not be implementing anything – the adoption of tech is in front of mind In summary the GrowCFO Finance Systems Survey shows: Modern cloud tech was the overall clear winner A lot of businesses appear to ‘settle’ for their software and find workarounds to fill voids Many poor systems are still in use. This may be fear of cost to change Current system might do more than you suspect – especially if handover from your predecessor lacked information in this area. Poor account management may also be a factor – challenge them about what is possible. If foundations are not right, future plans will eventually suffer. Clearly still a big miseducation around cloud We discuss the future finance function in a Zoom call every Tuesday lunchtime. Finance systems take up a large part of the discussion. You can join in by joining the GrowCFO community today. Membership is free.

Stuart Trood is a portfolio CFO. He undertakes the CFO role for a number of different clients, each on a part time basis. We caught up with Stuart to find out more about the work of the portfolio CFO and find out how to become one. Stuart also explains to us the importance of a support network of fellow portfolio CFOs. Stuart Trood portfolio CFO Stuart Trood has undertaken previous full time roles as both a CFO and a CEO. He worked for a range of businesses from large corporations to startups over a period of 30 years. Stuart wanted to take this experience and use it to help smaller businesses. Stuart wants the choice of working for businesses that interest him. He also wants freedom in the way he can use his time. He manages his commitments to maximise the time he can spend working on the things he enjoys most and to achieve a better balance between work and family life. Stuart became a portfolio CFO following the sale of his previous business. Following the sale he wanted to do something completely different and ddeliberately chose not to return to corporate life. Does a portfolio CFO work fewer hours? The portfolio CFO has the ability to work as much or as little as he chooses. The big challenge is balancing what you want to do and how you want to work with demands of the client. Stuart doesn’t work any less but has more choice in what he does and when he does it. He wants to be involved in managing the business and not just the numbers. The portfolio CFO has more choice and can easily get involved in direction and strategy of the business in a hands on way. This may mean he works more rather than less. How do you switch from corporate to portfolio CFO? Stuart was fortunate. His transition was relatively easy. Following a business sale he got his first portfolio role quite quickly, but didn’t have the financial pressure of needing to immediately find other roles. He had time to develop his portfolio. Stuart found networking a key requirement. Joining the right networking groups is important. No matter how much you network its unlikely that everything will come together immediately. You need to be patient while your portfolio develops. You also need to be dogmatic, and stick with your vision. Its all too easy to give up too soon or take an opportunity that doesn’t align with what you really want to do because you simply need the income. There are various agencies for portfolio CFOs that will help you find work. Its worth investigating these. You can register with more that one. Covid-19 has changed  the market Covid -19 seems to have increased the opportunities for portfolio CFOs. This has happened in two ways: Some businesses are struggling to afford a full time finance professional.  They realise they can buy part time support from a portfolio CFO rather than employing their own CFO. Other businesses  may never have employed a senior finance person. They are realising they need extra support. Many of these can’t afford the extra member of staff but may be able to afford one or two days a week from a portfolio CFO. What does Portfolio CFO do? The portfolio CFO isn’t necessarily doing the books and the accounts. He may take on more of an oversight role. Alternately he might have more of a project focus. This can be business turnaround, or doing finance transformation. On the other hand, the portfolio CFO might find it interesting to go back to the basics. It can be refreshing after corporate to be more hands on again. He can do some bookkeeping and  use systems like Xero “hands-on”. Stuart has found lots of variety. Covid has meant he has been involved in loan applications and managing the furlough scheme for his clients. Can GrowCFO help the portfolio CFO? Stuart originally came into contact with Dan Wells and the GrowCFO network because he wanted new networking opportunities with his peers. He has ended up running the portfolio CFOs community within GrowCFO. He is also the CFO of GrowCFO! Its part of his personal client portfolio. The community has become a great place for sharing experiences and learning with fellow portfolio CFOs . The covid crisis has actually been a great time to establish this group. Everyone has new questions to answer at a very difficult time. Sharing and collaboration has helped disseminate knowledge both quickly and effectively. What to become a portfolio CFO? If you want to become a portfolio CFO what are the 3-4 things to do in the next 100 days? Stuart has some clear advice: Be certain you