A Chief Financial Officer

What It's Like To Be...

Dan Heath

Curiosity, Jobs, Careers, Business, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Human Interest

4.8 • 646 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Forecasting what a business will earn and spend, allocating resources among teams clamoring for more, and practicing professional skepticism without killing the vibe with Steve Love, a chief financial officer. What does it feel like to confess to a board of directors that you've made a potentially catastrophic error? And what happens when business leaders accidentally release non-public information? IF YOU LIKE THIS EPISODE: Check out what it's like to be a turnaround consultant, a fore...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Steve Love has been a chief financial officer for 15 years. He currently works for SIFT. It's a startup that helps businesses prevent online fraud. I asked him what sparks anxiety for a CFO? And he said, your head of sales tells you, hey, we need to talk about the forecast.
0:23.8	I can guarantee you there's nothing good coming to have that conversation.
0:30.2	They are not saying like, oh my gosh.
0:32.6	Hey, we're ahead of plan.
0:35.4	No, never.
0:44.2	It's always negative. And you're like, ah. How bad would someone have to miss their forecast before you would actually get angry about it? Like feel like they had done something
0:49.5	negligent or they had just botched it so bad it wasn't just the innocent quirks of the world unfolding.
0:56.6	Yeah, it's two aspects.
0:58.0	One is like the percent.
0:59.5	Like if it's, you know, five percent different.
1:01.9	Oh my goodness.
1:02.7	Take it.
1:03.2	Let's move on.
1:04.2	If it's 10 percent, uh, more than that starts to get painful.
1:09.7	And sometimes it's more than that the biggest challenge is the
1:13.2	why and when are you telling me with like a week to go and did you know did you really know or should
1:19.9	you have known yeah right like these three deals fell out of the forecast that is to say they
1:25.8	didn't close when should we have known it?
1:29.3	That last part is key because a CFO's job is not just to make sure there's enough money in the bank.
1:35.3	It's to understand the business. So a missed sales forecast doesn't just represent a failure to take in money. It represents a failure of
1:46.0	understanding. And when a CFO doesn't understand what's coming, bad things can happen.
2:05.5	I'm Dan Heath, and this is what it's like to be.
	...

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