CFO, a day in the life of a Chief Financial Officer

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I am going to show you how a CFO spends his day and toward the end of the video, I will share with you the best career path to follow if you want to one day become a CFO.

Mark meets with sales leaders to discuss pricing of a new software product. The sales team presents him with their ideas, where they consider making the most money while keeping inline with similar products in the market.

At 12:30 it’s time to break for lunch. Mark always has a working lunch with someone from the company, where they combine eating and discussing one area of the business.

After spending about an hour on lunch, Mark returns to the office where he meets with the FP&A team to discuss the quarterly re-forecast…. and the Focus of the meeting is revenue forecast.

The team contemplates 2 approaches to forecasting revenue in the coming quarter:
A bottom up approach
And a top down approach

With the bottom up forecast approach, it is performed just like the name implies..you start from the bottom which is a list of your products/services, then use current customer/volume data to try and predict future revenue.

While with the top down approach, the team starts at the top, meaning they assess the size of the market it operates in and its share of that market.

They decide as a team to focus more on the bottom-up approach because it will be easier to rationalize when speaking to investors…AND use a light version of the top-down method to validate the results.

The team will have to roll up their sleeves…. LOAD UP on caffeine and start building the revenue model, which will have to account for projected growth by customer, seasonality and other variables.

Ok, it’s 3 PM and it’s time to sit down and review the board slide deck. The executive team meets with the board of directors once each quarter to review financial results, forecast and business outlook. The slides need to be easy to digest and provide good information.

Mark likes a clean minimalistic slide structure, which allows him to talk over it and provide further context.

The slides present KPIs such as DSO, CAC, Gross Margin growth among others. These board meetings are typically stressful and Mark usually takes the team out for some drinks later that day to blow off some steam.

Those who qualify for a CFO role typically come from the following background:
90% of the time come from either Investing banking or equity research, while just about 10% of the time come from an Accounting background like myself.

But generally This means to maximize your chances, you want to join an investment bank or an advisory consulting role at a big firm.

This is based on my personal observation throughout my career, and to be clear, my current trajectory as a controller is to one day become a Chief Accounting Officer rather than a Chief Financial Officer.


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