2024 CFO Series: Strategic Priorities of Today’s Finance Role

This course focuses on proven tactics to increase profitability, including cost reductions, revenue enhancements, reducing investment, avoiding waste and taking a more integrated look at avoiding risk. We also look at methods to optimize the return from the marketing function.

Highlights

Tactics to Improve Bottom Line

In this the first of this course, we will explore successful strategies to improve pricing, increase volume, and reduce risk. We will discuss proven techniques to help your organization thrive, including:

Introduction to the three levers – Income, Asset Utilization and Risk.

Cost control

Increasing volume

Pricing

Tactics to Reduce Investment

Next, we will explore strategies to improve asset utilization and reduce investment. We will discuss proven techniques to help your organization thrive. Topics will include:

Cost of capital

Increasing asset utilization

Process choices

Tactics to Reduce Risk

Then, you will see what happens when risk becomes real and reduces net income. We will discuss proven techniques to help your organization plan for risk before the next miscalculation. Topics will include:

Why is risk relevant?

Your risk profile

Managing risk

Bridging the Gap with Marketing Management: The Four Ps

Lastly, we will take a look at the four Ps of marketing and what financial leaders need to know about the marketing function, marketing management and measuring marketing results. We will discuss proven techniques to help your organization grow and thrive. Finance and marketing professionals should help each other and work collaboratively to drive a superior bottom line. Topics will include:

What is the function of marketing?

Marketing plans

The four Ps: Products and services, price, place or channels, and promotion

Benefits

• Understand the issues that drive the bottom line and discover ways to improve it.
• Learn more about pricing for profitability, cost control and increasing throughput.
• Understand the issues that drive asset utilization.
• Learn more about the cost of capital, asset utilization and choosing an appropriate process.
• Understand the issues that drive risk and why it matters.
• Understand the four components of marketing and how finance and marketing can work collaboratively to drive superior financial performance.

Designed For

• Corporate financial leaders, corporate financial managers, CEOs, CFOs, controllers, accountants, board members, advisors, and consultants
• CPAs in public practice
• Business owners, entrepreneurs and professionals who are interested in enhancing the bottom line by working in a collaborative, effective partnership with the marketing function

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This course focuses on the key role of being a reviewer, including processes, systems, test results, performance, taxes, financials, timelines and progress. We will also provide a high-level overview of taxation and the newer skills needed to be an effective financial leader.

Highlights

Aren’t We All Auditors All the Time?

Audits involve testing, review, examination and verification. We will illustrate how continuous auditing skills are valuable, all the time. Whether you’re an auditor or not, the role of a business leader IS to audit continuously! Better leaders have these skills.

The need to think before we react.

Being skeptical without being cynical

Unconventional keys to success

The never-ending need to audit continuously

Audits Begin with the Right Questions: Listen!

Technology has boundless memory and can store all the answers, unlike humans. Regardless, technology and AI cannot discern the right questions to ask. Asking the right questions separates successful professionals from mediocre professionals. This session will take a big-picture approach and redefine auditing in a broader perspective which will deepen your skills, perspective and know-how. We will illustrate three types of audits and dive into the most fundamental aspects of our daily work that needs constant attention, not seasonal treatments.

The need to ask the ‘right’ questions

A core principle of audits not taught in the textbooks

A new type of audit that will simplify your life

Four auditing skills to take you from being a good auditor to being an amazing auditor

The most important element of auditing is listening

What We Can Do to Minimize Taxes: Without Danger

When stepping into a leadership role, you may not have been exposed to all the various tax issues. We will take a 30,000-foot view into corporate income taxes and other taxes with a focus on potentially lowering taxes. We will explore what and how to communicate with your external accounting firm. What is the value of proper fixed asset schedules and their crucial role? Depreciation, qualified business income and the employee retention credit will be reviewed. Keep a schedule and be prepared because at the end of day you will be held accountable and responsible for missed dates and missed opportunities and you may be given credit for taxes saved. Be prepared and aware of tax savings alternatives.

Tax reduction strategies

History of taxation in the United States

Understand your tax environment.

Taxes: corporate, state, property and sales

Tax planning concerns

Depreciation and fixed asset schedules

How to recognize and ward off tax schemes

Successful System Implementations: Planning!

