The 6 things your CFO wishes you did each month

Monthly results conversations are the backbone activity of any FP&A team.

When done well, the company gains insights about financial and operational opportunities.

Unfortunately, many FP&A teams aren’t getting the most out of their monthly results conversations.

The main reason they don’t:

It’s just another to-do

When you are looking forward to the conversation being over, you have already fallen short.

This means you see it as another to-do that doesn’t make a difference on the business.

It feels like a waste of energy to update the same slides each month.

However, the best FP&A teams will focus their energy on monthly results meetings.

They lean in and give it their best effort.

Then slowly over time, results begin to change.

After leading 120+ monthly results conversations, there are a few things I see repeated that are practices.

Here are my 6 tips for improving your monthly results conversations:

Tip 1: It’s not a presentation

The first and biggest mistake FP&A teams make is believing it’s about them, and it’s a presentation.

It’s not a presentation, and it’s not about you.

It’s a conversation, and it’s about the business.

Almost every other tip in this guide doesn’t matter unless you get this right.

How does it look when done right?

• You don’t rehearse, you research

• You don’t get nervous, you get excited

• You don’t control the conversation, you steer it

• You don’t see underperforming results as something to avoid, but as a challenge to solve

Before your next conversation, imagine that instead of talking to the COO about their staffing budget, you are talking to your spouse about your grocery budget.

Your whole approach will change.

Tip 2: Focus on what matters

Likely, your meeting with the business is 60-90 minutes.

And you probably have over 10 slides. If not 30+.

If you tried to cover each slide, you have anywhere between 2-9 minutes on each one.

Which isn’t enough to have a meaningful conversation about the results on the page.

Instead, try to hone in on 3-5 things you need to talk about.

Declare what they are at the beginning of the meeting and then stick to the plan.

Send a pre-read, then go deep on what matters.

Tip 3: Link the operationals to financials

You’ve probably heard this from your business partners: “why should I care about gross margin?” (or some other financial metric that you report on)

They are absolutely right, gross margin is a financial metric and they don’t need to be experts in it. But it is driven by operational aspects of the business.

So spend time showing your business partners why gross margin matters and how it is driven by their daily actions.

Don’t stop doing this step until it clicks for them.

Tip 4: No surprises

If you approach your results conversation like a presentation, odds are high that you are tempted to bring a surprise analysis to the meeting.

Don’t do it.

Nobody likes surprises in business.

After 10 years of monthly results conversations, I can say from experience that surprises never go the way you want them to.

Instead, if you have a new insight that you want to share in the meeting, set up time with the business partner to talk through or at least send them an email ahead of time.

Think of your monthly results conversation as the summary of what you’ve been working on with the business all month. Not a place to bring forward new things.

Tip 5: Bring a juicy analysis

However, you should try to bring forward what I call a ‘juicy analysis’ each month.

This is an insight or root cause that advances everyone’s understanding about the business.

An example of this is:

• Revenue has been falling for 3 months.

• You do an analysis that shows your customer churn is higher than normal.

• You find that a certain customer demographic is churning for a competing product.

If you need help in structuring this analysis, check out a post where I share my $100M analysis 1-pager.

Just make sure you preview the juicy analysis or send it via email to your business partners ahead of the meeting.

Tip 6: Anticipate follow-ups

When you fail to anticipate follow-ups, you find that your conversation hits dead-ends instead of breakthroughs.

Your business partners will throw out a handful of hypotheses that are likely to fall flat. But you are on the hook for investigating them after the meeting.

Here’s what you should do instead:

Instead of walking away with frivolous follow-ups, you now are walking in with the root cause driver of the business trend.

In Summary:

Don’t sleep on the power of the monthly results conversation.

Remember, it’s not a presentation, and it’s not about you.

Your goal is to drive the business forward.

And preparing well for the meeting is the key to unlocking the value.

How will you take action on this?

See you next Saturday.

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