Stepping into a new CFO role, whether it’s your first time in the seat or simply your first month in a new company, has always felt, to me, like drinking from a fire hose.
No matter how seasoned you are, no matter how many C-suite roles you’ve held, the early days are overwhelming in the same familiar way.
You think you understand the landscape from the interview process, and you walk in feeling cautiously confident.
But then day one arrives, and suddenly the neatly packaged narrative you were told during recruitment gives way to the real business: its cracks, its silos, its miscommunications, and its pressures.
I’ve worked in CFO and CEO roles across different markets and companies, including swipejobs and now World Energy.
I’ve run a global consulting firm that took me through Europe and Asia, where I learned as much from my mistakes as from my successes.
Across all those roles, one thing has remained constant: your first ninety days set the tone for everything that follows. They determine how people perceive you, how much trust you earn early, and how effectively you can start influencing the company’s direction.
These days, I like to joke with audiences that I’m bilingual: I speak English and I speak Australian. The Australian version has lots of nuance, and if you don’t understand me I can dial it back.
But humor aside, that feeling of being immersed in a flood of information (and having to make sense of it quickly) is universal for every CFO starting fresh. What I’ve learned over the years is that having a structured approach isn’t just helpful, but essential.
Ninety days can go by in a whirlwind, and without a clear framework, it becomes easy to chase competing priorities without building a foundation.
So here’s my blueprint (broken into three thirty-day stages) grounded in lived experience, the problems I’ve walked into, the mistakes I’ve made, the questions I now know to ask, and the lessons I’ve learned the hard way.
Bill Guerrero
The first 30 days: Understanding the business before trying to fix it
Whenever I join a new organization, the very first thing I do is try to understand the business.
Not the theoretical business described in board decks or interviews, but the real business shaped by real people operating under real pressures.
Long before becoming a CFO, I ran a global consulting firm. I worked throughout Europe and Asia, learning through a mix of fantastic experiences and a fair number of mistakes.
One of the most important lessons that period taught me was the value of the org chart; not the neat, polished version circulated during onboarding, but the version that actually reflects influence, friction, bottlenecks, and unstated hierarchies.
If you don’t understand who the key players are, you won’t understand why things happen the way they do.
So during those first thirty days, I set up one-on-one meetings with leaders from every corner of the business. I don’t ask for presentations; I ask for candor.
People are remarkably honest in a one-on-one setting, especially when they don’t feel exposed in front of their peers.
They will tell you which processes are broken, who they can’t work with, what delays are hurting their ability to hit targets, and what they wish finance would stop doing.
Early in one role, for example, I thought I had a firm grasp on the company’s systems and processes before I walked through the door. But once I arrived, I realized the organization had significant cash-flow management issues and that nearly every department was running on different systems.
There was no unified financial platform like NetSuite. Data lived in silos. Business units had fundamentally different understandings of the company’s cash position.
It was the kind of problem that can go unnoticed until you're in the room, asking the questions that reveal fragility beneath the surface.
This is why I obsessively document everything in the first thirty days.
When I start hearing similar concerns from multiple leaders (whether around reporting delays, system inefficiencies, or strategic misalignment) I bucket them together.
Those buckets become the foundation for candid conversations with the CEO.
And speaking of CEOs: one of the most important early conversations is about the company’s growth strategy. I always ask the CEO directly: Where are we going? How do you intend to grow? How will we pay for that growth?
Because understanding strategy without understanding financing is like being given a destination with no idea how full the fuel tank is.
Sabrinthia Donnelly
Are we relying on line-of-credit financing? Are we looking at capital raises? Are we preparing for an IPO? Are we leveraging private investments? The answer fundamentally shapes how a CFO must operate.
During this period, I also review the financials; everything from cash-management practices to the balance sheet to the company’s lending facilities.
Once, I stepped into an organization where the fixed charge coverage ratio (FCCR) reporting was being completed on the very day it was due. No forecasting. No forward visibility. I thought I’d produce a neat, tidy quick win by building a forecast and showing that we were safely within covenant.
Instead, I discovered we were headed toward breaching a covenant within two months. Not exactly the kind of early victory you dream of sharing with your CEO.
Still, it turned out to be valuable. It exposed weaknesses, sharpened urgency, and gave me a clear starting place.
The first thirty days, in the end, are about listening more than talking, understanding before acting. It’s the only way to make the next sixty days meaningful.
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