🤢 Altitude sickness

What I meant: Errr…no. Of course, I don’t. It’ll take us 5 days to close revenue, and it’ll be another three days until we close the P&L, and even then we’ll need the next five to work out wtf happened.

Campfire is the ERP that helps you close faster, and get insight into the boardroom while it’s still box fresh

It had taken about a month for this new job to blow up my personal operating system.

Farewell my trusty servant of the last ten years. I honestly thought I’d climbed Productivity Everest and found the perfect setup for how my brain worked.

Maybe “personal operating system” is a stretch. 

Really, it was just a sheet of A3 paper.

I’d divided it into four quadrants: Me, Team, Business, Functions. Then I’d subdivided each into smaller headings until it became a kind of combination of a two-dimensional to-do list and memory system.

Every Sunday night, I’d print a blank copy and fill it in by hand, using my meeting notes from the previous week to catch anything I might otherwise forget.

The idea was simple: get the things I wanted close to mind for the week onto one page.

Then I’d highlight the three to five things that mattered most.

Finally, I’d fold the sheet in half and tape it inside the front cover of my notebook.

I’d go into the week grounded in my priorities, rather than immediately getting dragged around by whatever noise happened to be sitting in my inbox. And the system could flex; I could add anything new that came up.  

I’d been on the same journey a lot of growing executives go on when they’re figuring out the right system for managing themselves.

Over time, my journey looked something like this:

My trusty steed. The Robin to my Batman. The Gromit to my Wallace. The Greg to my Tom…

And yet here I was, four weeks into my first Group CFO role, and the sheer breadth of the patch had blown up almost every way of working I’d relied on.

Robin, Gromit and... yes, even Greg.

Killed in action.

There was just too much surface area.

All the old stuff was still there. Business performance. Cash. Forecasting. Partnering the operating. The finance team. People problems. The normal machinery of running a finance team.

But in this new role the stakeholder map exploded… Shareholders. Banks. Bondholders. Rating agencies. Credit insurers. And that was before I got to the Board and its various committees.

Then there was the project load.

Previously, I could fold major projects into the same A3 sheet. Now I had M&A, financing, systems work, transformation programs and a bunch of other things all running at once.

And that’s before you got to the other functions I was responsible for: procurement, supply chain, transformation, IT. Etc.

Each seemed to need its own sheet.

And then I needed to remember to book a dental appointment. Where was I supposed to write that?

Before long, my beautifully simple one-page system had become seven or eight A3 sheets, all with similar formatting, stapled together and stuffed inside a plastic wallet glued into the back of my notebook.

You don’t need me to tell you, my CFO friend, that this did not fucking work. It was a disaster.

At the same time, I was getting to know my new CEO best friend across the hall. We were only a few weeks in working together, but he had a very deliberate, and different, system.

He carried a huge lever-arch file around with him everywhere.

Inside it, he had a page for every person in the business he regularly needed to speak to. At its core, each page was basically a running list of things that person had promised to do for him. 

He also kept key pages he’d ripped out of the latest business-unit reporting packs, usually annotated. Functional reviews. Project plans. Notes from previous conversations. He could pull out a number, a commitment, or a previous discussion seemingly on demand.

It looked chaotic… but it wasn’t.

He had a very precise system for what went into the folder, what came out, and where everything lived. He could get to almost anything he needed very quickly. He didn’t really use an assistant beyond calendar management and travel.

The lever-arch file was effectively his second brain.

Now… I was never going to become the lever-arch-file guy.

I wasn’t going to lug a massive folder into every meeting. He could pull it off; a big guy, a commanding presence, loads of charisma. “Oh yeah, he’s the lever-arch guy. He’s so cool.”

But a CFO? Worse, an accountant? Walking into every meeting clutching a lever-arch file?

I could hear the whispers already… “Here he comes again... with his little fucking folder.”

No, that was never going to be me.

But I needed to find a system that was me…

So here we are. W75% of the way through the year. We’re at the 9+3 stage… rebasing the Long Range Plan ahead of budget season. Closing Q3 (great quarter, guys) and crashing into one final sprint to finish the year.

And a new month also means a new Playbook series…

So what is this series actually about?

Getting CFO shit done.

As I shared in the opening story, the tools that had served me perfectly well for years (basically a well-organized calendar plus a two-dimensional to-do list) fell apart quickly when they met a genuinely broad, complex Group CFO job. I would find my eyes popping open at 3AM, adrenaline racing, realizing that I’d forgotten something critical for my board update (published 6 hours earlier). That was the kind of mistake my system had always been good enough to protect me from in less complex roles. 

There were simply too many dimensions to the role to throw a simple fire blanket over.

I needed something with more shape. A way to stay on top of the right things at the right time, to balance protecting the business with growing it. To know where my attention needed to go, and how deeply I needed to get involved.

So this series is about creating the system for running the CFO job.

Not a list of CFO responsibilities, finance operating model, org chart, or your reporting stack.

I mean the way of operating that sits above that. A system of directing your, your team’s and the business’s attention toward the things that matter.

Because once a job reaches a certain size and complexity, your way of managing it has to become less organic and more deliberate.

It won’t just be your calendar, your inbox, and a well-organized to-do list… or at least not without some very careful guardrails.

You need a toolkit of stuff that works together to surface the right things, at the right time, in the right place, to stop the important things from disappearing into the noise.

I cannot multitask.

