There are a couple ways you can explain your job as a CFO Brew reporter at a dinner party.
You can go the newsletter route, explaining how your stories arrive in the inboxes of finance professionals three times a week, and how you’re sooooo good at writing for a specific audience.
When that fails (“So, you write emails?”), you can try skirting the issue by finding the nearest finance bro and letting him deliver a bittersweet eulogy to the end of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon’s DJ days. That’ll inherently make you want to never do that again, so you can just say you’re a reporter, thus prompting the inevitable question—“What do you report on?”—and bringing you back to square one.
I like to think CFOs run into some of the same dinner party confusion, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, my top-line lesson this year is all about definitions.
What does a CFO do? When I applied for this position, our trusty editor, Drew, asked me a deceptively direct question: What does a CFO actually do? It wasn’t a trick question, he assured me, which only made it sound even more like a trick question. I must have mumbled an answer about financial reporting and planning, or protecting a company’s assets, with two fingers crossed I wasn’t majorly oversimplifying things.
As the year progressed, I saw why it was a question worth asking. Once upon a time, this was a job about spreadsheets and more spreadsheets. But in 2023, being a CFO means just about everything under the sun. You’re a storyteller; you’re a chief therapist officer; you’re an organizational enabler.
The impact of that variety quickly became evident in my conversations with CFOs. When I asked how they explained their jobs to nonfinance folks, or how they expected their position to change within the next year, they always had such wide-ranging answers that, from one to the next, you’d think they were talking about totally different fields.
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Headspace’s Nicolette Turner told me the future of the job is all about communicating with new audiences. ThredUp’s Sean Sobers said CFOs are no longer “stereotypical budget gatekeeper[s],” now they’re mainly acting as business partners. Poshmark’s Rodrigo Brumana thought CFOs with predictive analytics skills are now in the highest demand.
And this is one lesson that’s going to carry into 2024: As the nature of the job changes, so will the way CFOs describe their actual work.
Have fun with it. For all the finance pros reading this, I owe you an apology. Before I started at CFO Brew, I have to admit: I thought most of you were as vanilla as they come. Sorry!
While I had a background in the broader world of business news, my experience interviewing CFOs was limited, so let’s just say I was relying on stereotypes more than I’d like to admit. And that’s probably why one of the most lasting (and uplifting) lessons I learned this year was about the importance of levity: Some of our most popular stories were also the most unabashedly light-hearted and fun, like this one about the so-called red meat recession.
Yes, we know you want us to break down the complexities driving the financial decisions you’re making day in and day out, but it’s been heartening to realize that those very same stories can also be silly.
With time, I realized—would you believe it?—everyone loves some laughs. (Probably could’ve figured this one out before working here, but, hey, live and learn.)