The Finance Gem 💎 #105: 10 Mistakes Destroying Your Company Value

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Hi there, 

I know it's still vacation season for many of you, but there's so much happening in the next few weeks. My team and I are working on some exciting projects while also welcoming new clients who decided to engage Financiario to upgrade their CFO Office after our last webinar.

Here's what I'm covering in today's newsletter:

• A new masterclass for CEOs, founders, and senior leaders I'm hosting on Wednesday

• My upcoming session with Oracle NetSuite for CFOs and financial leaders

• Last few days to join my financial intelligence coaching program

• The financial mistakes that quietly cost CEOs control and value

Let's get to it.

Brand new free CEO masterclass on Wednesday

This upcoming Wednesday, I'm hosting a brand new masterclass.

If you’re a CEO or founder, you may be weakening your company without realizing it—by treating the budget as the plan, walking into board or lender meetings without a value roadmap, or making major spending decisions without a clear framework.

And if you’re in the C-suite—CFO, COO, or other senior leader—these same traps limit your ability to give the CEO and board the foresight and leverage they expect.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• The 10 most common mistakes that quietly erode control, cash, and valuation

• How to make sharper strategic decisions with full financial foresight

• How to strengthen your negotiating position in board and lender discussions

• How to actively grow company value instead of watching it drift

Register here for The 10 CEO Mistakes That Quietly Erode Control, Cash, and Valuation

📅 August 20, 2025 8:00 AM PT / 11:00 AM ET / 5:00 PM CET

CFO and financial leadership masterclass with Oracle NetSuite

If you're still leaning on EBITDA as your main performance measure, you might be ignoring what really matters: cash flow. EBITDA won't pay your team, cover your debt, or keep you afloat when the market turns. Cash Flow will.

In this free, executive-level session hosted by me and Ranga Bodla from Oracle NetSuite, you'll discover why EBITDA can steer you wrong, the three real drivers of cash flow, and a practical checklist to improve cash management right away.

Register here to join the Oracle NetSuite session

📅 August 26, 2025 11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET / 8:00 PM CET

Final days to join The CEO Financial Intelligence Program

The CEO Financial Intelligence Program starts on August 27.

In six weeks of live masterclasses and coaching, you’ll strengthen your ability to lead with financial foresight—seeing the true state of your business without requiring CFO translation, spotting risks before they hit, and recognizing opportunities your competitors miss.

You’ll be ready for any board or lender discussion, able to challenge the numbers behind every major decision, and confident in directing your team toward moves that protect and grow enterprise value.

If you want those tools in place for Q4, now's the time to secure your spot.

Once we start, enrollment closes.

The Top 10 Financial Mistakes That Quietly Cost CEOs Control and Value

If your company is profitable but growth has slowed, cash is a struggle—or valuation isn’t moving—it’s often not because of the market. It’s because of the way financial decisions are made and monitored inside the business.

Some habits feel harmless in the moment but compound into weaker cash flow, misallocated capital, and missed opportunities.

In today’s issue, I’ll break down 5 financial mistakes that hold companies back—and how top-performing CEOs and CFOs replace them with systems that protect and grow enterprise value.

Join the upcoming masterclass to hear me break down all 10 of them and have a chance to ask your questions live + earn high value bonuses for showing up in person

1. No long-range financial plan

Many CEOs operate with only a 12-month budget and a loose sense of direction beyond that. This forces the company to optimize for the short term—hitting next quarter’s numbers—without a clear line of sight to enterprise value five years out.

The result is capital deployed to meet immediate needs, not to advance the end goal.

High-performing leadership teams anchor their planning in a multi-year value creation plan.

They define specific targets for revenue, margin, free cash flow, and valuation—and then reverse-engineer the operational and financial path to get there. This becomes the North Star for every capital allocation decision, ensuring near-term moves reinforce the long-term outcome.

Without this horizon, the business drifts. Opportunities are missed because they don’t fit the “this year” budget. Risks build quietly because no one has mapped their impact on the value plan.

And when a market shift hits, the company reacts from a weak position—because there was no broader plan to protect and grow value in the first place.

