Patrick Coggins

Operator, Drummer, Partner CFO's Domain

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

Thrilled to announce that CFO's Domain has been acquired by @Solomon_Edwards to expand their Office of CFO capabilities! It’s been an incredible journey the last 7 years, from starting my own firm with my partner to navigating a global pandemic 9 months later, to growing and selling the company, I couldn’t be more excited for what lies ahead.

Grateful beyond words to our families, team, clients, and everyone who supported this journey. Couldn't have done it without you.

Full details: https://t.co/fJbIyleFCu

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@KevinDeShazo People pay more attention to what leaders do than what they say. You can set expectations all day, but the real standard is established by the behavior you consistently demonstrate, especially when things get difficult.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@KurtisHanni Good bookkeeping tells you what happened. A strong finance system helps you understand why it happened and what to do next. That shift matters most when decisions about growth, hiring, or payroll can’t wait for the next monthly report.

[Kevin DeShazo @KevinDeShazo]

When you're part of a team, it's no longer about you. It's about the team. Don’t let your ego cause you to view every decision/interaction as being about you and your wants, needs, expectations.

Align your vision with the team’s vision.

Be about the team. Humility is the way.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@KevinDeShazo The best teams are built when people care more about the shared outcome than individual recognition. That doesn’t mean losing your voice. It means knowing when to lead, when to listen, and when to put the team’s needs ahead of your own.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@mikebeckhamsm Culture shows up in the small moments, especially when things get difficult. How people respond to mistakes, disagree with each other, and support their colleagues often says more about a company’s culture than any set of values on the wall.

[Mike Beckham @mikebeckhamsm]

Culture isn’t created by the leadership team alone.

It’s shaped every day by how people throughout an organization communicate, collaborate, handle conflict, encourage each other and respond when things go wrong.

Regardless of your title, you’re contributing to the culture around you.

The question is what kind of culture are you actively creating by your actions? You are a big part of your company's culture, no matter your role.

[Connor Abene @ConnorAbene]

If your CFO isn't obsessed with cash flow, fire them.

Here's what a cash-obsessed CFO actually looks like (and why it matters for your business):

Poor cash flow = #1 killer of SMBs

That’s why a good CFO’s top priority should always be solid cash flow management.

“But how am I supposed to tell whether or not my CFO is doing that?”

A cash-obsessed CFO focuses on these 5 activities:

1/ Gather raw data

They track:

• Bank statements
• AR/AP balances
• 3-month profit trends
• Financing options

And consolidate the data into a simple 13-week cash flow model.

2/ Identify trends

They answer:

• Monthly cash patterns?
• Seasonal impacts?
• Expense vs revenue growth?
• Cash generation vs plan?

Then act fast.

3/ Make a game plan

Your CFO should create and execute as many micro-plans as it takes to correct what’s going wrong or maximize what’s going well.

All while keeping the overall strategy of the business top of mind.

4/ Forecast

Every action changes the model.

Great CFOs update forecasts weekly. Bad ones wait for month-end.

5/ Optimize the inputs

They obsess over:

• AR collections
• AP timing
• Operating budget

Small tweaks = Big impacts.

Even a profitable business can go broke if it runs out of cash.

So your CFO (and you) should always know where your cash stands, where it's going, and what needs to change.

[Matt Gillis @mattgillis]

Leadership is measured by the lives you lift, not the title you hold. The strongest leaders understand that serving others, leading with integrity, and treating people with compassion are not signs of weakness. They’re signs of character. Faith gives leadership its foundation, but how we serve others shows what that faith means in practice.

[Greg Moran @GregMoranX]

One of the biggest dangers of being CEO is that people stop telling you the truth.

Or at least the whole truth.

Bad news gets softened. Problems get reframed. People tell you what they think you want to hear.

And by the time you realize how bad something is, you’ve burned valuable time.

In over 2 decades building and running companies. I’ve learned that the higher you sit in an organization, the harder you have to work to get the unfiltered truth.

And you have to recognize that you’re often part of the problem.

Your reactions teach people what they can safely tell you.
That’s why I think every CEO needs someone outside the business who will challenge their thinking.

Someone with enough experience to recognize the warning signs.

Someone who isn’t worried about their next performance review or whether you’ll like what they say.

And someone willing to tell you that you’re wrong.

The worst thing you can surround yourself with as CEO is people who make you feel good about decisions that aren’t working.

𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗿.

Preferably before the numbers do.

[Mark Ajzenstadt @mardehaym]

“We’ll build your AI agent. But the IP stays with us.”

Let’s call this vendor model what it is: a raw deal.

You finance the R&D, your frontline experts spend weeks teaching the vendor your domain, and your proprietary data serves as the training ground.

Then, when the engagement ends, you’re handed a usage license for an asset *you* funded, while the vendor packages your institutional knowledge to sell to your competitors.

To be clear: not every solution requires a custom build. If a SaaS tool solves your problem, buy it. Off-the-shelf software is cost-effective, scalable, and somebody else handles the tech debt.

