Free Yourself
The tactical work is getting automated. What's left is you.
As a finance and ops leader, it’s my job to hold an opinion on almost every aspect of the business, at almost any given time. That opinion has to be founded in reality but it also has to be mine. The data can always tell a lot of different stories, but knowing which story I believe to be true and why is most of the job.
At least once a day, whether it’s the CEO, the sales leader, the marketing leader, our hardware team, someone says to me: what do you think about this? What does the data say? Is this a good use of our money? What’s your opinion on these sales reps? Is this marketing channel investable? Can we give this discount on these payment terms? How much inventory should we buy?
A lot of the time I answer from my gut. Yeah, I think this. No, I think that. Maybe, I’m not sure, let’s dig into the numbers. The data is all there. But parsing it, being able to actually form an opinion on what’s in there is what we sign up for. And that’s what we want to be doing.
Our job is not just to be a compliance function. Our job is not to just report the numbers. Our job is to say: this is what the numbers say, and this is what they mean.
I run a team of five. Finance is two people - me and an accountant. Under me: all of finance and accounting, all of legal, all of HR, all of operations, inventory, warehouse.
To do all of that and still be the voice of reason for the company, you cannot also be the one doing the data entry. You can’t think big if you’re buried in spreadsheets.
When you free yourself from the tactical work, from making sure there are no errors in a journal entry, from checking line by line the flux analysis, from manually responding to every email, you allow yourself to be the strategic partner the business actually needs. You can look at the big picture. You can understand, with the click of a button, any aspect of the business at any given time.
The job becomes making sure you have built your systems in such a way that you can access the data and form an opinion, or test a hypothesis, with the click of a button. And then holding that opinion, learning from it over time, and being the thought partner the business needs.
There are a lot of ways to get there. You can do it with already-built software. You can do it with a large team and data analysts. You will have both, or some combination of them. At a certain scale you’ll have no choice.
But we are in a world now where it’s possible to have the resources of all of the above at an early stage.
It is possible to have the output of a large finance team with two people, separated by an ocean, and a few Claude terminal windows.
I sent this to my team last week:
“The only real work that continues to exist 12 months from now is the work that requires you to use the creative part of your brain. If there is a part of the job today that is purely logical, systematic, it will not exist for humans in a year or less. Only physical and creative work is left. For better or worse, this is the future. Learn to think creatively.”
What do you think the finance leadership role looks like 12 months from now?
