5 Ways Finance Can Help When Business Is Good

When do people typically ask for help (if they ever do)? When things are going bad, right? If you work in a support function which job is to help other functions, typically, you will not be asked for much when business is booming. If you’re a finance business partner it might be even more difficult as your sole purpose is to help the business do even better. So when business is bad it’s easy to start helping like I wrote about a few years ago in “How Finance Can Help When Business Is Bad”. When business is good, however, what do you do? Let’s take a closer look at a few things you can do to help the business perform even better also when they don’t think they need your help with anything. 

No one is perfect and there’s always room for improvement 

Let’s first remind ourselves that no one or nothing is perfect so the good news is that there’s always room for improvements. Often companies fall in the trap of doing what I call “Red Flag Management” which means they only do performance management on products, customers etc. that perform poorly and below expectation. Over time this leads to “The Non-Performance Culture” where the only focus is on improving that which is underperforming. When business is good nothing is underperforming or at least so it would seem. Here is a list of several initiatives you can do to help the business improve even when it thinks it’s doing well. 

• Analyze the variances as even things are going well there will still be unprofitable products or customers within a given product line or geography. Shredding those or making them more profitable will make business even better. However, you need to deliver the recommendation as the business won't look for it on their own.
• Find out where there’s still available capacity as when you still have capacity left to fill then you also need to hunt for more business. Even if you’re out of capacity you can start to put a business case together for adding more. That also shows that you’re proactive!
• Identify the top performing unit and find out what other can learn from it as there’s always someone that’s better than others even when all are doing well within the company. What’s the top performing sales team, plant facility or retail store doing which is an example for others to follow. You can start this one with an analysis to show that if every unit performed like the top performing unit then the company financials would look X mUSD better. Now how’s that for expanding the pie?
• It’s all relative so how are you doing vs. your competitors? If you’re already beating them then maybe you should set yourself an even tougher goal and if you’re not beating them then the company is not doing as well as everyone thought, it did. It was just the market and you need to learn from them to beat them.
• Hunt down complacency as when things are going well people tend to become complacent and performance will start to slip again. Of course, you should be realistic and know that stellar performance can rarely be sustained in the long run unless significant shifts are done along the way. So you need to bring good suggestions to the table instead of just being in people’s faces about how complacent they have become. 

The point is that regardless of business is good or bad there are things you can do to turn things for something even better. 

How do I sell this to my stakeholders? 

I knew you would ask this question! No matter how smart you are and how many fancy analyses you can come up with you still need to impress your stakeholder for him or her to approve your ideas. The question is how do you get them to listen when they’re already over the moon with their current performance? I know that this is a fine balance because you can’t just walk into their office and tell them how they should be doing a lot better. Instead, you make a proposal to say “I know we’re doing great now but wouldn’t it be fantastic to be sales person of the year if we also did ABC?” or “last year the plant of the year performed at this level and even we’re doing well now we need to do XYZ to be in contention this year. Are you with me?”. I would say it’s tough to turn down statements like this but what do you think? 

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where there was nothing left to improve? What did you do and how were people acting around you? It’s at least an interesting case to consider. As always let me know how you liked the article by commenting, liking and sharing so we can get the discussion out to as many finance professionals as possible! You can follow me on Twitter for continuous updates about what’s happening in the finance function. 

I encourage you to take a tour of my old posts on finance transformation and not least “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” which is really that starting point for the transformation. Finally, you should join my Finance Business Partner Forum where we will continue to discuss this topic. 

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Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Head of Global Finance PMO for Maersk Transport & Logistics and is working with the transformation of Finance and business daily. I have participated in several transformation processes such as a (business) finance transformation at Maersk Line, going Beyond Budgeting at Maersk Drilling and transformed a finance team from Bean-counters to Business Partners. I would love the chance to collaborate with you on your own transformation processes to help you stay out of disruption. Don’t be shy! Let’s get in touch and start helping each other.