System changes are common, so why does seemingly every new system update or installation have multiple new problems? We will review the causes and effects, including a short-term outlook. We will focus on the best practices of successful organizations, specifically the one key task for success – proper planning. What are the steps to take? Which functions need to be involved? How do you reduce risk? These actions can be applied to small system changes, system upgrades or large ERP systems. Do not make the same mistake over and over. Learn from others who have paid the hefty price.

Consequences of failure to plan

Learn from previous mistakes.

No two installations are the same!

Why cheap costs more

How should accounting communicate?

Managing the organization to enable better system implementations

Benefits

• Grasp that our role is to constantly review, listen and examine – both in our professional life and personal life – to create a deeper understanding of the value of our auditing skills.

• Understand why listening skills are crucial for all leaders and for any professional who audits others’ work. You will gain a deeper understanding of the psychology behind how powerful auditing can be when done by a more insightful and purposeful manager who wants to drive their skills.

• Fulfill your responsibilities to account for tax in your organization(s) and successfully navigate the diverse paths to minimize taxes.

• Understand best practices in effective system implementation and identify pitfalls to avoid.

Designed For

• Corporate financial leaders, CEOs, CPAs, business owners, corporate financial managers, entrepreneurs, CFOs, controllers, accountants, board members, advisors, consultants, and the professionals who advise them
• CPAs in public practice
• Those who want to improve their success in systems implementations

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The war for talent is ongoing. We will review four topics concentrating on today’s employment realities, getting the most from your team, attracting and retaining talent, utilizing the employment lifecycle to deliver better performance, and re-invigorating careers (yours and others) to make our professional role easier and deliver better financials. The cost of ‘mismanagement’ is huge, and we will discuss tactics to help you and your colleagues improve.

Highlights

Are Employees Assets? Today’s New Employment

As the managers’ role continues to evolve, it is crucial for us to understand the strategic aspects of managing a diverse workforce, beginning with understanding the big trends in employee demographics. We begin with a rhetorical question - asking if employees are assets? GAAP tells us they are not, but does this treatment bias our view of the people in our organization? What do the most successful organizations do, believe, and why? What are the winning organizations doing that work?

GAAP versus economic value of employees

The changing landscape of work

Different generations and demographics

Employee engagement/assessment surveys and what they should tell us

Successful tactics for today’s workforce

The ROI on Your People: Maximizing Returns

Employees drive the written and unwritten culture at your organization. Understanding the key workplace issues and how to solve them in today’s environment can maximize the returns that employees provide for an organization. We will take a deep dive into the research behind the larger issues with our workforce and discuss practical solutions that will enhance your leadership and growth.

Dealing with people

Conflict management issues

How to truly empower your employees

Organizational culture and how to be a part of positive change

What are some of the ‘other’ employee issues that go unsaid?

What does work/life balance mean today? What do employees want and care about now?

Understand and Enhance the Employee Life Cycle

Many organizations have a documented process for their employment life cycle but do not look at it wholistically. Having a longer view of the employee life cycle can provide more value to your company than you think. Join us for an interactive discussion around the entire life cycle of employees with best practices discussed on continuous improvement for your organization. This session will provide an overview of each of the steps in the timeline from multiple perspectives, to provide keen insights on actionable ideas to take back to your workplace and implement.

Understanding the various stages of the employment life cycle

Onboarding and orientation

What goes wrong with training, cross-training, and growth priorities?

Are performance evaluations necessary?

How to unleash your staffs’ hidden talents

How to attract and retain talent in today’s environment

Re-invigorating Your Career: Planning Your Path

A career is a long time and yet looking back it appears to have been in the blink of an eye. If you have ever engaged in discussions with mentors or peer groups you may have heard the, “I wish I had ___.” This course is a review of keeping you individually prepared and ready for the various changes that will make your career. We start with where you are today and where you want to be. We discuss practical tips for professionals to be more prepared for changes that will come over your career. What are my career possibilities? The goal is that some of these ideas discussed will avoid more of the “I wish I had ____,” and will convert them to, “I’m so glad I ____.” We all have heard the maxim, “Failure to plan is planning to fail.” We are planners by nature, let’s plan our career and the career of those who report to us.

What is a career as a professional and as a CPA?

Changing technology, changes in required skills, and changing industries

Personal performance evaluations for your continuous growth

What is your brand, and do you need one?

I am living longer; do I want to work longer?

