• My coach yelled and screamed at me in high school, do I need that?

  Is business coaching touchy feely – therapeutic stuff?

  You don’t know anything about my business. I have been at this for xx years, how can you help me?

  How long before I see results?

  Do I need to meet with you every week?

  Am I signing up for a long contract?

  This must be expensive

  I’m not a business owner, just a manager, is this for me?

  What about start up businesses?

  Do you work with management teams?

  ---

  My coach yelled and screamed at me in high school, do I need that?

  Business coaching is all about you and not about the coach. I will challenge with questions that will help you think more clearly and anew about your problems and opportunities. My coaching is successful when you state the best solution, then it is your solution not mine. I measure my success by how little I talk and how much you produce results.

  Is business coaching touchy feely – therapeutic stuff?

  Business coaching is about business, about getting the right things done. Sometimes this touches on the way in which you listen and communicate with people, or, your focus on facts and not emotions. But, always, our discussions are about your business results and how to improve them.

  You don’t know anything about my business. I have been at this for xx years, how can you help me?

  There is an element of truth in this. If you really need help with a specific technical issue, business coaching is not the solution.

  On the other hand, every business is about customers, products, services, employees, sales, profits, capital, marketing, sales, operations, product development, quality, and more of these basics. It only takes me an hour to ask enough questions to know the basic shape of your business, to provide me a platform to engage you in productive discussions of how to push you and your business forward.

  And, another key role for me is to help you establish the short list of tasks to work on each week to drive ahead. I provide the constant reminder of how day-to-day work connects with the big picture goals and the tactical accountability for getting the work done.

  How long before I see results?

  You will see results in your personal management approaches and skills within a few weeks. Business results typically take longer, three months is a good timeframe, though it depends on the cycle time of the business issues you are tackling.

  Do I need to meet with you every week?

  Most clients find it valuable to meet every week. It keeps up the pace of the work, makes for better, more immediate feedback on progress and problems, and maintains better self-accountability for the important future-building tasks. On the other hand, some clients find every other week to work fine. We just need to identify what works best for you.

  At the outset of a new relationship, I insist on at least three months of weekly meetings. This gives us the opportunity to really dig in and accomplish something important and useful. It also assures that I have a sound understanding of how you work and the important facts about how your business works.

  Finally, most clients really look forward to talking with me. I am the one person they speak with each week who will listen with interest to whatever they say, not be judgmental in anyway, and be supportive through good questioning and sound advice.

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  How effective is telephone or computer based coaching?

  I have been working via telephone and Skype for four years, after years of face-to-face consulting. To my initial surprise, I have found the telephone to be better in many ways than face-to-face meetings. When I sit down to talk with a pad of paper at the ready for notes, and my notes from earlier discussions, I am totally present and focused on the person on the other end of the line. I am listening to every word and, not being required to provide visual focus, I can process the conversation and think of different questions to reframe the issues or bring up new avenues to explore very consistently. I can hear the body language through the audible cues given during a conversation.

  Sometimes we need to talk about financial management issues or other document based topics, then, we can turn to our computer screens and refer directly to the facts in question. Some clients keep detailed notes and create an agenda for every meeting. I print this out in advance and I let the client manage our meeting as they see fit. Other clients come to the meetings with topics that are pressing on them that day. For them, I have to be sure that I bring up the tasks from the previous session so that we close the loop on their progress.

  Am I signing up for a long contract?

  No. My contract with you includes a clear statement that either party can cancel the engagement on a one week notice.

  This must be expensive

  Most clients budget $350 to $500 per month. This means that business coaching that will produce significant results, measured in sales dollars, increased profitability, more customers, and a more productive, happier you, the business owner or manager, costs on a par with your CPA. So, when you think of adding a new senior manager to your staff, this looks outrageously inexpensive.

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  I’m not a business owner, just a manager, is this for me?

  If you manage people, have a budget, and are responsible for results, business coaching can help you be more effective.

  What about start up businesses?

  I work with start ups regularly. In fact I have a discounted rate for start ups. Go to this page for more about how I work with startup companies.

  Do you work with management teams?

  Yes. This is where a Skype videoconference works really well. Unlike working with individuals, I do need to see everyone so that i can effectively manage the group and keep everyone involved.

