"And if it goes wrong?"

Every ERP business case I’ve taken to a board hits that question about four minutes in. 

There’s no clean answer, so the implementation gets pushed again… and the risk just moves further out.

Campfire have answers to the tough implementation questions you can take into the boardroom.  

Alex Rogo had a problem.

Things were going badly at the industrial manufacturing plant he was running for UniCo, a large American manufacturing company: delayed shipments, piling inventory, spiraling costs, angry customers, etc.

His boss gave Alex three months to turn the place around, or the factory was closing.

But when Alex looked around the factory, nobody seemed to be slacking.

The machines were running, workers were busy, supervisors were chasing production targets. Everybody seemed to be doing their bit, and yet the whole operation was a disaster.

Eventually, Alex turned the plant around with the help of an old university professor, and saved the factory by focusing on one simple question:

What was actually stopping the factory from producing more?

That led him to a few key insights:

Now, if this story is feeling familiar, that's because Alex isn't a real person, and UniCo isn't a real company.

He's the protagonist of The Goal, the 1984 management novel by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox.

Yes, 'management novels' are a thing…

Seriously, if you haven't read this, it's incredible. There is even a graphic novel version.

Goldratt's ideas became known as the Theory of Constraints, and they stretch way past factory floors. I only discovered Goldratt's book a few years ago, but I studied the Theory of Constraints in business school.

Elon Musk has talked about how he makes progress across so many businesses at once. His approach is essentially the same, attacking whatever the biggest constraint is at any given moment. Here is a clip of his talking about it:

If the bottleneck is one failing machine in one part of battery production, that's where he focuses his attention until it's no longer the problem.

Then he moves on to the next.

Just relentlessly directing his attention toward whatever is currently placing the greatest rate limit on the whole system.

I think that's an incredibly elegant way to think about the job of a leader.

And it stretches well beyond factories…

In the first week, we defined your CFO operating system as the tools and routines through which you get work done as CFO. And why the sheer surface area of the CFO role means this needs to be deliberate and designed.

Last week, we broke down the four operating modes of the CFO, the Four Es:

This week, we're getting into how to set up your routine and build your operating rhythm, i.e. what you do and when.

We'll be building on some of the ideas and terminology from last week's post, so if you haven't read that yet, I'd suggest doing so before reading on.

Ready?

Cool…

The greatest constraint in your personal operating system, as CFO, is your own attention.

The problem, as we saw last week, is that the recurring machinery of the business can (and normally will) consume all of it.

Then, when something unexpected or intense comes around, like a performance crisis or an M&A deal, it bends you all out of shape. Meanwhile, all the things that would make tomorrow a bit easier get shoved onto the back burner too.

So this week, we're focusing on how you address that. How you stay on top of the whole business without spending your entire life monitoring it.

The goal is to systematize the Everyday work, the regular machinations of the business, in a way that leaves you enough capacity to attack the most important constraints as they emerge. Just like we saw in our opening story.

It's common for CFOs to plan every inch of their time. But, a bit like in Alex Rogo's factory, a system running at full capacity leaves very little room to absorb disruption. Let alone focus on the things that will make the biggest difference.

But I say that like it's easy to do... (it’s not).

As we said in the first post, the surface area of a complex CFO role is huge.

In my last job, external stakeholders alone—lenders, shareholders, pension trustees, analysts, key customers, suppliers, rating agencies, credit insurers and regulators—wanted enough of my time that I could have spent a solid 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, just talking to them.

And that is completely ignoring anything happening INSIDE the business. You know… where the real work is.

And let's be clear, the Everyday job isn't just what is coming at you. Sure, there's inbound work: reviews, monitoring, governance. But there's also outbound work: preparing for board meetings, thinking through solutions to problems, making decisions, actually producing something yourself.

Both need proper time in the calendar.

So, we start by focusing on just one of the Four Es: Everyday. The better you get this working, the easier it becomes to make space for everything else.

I call this your operating rhythm.

Let's approach it in five steps:

I make this sound so organized, don't I? Like I had it all worked out at the time.

To be clear, I absolutely did not. I stumbled my way there.