want to do it. Talk to existing Portfolio CFOs. Make sure you cover a range of people. Varying tenures and different disciplines. Find out as much as you can. Work out who your first client might be. Don’t step out of corporate into a black hole. Figure out what networks you might need to join Be clear on the sort of portfolio you want. What sort of work interests you? Decide what lifestyle you want. This will impact on the sort of client you take on. What about day rates? Portfolio CFO rates can vary hugely. It all depends on what the business can afford to pay. Its not necessarily just day rates. Some CFOs will keep timesheets and charge by the hour. Others will commit one or 2 days a week to each client and charge by the day. Day rates can be £500 upwards Rates will vary according to the type of work you do. Deep specialists in particular areas may be able to command higher rates. A portfolio CFO might also act as a mentor or coach. Mentoring day rates can be quite high. Some of the top mentors and coaches may well charge  £1000 -£1500+ per day. Giving back Money isn’t necessarily the CFOs motivation. Both Stuart & Kevin want to pass on knowledge to next generation. There are many years of experience to pass on. For example navigating the financial crisis of 2008 has many lessons for the covid crisis. The role of CFO is changing rapidly, Covid has accelerated this, often with CFO being more hands on strategically. Portfolio CFO can bring big corporate experience into the small business that can’t afford full time support. Good time management is vital It’s Easy to be a victim of your own success. A good CFO will be asked loads of questions by the rest of the business team. He will become key member of that team and can easily end up working 12 hour days. Multiple clients can give conflicting deadlines. There is a real need to be disciplined and understand when to say no. The portfolio CFO role will easily creep from a part time to full time role. This can happen unintentionally and you end up back with a single full time role you never really wanted. How do you find out more? Join GrowCFO, its free. Once you join the GrowCFO portal you can make contact with Stuart. You can join the GrowCFO Portfolio CFO community. There’s no cost to join. You can take part in monthly community meetings, make contact with the portfolio CFOs, chat, and get informal support.  

This week’s GrowCFO Show guest is Chris Tredwell. Chris runs the Future of the Finance Function topic in GrowCFO. Chris hosts a regular weekly live session over Zoom discussing the many different aspects of the topic. These sessions are free for any member of the GrowCFO community to attend. Introducing Chris Tredwell Chris Tredwell is currently part of the team at Aqilla. Before Aqilla he worked for a series of innovative tech companies from various industries. This led him to working with business and individuals all over the world. His passion is  to help his customers address their toughest problems and work with them to find best in class solutions. Chris has international experience that spans SME’s, blue chip organisations, government entities as well as Industry associations and startups. He has managed relationships throughout the business hierarchy from entry level professionals through to C suite executives. Who are Aqilla? Aqilla is a modern Cloud based, multi currency accounting solution designed to suit the needs of demanding mid-sized (mid market) organisations. Its one of the systems to look at when you have outgrown Xero and Quickbooks. Gartner describes Aqilla as “Post modern ERP”. What is the future of the finance function? The aim of future of the finance function is to allow CFOs to collaborate and understand the issues that the modern finance function needs to tackle to stay abreast of technology. The format is a weekly meeting, every Tuesday, using Zoom. The Zoom call is open to all members of the GrowCFO portal. These sessions can be discussions amongst members, or a subject matter expert giving a presentation followed by a Q&A. Chris arranges and chairs each session. Though he works for Aqilla, he remains impartial and the future of the finance function sessions are generally technologically agnostic. We record each session. Recordings are published within the premium section of GrowCFO meaning that premium members can access the back catalogue of topics covered whenever they need. What topics has Future of the Finance Function covered? The very first session was an open discussion amongst members and this highlighted quite a number of areas that the community wanted to explore further. From this Chris compiled a list of topics for future sessions, the things that CFOs wanted most. So far these have covered: Remote finance function, a very timely session as many CFOs were struggling with remote working at the beginning of lockdown The results of the finance systems survey, where the community pooled their combined experience. Automation and integration. This continues to be one of the hottest topics CFOs want to know more about BI tools helping CFOs provide more insights into their business. Managing change. Most CFOs haven’t been trained in change and lack skills in this area. Blockchain & Cryptocurrency, the Wild West for many CFOs. Digital Transformation, which impacts the whole business and draws