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š Selling the Dream: Building (and Retaining) A Dream Team
And when to get rid of dead weight


The art of simplifying your finances from day one
In a startup, being the first can be exhilarating. Being the first finance lead, however, can be daunting. Mercury explains how to simplify the complexities youāll inherit and establish a strong finance function in the first few months.
Learn the five steps to simplifying your financial workflows and positioning yourself and the company to perform at the highest level.


Selling the dream
I was devastated.
āWhat ā¦ both of them?ā I confirmed, already knowing the answer.
āYes, both of themā Heather confirmed.
I had just taken my first business unit CFO role. I could not believe the state of the finance team I had inherited. Across the total team of 45, I had identified only 2 people who I felt were of the right caliber.
There were critical weaknesses in financial control. And I didnāt have the people to fix it. Iād already decided two people had to go urgently, but not until they had been replaced.
Iād appointed Heather as the recruiter (working for one of the major global finance recruitment players) to go and find two A-Player accountants from the Big 4. I needed a ātalent floodā into this barren land.
But it wouldnāt be easy. The business did not have a good reputation as a finance employer in the market. This was one of the problems I had been appointed to fix.
Heather had done her job in getting good candidates to the table. There were two I liked a lot. Both highly rated by PwC (one senior manager and one manager). And I had been able to sell my vision of an exciting transformation to them, and their part in it. Or so I thought.
They had verbally accepted our offers on a Friday.
By early the following week, Heather had called to tell me they had backed out and would be staying with PwC. Both of them! This was no coincidence.
Iām still not quite sure exactly what happened in those few days. But we later discovered that one of them had spoken to another recruiter over the weekend. Having heard that these two top-tier candidates were coming to join our business, the rogue recruiter did a hatchet job on our company. Highlighting our high employee turnover in finance, telling stories of candidates who had left wishing theyād never joined. Complete sabotage.
It worked. It spooked the candidate, who in turn spoke to their colleague. Who was also spooked. On Monday, theyād both gone quiet on Heather. By Tuesday evening, Iād got the news that both were reneging on the offers.
It was devastating. The issues with the reputation of the business as a finance employer were real. And some of the criticism justified. But my appointment had been the start of changing that, and we needed to put the past behind us.
Here, weād fallen at the first hurdle.
But it was a valuable lesson. I needed more than a dream to sell to candidates. We were simply ātoo earlyā for A players. We had to walk before we could run, and we werenāt even crawling yet.
And weād dodged a bullet (or two) in a way. I can see now with hindsight, itās unlikely the two candidates would have lasted long in a transformation. Too ugly for them.
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This is part 3 of a 3-part series on building a finance team.
Selling the Dream: Building (and Retaining) A Dream Team

