5 Ways For Finance To Start Adding Value Now!

If you work in Finance and you’re not contributing to the value creation in your company chances are you will soon find that your job is either outsourced, offshored or eliminated entirely. That’s simply due to companies needing to focus on their core activities where they have a competitive edge. So if you can’t help them gain any competitive edge then you better start looking for ways of doing that. The good thing is that there are many activities you can start right now in order to help your company create value and be seen as someone with a future in the company.

A perfect blend of soft and hard skills

In order to help you get started on creating value I have prepared a short list for you below but what’s critical to understand is that what will make you successful is a perfect blend of soft and hard skills whereas 5-15 years ago you could rely more on the hardcore accounting and analysis skills and expect someone else to find out what to do you with your analysis. Nowadays finance professionals are counted upon to be present from the idea stage to execution and delivery of the company’s business model. Therefore you need to start doing below 5 activities right now.

• Study your company’s value chain so you have a clear view on how your company makes money, where new products are created, who are your suppliers and customers etc. If you don’t know this you won’t have any chance of supporting the business in creating value.
• Learn how to communicate the results of your analysis. Without it being translated from the numbers it’s created on into something visual or a story even the business simply won’t understand it. So you might be the best financial analyst in your company but someone else will always steal your thunder with the business if you can’t communicate.
• Understand who of your internal stakeholders that would be most likely to want your assistance with solving their business problems. Not everyone in the company will be equally susceptible to your efforts to help them hence better to work on those that are.
• Find out what your company’s competitors are doing, see if there’s something your company can easily replicate, and then create a business case you can sell to your stakeholders. That’s just one way you’ll be able to positively surprise your stakeholders and that’s something everyone likes!
• Always deliver on your promises and it’s better to underpromise and overdeliver rather than the opposite. As soon as you start committing to something you can’t deliver on you’re not helping anyone create value.

There are, of course, a lot more activities big and small that you can do to help value creation in your company but above 5 are quite tangible yet still significant enough to get you noticed and improve your company’s performance.

The table stakes are being upped for Finance

There’s no doubt that you need to do increasingly more in order to get a seat at the table in your company. Regardless if you’re the CFO or the analyst there’s always a table where you’ll get to collaborate with the business to create value. However, you need to do a lot to get there as simply producing a management report doesn’t cut it anymore. The report your business stakeholders can pull themselves from the system in real time. Doing some of the activities suggested here will definitely put you on the right track but above all, it is consistently delivering on your promises that will keep you at the table once you get there.

What activities have you found were successful getting you to the table and take part in the value creation in your company? If you’re struggling to get heard what are your main challenges? As always let me know what you think about the article by liking, commenting and sharing so we can get the discussion going.

I also encourage you to take a tour of my old posts on finance transformation and finance business partnering and in particular “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box”. You should also join my Finance Business Partner Forum where we will continue to discuss this topic and you can even follow me on Twitter.

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The CFOs Roadmap To Transforming Finance (including beyond the final frontier of Finance and Big Data 2.0)

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How Finance People Can Be More Successful (including storytelling and business finance)

Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Senior Finance Business Partner for Maersk Line North Europe and is working with the transformation of Finance and business on a daily basis. I have participated in several transformation processes among others helping Maersk Drilling to go Beyond Budgeting 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. If you are looking for more advice on how to get the most of LinkedIn I also have a few tips to share as well as if you want help in your job search. Don’t be shy! Let’s get in touch and start helping each other.