the CFO out of his comfort zone. Just joining GrowCFO now? Don’t worry, you haven’t missed out on all of this. We record every session. Become a premium member and theres a whole back catalogue of recordings you can access. How does the Future of the Finance Function community work? Many CFOs have made the leap from a financial accounting role into the boardroom. GrowCFO helps those CFOs develop the skills they need to become a strategic advisor to the board. Some members aspire to be the next generation of CFO while others have many years of experience. GrowCFO’s role is to allow you to collaborate and network. The future of the finance community is all about sharing knowledge. You can learn from other CFOs who have been there and done it. Many CFOs feel isolated and the CFO community can help break this. Future topics There’s still lots to talk about. Some of the topics in the pipeline include: Making tax digital which is fast  becoming a hot topic. Cybersecurity. More on KPIs and non financial reporting. As always the agenda will be driven by the needs of the GrowCFO community so the agenda will evolve to meet members needs. The future of the finance function is the cloud, but is the cloud safe? The future is cloud accounting and integrating systems using their APIs. That means your financial data is stored by somebody else. Is your data safe? Its a question every CFO asks as he moves his finance system from a desktop application to the cloud. I asked Chris his view on this. Chris points out that CFOs and CIOs of small or medium businesses generally aren’t data security experts. The big cloud providers have that expertise so why not use it?  Aqilla has just transitioned to Amazon AWS. Amazon has great capabilities, and deep expertise in cloud storage and data security. Its a great place to trust with your data. Have you joined GrowCFO yet? Find out more about the community and how it will benefit you and your business.      

Welcome to the very first episode of the GrowCFO Show. In this episode Kevin Appleby chats to GrowCFO founder, Dan Wells, about why he left the “big 4” to set up the GrowCFO network. We chat about GrowCFO and what it offers to both existing and aspiring chief financial officers. Play the audio version Or watch the video https://youtu.be/IzGeW50AehU Who is GrowCFO founder Dan Wells? Dan is a chartered accountant with almost 20 years experience in the big 4. Latterly he was an equity partner in KPMG. His role made him a trusted business advisor to entrepreneurial businesses who have built and sold their companies for a combined billions of pounds. He is an FCA member of the ICAEW (ACA-qualified in 2004) and has a first-class degree in mathematics from Durham University. Dan has a great working knowledge of most common business challenges and opportunities, and a strong track record of supporting businesses and their key executives throughout their life cycles. You can check out Dan’s LinkedIn profile Why did Dan Found GrowCFO Dan met many CFOs as part of his last big 4 role. There was a common question that they all asked him. He found that CFOs always wanted to know what their peers were doing. Dan realised the finance community needed a easy way to collaborate. CFOs needed a place they could share their knowledge, network, and talk about shared issues. Dan observed that CFOs often feel lonely, and have few people to turn to within their own organisation or immediate circle of associates for good advice or to debate issues. Dan decided to do something to solve the problem and started GrowCFO. The initial GrowCFO portal contained interesting articles and allowed the community to start talking and sharing. GrowCFO arranged many Zoom session, allowing members to chat about interesting topics. These really developed during the early stages of lockdown when CFOs were keen to chat to their peers and find out how each other were coping in crisis. These discussions lead to GrowCFO developing white papers, particularly looking at how individual industry groups were being affected by Covid-19. Polls and surveys have followed, and these have been a great way of bringing together the expanse of members knowledge into easy to distil findings. Who is GrowCFO intended to help? Dan sees four distinct groups of GrowCFO member Future CFOs; those that aspire to take on the CFO role in the near future. 1st Time CFOs, still growing into the role and wanting to extend their skills and knowledge Experienced CFOs with lots of experience to share with the community Portfolio CFOs, working part time across a number of different organisations. GrowCFO gives something specific and unique to each of the 4 groups, but the dynamics of these 4 types of finance leader collaborating and sharing with each other collectively is very powerful. The role of the CFO is constantly evolving, and there are always new things to keep up with and learn about irrespective of your background or years of experience. The Future CFO programme The GrowCFO Future CFO programme has been borne out of lots of discussion with our community of aspiring CFOs. The next generation of finance leaders. We realised that something needed to be done to help folk who had moved up through financial controller and head of finance roles to transition from back office to boardroom. Most business accountants qualify early in