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Business owners and managers have plenty of work and lots toworry about. This seems to be the natural state of being entrepreneurial and liking to run your own affairs.

Worrying is not productive

The worry part of running a business (or starting one, for that matter) can be minimized. Learning new skills and approaches to make you more productive, more successful, and happier.

Work with a business coach

An important component of your strategy to getting the right things done can be to work regularly with a business coach.

Business coaching works – the proof is in our results

I know that this is true because I have worked with many business owners in many types of businesses, start ups and small firms, and we have proof in dollars, customers, new markets, and more ease at managing to show the value of our work together.

Learn more about how the coaching process works here.

“DO YOU…

1. IMPROVE basic, measured efficiencies continuously?
2. THINK simply and directly about what you are doing and why?
3. BEHAVE towards others as you wish them to behave towards you?
4. EVALUATE each business and business opportunity with total, fact-based objectivity?
5. CONCENTRATE on what you do well?
6. ASK questions ceaselessly about performance, markets and objectives?
7. MAKE MONEY- knowing that, if you don’t, you can’t make anything else?
8. ECONOMISE always seeking Limo (Least Input for Most Output)?
9. FLATTEN the organisation to spread authority and responsibility?
10. ADMIT to your own failings and shortcomings and correct them?
11. SHARE the benefits of success with all those who helped to achieve it?
12. TIGHTEN up the organisation wherever and whenever you can because familiarity breeds slackness?
13. ENABLE everybody to optimise their individual and group contribution?
14. SERVE your customers with all their requirements to standards of perceived excellence in quality?
15. TRANSFORM performance by innovating creatively in products and processes including the processes of management?

Again from this email concerning this list: “These questions penetrate to the heart of successful management. They have passed, and will pass, the test of time.

This list looks a lot like others I have seen, and certainly many entries would be on such a list that I might create. But, whenever I see lists like this, I say to myself, “Great, but how do I do this?” Lets just take number 15, for example,  “Transform performance by innovating….”. What business processes do I put in place that assure that these results are regularly and sustainably produced? Or, what approaches and tools do I deploy to achieve number 8, “Economize…” ? Again, are there tools and approaches available that assure the we meet number 13, “ENABLE everybody to optimize their individual and group contribution?”

Without wasting further time with rhetorical questions, let me point out that in fact there are well-developed, well-tested systems of business processes available for a manager who wants and needs to achieve positive answers to questions like those posed by Heller. These include Lean^[[2]] , Baldrige^[[3]] , EFQM^[[4]] , or ISO9001-2008^[[5]]. None of these are simple cookbooks of management. The reality of management problems is much more complex and requires some subtlety in thinking through how to apply the principles and practices of these management systems to the individual enterprise. Nevertheless, these management systems provide the tools to systematically achieve results that answer the 15 points of this checklist, and more.

There is something else that interests me about lists like Heller’s 15. These lists almost always contain a provocative overlap between the attributes and skills of the manager and those of the organization. This overlap produces an opportunity (and responsibility) for the manager to drive the development and maintenance of these attributes in the organization. On the other hand, without the manager embodying a number of these attributes and skills, the organization will not come to embody them. In this case the manager’s performance is a negative driver of performance.

Lets take a look at a couple of Heller’s 15 as examples of this overlap phenomenon.

Number 4, “EVALUATE each business and business opportunity with total, fact-based objectivity?” calls for a fact-based approach to business. If the manager does not act, think, and talk in a fact-based manner consistently and rigorously, the organization will veer off this path quickly in response. If a manager does not gather facts and make decisions based on facts^[[6]] the organization will note this and begin to act in a fashion consistent with whatever decision making process the manager uses. This is a simple fact of life. People will do as the boss does, not as the boss says. On the other hand, if the manager is fact-centered in decision making, the organization will respond in like.