Source: Giphy
In week 1 of this series, we explored the importance of a vision for a finance team.
Last week, we went deep into how to structure a finance team.
Now we need to ensure we have great people to fill that team.
There are seven principles for attracting and retaining great people:
Be someone great people want to work for
Hire for Values
Manage with Guardrails
Retain Before Recruit
Grow Your Own
Donāt tolerate dead wood
Focus on 1:1 relationships
1) Be someone great people want to work for
If you want to hire great people, it starts with you. You need to be someone great people want to work for.
People work for people, not companies.
I have seen it many times in my career. Inside and outside finance. High-performing, settled teams are decimated by a new leader that no one wants to work for. Few say it out loud. But slowly they vote with their feet and leave the business. And over a couple of years, the team is unrecognizable from the high-performing unit it once was.
Iāve also seen the opposite. Great leaders walk into poor teams and build confidence and quality.
BUT ā¦ it takes 10x longer for an A Player to build something, than it does for a bad leader to tear the same thing down.
Different people want different things from their boss. But there are a few things that are appealing to most people:
Be someone they feel they can learn from. Share what you know generously.
Give clear, timely, and fair feedback
Never leave them wondering what they need to do to reach the next level
Support them publicly. Never throw them under the bus.
Challenge them privately. Push them to be better in a safe space.
These are things anyone can do at any level. You donāt need to be a CFO to practice these qualities.
And they compound. Those great people will learn these skills from you. They will then do the same with their teams. You will see the power of this over a long period when leading a large team.
But it starts at the top.
2) Hire for values
Weāve all been there. That one guy (or girl, but it's normally a guy) who behaves like an a**hole. But no-one will touch because they are āgood at what they do.ā Getting rid of these people is always painful in the short term. They tend to use access to data or expertise to build moats around themselves in organizations. Which is hard to undo.
But you are always better off without these people in the long term.
Itās hard to understand how costly it is to have a value misalignment in your team. That is until youāve seen what both good and bad look like.
A-Players are forged in their attitude and values as much as they are in their talent, qualifications or experience.
By hiring people whose values align with the teams, youāll accelerate your journey. They will hire similarly well-fitting people.
And the reverse is true, one bad culture fit can spread toxicity like wildfire.
Raw intellectual horsepower is important. But letās face it, business finance is not that complicated. You donāt need elite intelligence to run or work in a finance function.
Never substitute someone with perfect values alignment for a sh*tty person with an extra 5 IQ points.
3) Give guardrails
A common management philosophy I hear is: āHire great people and get out of their way.ā
I disagree with this. Even great people need direction. They have bad days and good days, just like everyone else.
But micromanagement isnāt the answer either. No seed will ever grow if you dig it up every day.
Instead, set guardrails. Like bumpers for children in a bowling lane. They are there to step in if needed and help correct a mistake. And you should adjust the width based on the individual and what they need.
Your style should adapt to the needs of the individuals. And what you need to get the best from someone at a point in time. A leader with just one style is no leader at all.
Iāve had some people that need very little management. Set the objectives at the start of the year, 1-hour check-in every two weeks, and away they go.
Iāve also had people that have needed daily check-ins. This could be because of experience or competence. But it also could have nothing to do with the individualā¦
It might be the sensitivity of the work they are performing. For example, during a big M&A deal, my VP of Corporate Development and I will be speaking multiple times per day. Constantly reassessing the position of the guardrails.
You need to give people the space to make low-stakes mistakes. People learn 10x faster by self-correcting mistakes.
The secret sauce here is in learning to adjust the position of the guardrails to fit the risk.
4) Retention first
Itās no good just being a place great people want to join. You need to be a place great people want to stay.
Iāve inherited teams with high turnover several times. Itās a pain the a**. Itās highly disruptive. Recruiting is expensive, and Iām not just talking about recruitment fees.
Itās the intangible costs too. Like another six-month stall in progress while you have to find and onboard the right person. The uncertainty you have to plan with, that someone is going to pack and leave at any moment. And the cost all of that has on the motivation of your team that is in it for the long haul.
If you are lucky, you can keep the wheels turning, but you wonāt move anything meaningfully forward.
Retention is everything.
One way to retain people is with money. This can be effective in the short term but is almost always the wrong play in the long term. You need to pay your people well. But if you are consistently paying above market there is an issue. The non-financial components of your offer are likely below market.
Very similar to a business strategy. Often people resort to price competition when it is all they have left.
Great finance pros donāt just auction themselves off to the highest bidder. Money is a āhygieneā factor. It needs to be good enough, but itās not enough on its own.
What most top finance pros are looking for are long-term opportunities. Plus a vision and leader they can get behind. You can fake that when you are hiring. You cannot fake it once they are inside the business.
Have real, credible plans for how each of your stars can grow 1 or 2 levels in the next 3-5 years. They want to know you share their ambition.
5) Grow your own
There are so many great things about hiring fresh college grads (if you can see past the silly broccoli haircuts):