their career, and learned about the basics of accounting, law, tax, and financial reporting. They now need to be future facing and operate strategically at board level. The big challenge is learning how to become the catalyst of change in the organisation. The Future CFO programme is mostly online self paced learning, and can be found in the GrowCFO learning centre. It contains lots of individual lessons, many with video input from our experienced CFO community. Alongside the programme we offer prospective CFOs the ability to join cohorts of their peers in order to support each other on the journey to gaining that first CFO role. Each cohort consists of 10-12 people who meet monthly on Zoom. Each Zoom session maps to one of the modules in the Future CFO learning programme, and quite a few involve our more experienced members offering advice and guidance. Many of the experienced CFOs have joined in order to give something back and share their learning, and one reason we created future CFO is to allow experienced CFOs help the next generation gain the right experience & knowledge. GrowCFO has an active community of portfolio CFOs Quite a number of portfolio CFOs have joined our membership, and have formed their own active and lively community. These folk will generally have two or three CFGO roles across different companies. Stuart Trood, GrowCFO’s own CFO, is himself a portfolio CFO and is taking a leading role in this community. Many of the portfolio CFOs are towards the end of their career having previously had a full time CFO role. We have seen two trends emerging: More younger CFOs wanting the variety and flexibility of a portfolio role More companies wanting the services a CFO can offer, but not being in a position to employ somebody full time ion the role. There’s lots of demand in the fast growth companies in the high tech sector. We see a key future role of GrowCFO in helping CFOs prepare to take on a portfolio role. GrowCFO can support them by teaching some of the sales and marketing skills they might not previously have had need for. Monday Masterclass and An Audience With Once a month GrowCFO hosts a Zoom session either with an expert in a subject area who will present to our premium members, or we interview an experienced CFO about his career and cover some of the particular challenges he has faced. July’s An Audience With was hosted by Stuart Trood. Stuart Interviewer Richard Baker about investment strategies. Richard is a partner with Acuity Advisors. In August Kevin Appleby presented a masterclass on cost reduction. GrowCFO Women finance leaders group Women are under represented at CFO level. Only around 20% of CFOs are female. We want to do something about that. The women finance leaders group is now meeting monthly and we are working in conjunction with Helen Cowan. Helen runs the Tall Wall executive coaching service and specialises in helping and advising ladies. The group is exploring the common issues faced by the senior female finance leader. It looks at issues such as Juggling family and work Unconscious bias Imposter syndrome Influencing, Operating in male dominated environment Polls and surveys Earlier this year GrowCFO undertook a big survey about Finance Systems. A significant number of GrowCFO members responded to the 20 questions we asked. We wanted to find out what are the right finance systems for different sizes and types of business. Our members experience covered 32 different accounting systems and allowed us to give a very candid and revealing view of the finance systems marketplace. The survey gives a great deal of information and we will cover it in a future episode of the GrowCFO show. Since the survey we’ve been running shorter polls, almost one a week. These ask members about a variety of subjects. Questions have included: What are biggest tech challenges? When expect finance fully automated? Future of finance functions The finance systems survey revealed our members thirst for information about the future of the finance function. In particular how technology is driving change in the back office. Members have concerns over many issues, and we are gradually, week by week, addressing these. Chris Tredwell leads the Future of Finance Function. It meets weekly over Zoom.  Anyone can join the live Tuesday lunchtime call, and recordings are available for our premium members. We’re planning to interview Chris for a future episode of the GrowCFO Show. Topics covered so far have included: A detailed review of the results of the finance systems survey Business change and benefits realisation Digital transformation Blockchain Cryptocurrency Automation and Integration Open banking Selecting the right people for a systems project There’s quite a knowledge library building up, and if you join GrowCFO premium you can listen back to any of the sessions you might have missed. Its not just about finance Mark Channon & Andrew Tallents both offer coaching in different areas of high performance. Andrew has run a series of workshops on self coaching. Mark Channon originally trained as an actor, before becoming one of the first 8 people in the world to become a Grand Master of Memory in the 1995 World Memory Championships. He shows your how these skills can give you an edge in business. Remembering names and presenting without a script are two key subjects he covers