Why more headcount won't get finance a seat at the table

Editor's note: This article is adapted from Roman Labutin's talk at our CFO Summit in Boston. Our team turned his session into a first-person article, edited for length and clarity, using only what he shared on stage. You can watch the full session on demand on your dashboard.

A CEO walks past my office and says:

"By the way, did you hear we made a decision to do this? How will you reflect it in the financials? Just figure it out, and we'll talk later."

I've had some version of that conversation more times than I can count. Reporting on a decision someone else made without finance in the room is not where any of us want to be.

I spent 25 years at Citigroup, most of it as CFO of various Citi businesses, and today I'm CFO of WI Harper Group, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco.

Every one of those businesses was different, but the problems a CFO faces boil down to the same two:

• How do we support the growth of the business without adding resources?
• And how do we become part of the decision process, rather than absorbing the results of decisions made behind our backs?

When I asked a room of finance leaders who had increased headcount over the last two years, whether real people, bots or AI agents, plenty of hands went up.

When I asked them to keep their hands raised if their CEO had started involving them in decisions earlier as a result, the hands came down.

We're adding resources, but it isn't buying us influence. What matters is how we organize our finance teams to earn a place in the conversation.

What a capable finance function looks like

We're always busy, and it's easy to stay that way. Every new entity, fund, regulation or system gets the same response: no problem, we'll open another Excel spreadsheet. Then another PowerPoint, then another spreadsheet.

When the pile gets too high, we ask for more resources to tackle it. Output rises, but nothing we do as leaders gets us closer to a seat at the table.

What we want instead is a function built on purpose, one that participates in discussions and helps shape the decisions senior management is making.

That starts with speed: moving information faster and getting it to senior management in time to matter. Next is stronger forecasting, which I consider one of the cornerstones of the job. Actuals are the past.

None of the CEOs I've worked for were very interested in what happened last quarter or six quarters ago; they wanted to know what the future looks like. I don't treat a forecast as absolute truth. The moment it comes out of the printer, it's wrong by definition.

What matters is the thinking that goes into it, the drivers, and how those drive decisions. That's what CEOs actually care about.

Third is disciplined growth. Capital is a scarce resource and needs to be used smartly. A startup may behave as if it has unlimited capital and simply burn cash, but in banking, where I come from, every dollar counts.

Banks are limited in how much capital they can put to work, with regulatory ratios and restrictions attached, so understanding what each dollar brings to the organization is powerful.

Finally, there are effective controls. When I moved from a 250,000-person organization to a 50-person one, I was told to forget my past. Big companies have thousands of people to run controls; a small firm can cut corners because nobody comes asking. I disagree.

Integrity is what people do when nobody is watching, and finance leaders have to demonstrate it. If something goes wrong, everyone looks at us and asks why we allowed it, whether our remit covers only finance or extends into HR, operations and technology.

Speed, forecasting, discipline and controls together are what create meaningful influence.

Every finance activity needs a home

I have a scientific background and like things organized, so I map finance activities on a simple matrix. The vertical axis is how much judgment an activity requires. The horizontal axis is how rule-based and repeatable it is.

Every activity needs a home on that grid, and like people, activities aren't comfortable in the wrong one. Some people hate five-star hotels and are perfectly happy in an Airbnb.

High-judgment, episodic work is where you build or hire. Hiring buys speed. It's easier to tell my CEO I need a Head of FP&A than to do it all in Excel, or dump everything into Claude and then check whether it's hallucinating.

But that headcount costs money, and we don't always have the luxury.

High-judgment work with more rules attached is where you embed finance partners in each business line to translate the financials.

The danger is that they go native. Business lines are built to sell, and they'll sell your partner on needing more resources and technology. Over time, that person stops representing finance.

Low-judgment, episodic work such as tax, audit, payroll and fund administration is where you outsource. Low-judgment, repetitive work such as bank reconciliations, intercompany matching, consolidations and standard packs is where you automate.

With AI and new software, that bottom half is getting cheaper every year. Five years from now, I believe it will be completely commoditized, so we need to move the activities we retain toward the value-added top of the chart.

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