The Secret CFO

Sharing real world insights as the former CFO of a multi-billion dollar company. Opinions, not advice.

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

Been a while since I reintroduced myself.

I write about CFO craft under The Secret CFO pseudonym.

Initially, that pseudonym gave me the freedom to talk about the CFO world in a way I never could with my name and company attached... and I guess it just stuck.

- Path: Big 4 → FP&A → Controller → Corp Dev → CFO (+ a few detours since)
- Experience: 25 years in finance, more than half of those in CFO roles
- Scale: Last CFO role as Group CFO in a $4bn revenue business
- Specialism: Special situations. High leverage, complex balance sheets, operational turnarounds and refinancings
- Transactions: 20+ M&A deals, integrations, exits, and major transformations
- Industries: Mature, 'real-world' businesses. Manufacturing, agriculture, hospitality, CPG, retail. Thin margins, operational complexity, high stakes.

A couple of years ago, I stepped away from the CFO seat for what I thought would be a year or so break. I had 20 years’ worth of handwritten notebooks full of things I’d learned, mistakes I’d made, frameworks I’d built, and lessons I wished somebody had taught me earlier. So I started writing them up and sharing them through my email newsletter.

As Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.” The more I wrote up, the more I shared. The more I shared, the more my platform grew.

And along the way I discovered I really love codifying and then teaching this stuff. I’d always enjoyed developing people in the teams I built. But suddenly, I could do it, at scale, for people I had never even met.

I started getting unsolicited emails from people who had landed their first public-company CFO job, completed a PE exit, escaped a boardroom bear trap, or simply made a better capital decision helped by one of the Playbooks I have written.

It humbles me every time. And it's addictive...

I’ve now written more than 500,000 words about the craft of being a CFO. Some came straight from those old notebooks. Some emerged from trying to make sense of a career’s worth of experience. And plenty has come from what I continue to learn from the incredible finance leaders I talk to everyday.

So, that’s why I’m here...

To codify the craft of finance leadership. To challenge and improve the fundamental ideas. And to put that context into the hands of the humans and machines building the finance function of the next decade.

It's an honor, thanks for following along.

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@buccocapital 100% what I’m seeing re adoption in finance teams too.

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@buccocapital Haha

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@PEoperator 100%. the beauty of the tech is that you don't need to be technical ...

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@MatznerJon That guy SMB’d

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@_jdill23 Joel - I appreciate you, sir 🫡

Thanks for reading. If you are an ops guy, there is a lot to love in that book

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@CollettKevin @ManUtdNoContext It’s killing me

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@SaltyCFO @PEoperator Yes … if they can’t figure it out, good old market forces will do the job for them over time.

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@Colin_Best @PEoperator Capacity release is much more exciting than cost savings with AI in my opinion. But we are getting to the point where quantifying it is becoming important.

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

I agree, it’s gotta have room to breathe.

But I also think now the enterprise spend on AI is sufficiently large in aggregate that it’s not unreasonable that folk are ready to see productivity materialize into a measurable on the P&L. And that that is pretty important for the whole AI (and therefore market) narrative

[Andrew Lynch @andrewglynch]

"I've been in rooms with too many finance people before. It's dangerous because the wrong things can end up dominating the conversation.

Most business problems are ultimately solved through better products, better marketing, and better sales.

Finance is a vehicle to help make that happen, not an end in itself."

-- wise words from @SecretCFO

[Two related ideas:

1) everyone, in particular those in finance, tends to over-emphasise things that are easy to measure (like marketing spend), and under-emphasise things that are hard or impossible to measure (like your brand value) which often leads to large errors

2) "The map is not the territory" -- what we see in finance on dashboards, in the P&L, is always an abstraction or representation of the business, not the business itself]

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

Reminds me of the guy that said he was going to open a dog training school called Harvard so all their MBAs would forever have to say “no… the one for humans”

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@noahkagan Ignore the vibe code suggestions. That’s a bad answer for your accounting system of record.

I use @Meet_campfire

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

Reminds me of the guy that said he was going to open a dog training school called Harvard so all their MBAs would forever have to say “no… the one for humans”

[Overeducated Gibbon @MostlyMonkey]

One of my favorite ongoing bits is "confusing" someone's elite alma mater with a lower ranked college

"How was Boston College" (Harvard)

"Would you recommend Penn State" (Penn)

"What was Rutgers like?" (Princeton)

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@junkbondanalyst @tradingawayJBA Congrats . Great first issue, love it .

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@cjgustafson yes huge problem ... the cost of sending credible sounding superficial questions has gone to zero. Big problem for in house IR teams right now.

and it works both ways. I'm also sick of getting shitty AI generated updates from early stage investments I've made too.

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@Arkadiusz_Kunc Yeah, and the graphic format is so fun too

[Alex Holt @holtale]

@SecretCFO Quick work @amazon 📬

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@sharoonthomas Very very good.

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

@RobertMSterling Oh man. I’m so sorry. Praying for Brian, Eileen, you and the rest of your family 🙏