Following your career plan

Benefits

• Recognize the numerous significant external factors and trends in today’s workplace, including the need to transform our management and leadership tactics to thrive in the next twenty years.
• Understand how to look at the requirements of the modern-day CFO differently and how to be an effective leader in your organization.
• Gain a deeper appreciation of the ‘employee life cycle’ and the value of effective onboarding.
• Explore best practices to keep your career path vibrant, ready for change, and prepared for new opportunities.

Designed For

• Corporate financial leaders, corporate financial managers, CEOs, CFOs, controllers, accountants, board members, advisors, and consultants
• CPAs in public practice
• Business owners, entrepreneurs and professionals who are interested in enhancing the bottom line by working in a collaborative, effective partnership with the marketing function

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Whether you are a seasoned CFO or a staff professional, you want to enhance your skills and become more effective. We will discuss methods to improve, including getting the most from the sales function, how CFOs can (and should) deliver much more value, new skills to develop and how to find the time to do this. We will also review the value of sustainability, ESG reporting and measurement.

Highlights

Enhancing Sales: Work with Sales to Drive Result

Sales and accounting are not alike. Both functions should work together to achieve superior financial performance. If accounting and sales work together effectively, then net income, revenue and sales incentives would all increase. Thinking differently about how to work together will dramatically enhance financial performance. Imagine at least a five-percent increase in the bottom line.

Understanding the sales function and sales team

Developing strong relationships

How to ascertain what sales really needs

Effective incentive plans that are understood by the sales team

Becoming the key support people for sales

Communicating value and profitability

Growth Opportunities for CFOs: Value Added CFOs

Many CFOs place too much emphasis on external financial and statutory compliance reporting for government regulatory agencies and not enough on corporate performance management (CPM) methods, including internal management accounting. The former is for valuation (e.g., inventories and COGS). The latter is for “creating wealth value” to support better decisions. This course will provide tools and information for CFOs to transition from bean counters to bean growers. The best CFOs not only keep score, but they enable the organization to score more, which is much more valuable.

Best practices for product, service line, channel and customer profitability using activity-based costing (ABC)

Strategy management using strategy maps, balanced scorecards and dashboards.

Process improvement using lean management with lean accounting

Process improvement using quality management and cost of quality

Capacity-sensitive driver-based budgeting and rolling financial forecasts

Enterprise risk management (ERM)

Data science and analytics

Ready to be an Effective CFO? Skills to Succeed

With all the buzz about the additional responsibilities of CFOs today, what are the essential skillsets for success? How do you excel when you are spread so thin? Becoming the multi-skilled CFO companies are looking for requires you to balance traditional responsibilities with new demands. How do you utilize your key relationships and your team to fill the gaps and make sure nothing slips through? To be effective requires a shift in the way financial leaders think and approach their day. Thinking differently about how to accomplish the broad spectrum of CFO responsibilities is a key lesson in your essential lifelong learning. We will review many tactics to help you become even more effective.

Utilizing your team – your whole team

Maintaining relationships with key external parties that can be your secret weapon

Making timely critical decisions

Gaining knowledge efficiently

Becoming the Chief Value Officer

Measuring and Reporting - ESG and Sustainability

ESG broadly covers many of the non-financial issues every organization faces. The use of ESG as a term however conjures images to many of tree-huggers protecting rare species at the expense of jobs and growth, requirements that well-qualified candidates are not hired or passed over for promotion because they do not meet “diversity standards” and that companies are constrained by restrictive laws and regulations from conducting their business. ESG is not about limiting growth or profitability. It is about measuring non-financial information and using that information to make companies more efficient and more profitable. ESG is not a fad that will go away but a method of viewing our organizations so that they can be better and more profitable.

Defining sustainability

Environmental risks and opportunities: How your organization deals with natural resources

Social risks and opportunities: How your organization deals with people

Governance risks and Opportunities: How your organization deals with laws, regulations, and controls

Defining and measuring ESG

Reporting on ESG metrics and your organization’s efforts

Benefits

• Understand how to work more effectively with the sales function and the large impact that accounting has on sales. Understand how to enable sales to enhance financial results in your organization.
• View enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM/CPM) as the seamless integration of managerial methods rather than as a process.
• Understand how business analytics is an advance over business intelligence and where Big Data fits in.
• Identify and differentiate strategic KPIs in a balanced scorecard and operational performance indicators (OPIs) in dashboards.
• Properly calculate product, service-line, channel and customer profitability for analysis, insights and actions.
• Perform “predictive accounting” for capacity-sensitive driver-based budgets/rolling financial forecasts, what-if analysis and outsourcing decisions.
• Overcome implementation barriers such as behavioral resistance to change and fear of being held accountable.
• Look at the requirements of the modern-day CFO differently and be an effective leader in your organization.
• Better understand how identifying and defining environmental, social and governmental efforts within an organization and measuring and reporting on those efforts will make their organizations more efficient and profitable.

