It was three o’clock on a Wednesday, a studio in Bristol, and a Texan on the screen who’s bought 58 companies.
Adam Coffey spent twenty-one years as a PE-backed CEO. Nine sponsors, three industries, exits measured in billions, and then a second career advising a hundred more companies on how to scale and sell. He’s also written the book a lot of your investors have on their shelf, The Private Equity Playbook.
We recorded the first episode of the new season of The Conscious Finance Podcast last week, and I asked him the question every finance leader eventually asks in some form. What does the buy side actually want from a finance team?
He answered with an aircraft carrier…
The floor, not the job
Start with what doesn’t impress him, because it surprised me how little of the traditional job made his list.
Books closed on time. Clean audits. Cash collected, AP under control, reporting cadence steady. He calls it keeping the trains running on time, and his view is blunt: that’s the floor. The basic function. “It’s not about work ethic. It’s about results.”
He’s seen plenty of CFOs who are first in and last out, buried in the minutiae, and still failing. They can bring the numbers, but they and explain the meaning.
Then he described the CFO he actually pays a premium for.
“If I’m the commander of the aircraft carrier, I’m looking for the CFO to be the second in command.”
Not the scorekeeper in the fishbowl off in the corner, as he put it. The officer on the bridge. The radar.
“Historical finance: tell me what happened. Transformational finance: tell me what’s going to happen before it happens.”
He needs to know where the ship will be long before it gets there, while there’s still time to adjust course. A board pack that explains last month, however accurate, is a rear-view mirror. Nobody steers with that.
What this costs when it’s missing
Coffey has sat on the buy side of more deals than almost anyone your investors will ever meet, so I asked where deals actually die.
“Ninety plus percent of deals that fall apart fall apart because the seller told me I had five million in EBITDA, and when I’m doing the work, they really have two and a half.”
Not fraud, usually. Not games. His phrase: people who don’t know what they don’t know. Revenue recognised in the wrong period, percentage-of-completion done wrong, a finance function that was never sophisticated enough to see its own picture clearly. Within 10% of the stated numbers, he closes at the price on the letter. 10 to 30% out, he reprices. Beyond that, the deal is usually dead, and so is the founder’s number.
Every one of those failures was preventable, years earlier, by the function that kept telling everyone what happened last month.
And the seat this all lands on isn’t in doubt. In a PE-backed world, he said, the most important role in the company is the CEO. “Number two, always the CFO.”
The mirror we’re polishing
Here’s where the week’s research landed a little too neatly.
Gartner published a survey of 204 finance leaders on 20 July. 45% of finance AI investment leans towards productivity. Just 20% leans towards decision quality. And the functions investing in AI that creates new value were more than twice as likely to report high realised value from it.
Read those numbers next to Coffey’s ship and the pattern is uncomfortable. Most finance AI budgets are being spent making the rear-view mirror faster. Quicker close, tidier reconciliations, first-draft reporting in minutes. All real, all useful, and none of it changes what the board gets from finance.
Gartner’s own phrase for the result is a perception gap. Finance reports progress on AI. Boards see limited strategic impact. Of course they do. The mirror was never the product.
What stays human
The radar isn’t a dashboard, and it isn’t a forecasting tool. Anyone can buy those.
It’s a person willing to say the quarter is going to miss while there’s still time to do something about it, and to be wrong about that sometimes, and to stand behind the call anyway. It’s translation, so the sales director and the board and the founder each hear the same truth in words they can act on. It’s trust, built one accurate uncomfortable conversation at a time, so that when the forecast wobbles the room turns towards finance rather than on it.
When the prep disappears, judgement is the job. What’s left, and what Coffey has been paying premiums for since long before AI, is the part that was always the real job.
What this means in practice
One. Audit your own pack. Count the pages that explain last month, then the pages that commit to next quarter. Most packs I see lean heavily in favour of the mirror. Even 60/40 changes the conversation.
Two. Rebalance the AI spend. Before the next automation of the close, ask what it would take to model the next twelve months credibly. Gartner’s data says the value sits on the side almost nobody is funding.
Three. Always be ready for inspection. Coffey’s advice to CFOs anywhere near an exit: build the data room now, run a sell-side quality of earnings before the buyer does, know your own number before someone else prices it. “A well-versed CFO does not have to scramble at all during a sale process.”
Four. Hire for the radar. If the next finance hire’s CV proves they can run a close and nothing else, they’re joining the part of the function that’s shrinking. The scarce profile reads differently: forecasting credibility, commercial curiosity, the nerve to defend a number in a hard room.
Where this leaves you
The trains still have to run on time. Nobody is excusing a late close.
But if a buyer walked in on Monday, your function would tell them one of two things. What happened…or what happens next?
Only one of those is worth a premium.
The full conversation with Adam Coffey opens the new season of The Conscious Finance Podcast, out soon. He goes deeper on value creation levers, the 30/20/10 unit economics rule, and the first 90 days of a CFO he trusts. Well worth your commute when it lands.
Thanks for reading.
Leo Hewett. Founder, Core3. [email protected]