It's only with the space, reflection and clarity I have now that I can see what actually worked. I couldn't have articulated it this way back then.

Hopefully, you can use this pattern to get there a little faster than I did.

Back in week one, I described the hellscape of trying to watch far too many things at once.

My trusty four quadrants from my old A3 system, which had served me so well in earlier roles, had somehow multiplied into about 30 different areas demanding my attention. And my head exploded before the first month was out.

The problem wasn't just the volume of work. I was trying to monitor, prioritize, and plan at completely the wrong altitude.

After plenty of iteration and heartache, I eventually managed to group my responsibilities as a Group CFO into six buckets:

Now, I should add, these were right for me. The right answer depends on your business and your role.

As a Business Unit CFO, I might have had a bucket for Exec and another for Corporate, instead of Non-finance and Stakeholders.

You might be in a business where Transformation is so active that it deserves a bucket of its own. Or in a 100% CEO-owned business where 'CEO' replaces Stakeholders.

Defining these at the right level is important because it helps you organize your work and think about it at the right altitude.

Back to my earlier point about Stakeholders. I could easily have given each stakeholder group its own bucket,  and done the same for each non-finance function. But that would have left me with way too many buckets. And I'd probably have ended up misallocating my time toward them anyways. That also told me something about the org design I needed.

While there's no hard rule on the number, I'd say three is probably too few and eight is too many. So let's call four to seven buckets a reasonable spread for managing your cognitive load.

To draw a parallel, these days I break my work into four buckets:

That's proven to be the right level for me. Even though I spend 80% of my time in the first bucket, it’s been the right way to think about and organize the work. So the buckets don’t need to be evenly distributed.

With your buckets set, you can now do a full inventory of your target Everyday touchpoints.

Go bucket by bucket and build a long list of recurring obligations. Don't worry about organizing it perfectly yet.

Start by separating inbound from outbound work:

Make sure you include recurring oversight of Evolution: transformation steering, improvement projects, capability development, etc.

As we said last week, the governance of ‘Evolution’ actually belongs in your Everyday routine. That's how you make sure it happens.

And don't forget the less obvious recurring work: personal administration, talent reviews, stakeholder management, etc.

The important thing is to distinguish genuine recurring obligations from one-off projects and interventions. We'll come to those later.

Next, determine how often each obligation deserves attention, and what form that attention should take.

Start by assigning frequencies: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually.

The right frequency depends on three things: how quickly something changes, how consequential it is, and how quickly you might need to react.

Broadly, my approach was:

*I am going to share my own cadence as CFO in more detail in the final part of this series, so this is just a snapshot.

Think about format as well as frequency. Does something need a meeting? A written update? A quick scan? A deep review?

Remember, every additional review creates work for the people preparing it. More isn't necessarily better.

The right cadence gives you enough visibility to intervene before problems become unmanageable, without over-monitoring everything.

And here's where things get interesting.

Once you’ve assigned each obligation a frequency, format, and duration, you can calculate how much of your attention your Everyday rhythm will consume.

The right answer depends on your role and circumstances, but I think 50% is a pretty good target.

That gives you enough structure to stay on top of the whole patch, while leaving roughly half your capacity outside the fixed rhythm.

If something starts going badly wrong in one part of the business, you have a meaningful chunk of your time available to throw at it. It’s also where your Event capacity comes from if you need it… which you will.

Now, you might be surprised to see 1:1s only quarterly with my direct reports. But I've always found frequently scheduled 1:1s a surprisingly inefficient way to run a senior team.

You can burn an enormous amount of time in these meetings. Especially when you're trying to solve problems one-on-one that actually need three or four people in the room. And because 1:1s sound like such a good leadership habit, nobody ever seems to question how much time they consume.

My preference was to be more available to my team throughout the week, creating opportunities for spontaneous conversations and interventions that were often far more valuable than another scheduled hour together.

Of course, this assumes you're actually available. If you only see your direct reports formally once a quarter AND your calendar is permanently full, you've probably got a problem.

And the cadence should change with circumstances. A new senior hire might need weekly 1:1s for the first 3–6 months, before loosening the frequency as trust and understanding develop.