Designed For

• Corporate financial leaders, corporate financial managers, CEOs, CFOs, controllers, accountants, board members, advisors, and consultants
• CPAs in public practice
• Business owners, entrepreneurs and professionals who are interested in enhancing the bottom line by working in a collaborative, effective partnership with the marketing function

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We will discuss what you can do to improve your management skills. The best leaders have a never-ending passion for improving and acquiring useful knowledge. Management skills can be learned only if one is willing to do the work if you aspire to be a more valued, trusted, credible leader. This course will help you become a first–class manager.

Highlights

Five Management Superpowers

We walk through the A-to-Z of effective management from the standpoint of self, team and individuals. It is not enough to be a ‘good’ manager and excel in our field, we need to be more than the subject matter expert. The five management superpowers is a proven path for those who desire to ascend the ranks to higher leadership.

• How feedback becomes effective
• How to develop listening skills
• Cultivation of self, cultivation of team members as individuals, cultivation of team members as a group
• How to create a working environment in which team members feel acknowledged and “heard”
• Inspirational motivation for team success
• Relational communication skills that increase productivity
• The ‘secret sauce’ that holds communication and professional relationships together on the individual and team level in the short and long term

Accepting Perfectionists: Understanding & Adapting

You may know people who believe, “Good, is never good enough.” They are sharp, driven, push themselves, have lofty standards and may focus on the negative. They wear themselves out and others as well. Could they be perfectionists? We will discuss perfectionists from several perspectives and how to harness their skills to enhance results. Learn actions to take that are based on research and proven methods so that perfectionists may learn how to transform their behaviors.

• Why perfection is not obtainable
• The wonderful attributes of perfectionists
• Why do most attempts to deal with perfectionists fail?
• Why many perfectionists are procrastinators and masters of self-punishment
• Tactics to help the perfectionist become more effective

Why You Should Be a Learn-a-holic: Staying Ahead!

Successful people do know one secret that keeps them on top. The answer is - they are lifelong learners. It is a mindset and a way of life that they learned to utilize. Hear quantifiable research to support that learn-a-holics (or lifetime learners) are clearly more successful, as well as practical actions on how you can stop being left behind and start getting ahead by adopting the habits and mindset of a lifelong learner. The crux is to expand your mind and expand your possibilities.

• The key mindset difference between extremely successful people and others
• Learning styles
• The seven essential elements for lifelong learning success
• Two daily habits that can make this lifestyle transition easier.
• A learning technique that works regardless of your personal learning style
• “How-to” guide to starting your new life as a learn-a-holic

Advancing Your Role as a Business Leader

Knowing the numbers is a valued skill, but not nearly enough to make you a real business leader. True leaders put in the work and make sacrifices for others. Leadership is a learned skill, a skill that must be practiced. It may look simple, and it is – only if you know what to do and how to do it. Leadership requires one to develop a greater understanding of intangibles that are difficult to quantify – but are priceless. The best leaders care about others, are trustworthy and are credible. We will discuss proven tactics to enhance those skills.

• Leadership is earned, not given.
• Leaders understand: human nature, others and themselves.
• The need for better relationships, credibility and trust
• Lessons from great leaders
• Steps to becoming a better leader

Benefits

• Develop management and leadership skills to enable teams to flourish. Learn effective methods to become a better manager. Understand the importance of earning trust, helping others, maintaining integrity and communicating.
• Recognize, accept and understand the tendencies of perfectionists. Understand their strengths, areas where they may improve and how to get the most out of them.
• Recognize the importance of being a continual learner. Understand your unique learning style and what is necessary to become a learn-a-holic.
• Understand the importance of earning trust, helping others, integrity, relationships and communicating.

Designed For

• Corporate financial managers, business owners, entrepreneurs and professionals who advise them, especially those who wish to advance in the organization, corporate financial leaders, CEOs, CFOs, controllers, accountants, and board members
• CPAs in public practice
• CPAs in industry who want to be more than number crunchers

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