Your Job as CFO: Keep the Talent on the Field
Eliminating friction so star players can do their jobs
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A good CFO works the scoreboard.
A great CFO actively works to keep star players on the field.
You sit at a unique intersection within the org. You see what’s slowing things down, and—importantly—you have the power (and budget) to remove obstacles.
💰 If throwing $5,000 at a problem will unlock a $200,000-a-year exec who’s operating at 75% productivity, that’s an easy call.
Money is cool like that.
What’s not cool?
Penny-pinching your way into inefficiency.
If the finance team is patting itself on the back for saving $15,000, but that ‘win’ just cost the business $500,000 in lost productivity, you didn’t save anything.
You avoided burning cash, while incinerating enterprise value.
Tactically, how do you do that? By eliminating friction so people can do what they’re uniquely qualified to do—not get bogged down in stuff that isn’t their job.
If your CRO is your striker, you want her closing deals, not scrubbing bad Salesforce data for the 19th time.
If your CPO is your star midfielder, you want him shipping products, not haggling with a sales rep over whether a Miro license should be $8 or $12 per seat.
Plus, with your unique skill set you might get it down to $7, but hey—that’s not the point.
If your CISO is your defense, you want them locking down security risks, not wasting hours manually reviewing every software contract before it’s uploaded to procurement.
The whole “CF-NO” thing? Holy shit, we gotta give that term a rest. It’s played out. It’s been beaten to the ground. We get it. CFOs have to say “no” to a lot of dumb ideas.
But great CFOs go a step further: they say yes to the right things, before people even ask.
📉 If your entire finance strategy is built around saying 'no' to expenses, you’re missing the bigger picture. A great CFO doesn’t just cut costs—they proactively reallocate resources to the highest ROI activities. It’s not about spending less—it’s about spending right. You’re playing Moneyball, not Extreme Couponing.
This is not about being a pushover. It’s about removing the sludge that slows down execution so the business moves faster.
Get. The. Gunk. Out.
If you want another sports analogy, it’s the opposite of Tom Thibodeau running his starters into the ground. His players are definitely on the court, but they’re played to the point of injury.
The best CFOs don’t overwork their team with processes that exist just to make finance’s life easier. They make the whole team better by designing systems that optimize for output, not just control.
The CFO’s Job is to Create Flow
Ever seen a world-class team play when they’re in the zone? It’s not just talent—it’s rhythm. The ball moves effortlessly, players instinctively know where to be, and decisions happen in real time. That’s flow.
The opposite? A team that looks sluggish, overthinks every move, and spends more time arguing over process than executing. In a business setting, that’s what happens when finance becomes a bottleneck.
A few ways CFOs kill flow without realizing it:
1. Over-engineering approvals
If your CRO needs a new tool to speed up pipeline conversion, but finance makes them run through three layers of approval, they’ll just stop asking and go back to using sheets (or making Salesforce do unholy acts).
Solution: Define clear thresholds—if a purchase is under X dollars and fits within the budget, it’s a yes by default.
“Yes by default” is a powerful mechanism. And it actually serves as a forcing function to root out bad actors. In many respects, it’s a dummy test.
2. Making reporting a chore
If department heads are spending hours each week just formatting slides for a finance meeting, you’re making them do your job.
📊 I’ve seen entire executive teams waste 10+ hours a week formatting slides for a finance meeting that nobody actually reads. If you’re in finance and your biggest insight is 'we need to see this in a different format,' congrats—you just wasted everyone’s time.
Solution: Standardize and automate the reporting framework. Give them plug-and-play templates so the conversation is about insights, not formatting. Better yet—build them dashboards in Sigma or Looker. Throw out the slides entirely.
3. Turning finance into an internal DMV
Bad finance teams operate like the DMV. Long lines. No clear answers. Endless forms. And by the time you finally get what you need, you don’t even care anymore—you just want to leave.
Great finance teams operate like a high-end concierge. Quick responses. Proactive guidance. White glove service.
Solution: As a CFO, the greatest compliment was when a leader would come to me not to ask for approval, but to simply bounce ideas around. It meant they looked at me as a thought partner who could help them scope out a solution, and were vulnerable enough to bring me something half baked, knowing I wouldn’t jump down their throats and say this isn’t possible.
Want an example of a company that understands flow? Look at Netflix.
No set vacation policy – Employees take time off when they need to.
No rigid expense policy – The official guideline is simply: “Act in Netflix’s best interest.” If an expense is reasonable and supports the company’s goals, you don’t need layers of approval.
Decentralized hiring decisions – Managers have a lot of autonomy to hire the right people without excessive red tape.
High talent density – They don’t waste time with performance improvement plans. If someone isn't a fit, they move quickly.
The idea is that if you hire and retain only the best people, you can trust them to make smart decisions without overloading them with process.
The best finance leaders do the same thing inside their org. They create structure—but that structure fuels execution instead of slowing it down.
Some ways to apply this in real life:
Kill death-by-procurement
If an exec needs a key tool, don't make them justify it with a 40-slide business case. Trust them to know what’s necessary. You wouldn’t make Messi fill out an expense report for his cleats.
Automate where it makes sense
If your finance team is spending hours manually reconciling Stripe payments, invest in a tool that syncs transactions automatically. You want them forecasting revenue, not fixing circ ref errors.
Make data useful, not painful
If your go-to-market teams are constantly complaining about bad data, don’t just tell them to “work with what’s in the system.” Fund the right RevOps hire or invest in tooling that cleans the pipeline proactively.
Final Thought
Your goal? Keep the talent on the field. Remove the friction. Let people do what they do best.
Because at the end of the day, nobody remembers the CFO who saved an extra $100K. They remember the CFO who helped scale the business to $1B.
Run the Numbers
Apple | Spotify | YouTube
Folks, he’s BACK.
Jim Cook, Netflix co-founder, former CFO of Mozilla, early employee at Inuit, executive coach, and author of Substack Cook’s Playbooks, returns to the podcast for the third time.
In this episode, he breaks down the evolution of the role of CFOs from traditional scorekeepers to more strategic and operator roles, before looking ahead at what’s to come. This episode is packed full of helpful advice about transparency, building trust, authenticity in your executive role, and why “fake it till you make it” is actually bad advice. Looking at the future of the CFO role, Jim explains why he believes there will be no need for both COO and CFO roles in an organization, the biggest mistake a CFO can make at this time, and how CFOs should be adapting in order to succeed in this next era.
Something I’m Looking Forward to Attending:
My friend the FP&A Guy, Paul Barnhurst, is hosting the Power Planning & Analytics in BI Tools Showcase on Thursday March 20th.
FP&A software has seen a convergence of planning and analytics, and one area that has gained a lot of traction over the last year is planning within business intelligence tools such as (Power BI, Qlik, Phocas Software, etc.).
This event features leading BI solutions that are empowering companies of all sizes in defining the next generation of FP&A .
Discover the current landscape of and experience leading BI tools in action to help you choose the technology that will empower your FP&A and Finance teams to deliver value across the enterprise.
Quote I’ve Been Pondering
“Software is the best business, because you sell it, and still have it.”