CFOs See Internal Collaboration as Key Growth Driver

CFOs are leveraging technology and breaking down internal silos to build holistic organizational growth frameworks.

Even in the face of macroeconomic headwinds, or perhaps especially in the face of them, organizations need to put in place the right infrastructure that can support both their near- and long-term goals.

“The challenge for the financial office is really to make sure the business continues to grow efficiently,” Bas Brukx, CFO at East Coast-based sales enablement platform provider Allego, told PYMNTS in a recent “Day in the Life of a CFO” discussion.

“Growth is accelerating [for us], especially on an absolute basis, so it gets more complex quick,” he added.

Brukx said that the key, at least for Allego, already a market leader, is “putting in place the infrastructure and governance for continued growth. We have a proven product, proven customer base, some great investors — all the groundwork for being successful is already there. Now it’s putting in place that infrastructure platform to really continue to grow.”

“We don’t want to grow again if it’s too expensive, we want to make sure we do it the right way,” he said, noting that the tech industry’s infamous “growth at all costs” mindset is no longer relevant in today’s economic environment.

“Being an East Coast company, especially a Boston company, we tend to be a little more conservative — so a very reasonable, very sustainable growth roadmap, that’s the goal,” Brukx told PYMNTS.

Activating the Architecture

Still, even for mature organizations, there is a lot of work to be done.

“There are execution constraints in terms of how fast we can grow — but for a tech company like ours, cash is always the number one constraint,” Brukx said. “The challenge is to manage the growth to such a degree that you can maximize it, but at the same time to do so in a reliable, predictable, and scalable fashion without spending too much money.”

CFO responsibilities are evolving alongside operational advancements and empowering today’s finance leaders to do more.

“An important part of the CFO role and finance organization is to bring everybody together and translate all the goals — both the internal corporate functions,” Brukx said, “but also the outside stakeholders; trying to get all the different perspectives, visions, ambitions, goals, and yes, spend requests, together and really putting it all together in a complete financial picture that then allows the finance team to prioritize, communicate, and track all the KPIs [key performance indicators].”

Key to getting everybody on the same page, Brukx said, is breaking down silos by encouraging two-way communication. After all, a business’s operational processes and internal working systems should not create obstacles or roadblocks to finding truth and powering alignment.

“Creating a culture of collaboration is really important and a really good value add from the CFO, and that starts with the CFO having a good understanding of the business,” Brukx said. “It sounds pretty simplistic, but it’s  really important for a company to understand, What are its leading indicators? What are the lagging indicators? What are the cost drivers, and how do they all correlate?”

Realizing a Return on Investment Across Initiatives

“Everybody’s talking about a recession,” Brukx told PYMNTS, “and nobody wants to spend a lot of money on efforts that won’t provide a return in a downturn, but no one wants to be on the sidelines either and miss a growth cycle — for us, we really pay close attention to those metrics, those indicators and relationships between different things that we’ve seen in the business, both quantitative as well as qualitative, and make a judgment call like, ‘Hey, this is what we think is going to happen,’ and then we measure again, measure frequently, in order to try and time things right and read the market and our environment.”

He added that everything ultimately gets translated into a financial operational model. “With the tools available now to do the job, it’s enabled the CFO to really elevate his or her role within the company.”

PYMNTS has been keeping a keen eye on the growing trend of finance and accounting teams increasingly overseeing cross-departmental coordination and driving holistic business priority alignment.

“The amount of tools and software now available to help the CFO office execute has grown significantly,” Brukx said. “I think that’s made the job much more manageable and has helped broaden responsibilities of the CFO and finance teams beyond just closing the books, paying bills, and creating a budget, into really being a central resource for managing all the different business priorities and organizational directives.”

As for what Brukx is excited about most in the near-term?

“It’s all about that organic growth and execution.”