Chief financial officers (CFOs) must be prepared to handle many duties, assist teams across the business, and collaborate with customers in any company today, especially in a startup.
“Even if you work for a huge Fortune 100 firm, a CFO’s duty these days is not only to balance the books and put out financial statements,” equipifi CFO Colleen Shannon explained. “You really need to be a trusted partner to the business and genuinely think about the strategy.”
Shannon joined equipifi in September, having considerable expertise in SaaS, startups, and venture and private equity-backed firms.
Shannon plays an important role in deciding growth and hiring strategy, back-office infrastructure, and new collaborations as equipifi grows.
Collaboration with several departments within the company
Shannon claimed in an interview for the series “A Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO” that she had comparable responsibilities in her former post at CampusLogic, a firm that expanded from 56 workers when she joined to almost 200 when it was sold.
“When I came here, the thesis was that we were going to expand and that we needed to put mechanisms in place to assist us to develop,” Shannon explained.
Beginning with QuickBooks and the data visualization tool Grow, CampusLogic built additional systems and a data warehouse to feed data to its constituents — the rest of the business — and achieve a single source of truth throughout the organization.
When CampusLogic raised funds a year later, it was able to do so promptly and neatly since it had already established up these mechanisms.
“I think a lot of what CFOs need to spend their time on is making sure that the data is accurate, that you’re working with different parts of the company and asking what they want to see, and then looking at it with them to make sure that they’re looking at the right [key performance indicators (KPIs)] and the right information,” Shannon said.
Being a Good Customer Partner
According to Shannon, CFOs must also work with their company’s consumers, understand what is going on in their environment, and be good partners with them.
“We were able to be a good partner with them by coming up with creative methods to assist them to get the items that they required without breaking the bank from a cash flow standpoint,” Shannon explained.
Advancing the Company
Shannon believes that CFOs must have an entrepreneurial attitude when working for a company. Shannon’s daily activities might range from onboarding a new employee to discussing a contract to working on an annual budget because equipifi is young and only has 29 employees.
When a firm has only a few employees, everyone relies on one another, and everyone must be prepared to handle a variety of tasks.