Source: Reddit
If you pick them right, you get energy and work ethic. And they will learn at a pace that will intimidate the rest of your team (in a good way).
But the best thing is you can mold them into the shape the business needs. They can become lightning rods for the culture you want to create in your finance team. They come without a preconception of what normal is. And therefore you can grow them into whatever you want.
Often CFOs strengthen their team from the ātop down.ā And that is right more often than not. But you also need to overinvest in the raw material coming into the business at the entry-level.
There is no substitute for homegrown talent.
One graduate I developed earlier in my career has gone on to take a country CFO role for a high-profile business. Iāve yet to have one go on to a corporate Group CFO role, but it will come with time.
And when it does, it will be one of the proudest moments of my career.
6) Donāt tolerate dead wood
There is one thing Iāve seen that turns off good people quicker than any other: leadership that tolerates mediocrity.
The cost wonāt be obvious immediately. Itās a slow death that eats away at the soul. And eventually, great people will vote with their feet.
Iāve built a career on turning around finance functions. Which means Iāve inherited some dumpster fire teams in my time.
Naturally, that takes time to fix. You canāt change 90% of the team overnight, as much as youād like to. One of the key challenges as you bring stars into the team is managing their expectations in those early days. This is what I didnāt understand when failing to hire those two A-Players from PwC.
Sometimes you have to work with what you have. And others you need to clear out.
The key is that you get that judgment right.
And when itās time to cut ties with someone, you do it quickly and fairly.
Iāve fired people more times than I can count. I can think of plenty I should have dealt with sooner. I canāt think of a single one that I should have given more time.
7) Teams are just a series of 1:1 relationships
At its core, teams are groups of people. Not one unit. They are a series of relationships, with increasing complexity as they get bigger.
The complexity involved in managing a team grows in proportion to the square of the number of its members. Put another way: managing a team with 9 people is more than 3 times more complicated than managing a team with 3 people.
This is why it is important to:
Manage problems in a small team
Organize large teams with clear structures so they act as a team made up of small teams.
When I ran my first post-merger integration, I would hold these huge cross-functional meetings. I thought I was doing the right thing āgetting all the stakeholders in a room.ā
It did not work at all.
I soon learned that the shape and composition of a team drive its function. That is as much about personality types as it is about roles or experience.
Each line in a team represents a unique relationship. With its own history, context, dynamics, goals, etc.
Some of those relationships will be more important than others. Your Head of FP&A <> Controller relationship, for example. Or the relationships inside your accounting team. Or relationships between business partners and their partner function leads.
As the leader of the team, your job is to give those relationships the space to grow and flourish. And when key relationships fail or produce crap results, you need to intervene.
That could mean anything from a quick chat with one or the other. Or in extreme cases, firing one or both. Or anything in between ā¦
The cure needs to fit the disease.
Itās hard to be specific on how you do this. But it starts with paying attention, listening to people, and observing dynamics. When you hire, fill gaps with the right personality type. It's important to get the best out of those critical relationships.
Finding and retaining great people for a finance team is not easy. But, it might be the most important part of your job.
After all, until AI replaces us all, the team is only as good as its (human) components and the 1:1 relationships they form.
This is why Iāve spent so much time establishing and fine-tuning my principles for building and improving finance teams.
Note, that we didnāt talk hiring process for great people.
Next week we have a special on hiring finance leaders, where I will set out the step-by-step process I use.

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Cheeseball from Tampa, FL asked:
Our CFO has started to say financials just need to be āgood enoughā. This good enough stance means things are booked into the GL to the wrong cost centers & accruals are completely disregarded. Iāve been in finance & accounting my whole life, and accuracy has always been the name of the game. What do you make of this?

This is an interesting question, Cheeseball (if indeed that is your real nameā¦). There are plenty of finance functions that think like this. And itās not without merit. Finance is a supporting function after all, so maybe good enough is ok?
The question is thisā¦ is what you are seeing really āgood enough?ā Mis-postings and disregarding accruals donāt sound āgood enoughā to me. It sounds quite sh*t.
It does say that the business you are in doesnāt have a strategic view of finance. And is it the business? Or is it the CFO? And what is it that is the barrier to being better? Is it resources? Is it the CFOs own capabilities/shortcomings?
If I were in your shoes, these are questions I would want to answer in order to decide whether this was the place I wanted to dedicate 50 of my own precious hours every week for the foreseeable future.
I have always spent my time in finance teams where the input of finance is vital. And if we were to make mistakes, there would be real consequences for the business. Thatās how you deliver value in finance. And itās how you learn and how you grow.
Something for you to think about.
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And Finally
Next week, we have a special on hiring finance leaders, where I will set out the step-by-step process I use.
If you enjoyed todayās content, donāt forget to check out this weekās sponsor Mercury.
Stay crispy,
The Secret CFO
Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe Iām 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.

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