Number 13, “ENABLE everybody to optimise their individual and group contribution?”, is another interesting example of the overlap between the personal approaches and performance of the manager and and those of the organization. Central to every high-performance organization is the challenge to create an environment in which every person can and does make a fully engaged and productive contribution to the organization. The manager’s involvement in cross-functional team-based work expressly embodies this approach. After all, the people who report to a general manager (CEO, divisional manager, owner) are by definition cross-functional and they should solve the organization’s challenges as a cross-functional team. If the manager carries out his/her work in a cross-functional team-based manner, this will drive and support similar approaches throughout the organization. And, similar to our earlier discussion, failure here will support traditional management methods of command and control.

This overlap between the individual and the organizational is a great resource for the manager who wants to build a high-performance organization. They can make a direct contribution to the transformation by learning new approaches and skills and applying them in their day-to-day work. And, really, the principles and practices are quite straight forward. It requires more persistence than genius to build high-performance organizations. The transformation process is not like building a rocket where every part must work perfectly to even get off the launch pad.

1. http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/
2. Lean is the American name for the Toyota Production System, also more broadly the Toyota Business System. There is no standards organization for lean principles and practices. A good starting point is Womack, James P., and Daniel T. Jones. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated. 2nd ed. Free Press, 2003 and The Lean Enterprise Institute
3. Baldrige National Quality Program Criteria
4. European Foundation for Quality Management
5. International Organization for Standardization ISO9001-2008 Quality management systems — Requirements
6. Here is an interesting point about “facts”. Facts are by definition observable and independent of any individual. Facts exist in the shared space of the organization; they do not belong to any person, but to the organization.

Unhappy prospects or customers are an opportunity to display your real value and win a fan for life.

Here is the story from the owner of a start up yoga studio in New York City.

A neighborhood person began to say negative things about the studio on Twitter. Challenges about the pricing being too high and a lack of community involvement in the new studio. A PR person working with the studio’s owner responded and engaged the disgruntled neighborhood person. This lead to the owner becoming engaged and an exchange of emails that clarified the concerns and the facts of what the studio was really doing. The neighborhood person also received feedback from others about the competitive pricing for yoga in NYC. All of this lead to an invitation from the owner for the neighborhood person to come by for tea and attend a Saturday evening potluck party at the studio.

The neighborhood person responded with a 745 word blog entry that recited all of her concerns and the email responses by the owner. This blog postings closes with this:^[[1]]

you should note that B…… & Y…..’s instructors are all members of our Inwood and Washington Heights communities – which warms my heart to no end.  so, go to B…. & Y….. this weekend, take a free class, congratulate M….. and wish her much success. don’t forget to take advantage of their special packages before they end.

no matter what, the most important thing for me is community, and we need support our friends and neighbors in all of their endeavors.

maybe we will see you there… the potluck on Saturday night sounds like lots of fun!

The owner of the yoga studio told me that this neighbor came to the potluck and has signed up for classes.

There are many lessons to be noted.

Pay attention to what is being said about you on the Web

First, in the world of instant social media, you must pay attention to what is being said about you on the Web. When negative comments are made, you need to engage them immediately with positive fact-based responses. Find out more about the person and engage them. Every company no matter how small or large needs to have a process in place to regularly follow the chatter on the web. Follow Twitter, Facebook, local Yahoo Groups, and other places on the web where your customers and prospects hang out. Set up a Google Alert to automatically track comments about you and your business.

Greet every unhappy prospect or client as an opportunity to excel

Second, greet every unhappy prospect or client as an opportunity to excel. Be responsive, do not be defensive, ask and listen for the reasons for the unhappiness. Take action to fix or correct these problems or misperceptions. More often than not you will win that person over and make them a fan for life.

Silent, perhaps unhappy, customers who leave and never return

Third, what process do you have to find the silent, perhaps unhappy, customers who leave and never return? Do you follow up with clients who use your services once or twice and then never see again? Remember, you have already put the effort into attracting these customers. You have a relationship with them. They know what you do, where you are, how much it cost, but, for some reason they have chosen not to return. Most people will not complain or explain why, unless you ask.  Put a process in place to ask those silent customers who don’t come back. You will be surprised by the results and learn a lot about how your business is perceived.

1. names occluded by me

In the world of planning and strategy, there is a truism that too much planning, too much detail, too much analysis, leads to inaction, to a loss of opportunity. Along the same line of observation, in the world of learning to becoming a more effective manager, there can be too much study, too much thinking, too much integration of the many many skills and aptitudes required to become more effective. In both strategy and management skills action is almost always preferable to another round of study. Action bumps you up against the real world and provides the real basis for improving skills and results.

