Episode 57: How to be a Transformative CFO

Guest: Brian Frohn

Large influential consultancies like McKinsey, Gartner and others have been talking for several years now about how the responsibilities of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) are expanding to include their companies’ digital activities. This makes sense, since the Office of Finance is the most central of all functions in any business, and embracing digital technology is the only way for Finance to stay connected in an age when data volumes and velocities are exploding.

But just because it makes sense doesn’t mean that it is easy to do. Those who work in Finance have demanding day-jobs with hard deadlines, and little room for error. Surveys of finance professionals regularly show that more time is spent on low-value tasks like data manipulation and validation, leaving very little time for high-value analysis and interpretation. While most people understand that the use of technology is necessary to correct this imbalance, finding a way to break the cycle is extremely difficult.

This week we talked to Brian Frohn, who recently started a new career as an Executive Coach after many years working as a CFO and a CEO. In this conversation, we dug into Brian’s own experiences of how to drive change in an achievable manner, and how he – as a non-technologist who started their career in Public Accounting – was able to introduce technology that transformed how his Finance team did their jobs for the better.

Find out more about Brian at https://stoicexecutive.com.