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James was arrogant and unpleasant.

But I had no choice but to work with him…for the next few days, at least.

I was replacing him as BU CFO. He was leaving; jumping before he was pushed.

He was a corner-office kind of guy. I was more of an open-plan man. That was one of many things I would change, but it would have to wait.

For now, his office door was shut, and we were crammed behind his desk while he walked me through his spreadsheet. It was a painful conversation. He was difficult and evasive, but I had to push on.

This was a critical part of the handover.

Six months earlier, the business had won a huge new contract. $150M of new revenue. Nearly 20% top line growth with one deal. There was a long tail on the customer's previous contract, so we wouldn't start onboarding for a few weeks, right as James walked out the door and I'd taken the seat.

I assumed this was no coincidence.

It'd be me sitting in a Monthly Business Review a couple of months later, explaining the actual financial impact of this contract win to the Group CEO and CFO. James had had the considerably easier job: explaining the expected impact six months before, setting the expectation, and lapping up the glory for a ‘transformational contract win’.

This was a fine-margin business. I know what my two biggest questions were:

For now, I was focused on the former.

James's model showed we'd generate $25M of new annualized EBIT from the $150M of revenue. Not great, but not terrible. Pretty standard margins for the industry.

"OK, so by the end of the quarter, when onboarding's done, I can expect a step up in EBIT of around $500K a week… right?"

That smug grin (I can still see it now 15 years on): "Oh no. That won't happen."

It was the answer I feared, but was expecting. I played along.

"What do you mean? There's not much seasonality. If the uplift is $25M a year, why wouldn't I see $500K a week coming through quickly once the revenue lands?"

"This was priced on raw material costs from six months ago. There's been a lot of inflation since. It'll wipe out at least half the contribution margin."

"I assume you've got some pricing dynamism built into the contract, though? We'll be able to pass that through to the customer." I already knew the answer... I'd have to reopen the contract (and risk the whole deal) to fix that later.

And James wasn't finished.

"Oh, and there's no way the factories cope with this extra volume without adding overhead. Unplanned overtime. Extra management costs. Probably inflated utilities. At least $200K a week of cost risk in there. You'll be lucky to break even on this deal when the dust settles."

This was a big thing to say, and it was delivered so casually. Without a care in the world. It made me immediately want to land James with a devastating two-handed simultaneous powerslap (I still wish I had.)

"What the hell do you mean? $150M of additional volume for no new contribution at all? We'll be busy fools. Why wasn't that built into the pricing? Who have you told?"

"Well, we didn't build it in because we classify most of those as fixed costs in the P&L. So we don't treat them like contribution margin."

We then had a dumb argument about the definition of contribution margin. I explained to him that the only thing that mattered was the net new profit this contract would deliver, not some nebulous accounting debate.

If it took another $200K a week of fixed cost to make the contract work, it was a relevant cost for the analysis. This should not have been controversial.

"I don't get it. This model has your name on it. $25M of additional profit. And now you are saying it’ll deliver nothing?"

"Yeah… well. Now it's got your name on it. Anyway… I tried."

He hadn't. It was the kind of passive defeatism that I hate from anyone. But from a business leader? Pathetic.

The business (including the Group CEO and CFO) was assuming this contract would dilute our overheads significantly. It wouldn't. It was like James had been sat on this secret, and would now bail just in time before the truth was inevitably exposed.

This new contract would just make us busier, stretch management bandwidth, and all for terrible pricing. No wonder we'd won the contract. The customer was the only winner in this deal.

I came in the next day for two more days of handover before he left.

There was a sticky note on his laptop, along with his work phone, on the desk. "Sorry!" With a smiley face.

Turned out, that had been his exit. He wouldn't show for his last two days.

An exit confession, a Post-It note, and… gone.

This month, we're talking about all things growth, and specifically the role of the CFO within it:

Let me kick this whole thing off by dispelling one piece of nonsense that particularly gets my back up.

I frequently hear it on CFO podcasts or from CFO community owners: the CFO's role is to "drive growth." Some even try to reframe the role with puke-worthy titles like Chief Future Officer or Chief Growth Officer.

If you, as the CFO, are the person in the business "driving" growth, then at least one of the following must be true:

So why do people say it?

The short answer: It sounds good, generates social media traffic, scratches egos, and sells community platforms, consultancy, and software. CFOs like to hear it. But that doesn't make it true…

Outstanding performance in an exec team comes from one shared big goal, but with each individual holding a clear, specific role within it. Those roles carry tension. Day to day, they need slightly different things. And they don't all matter equally at every moment.

Think about it like a soccer team. Note: Yes… you're going to have to put up with endless analogies from the beautiful game over the next couple of months. I’m not sorry.

A great finance team is like the deep-lying midfielder. They control the rhythm and tempo of the play. They don't attack directly, (that's for the players ahead of them), but they set the tempo that tells the attackers when the moment is on. And they make sure everyone around them knows their role in it.

It doesn't mean they never venture forward and occasionally score the odd goal, but that's not their core function. There are other players on the pitch to score the goals and take the glory: the CEO, the CRO, the CMO.