But, that still leaves us with the nagging question as a manager, especially for rookie managers and supervisors, how do I get started?

Based on many years of personal work as a manager and many years coaching managers, here are three steps you can take that will get you into action and guarantee striking results. These results will come in your personal effectiveness and in of the results of the organization you manage.  Remember,  by results, I am referring to the three meanings Drucker defined: (1) direct business results (usually measured in $s); (2) improved organizational culture (values); and (3) development of people.^[[1]]

1. Stop Answering Questions

If most managers could listen to themselves, the proverbial fly on the wall, for just a few hours, they would discover that they are chronically enabling dependency all around them and undermining whatever formal delegation systems are in place. How is this happening? Just listen and you will hear a stream of questions coming at them followed by answers in response. You are enabling the following the reflexive pattern: ask the expert and be rewarded with answers. Ask the boss, get an answer, and be safe from responsibility for the answers.

If you want to get people to take responsibility and be involved in the business, you can’t go on answering all these questions. They will just go on asking whether they need to or not. And, you are spending an enormous amount of your time, your most valuable resource, to answering all of these questions.

What should a manager do to break this pattern?

Simply announce to the troops, “If you want to ask me a question, you have to have at least three possible answers thought through before I will consider your question. If you are having trouble coming up with answers, ask others to help you. Group thinking is always the best thinking.”

Shortly I will go into a few further refinements to make this a really effective policy. For the moment though, think of how simple it would be to put this new policy into action. The really tough step is entirely in the mind and habits of you the manager. You have to get up every morning and look yourself in the mirror and say, “My job as manager is to create an environment in which everyone can participate fully and will take responsibility. To help this along, I will help people by not answering their questions. And I will examine and fix why it is that they can not answer most of the questions that arise in their day-to-day work.”

One of the reasons managers answer so many questions from their staff and others in the company is that they fear that if they don’t, then really important issues and opportunities may be addressed incorrectly or sub optimally.

A key to getting out of the round of endless questions while still being involved in important ones, is to set some boundaries, some limits.

This might sound like this: “I want you to develop three solutions before you come to ask me a question. Ask your colleagues for help if you get stuck. But, in the case of the following critical customer, Immense Big Machines, Inc., I want to be informed of any issues involving delay or cost overruns in Project XZY.”

With the right boundaries set around your new rule, you can still be assured of being involved where you need to be.

Once you put this policy into action you are likely to see that many of your reports’ questions arise because they lack information and decision making tools. Glance down to Step 3 It’s Your Fault – Take Responsibility below and you will see that you have to take action to get these tools into place to enable your report to work effectively.

Finally, to make your staff and others in the company comfortable about taking responsibility for solving problems and answering their own questions, you need to have environment in which mistakes are expected and dealt with positively. Remember, if you are not making mistakes, you are doubtless doing very little and learning not at all. Mistakes need to be analyzed and the lessons learned. Perhaps the only rule about mistakes is that they should not be repeated.

As a bit of personal history, I implemented this step myself out of self-preservation in the midst of merging four sales departments into one. For the first couple of days some Regional Managers were frightened to death that they would make mistakes. These folks had worked for years before I came on the scene for managers who acted like your worst image of tank commanders. Other Regional Managers were delighted immediately. All of them made mistakes. The company was not adversely effected and within a few weeks almost all found their legs, helped work out the decision algorithms we needed, and I had much more time available to address all of the other issues revealed by this merger. One final note though, one manager never became comfortable making her own decisions. No amount of work on my part and her compatriots convinced her that she really should and could make decisions. Within two months she moved on, of her own accord, to a staff position in another business unit where she would not be confronted with the stream of business decisions about pricing and production priorities that every Regional Manager faced.

2. Seize Your Time – Don’t Manage It

In recent work with managers on time management, we have taken a new tack on this old problem of time.  We have encouraged managers to simply seize a block of time during the week and get to work on the really important things they feel they need to do to improve their contribution to their company.

