622: Elevating Your Organization's Financial IQ | Shane Hansen, CFO, Planful

CFOTL: Having only stepped in to the CFO office in April, what is the vision you have for the role of CFO? 

Hansen: I’m really keen on having Planful be a world class FP&A organization and definitely be one of the best users of the Planful platform. I think that’s important for us as an organization to eat our own cooking so to speak. On the second initiative of covering the basics, particularly in times like these where there’s high level of uncertainty, we need to be able to iterate on company plans and department plans. We need to be able to adjust budgets and investments and offer forecasts that illuminate some of the potential paths forward. So I’m talking about basic competencies here like a direct method cashflow forecast that we really don’t want to mess up. So that’s what I meant by make sure we’re proficient in covering the basics.

And then finally accelerating growth. I really want to begin with our end in mind and work backwards from there to uncover the activities that are critical for us to do over the next couple quarters. And maybe if I gave an example there, what actions would we need to consider to improve our customer life cycle or our customer experience that will ensure our customers are getting the optimal value from our platform so that we have low customer churn and a very strong platform to grow from.

…I believe part of the job of being a finance leader is to elevate the financial IQ of the entire organization. And I think we’re seeing the role of the CFO in particular and the finance organization at large expand and change to meet that challenge. And I think that the old style perception of finance as a service desk is going away and transitioning more towards a strategic advisor role for the entire organization. And so the ability to have business users in marketing, and in all corners of the business have access to their budgets, to their plans, to the information they need to make their decisions and be a part of the elevation, we’ve seen that pay dividends.