I can barely think about more than one thing at once, let alone do two things at once. In fact, I respectfully offer that multitasking doesn’t really exist.

Editor’s note: I told Mrs Secret CFO this and she said I should stop projecting my ineptitude onto my 60,000 ‘internet finance fwends’.

The truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever met a genuinely effective senior executive who didn’t have a  system that helped them intentionally focus on one thing at a time.

Beyond the lever-arch-file CEO from the opening story, I’ve seen:

Now, you are probably turning your nose up at one or more of those, and that’s kinda the point.

They would turn their nose up at yours too… I’ve seen all of these used effectively by very successful execs.

Each had built some way of carrying the job: to hold context, commitments, priorities, people, decisions and loose ends without relying entirely on memory. That worked for their brain and personality.

There are a few features of the CFO role specifically that any personal operating system has to account for:

So yes, this is a broader executive challenge than finance, but what can I say?

I care a lot about CFOs and not a lot else. So we’re going to look at operating systems for CFOs…

One thing I’ve noticed in my 40s… I kinda just forget stuff. Things that I definitely told my brain were important at the time. And yet... I still forget it. That did not happen to me 15 years ago.

I haven’t left one of my kids at the school gates yet, but it feels like only a matter of time. And even if I did… I wouldn’t admit it (just in case Mrs SCFO is reading.)

I’m not a neuroscientist, but the broad direction of the research is pretty clear: working memory gets better through childhood and early adulthood, peaks and then starts a long, gradual decline.

Oh, great. Demand for brain cells goes up, and supply goes down. Thanks, science…

But it’s not all bad.

Because, while raw capacity may not keep expanding forever, you do get better at using what you have. You build patterns, judgment, and crucially… systems.

James Clear puts it neatly: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

What does that mean for a CFO? And how do you build a system that actually works for the job you have?

That is exactly what this series is about.

You might be reading this post thinking: “For fuck’s sake, can’t you see what’s happening? Get out of the 20th century, man. AI fixes all of this...”

And honestly, I think you’d be right.

In fact, this is one of the areas where I think AI can be genuinely extraordinary today (depending on how brave you are with privacy assumptions.)

In the short term, I’m far more excited about how AI is transforming my personal operating system than I am about using it to make another nice-looking but superficial last-mile dashboard automation.

And I’ve made some big changes in recent months using AI in how I run myself and my work. And if you are busy and overwhelmed (a state I’ve been in perpetually, probably since my first child was born), I honestly think personal productivity is the best place to start with AI.

I’ll share examples throughout this series.

And to get the best out of it, you have to be able to codify how you work.

Which means understanding your current system, what works for you, and why, is more valuable than ever.

A mistake I see among inexperienced CFOs, and even some experienced (but inattentive) ones, is failing to focus their attention into the right place.

There are two concepts I want to introduce here that we’ll come back to throughout this series.

I call the first altitude control.

I remember asking the very first CFO I worked for, like any good rookie, what unusual skill you needed to become a good CFO. His answer is probably even more true today than it was then.

He said: you need to be able to zoom in and out at will.

Constantly scanning the whole patch from above, while being capable of diving into extraordinary detail when something warrants it.

He described it a bit like a helicopter circling a forest looking for fires. Most of the time you need the aerial view. But when you spot smoke, you need to get down on the ground and work out exactly what the fuck is burning and how to put it out.

When you’re 60 hours per week deep into an M&A project, it’s surprisingly easy to miss that cash flow in your core business is slowly driving off a cliff. Or to become so in the weeds fixing a performance problem, you missed that your burned out your two best people who both resign in the space of a week.

I see this particularly with new CFOs, who naturally tend to bend their time toward the part of the role they already know best.

CFO-ing does not mean operating at a permanently higher altitude. It means having more altitude levels to choose from and getting wonderful at picking the right one, at the right time.

The second concept is attention quality.

This matters particularly when you’re reviewing other people’s work, which becomes an increasingly large part of the job as your finance team gets bigger.

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow popularized the idea of two broad modes of thinking:

I’m bastardizing the concept slightly for my own purposes here, but I realized over time that I have two very different review modes.

A scan is fast.

I’m looking for shape, exceptions, things that don’t smell right, perimeter issues, whether or not the broad argument hangs together. A deep review is more deliberate. Door shut. Distractions gone. Line by line if necessary.

And the same task might need different attention qualities at different stages. Take an earnings call script. An early proof might only need a scan. Do the key themes make sense? Is the structure right? Are we emphasizing the right things? But once we’re getting close to the final draft, at some point I’m sitting down and going through every fucking line.

This distinction is vitally important, because constantly switching altitude and attention quality is wildly inefficient.

If you’ve ever tried to pull together your CFO report in four 30-minute gaps between 90-minute business performance reviews, while a Board pre-read deadline is breathing down your neck, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

You can technically find the time. But you cannot necessarily find the right kind of attention.

Get the right operating system for you, and it fixes these kinds of problems.

So this month I’m going to share the tools I used to manage the breadth of my CFO roles, and how you can build one to fit you.

Here’s the running order:

In the meantime, here is some homework you can use for some introspection on your own current toolkit, and where it might be breaking:

Now, more than ever, is the time to get deliberate about how you work.

And to codify it, so AI can increasingly take some of the cognitively demanding coordination, context management, and prioritization off your plate.

But that starts with understanding the core operating modes of the CFO and finance function.

I call them the Four Es. And that’s where we’re going next week…

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Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need.