It works like this. Look at the next week’s calendar and mark off one, or better, two hours on some day where there is nothing now scheduled or their are meetings or tasks that really can be skipped. Send an email around to everyone who reports to you announcing this time as your Private Work session. Tell them that you will be working on an important initiative and that barring a fire, you are not to be disturbed until the session is over.

When the hour arrives put a sign on your door or at the entrance to your cubicle, “Private Work Session – Do Not Disturb“. Turn off your email, instant messaging, cell phone, Blackberry, or any other communication device that can interrupt. Sit down at your desk or work table and get to work on that project that you have not gotten to because of all the other “important” tasks in your day-to-day work life.

Managers who have taken the step to seize their own time have found that they make real progress on their projects and the company does not grind to a halt.  They become daring and schedule two or three hours for the next week. Seizing personal work time also energizes their efforts to really learn how to manage their time. They already can see that they can make real progress working on the future of the company instead of constantly balled up in the day-to-day activties of the company. It is a demonstration of the power of spending significant time working on your company instead of just in it.

3. It’s Your Fault, Take Responsibility

Attracting, selecting, training, mentoring, and pruning human resources are among the most important tasks a manager confronts. Almost everyone agrees that, at every level of organizations, managers need to be devoting a significant portion of their time addressing the people needs of the firm, business unit, or department. Without the right people in the right positions, no strategy, no matter how clever, can succeed.

To be truly successful in meeting these responsibilities, a manager must embrace an all important management rule: “If an employee is working below expected or required performance it is always the manager’s fault.”

Read that through again. The manager is always responsible for sub-par work by any employee in their work group.

The first place to look for the source of poor performance is the manager. After all, the manager hired or selected the person. The manager defines the work, provides tools, training, and all other resources required for the job.  The manager is responsible for the success of every person they supervise.

An important effect of this rule is that it prevents you from entering the whinny land of thinking, or worse, saying:  “Why doesn’t Joseph pay more attention to detail?” “Mirabelle keeps making the same errors over and over in these quotes.” “Walt just doesn’t get the big picture of where this project is going and he is heading down the wrong track, for the umpteenth time.”

Embrace your responsibilities and powers to make your personnel successful.

• Make sure that you really have well thought out and planned jobs.
• Are job definitions focused on results?
• Are the task definitions actionable?
• Do the skills listed actually match up with the results you want to achieve?
• Have you provided the training required?
• Do your personnel understand where the company is going strategically and is it clear how the results of their jobs connect with these strategies?
• Have you acted promptly to provide feedback and take corrective action to support performance?
• Do you have a company culture that embraces, supports, and demands full participation by everyone?

Selection and promoting personnel are management tasks with a high error factor. Every manager needs to acknowledge that their judgments in selection and promotion of personnel are not perfect, not even close to perfect, . So, faced with a weak performance from a new hire or newly promoted person, managers must ask the question early, “Did I make a mistake here?” If you come to that conclusion you need to act promptly to correct the error.

The central point is that you selected your personnel, you set the conditions and environment of their work, your provide the tools and training, you set the expectations, the results required. If you are not getting top performance from your personnel, look to the basics, look to your own responsibilities as a manager first. After all, if you are really holding yourself accountable for these responsibilities, you will achieve equal or better performance from everyone in your organization.

The Three Steps Taken Together

These three disruptive steps will make you a more effective manager. Stop Answering Questions reveals where you need to improve training, data resources, and decision making algorithms. This step also firmly embraces and puts into action the third step, It’s Your Fault, Take Responsibility. It is a certainty that implementing the first step will librate those who report to you to perform better and by cascading the third step down the chain of command your reports will apply the first step to those who report to them with equally robust and invigorating results. Meanwhile, you will have implemented the second step, Seize Your Time – Don’t Manage It. This will lead to some significant achievements on your part. You will be able to work on forward looking projects that will move your group ahead. After a bit, you will be able to recommend that your reports apply all three rules to their own work.

1. see Chapter 2 – What Can I Contribute? in his book The Effective Executive

I have used David Allen’s  book, Getting Things Done: the art of stress-free productivity (Penguin: NY 2001)  both personally and with clients for a number of years. Recently I volunteered to lead a discussion of the book’s approach to personal productivity with the Greater Boston Business Network. This provoked me to re-read the book in preparation. Here are a few thoughts following my re-read and the discussion with GBBN.

