You're not understaffed

Have you ever met a finance team who is perfectly staffed?

No? Me either.

And it’s almost more rare to find one that is staffed with excess capacity.

A great finance team becomes an integral part of a business and starts to generate more/deeper work for our business partners. AKA, we get more work when we do a good job.

But finance is also a cost center.

Which means additional staffing resources is harder to justify and doesn’t necessarily mean direct value for the business.

If you are feeling the pinch of being asked to do more with less (as an individual contributor or leader), here’s how you can navigate it:

Idea 1: Question your team structure

As a finance team matures, it is important to continually evaluate your team structure and if it’s optimized for your current workloads.

Here’s a common example I see:

• A solo VP of finance is doing all the work - no team structure necessary

• They hire a manager to take the technical work while the VP keeps the business partnership work - there’s a clean delineation of labor

• The manager hires 2 analysts to run the reporting and ad hoc analysis - one analyst is accountable for revenue and the other expenses

• The company begins launching more new products and putting pressure on the revenue analyst’s workload - the expense analyst is working a comfortable 30-40 hours while the revenue analyst is working 60+

At this point, many people would hire another analyst and/or start to build out the revenue analytics team.

But there’s another option.

What if you rearranged the 2 analysts to have back-office support and front-office support? Just like it was in the beginning with the VP and manager.

So you’d have 1 analyst focused on building reporting, analytical tools, and managing all recurring work (forecast models, etc). This is your back-office analyst.

While your front-office analyst tackles any requests that come in from the business partners or executive group.

In this structure, your back-office analyst likely has a solid 40 hours of recurring work and your front-office analyst can take on the ad hoc fire-drills that keep coming in from all over the company.

A hidden perk to this decision is that you can also create the back-office analyst role as a junior analyst while the front-office analyst role is a senior analyst - creating a clear career path within your team.

Idea 2: Question ad hoc prioritization

Not all requests are created equally.

If you are finding that your team is getting bogged down by urgent work and unable to get to the important work, it’s time you push for more clarity around that urgent work:

• Who is the request coming from?

• When do you need this by?

• What is this being used for?

Those are all great questions for cutting through the noise of a simple request “I need xxxx"

Because often times, an urgent request can actually wait until next week when someone on the team has free time.

But you need to be brave enough to ask the hard questions.

Idea 3: Question relative importance

Not all finance business partners are created equally.

Think about it this way:

When you get a call from an unknown number on your phone, do you treat it the same as when a family member calls you?

If you’re anything like me, you ignore and block unknown callers and simply ignore everyone else too.

While I’m not advocating you ignore or block any calls from certain business partners (or your family), it’s important to know which business partners are influencing the results more than others.

For example, I would never advocate staffing your HR finance support the same as Marketing or Sales. It’s clear that one is more important than the other because it drives more meaningful results for the business (sorry HR!).

But a common trap I see is finance teams staffing teams based on data complexity or business partner needs.

This is what creates situations where indirect value business units (HR, IT, etc) have more support than revenue generating business units (Sales, Marketing, Product).

In summary:

There is no right answer when it comes to staffing your finance team for driving value in the business.

But there are optimal staffing models based on your current situation.

Get comfortable taking a step back every 6 months and questioning everything about your talent model.

If you land on the same answer as before, great! If not, then hopefully a small adjustment can help you drive more value.

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