In today’s firm, chief financial officers (CFOs) must be prepared to handle several responsibilities, help teams across the organization, and engage with consumers.
“Even if you work for a Fortune 100 company, a CFO’s job these days isn’t only to balance the books and issue financial statements,” equipifi CFO Colleen Shannon noted. “You must be a trusted partner to the business and honestly consider the plan.”
Shannon joined equipifi in September, bringing with her extensive experience in SaaS, startups, and venture and private equity-backed companies.
Shannon is critical in determining equipifi’s growth and employment strategy, back-office infrastructure, and new collaborations as the company expands.
Collaboration with various company departments
Shannon said in an interview for the series “A Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO” that she had similar responsibilities at CampusLogic, a company that grew from 56 employees when she started to almost 200 when it was sold.
“When I first arrived here, the thesis was that we were going to grow and that we needed to put systems in place to help us grow,” Shannon remarked.
Using QuickBooks and the data visualization tool Grow as a foundation, CampusLogic constructed other tools and a data warehouse to feed data to its constituents — the rest of the business — and achieve a single source of truth throughout the enterprise.
When CampusLogic secured funding a year later, it was able to do so quickly and elegantly because these processes had previously been created.
“I think a lot of what CFOs need to spend their time on is making sure the data is accurate, working with different parts of the company and asking what they want to see, and then looking at it with them to make sure 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.