Underlying Principles and Thoughts

Work and personal are now quite blurred. And so, this book is about everything in your life. There is no boundary between work and personal when it comes to being more productive. And, your mind does not treat them as separate, so a productivity system can not either. There is also a need to incorporate the big picture, strategic view, with the tactical day-to-day,  but the emphasis must be on actionable tasks. Thus, the title, Getting Things Done.

Getting into a “Productive State”, what I might call a state of flow,  when required is both a challenge and an objective of a productivity system.^[[1]])

Allen builds his approach to productivity on a few “principles”.

First principle: Deal Effectively with Internal Commitments

• If it’s on your mind, your mind is not clear. Put this stuff in a trusted storage system
• Clarify what the commitment is, what you have to do to make progress
• Keep reminders in a system you review regularly

A key phrase here is: “trusted storage system”. It is exactly the trusted storage system that both gets all this stuff out of our heads and away from the worrying, fretting machinery of the mind and provides a robust platform for action. In the trusted storage system, we know that nothing is ever lost and we know where to turn to find the next action.

This leads to one of Allen’s key action steps:

Transform “stuff” – “stuff is anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.”

Allen calls this step “Mind Sweep”.  Allen provides a long list of memory triggers to help you remember all of the “stuff” in your life and get it down on paper and out of your head.

Second Principle: Managing Action is the Prime Challenge

We need to be clear about what the work is about and what the next steps are to get it done. Allen is clearly not a supporter of that oxymoronic concept: time management.^[[2]]

He clearly see that being more productive is all about making choices correctly and taking action, getting things done. Time takes care of itself as it will inevitably. Managing action requires horizontal and vertical action management. The horizontal manages the current environment of tasks while the vertical organizes the longer and more complex projects that frequently also require more complex social involvements with others to get things done. This is where project management fits in.

Five Stages of Mastering Workflow

Allen posits five stages to a solid workflow. These are:

1. Collect things that command our attention
2. Process what they mean and what to do about them
3. Organize the results
4. Review and choose
5. Do

Allen provides the following flow chart:

From My Use of the Book

In my work with Getting Things Done, two practices have proven most valuable.

First, I regularly go back to the “Mind Sweep”. I tend to build up a worrying collection of stuff especially obligations to others. The mind sweep helps me put these down on paper and also reminds me to be more disciplined about making commitments that many times I should not make in the first place.

Second, I have really put in practice Allen’s ruthless passion for filing things away. I have a two part system. First, there is filing of clients in alphabetical order. Then, in separate filing drawers everything else is filed alphabetically. And, following Allen’s office design principles, these file drawers are at easy reach from my desk chair. No need to get up to find anything in this file system. I even own a P-Touch label maker and regularly make labels for my file folders.

My computer files are similarly structured. I have the same folder structure on my computer today as I had two years ago when I last did a major house cleaning. Clients are all in individual

From the GBBN Discussion

One point that came up during the discussion with business people at the Greater Boston Business Network is that the exact shape of your “trusted system” is not so important. If you have a reliable system like Day Timer working for you, keep at it. Though, perhaps you can improve your productivity through applying some of the other tools in Allen’s approach.

Now, six years on from my first read of Getting Things Done, this little book remains a useful tool. If you have not read it, go to your local library or visit the bookstore, physical or virtual. Also, go to David Allen’s website learn more about his personal productivity tools.

1. Here you might compare this with the work on how we work best in a state of “flow” as discussed in  see Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s   Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience ( Harper Row, NY: 1990
2. I wrote an earlier musing on this topic in my posting: Time Management – is now the time to get beyond this distracting oxymoron?

This podcast lasts for 8 minutes 49 seconds.

A written format is available here.

The first step in the hiring process is to define the job you want filled. What specific results should the CFO produce for you and your company? Are you concerned about running out of cash because you have taken on a big project but will not get paid until completion? You worry about having enough cash on a regular basis. You are not certain that the bookkeeping is being done in an efficient and rigorous manner? What else of a financial character concerns you? Is your CPA driving you crazy with questions or suggestions that you do not entirely understand?