This bit is extremely important, and often not thought about properly

We talked in week One about the cost of constantly switching context and attention quality.

I saw this yesterday, which articulates the problem perfectly:

Batching or time-blocking is one of the simplest ways to reduce that.

There are two big benefits.

First, efficiency. You spend less time constantly switching between completely different types of work.

Second, pattern recognition. Reviewing businesses or functions together makes it easier to connect the dots, spot inconsistencies, and identify emerging themes.

For example, most of my monthly inbound work tended to be business performance reviews and key initiative reviews. In total, they took about two days.

So I'd put those back-to-back, in the same two-day window each month.

Likewise, most of my monthly outbound work involved preparing Group performance commentary, Board materials, etc. Scheduling that work immediately after performance reviews made sense, while everything was still fresh in my head.

Not only was the context fresh, but I didn't have to carry all those numbers, issues and conversations around in my head for days, only to waste time reconstructing them when I finally sat down to do the work.

And I found my weekly work tended to fit best on a Tuesday morning. Early enough in the week to have an impact, but giving the team Monday to get their numbers together.

Sure, some of this will depend on the business and the need to synchronize with the wider executive team.

But you're the CFO, dawg. You're in a pretty good position to influence this stuff.

Finally, put the whole thing into your calendar. And kill everything else.

Recurring appointments, protected working sessions, preparation time. Whatever it takes to make sure the rhythm actually happens.

And remember the inbound/outbound distinction. It's easy to fill your calendar with meetings reviewing other people's work, then find yourself writing Board papers at 11PM.

Your own work needs protected time too.

Once it's all in there, step back and look at how much of your calendar you've committed.

If you've blown straight through that 50% target, go back and challenge what you've built. Can you reduce the frequency? Shorten the meeting? Combine some activities? Get the information without a meeting at all?

And crucially, don't rush to fill the space you've just created, you’ll need it…

Short answer… um, yes.

Of course. Your CEO's tantrum, a key employee resigning, a major customer going under, a fire in the factory, an IT outage, or an M&A deal don't all get together on a Monday and agree to schedule themselves neatly around your calendar.

But back to the lessons from The Goal. By ensuring you have capacity designed into the system, you've got somewhere to go when those things happen.

Your operating rhythm is your default operating state, not a prison.

One very practical thing in my own routine, which I started doing maybe 15 years ago and still do today, is what I call my Sunday Reset.

If I'm organized, I do it mid-morning on a Sunday. More often than not, I end up doing it on Sunday evening.

It's my chance to review and course-correct my priorities and schedule. Look a few weeks ahead. Work out what's coming up, what needs moving in the calendar, and what might need more attention than I'd planned.

Then I rebuild my to-do lists into three columns: Do Now/Do Soon/Do Later.

I also look for anything that needs a momentum shift inside the team or business. Something that needs speeding up. Or stopping altogether.

Importantly, this isn't about doing work. It's about planning my effectiveness. And it normally takes me about 30 minutes.

If the working week feels like spinning plates, this routine gives me a moment to feel in control, while none of them are falling on the floor.

Plus, I swear my gray matter does half the work overnight on Sunday, meaning I hit Monday morning ready to crush it.

It's not for everyone. But I love it.

No separate homework this week, beyond running through the five steps above for yourself. This whole piece is kind of the homework, so I won’t repeat myself.

But let me add this… This is an EXCELLENT exercise to do with AI.

Depending on how brave you are about connecting your calendar, emails, notes, etc. to your chosen AI tool, you can give it a huge amount of the raw material it needs to help you build and design this.

I've done this myself (I used ChatGPT), and it does a phenomenal job of synthesizing your work life and interpreting it into a way that fits this framework.

But the quality of the output depends on the context you give it. Which means sharing data with it generously, within your own appropriate data security boundaries.

And ‘context’ brings us neatly to next week.

Because freeing up your time is only half the battle. You also need the right information, in the right place, at the right time, to make good use of it.

Next week, we're tackling how information and decisions flow through you and your team, without turning the CFO into the human filing cabinet for the entire business.

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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.