7 deadly ways to spot if you’re an entrepreneurial finance professional or an accounting technician

A lot is talked about finance professionals having a more entrepreneurial mindset so what does this look like in practice and how do you know if you’re already there or you’re more of an accounting technician?

Here’s my thoughts on seven deadly ways & questions you can look at to check:

1. You understand and ask “How must the business work?” to create and retain internal and external customers that ultimately result in driving margin for the organisation as a whole. Technician: you’re focussed their own work and don’t care too much about how to improve margin for the rest of the organisation.
2. You start with a future-oriented mindset on how to protect and grow profitability (i.e. driving value) and then come back to the present with the intention of changing the necessary, controls and processes within the system to match the vision. You work backwards. Technician: You work forwards (i.e. you follow checklists and standard operating procedures) without a looking on how they can be changed to drive more profitability.
3. You take a holistic or end-to-end view of the the business in its entirety, you see it as a broad system of interrelated value drivers that produce results for internal and external customers and you can articulate the main value drivers/levers. Technician: You’ve a narrow siloed view of how your work drives value for others.
4. You understand and have a coherent picture of your organisations competitive position in the marketplace, you’ve also an external focus. Technician: Internal only view
5. You’re highly visible because you’re continually curious as to how the business needs to work and know that great insights alone without influence don’t deliver impact. Technician: You rarely come out from behind your desk.
6. You thrive in chaos. For instance you’re comfortable with working both quantitatively and qualitatively which means you’re calm with advising decision-makers towards directional outcomes with various levels of uncertainty. Technician: Routine is your order of the day and you’re very much stick to the rules.
7. You appreciate the fundamental truth that income follows assets, so your actions are directed at creating and nurturing assets, whether people, controls, reporting, etc… that supports building a sustainable profitable business. Technician: Focus on the behaviours required to execute existing tasks.

And that’s why we bring guest mentors onto our Strength in the Numbers Show, to help you peer over the fence to see what’s worked and not worked for them when helping decision makers make better decision to prepare their organisations for growth. They deconstruct word for word and share with you their stories and hard won lessons so that you can digest their knowledge to make better calls and practically figure out how be more entrepreneurial and make a more meaningful impact in their organisations.

So what techniques do you use to be more entrepreneurial?

The author Andrew Codd is the producer of the Strength in the Numbers Podcast which interviews real finance practitioners to break down their hard won lessons and deconstruct their practical methods that work on the job and which you won't typically find in textbooks or exams so that we create more influential finance professionals worldwide who solve meaningful problems for their organisations and in return have fun, rewarding and successful careers in finance.