You called it in April.
Margin was slipping in one division, the forecast was going to miss by the autumn, and you said so in the leadership meeting, with the workings attached. Everyone nodded. Sales carried on. The ops director said his numbers looked different from where he was standing. And in September the miss arrived, roughly on schedule, along with the question you’d been dreading. Why didn’t finance see this coming?
But you did see it coming… thats the part that stings.
Recently I wrote about what Adam Coffey pays a CFO a premium for. The radar. The person who can tell him where the ship will be while there’s still time to change course. It seemed to resonate, and it left a question hanging that I’d put to him on the episode… what happens when the radar is working and the CFO still gets ignored?
Two wirings
The way I put it to him was… You’ve got the risk-averse CFO, trained their whole life to mitigate risk, sitting opposite the risk-taking CEO who’s all vision and growth. The CFO’s job is to be the storyteller, to package the insight so the other one can act on it, and that takes a kind of emotional intelligence that’s a skill in itself. Sometimes the CFO hasn’t got it yet. Sometimes there’s a cultural problem higher up and everything finance says falls on deaf ears. How do you tell the two apart?
He agreed on the wiring straight away. Business law was his worst course at university. “You give me an 1,800-page textbook and I go brain dead.” CFOs live in the detail and in very high levels of technical accuracy, and he doesn’t. Polar opposites, in his words.
Then he answered the diagnosis question, starting at the top.
Look up first
“I can tell a ton about a company and its culture by asking a few questions of a CFO. How does the CEO treat the CFO and the office of finance? Is your job just keeping score?”
If that’s what your world looks like, he said, that’s a company with a poor CEO who doesn’t understand the value of finance. He’s walked into plenty. The previous leader only ever asked finance for the reports, so reports were all finance produced, and the team was staffed for exactly that. In a PE-owned business he’s usually beefing the function up on arrival, because one question from the sponsor begets another and it never stops.
So part of the ceiling really can be above you. He’ll say that out loud, which is worth hearing from someone who’s sat on the CEO’s side of the table for twenty-one years.
And then he stopped letting the CFO off the hook.
The excuse he won’t take
“I don’t accept that as a final conclusion that as a CFO, I can be dry.”
Keeping the trains running on time, he said, gets you some level of success. It won’t elevate you. If you’re good at the numbers, good at FP&A even, and you struggle to communicate what you’re seeing, that’s the thing to work on, and it can be worked on. He learned it himself. The class clown who kept getting sent to the office for not knowing when to shut up, until the same instinct became the thing that let him sell a vision and get people to follow it. His advice for anyone who dreads public speaking involves Toastmasters and, at one point, a Baptist preacher in Alabama holding an entire church in the palm of his hand in a hundred-degree heat.
He also sent every first-time supervisor on a Dale Carnegie course before they were allowed to manage anyone. As a Dale Carnegie fan, I enjoyed that more than I probably should have.
The expectation underneath it is… “I want you to have a voice in this organisation. I want you to build trust. I want you to get out from behind your desk and go out and spend some time in the field. I want you to see what we do for a living.”
Where the second seat is actually decided
He works out who belongs on the bridge in a room most CFOs think of as somebody else’s.
Every week he ran a staff meeting with all his department heads. He calls it ‘managing the T’. Each subject matter expert reports out on their area, and that’s the top of the T, everyone getting a thin slice of everything. His one-to-ones give him the depth. Which makes him the only person in the company holding the whole block of knowledge.
What he’s watching for in that meeting is the CFO. Are they influencing the others? Do they have opinions about sales and operations, based on what the numbers are telling them? Are they helping the room find consensus, or reporting and going quiet? “I’m looking for the CFO to be a thought partner.” Sitting in a fishbowl off in the corner keeping score, as he put it last issue, gets you the corner. The second seat gets decided in the staff meeting, on a Tuesday, in someone else’s agenda item.
He gave the practical version too. The branch managers in the businesses he ran came up through the trucks. Good technicians, promoted to service manager, promoted again, and nobody ever taught them to read an income statement. His instruction to the CFO: “Don’t give them a spreadsheet. Give them a scorecard.” Point out where the metrics are off. Suggest an activity. This branch is underperforming because you’re not controlling overtime, let me help you manage the workflow, your numbers would pop right back and you’d earn your bonus.
The manager believes the person explaining the overtime long before he believes the P&L.
The gap, measured
EY published its 2026 DNA of the CFO survey in June. Just over 1,600 finance leaders, 28 countries, all at companies of a billion dollars or more, so bigger than most of the businesses reading this. The numbers still travel.
60% said the CFO should define and shape how the business creates value. Asked how the finance function is most commonly perceived across their own business today, 27% said strategic partner in value creation. The rest landed on data and insight, operational support, risk and control. EY’s phrase for the distance between those two figures is a gap between ambition and action.
The one that made me smile was further down. 67% of CFOs said they should be actively challenged to break out of their comfort zones. Two-thirds of the profession, asking to be pushed. Adam Coffey is happy to oblige.
What stays human
When the prep disappears, judgement is the job, and I’ve written that line enough times that some of you can recite it. This issue is about the half of judgement that happens out loud.
The forecast can be right. The agents will make it more accurate, faster, with more scenarios than anyone asked for. None of it changes course until a person carries it into a room of people who are wired differently, says what it means for them in their language, and is still standing there when the ops director says his numbers look different. That’s the range Coffey is asking for, and it sits on top of the wiring you already have.
What this means in practice
One. Run his diagnostic on yourself before you run it on your team. How does the CEO treat finance? What have you actually been asked for since you arrived? If the answer is reports, some of the ceiling is above you, and that’s a conversation to have with the CEO before you decide it’s a personal failing.
Two. Count the opinions. At the next leadership meeting, keep a private tally of how many times finance offers a view on somebody else’s area with the numbers behind it. If the tally is zero, you’re at the top of the T.
Three. Swap one spreadsheet for a scorecard. Pick the manager whose numbers are furthest off, give them three metrics in their own language, and one suggested move. Then go and see what they do for a living. Coffey’s instruction, and the cheapest credibility you’ll build this quarter.
Four.If the voice isn’t you, hire it beside you. He said as much himself: sometimes you hire someone with a bit more charisma and stay behind the curtain pulling the levers. For a CFO that’s the next commercial finance hire. The CV will tell you they can model. Put them in front of a non-finance stakeholder before you offer, and watch whether the room moves.
Where this leaves you
Twenty-one years as a PE-backed CEO, nine sponsors, and the thing that decided whether his CFO was second in command never once showed up in the month-end pack. It showed up in a board meeting, in whether the person with the best information in the building was willing to use it on somebody else’s problem.
The close still matters, and it always will. But the seat next to the captain gets earned in rooms that have nothing to do with finance, and you’re already in most of them.
The full conversation with Adam Coffey is out now, the first episode of the new season of The Conscious Finance Podcast. The 30/20/10 rule, unit economics on a single truck, and the first time you think you might have to make a change. Its well worth a listen!
Click to listen to the full episode
Thanks for reading,
Leo Hewett
Founder of Core3 | CFO search & finance recruitment | Scale-ready finance teams | AI-enabled finance transformation | Host of The Conscious Finance Podcast
