A sales pitch to the senior management team and the board should go as follows:
● Make sure you have a good proposal and one with a sound focus on the emotional drivers that will matter to your audience.
● Focus on selling to the thought leader on the senior management team and board before presenting your proposal. This may take weeks of informal meetings, sending copies of articles, telling better practice stories, and so on, to awaken interest. Remember that the thought leader may not be the CEO or board chairperson.
● Make sure you prime the thought leader to speak first after your presentation has been delivered. This gives your proposal the best chance of a positive vote.
● Go for an easy next step, the running of a one day focus group with the organization's oracles.16 You state, “If I can convince the oracles that this project will work, and get their involvement in the project plan, I will be able to present to you a project that has a greater chance of success.”
It's important to get this presentation right, because you will probably not get a second chance. Thus one needs to embrace the better practices around delivering “killer” presentations. I have recently read The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo.17 It is a compelling read. I have incorporated his work along with the work of Nancy Duarte's Slide: ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations18 and Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery19 in creating a list of the top tips to deliver compelling presentations. This checklist is included in Appendix B.
THE POWER OF THE FOCUS GROUP
I have found holding a one-day focus group meeting is a superb way to get a coalition of oracles behind the project. This focus group meeting would be attended by a cross section of 15 to 30 experienced staff, covering the business units, teams, area offices, and head office, and covering the different roles from administrators to senior management team members.
This focus group meeting should discuss the existing issues with performance measures, expose the attendees to the new thinking, outline the intended approach, and seek their advice to decide if the project is viable, and if so what lessons could be learned from past projects.
The aim of this workshop is to get the green light and secure the full support of the attendees. The next step is to develop a robust blueprint that sets out the direction and the requirements, using some of the oracles who have attended the focus group workshop.
I have prepared agendas for the focus group workshops to re-engineer month-end reporting, annual planning, and the annual accounts. These are available in the PDF download.
PDF DOWNLOAD
To assist the finance team on the journey, templates, checklists, and book reviews have been provided. The reader can access, free of charge, a PDF of the following material from www.davidparmenter.com/The_Financial_Controller_and_CFO's_Toolkit.
The PDF download for this chapter includes:
● A book review of The Three Laws of Performance
● A book review of Leading Change
● Selling pitch PowerPoint presentations
Part II
To Be Completed Before the Next Month-End
Chapter 3
Rapid Month-End Reporting: By Working Day Three or Less
OVERVIEW
Although many large organizations have made massive inroads into fast and accurate month-end reporting the vast majority of finance teams around the world have month-end processes that are career limiting, to say the least.
This chapter explores the processes you can abandon, those you need to bring forward, and when the cutoffs should occur. All these changes can occur before your next month-end. Many of these practices are common sense; however, common sense is not always evident.
Many large organizations have made massive inroads into fast and accurate month-end reporting. I say to them, “Celebrate your achievement,” but still read this chapter as you may be able to achieve a quicker month-end close. However, the vast majority of finance teams around the world have month-end processes that are career limiting. This chapter is an extract from my white paper, “Reporting rapidly, informatively and error free.”20
When I was a corporate accountant, each month-end had a life of its own. You never knew when and where the next problem was going to come from. Two or three days away, we always appeared to have it under control, and yet each month we were faxing (email was not on the scene then) the result five minutes before the deadline. Our fingers were crossed as a series of late adjustments had meant that the quality assurance (QA) work we had done was invalid and we did not have the luxury of doing the QA again. Does this sound familiar?
CEOs need to demand a complete and radical change if they are to free management and accountants from the shackles of a zero-sum process – reporting last month's results halfway through the following month. Here are the facts:
● Leading finance teams are now providing commentary and numbers by the first working day.
● Companies are migrating to closing the month on the same day each month (i.e., months are either four or five weeks).
● In leading organizations, the senior management team (SMT) is letting go of report writing – SMT members are no longer rewriting reports. They have informed the board that they concur with the writer's findings but it is a delegated report.
See the attached electronic media for a checklist of implementation steps to reduce month-end reporting time frames and for the common bottlenecks in month-end reporting and techniques to get around them.
RATING SCALE FOR MONTH-END REPORTING
The following rating scale, see Exhibit 3.1, shows the time frames of month-end reporting across the 5,000 corporate accountants I have presented to in the past 20 years.
EXHIBIT 3.1 Speed of Month-End Reporting Ranking
BENEFITS OF QUICK MONTH-END REPORTING
As a CFO of a tertiary institution said, “Every day spent producing reports is a day less spent on analysis and projects.” There are a larger number of benefits to management and the finance team of quick reporting, and these are set out in Exhibit 3.2.
EXHIBIT 3.2 Table of Benefits of Quick Reporting
IMPACT OF A QUICK MONTH-END ON THE FINANCE TEAM WORKLOAD
The impact of quick month-end reporting is a redistribution of work moving out of the low value processing activities of month-end annual accounts to the more future focused activities such as rolling forecasting, systems implementation, and advisory, as shown in Exhibit 3.3. This is often accompanied by a change in the mix of the finance team, which results in a higher percentage of qualified staff.
