I Couldn’t Stop Writing About Financial Strategy.

Have you ever met someone who collects recipe books, yet makes the same meals week after week?

Or the person who absorbs wellness information and can cite the latest health trend, yet has the same habits and struggles as they did a decade ago?

What about the one who memorizes business and leadership methodologies and has stacks of business plans, but stays put in their safe, well-paying, middle-management role?

And of course, the mental health guru that is self-absorbed and knows every flaw and diagnosis that applies to them and you, yet has not taken any demonstrative action to improve or change truly?

Well, if you are a Finance Leader who produces accurate numbers, timely reporting and has nearly perfect access to data - you might be suffering a similar fate.

The question is not how great your team is at keeping the records and providing the answers. It’s a question about how you influence strategy, how you are trusted to drive decisions and whether the work you do is creating action.

Compliance matters. You need your investors, board, bank, and stakeholders to be confident. Risk needs to be mitigated. Costs need to be under control. No one is letting you off the hook for the tablestakes.

But there’s a change happening. Analysis, forecasting, and table stakes are becoming increasingly easier.

Data is readily available, and even poor-quality data can be leveraged in ways most of us didn’t think possible.

If you read what I wrote just over a year ago, you’d see me anticipating slow opportunities for audit and much of finance and accounting as a result of bad data. Knowing full well that small and medium businesses have no standards for the source of truth or the health of the data made me skeptical. Top that off with minimal difference at the Enterprise level, and I felt like my friends, CPAs, were arguably safe

Now we know auditors can apply AI to client information that’s nothing short of a mess. And AI can pull information from unintegrated systems and make sense of it.

Not flawlessly. At least not yet.

But the point is obvious. So much of what you use to make a CFO vital is changing.

It’s time to consider how you can slim down the information to enable smarter decisions and support the strategy and the actions needed.

It’s time to step up as a business leader first

If your value is primarily producing information, you should be paying attention to what AI is doing.

If your value is creating better decisions and better outcomes, your future may be brighter than ever.