2. Relying only on EBITDA

EBITDA is easy to calculate and often quoted in board decks and investor updates. But it tells an incomplete story.

A company can post impressive EBITDA while free cash flow is shrinking, debt is rising, and capital efficiency is falling. In this scenario, valuation will suffer—regardless of what the earnings line shows.

The real levers investors and acquirers care about are cash yield and return on invested capital. This means tracking operating cash flow and ROIC alongside EBITDA—and connecting them to operating drivers.

This is the approach that shifts management’s attention from optics to economics.

Over-reliance on EBITDA can also lead to dangerous capital decisions. For example, a “strong EBITDA” business may justify higher leverage or bigger investments without realizing its cash conversion cycle can’t support it.

By the time the liquidity squeeze is visible, options are fewer, costs are higher, and valuation has already taken the hit.

3. Poor capital allocation

In many companies, capital allocation is an even spread—funding each department’s requests proportionally or “last year plus inflation.”

This dilutes resources, leaving high-ROI initiatives underfunded and low-value projects overfunded. And over time, this approach erodes returns on capital.

Top-performing CFO offices tie every material investment to the value creation plan. They set hurdle rates based on risk, require a defined payback period, and review the capital portfolio quarterly to rebalance toward the highest-return projects.

This ensures that both Opex and Capex are actively managed for value, not just approved for activity.

Without this discipline, companies spend millions on initiatives that don’t move valuation. Leaders often don’t realize the opportunity cost—the projects that could have delivered a higher return but never got funded—until a competitor passes them.

By then, catching up requires more capital and more time. None of which is easily accomplished.

4. Weak cash flow management

A healthy P&L does not guarantee healthy cash flow. Many profitable businesses run into liquidity crises because they manage only to income statements and static budgets.

Without real-time visibility into cash inflows and outflows, tightening headroom goes unnoticed until it becomes urgent.

High-performing CEOs track a rolling 13–16 week cash view alongside a monthly forecast.

This gives enough lead time to make strategic moves—renegotiating terms, adjusting spend, or sequencing investments—before liquidity risk turns into a constraint. It also creates space to seize opportunities when others can’t move.

Ignoring cash flow until there’s a problem forces reactive, expensive fixes—rushed financing, asset sales, or missed opportunities. And in today’s volatile markets, cash visibility is not just your defensive—it’s the foundation for controlled, confident growth.

5. Blind trust in assumptions

Budgets and forecasts are built on assumptions—about sales volume, conversion rates, customer retention, input costs, capital inflows and outflows, and more.

When those assumptions go untested, they become silent risk multipliers. 

Strategic CFO offices treat assumptions as live variables. They stress-test models under multiple scenarios—best case, base case, downside—while monitoring early indicators that show when reality is deviating from the plan.

This is how leadership adjust capital allocation mid-cycle instead of waiting for quarter-end surprises.

When CEOs accept assumptions at face value, they inherit the risk without the foresight. The result is overcommitment to plans that were never realistic - or failing to adapt to evolving assumptions.

What follows is missed targets, broken board trust, and in severe cases, loss of financing options.

Catch the full breakdown next Wednesday. Register here for The 10 CEO Mistakes That Quietly Erode Control, Cash, and Valuation

📅 August 20, 2025 8:00 AM PT / 11:00 AM ET / 5:00 PM CET

Here’s the shift:

Fixing these mistakes isn’t about small operational wins—it’s about building your executive financial operating system that supports faster decisions, sharper capital allocation, and a stronger valuation narrative.

That’s exactly what we build in CEO Financial Intelligence Program.

Over six weeks, I will teach you to replace reactive, fragmented finance knowledge you may already have with a strategic perspective on your financial reports, forward looking capital planning, cash flow, EBITDA and valuation levers.

Plus you’ll get decision ready frameworks used by top-performing companies.

Enrollment for the next cohort closes August 27.

Warm regards,

Oana

P.S. If you recognized your company in these mistakes, now is the time to put the right systems in place to correct that. By September, you could be making faster, better-informed capital decisions with full visibility into your growth path.