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When people think about financial leadership inside a business, they often think first about reporting.

Forecasts, dashboards, cash flow models, and financial statements all matter. Businesses need accurate reporting and visibility into performance. But in my experience, the real impact of strong financial leadership shows up operationally long before anyone talks about reports.

You can usually feel the difference inside a business fairly quickly.

Leadership conversations become more grounded…

When I invited Paul Sippil to join Ask the CFO, I expected an interesting conversation about retirement plans.

What I didn't expect was how many assumptions—even my own—would be challenged.

As CFOs and business owners, we spend a lot of time managing costs that directly affect our organizations. We negotiate health insurance renewals, review vendor contracts, and scrutinize operating expenses.

But when it comes to 401(k) plans, many of us assume that because they're highly regulated, everythi…

Business owners today are surrounded by advice.

Boards, peer groups, consultants, podcasts, advisors, networking circles — everyone has opinions about growth, hiring, pricing, systems, and leadership. Some of the advice is useful. Some of it is poorly informed. Much of it sounds reasonable on the surface but ignores the realities of the specific business receiving it.

That is where problems begin.

I’ve seen companies hire too quickly because they believed growth required it. I’ve seen busines…

One of the patterns I see most often in growing businesses is not a lack of effort or intelligence. Most owners are working hard and carrying a tremendous amount of responsibility well.

Where businesses tend to lose momentum is in the accumulation of unresolved decisions.

A pricing adjustment gets delayed because leadership is concerned about customer reaction. A key hire stays open too long because nobody feels fully confident in the timing. Operational inefficiencies become accepted because …

Last week, I asked you to step back and identify where your business isn’t running as well as it should.

Most people can do that pretty quickly. There’s usually a part of the business that feels slower than it should be, more manual than it should be, or harder to manage than it needs to be. That’s a good starting point.

But here’s where most businesses go next—and where things start to break down: They assume the solution is technology.

More specifically right now, they assume the solution i…

Insights from Ask the CFO with John Gies

In our most recent Ask the CFO session, I had the opportunity to sit down with John Gies, founder of Resonant Business Solutions, to talk about something most business owners rely on—but very few truly manage well:

Referrals.

Before we get into it, here’s where you can connect with John and learn more about his work:

• Website: https://johngies.com
• Company: https://resonantbusinesssolutions.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnrgies/ (he’s…

 There’s a question I keep hearing right now, and it usually comes up pretty quickly in a conversation:

“How should we be using AI in our business?”

It sounds like the right question. It feels practical. It feels like something you shouldhave an answer to right now.

But it’s actually the wrong place to start.

In last month’s Ask the CFO session on AI with Ken Scales, we kept coming back to something much simpler. Ken Scales said it directly:

“What are we trying to achieve first? It’s not, l…