So is the CFO a defensive role? Of course not. The best deep-lying midfielders dictate the whole tempo of the attack. But they dictate it; they don't finish it. And when the game turns, and the team has to dig in? They're the first ones back, doing the dirty work.

The CFO’s role is to enable growth. To clear the way, to give the real drivers of growth everything they need to be amazing.

The CFO should be Rodri, not Haaland.

Or for a more refined example, Andrea Pirlo, not Ronaldo (9). And who wouldn’t want to be Andrea Pirlo:

Headlines over the last twelve months have changed what we thought was possible with growth.

We've seen Anthropic go from zero to a ~$47B revenue run-rate in three years. And even outside of tech: Grüns, the vitamin gummy business, hit $100M of revenue and an exit to Unilever for a reported $1.2B in under three years. Unprecedented for a consumer brand.

In the long run, it's normally true that whoever can spend the most to grow will win. Not always… there are plenty of examples where it's gone horribly wrong (WeWork, Casper, Blue Apron), but often.

Here is a tweet I saw this week that reminded me how few CFO’s get this:

But for many businesses, growth is a much more mundane set of questions. No less important to your own business, just less likely to make a headline.

Do we take this new business win if it means diluting our margins? Do we invest in new capacity ahead of growth, or wait for more proof of demand? If growth means offering different payment terms that crush working capital, how do we fund it?

But before you get to any of that, there's one question more important than all of them…

When Warren Buffett talks about the "prototype of a dream business," you'd assume he was talking about his highest-profile wins: Apple, Coca-Cola, or GEICO.

But in 2007, that's how he described See's Candies, the American boxed chocolate business.

When Buffett bought See's Candies in 1972, it was generating $30 million of annual revenue, which in today's money would be roughly $250 million.

See's Candies' revenue today is not publicly disclosed, but it is estimated to be somewhere between $400 million and $500 million. That suggests consumption can only have grown modestly, if at all, beyond population growth (~65% since 1972).

Management chose to protect the brand rather than actively pursue any real volume growth at all, FOR FIVE DECADES!

So, how has that worked out?

See's cost Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway $25 million in 1972, and by 2007 he reported that the business was generating $82 million of annual pre-tax earnings and had produced $1.35 billion of cumulative pre-tax earnings in the 35 years (then) since acquisition. I assume that same figure must now run well into multiple billions a further two decades later.

‘Not growing’ has worked out pretty well over 50+ years for See’s.

The mistake many businesses make is assuming that growth comes from doing more. Often the opposite is true.

Take the sensational podcast Acquired. By my estimate, they have built a business generating somewhere in the region of $10-15 million of annual ad revenue in 2025, while producing only 12 episodes of their main show.

So to grow, you’d think they just do more pods, right? No… instead, they reduced output (in episode volume) so they could increase depth and research quality.

This year, they will only do 8 podcasts. Which direction do you think revenue will head in?

I’ll place my bet that it will grow significantly.

Typically, growth is talked about in terms of revenue. And for good reason… all things being equal, it's a decent proxy for the size of the business. And, well… growth = an increase in size.

But that's all it is. A proxy. Being precise about what you want to grow matters far more, and it depends on your strategy and vertical. Some examples:

As you saw in the opening story, James had let the business be led by a single revenue metric. In the long run, we'd have to take volume out of that business, not just the contract we'd won, but a little more on top, to create room to build back better, more profitable, durable, growth.

There was a sweet spot in there: A perfect mix of volume across different categories that would have been a far better growth objective. Being precise about what growth was needed, and where. We got there, but it took a couple of years and a lot of unwinding.

Next week, we'll go much deeper into the different types of growth and how and when to target each.

The default mode for the CFO should be to remove obstacles to growth.

That can mean removing unnecessary friction caused by finance itself. It can be funding and cashflow. It can mean making sure the front-line growth teams have the tools and guardrails they need to win.

Or it can be something else altogether…

Listen to Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao on the Invest Like the Best podcast. He describes making daily decisions about purchasing and allocating compute. Compute was the single most constraining resource for the business, so while others were driving growth, his job was to limit the drag that constraint imposed.

If the CEO and CRO are the ones firing the burner on the hot air balloon, the CFO's job is to throw off the sandbags and to know which ones and when.

It’s a subtle difference, but it’s important.

And there are also times when the CFO needs to get firmly IN the way of "growth." That's exactly what James failed to do in the opening story. He knew the deal was bad. His job was to throw his body in front of it, but he wasn't prepared to do it.

Knowing when to step in takes fine judgment. So does knowing how.

Plenty of CFOs fail here. They push back at the wrong time or in the wrong way. Do it badly, and you become the person the business stops trusting with the big calls. Or just deadweight on an ambitious business.

That's what this series is for. A Playbook for thinking about growth from first principles. And for sharpening the judgment that tells you when to clear the way, when to step in front, and how to do either one well.

Post I: Series Introduction (Today)

Post II: What is Growth? (Next Week)

Post III: The Math of Growth

Post IV: Building a Growth-Friendly Finance Function

Next week, we will kick off by getting deep into the different types of growth and when they apply.

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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.