Scotts Miracle-Gro CFO Mark Scheiwer said he’s the type of CFO to “get into the weeds of learning the business, and how it operates.”

And in the weeds he was, in his last gig as finance lead at Scotts Miracle-Gro subsidiary Hawthorne Gardening Company, a hydroponic distributor for cannabis growers that the parent company launched in 2014.

“Not where cannabis is sold or grown, but we dealt with the retailers who would provide them the input supplies they needed to grow the cannabis…It’s definitely an interesting part of the business,” Scheiwer told CFO Brew.

But the canna-business has seen better days, and Scotts Miracle-Gro (which reported $3.4 billion in net sales for the fiscal year ending September 30) is continuing on a new path as it sells off Hawthorne in order to “[re-energize] our topline sales,” according to Scheiwer.

By concentrating on lawn and garden, and investing in selective M&A and capex, Scheiwer said he hopes the business will see margins exceeding 32% this year.

Keep reading.—DL

The results are in, and they send a clear message to corporations and their auditors. Investors have continued “strong interest in expanded assurance services beyond traditional financial statement audits,” according to the Center For Audit Quality’s latest Annual Institutional Investor Survey.

The survey of 300 institutional investors in the US, conducted in November, shows strong interest in information not found in financial statements relating to governance, cybersecurity risk, and data privacy. At the same time, investors “view standards, comparability, and regulatory clarity” as table stakes.

More than four in five (81%) respondents use information on cybersecurity risk in making investment decisions either all the time or most of the time, an increase from roughly three in four (74%) in the previous year’s survey. Following cybersecurity, respondents most frequently said they review info on data privacy (78%), sustainability reporting (78%), and governance (77%). The survey shows that “investors are not a monolith,” and that their priorities vary, Brad Jacklin, CAQ senior director for communications and market research, told CFO Brew. This means the information they seek out will also vary.

Keep reading.—AZ

Staring down an escalating war, soaring oil prices, and inflation that refuses to quit, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates parked between 3.5% and 3.75%.

This is the Fed’s second consecutive call to hold rates steady, a decision that was widely anticipated amid growing concerns over how the Iran war could ripple through the US economy.

“The implications of events in the Middle East for the US economy are uncertain,” Chair Jerome Powell said during this week’s press conference. “In the near term, higher energy prices will push up overall inflation. But it is too soon to know the scope and duration of the potential effects on the economy.”

Oil shocks generally don’t rattle the Fed, which tends to look past them as temporary disruptions. But the bigger-picture concern is how long inflation has outpaced the Fed’s 2% goal. As Powell pointed out, “It’s been five years now of inflation above target.”

Keep reading on Brew Markets.—JD

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