The CFO & Extraordinary Execution

OpenView Venture Capital just hosted its first CFO forum this week!

The Forum was a great opportunity for the finance leaders of our portfolio companies to step away from the day-to-day and discuss common challenges faced in expansion stage technology companies.

Our focus was really the special perspective that a CFO or finance leader has across a company and how that perspective can allow him or her to significantly and positively impact value optimization across the organization.

We started the Forum with a series of key functional assessments specific to expansion stage best practices in the CFO’s areas of responsibility, and then mapped those results into a 12-18 month roadmap of initiatives to drive powerful performance improvement in Finance, Legal and IT.  The goal of this is to really ensure that our portfolio companies are equipped with the capabilities and tools that will ensure their success at their next stage of growth. 

We then discussed a methodology for driving strategic and functional initiatives into actionable operational and financial targets that, in turn, drive assumptions for detailed annual operating and financial plans. The final session was focused on best approaches to communicate, report and track progress against those plans (and thereby against strategic goals), in such a way as to help foster a culture of continuous growth and improvement across the company.

It was really a great opportunity to see these expansion stage finance leaders step “out of the back office” and think about how their unique vantage point can really help them drive and optimize value for their companies.