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At a recent CFO Brew virtual event, The Office of the CFO: 2025 Strategies and Spend, Russell Lester, CFO of spend management platform Tropic, shared his thoughts on how CFOs can handle uncertainty and serve as a “beacon” for their companies. Here are some of his top insights:
These remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
The “four Vs” CFOs should keep in mind: What I say is that finance leaders need to exercise the four Vs: visible, vocal, versatile, and value-creating. And the importance of those four Vs is because in the past, we weren’t very visible. We often weren’t the most vocal. We could have been viewed as being set in our ways. And really, this last one is maybe the most important: value creation. The office of the CFO should be generating value for the business.
The CFO’s role in managing volatility: There’s lots of uncertainty. Will there be more [interest rate] cuts? How will that interplay with employment rates?...Everyone’s collectively holding their breath for the market to free up and for liquidity to flow again, but in the meantime, we have to lean in to our own organic cash expansion efforts. And so the responsibility to solve that and help companies survive in this period of uncertainty falls to the CFO. Once the market is robust and flowing and capital is easier to come by, the pressure will shift in terms of where we’re focused around tracking performance and identifying which bets we’re going to place, but in the meantime, when it’s leaner and tighter and the pressure is on for liquidity, it pivots to scrutiny and containment and risk avoidance.
Coping with year-end stress: Stay laser-focused on your customer. They are the reason for being. And for finance teams, the customer is often internal. It’s your peers that you’re supporting across the business. And so how do you act as that source of truth to help them make decisions? How can you help clear the runway for them?
It may mean helping the business figure out what it’s not going to do. Sometimes it takes the CFO to push and nudge that. What will we do less of? What is it okay for us to put on the shelf and do later because it is not in service to our core mission?
Managing change: Start with a plan. And I would also say, believe in the plan…Often it means that we [CFOs] will be the ones rallying people to the plan, that we are the ones that will be there to drive ownership and accountability and help them connect themselves to how the work they do contributes to executing on the plan.
Stay nimble and look for ways to act as a beacon of hope or light in the midst of what is very stormy, very choppy waters. And I guarantee you that people across the company will continue to look for how you’re feeling, especially in the next 12 months.