What we reject is charging custom engineering rates for an asset the client will never own.

The real value in enterprise AI comes from building an agent around how *your* business operates. That advantage can’t be bought off the shelf. It lives in your operational edge cases, in the judgment of the specialist who knows why certain claims fail, and in the custom workflows holding legacy systems together.

Here’s how we approach building enterprise AI:

1. Start at the edge, not the top: Work alongside the people running the process before drafting a single prompt. Go beyond the executive brief and talk to the operational experts who handle the exceptions.

2. Real-world edge cases become the benchmark: Turn those cases into tests. The agent is measured against actual historical cases, and the domain experts define what success looks like.

3. Build inside the client’s environment: Every line of code, orchestration layer, and prompt is built directly inside your cloud environment, under your governance and accounts.

4. Give one person operational accountability: Assign one internal owner who manages the process today, governs agent behavior, and has final sign-off on deployments.

What this looks like in practice:

A PE-backed healthcare billing platform we partnered with relied on a 20-year-old legacy rules engine. No packaged AI vendor on the market could deploy into that environment out of the box.

Within six weeks of kickoff, their CPTO was evaluating a production-ready agent. It scored 59/60 on its initial deployment, runs within their own cloud tenant for $250 a month in total operating costs, and delivered immediate ROI. They expanded our engagement.

An AI agent built from your institutional knowledge, your data, and your capital belongs to your business. Period.

If a vendor wants to keep the IP, they should fund the build themselves.

[Mark Ajzenstadt @mardehaym]

If I was a PE fund about to pay a premium for an AI company, I'd open the codebase before I opened the model.

A PE firm asked us to look at an acquisition before close. The company had $4.2M ARR, growing 40% year over year, and wanted 12x revenue.

Management had 14 slides explaining its "foundational model architecture."

We opened the codebase. GPT-4o, a system prompt, a React frontend and roughly 600 lines connecting them.

The proprietary model described in the deck wasn't there. The buyer walked.

A company built on OpenAI can still be a valuable business. You just need to know which of those you're paying for.

Four questions before close:

01 → Model dependency If the model vendor changes pricing or retires the model, what happens to quality and margins? Have the team run an alternative against the same customer tasks.

02 → Training data liability Where did the "proprietary data" come from, and what do the licenses actually allow? Permission to retrieve is not permission to train.

03 → Talent concentration Ask someone other than the original builder to deploy it, investigate a failed run and explain how they test a change. If every answer requires the same person, that's a close issue.

04 → Integration failure rates Pick one workflow it would have to run inside your portco. Have engineers inspect the systems, estimate the work, and name the owner. Do that before counting the savings.

Get engineers with hands on the keyboard into the engagement during exclusivity.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

Demand is one part of the equation. The bigger question is whether Oracle can bring capacity online fast enough to meet it and generate returns that justify the investment. Strong contracts are encouraging, but execution will determine the outcome.

[Xun Qiao @mmkixn192986]

Oracle's CFO says cloud demand hasn't rolled over — bullish for $ORCL

In a Wednesday interview with Investor's Business Daily, Hilary Maxson said customers are still signing two- to four-year contracts and she has not seen demand turn. That backs the build-out Oracle already set out at investor day: about 7 gigawatts of new capacity over two years, to roughly 10 GW.

It's bullish for $ORCL and pushes back on recent AI-spending jitters. It does not raise the earlier targets, and land, power and equipment are still the hard part.

#AI

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[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@ConnorAbene Profitability tells you whether the business model works. Cash flow tells you whether the business can keep operating. The real value is in connecting the forecast to weekly decisions before a shortfall becomes a crisis.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@mattgillis Titles can give someone authority, but how they treat people determines the kind of leader they become. Integrity and compassion show up in the everyday decisions, especially when there's nothing to gain from doing the right thing.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@GregMoranX Leaders often underestimate how much their own reactions shape what they hear. If people learn that bad news is punished, they'll find ways to soften it. Building a culture where problems surface early starts at the top.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@davidgcant The value of a safety meeting is what changes afterward. Identifying risks matters, but assigning clear actions and ownership is what turns discussion into prevention.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

The contract needs to distinguish between the vendor’s underlying technology and the client-specific IP created during the engagement. Both sides can bring value, but ownership, data rights and exit terms should be agreed before the build starts, not negotiated after the investment is made.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@mardehaym The valuation should reflect what the company actually owns, not just what it can build using someone else's model. Model dependency, defensible data and the ability to maintain the product all affect how durable that revenue really is.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@sijlalhussain Outcome-based pricing sounds attractive, but the definition of success matters. If the AI resolves a case only for a human to reopen it later, the outcome wasn't really achieved. Measurement needs to account for quality and durability, not just completion.

[Patrick Coggins @PatrickCFOD]

@seanmcginnis Absolutely. Internal development takes time, so the earlier you identify future needs, the more options you have. You can build capability before the business outgrows what the team can currently deliver.