Make a list. Look back at the seven reasons I gave in my earlier article and see if this don’t provoke some additions to your list of worries. When you have completed your list, these are the problems, largely, that the CFO should solve.

Do not spend too much time thinking about exactly which functional skills are required to produce these results. It is the job of candidate CFOs to demonstrate to you that they have solved problems like yours and produced the required results. You are not hiring a trainee or development project, you are hiring an experienced CFO.

A few concrete skills and experiences you should look for.

First, your CFO must know how to get their hands dirty. This means they must have active skills to build spreadsheets and extract information from financial software systems and paper documents. Second, they must know how to present this to you in a clear, actionable format. A key task for them is to get financial information about company performance into your hands in a timely fashion and in a format that leads to making decisions. Third, preferably they will have experience in your industry so that they can set the analysis within the context your business lives in. Fourth, they should have worked as part of a team so that they have the skills to present the financial “score” clearly and then engage in a dialogue with the other management team members to help drive the business forward in a coherent fashion. At the level of the CFO, finance is not an isolated function, rather, it plays an integral role in managing the ongoing business and developing new strategies.

Write a one page description of the results you require and the skills and experiences that you think will be needed. Keep this simple - bulleted lists are great. You will use this when you go to the next step.

Where to go hunting?

You should certainly alert your close business associates that you are looking for a part-time CFO.  Do a Google search. There are now plenty of providers of these services. Here is a saved Google search (opens new browser window). Put an ad on Craigslist.

I would suggest starting out with the consulting firms that specialize in this work. Interview a couple. You will learn a great deal about how they might approach your situation. This may help you sharpen what you want to achieve. Under no circumstances should you pay for an assessment or any other consulting projects as part of this interviewing. Any consultant should be more than willing to come to your office to talk things over without any further obligation. Since they are experienced, they will conduct their assessment of the situation right in front of you and with considerable accuracy in under an hour. Don’t forget consultants interview far more companies than you.

You may be overwhelmed by the number of candidates. Just pick out three or four who really seem solid. If you are comfortable on the telephone, conduct a telephone interview to sort out the persons you want to invite for a face-to-face.  This article is not the place to discuss interviewing strategies and techniques, but certainly keep in mind that you will be looking to confirm that they can deliver the results you are looking for and have the inter-personal skills to work well with you and the other members of your company. Envision this selection process just as you would for a permanent full-time employee. A CFO, even a part-time one, should be a significant asset in your business, not a simple replaceable part.

The Deal.

Experienced consultants will always present you with a proposal that describes the scope of the tasks, what they will do, and what the “deliverables”, the results, will be. This proposal will also indicate some level of effort that they expect to put into the job. Keep in mind that they do not have to be on site to be productive. The proposal will also define some compensation arrangement for the work. Some will charge on an “as consumed” basis to an hourly or daily rate. Others will propose a fixed monthly charge for the level of effort described. Everything is negotiable, so think through how you would like to work. Always make sure to include an early review period (more on this below) and a cancellation process that is mutual and no-fault. Finally, you should look for a non-disclosure statement as part of any contract to protect your confidential business information.

Getting to Work.

Set time aside immediately to introduce your new CFO to every aspect of your business. They really need to understand what the business is about, who the customers and vendors are, and a myriad of other facts. Include a discussion of your forward looking plans and strategies so the the CFO can set these objectives in view as analyzes are developed.

Be sure to check in regularly with your CFO to make sure that progress is being made on the results you need. Set an early time for a formal review session. A month to two months from the start date would be right. You want to take an early reading of how the CFO is functioning. You will almost always have to make course corrections both to objectives and work processes. However, if you see that you or the CFO have made a mistake and the relationship will not work out, do not delay. Bring the relationship to a halt right away.^[[1]] Find another CFO and ask the old CFO to bring the new one up to speed. You are dealing with professional consultants, not employees. They never like to loose a client, but they will certainly do their best to make the transition smooth. They need you to think well of them.

This is just the beginning of your work with your new CFO. It will be productive. Have fun.

1. I wrote about this issue in an earlier article, “Managers – Early Intervention Is Key To Getting Your People Right” (opens in new window), that you can review if you find yourself in this situation.