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Hi there, 

If your company still runs on lagging KPIs—revenue, margin, utilization—you’re not driving your numbers. You’re documenting them.

Most executives believe they have control because they have extensive reports. But lagging KPIs only tell you what happened, not what’s coming. By the time they show a problem, the capital has already been misallocated.

Here’s what we’re covering in today’s Issue:

1. Why you should come to New York and attend FATE at the Javits Center (free)

2. My brand new & free KPI Masterclass on October 16

3. The four levels of financial maturity that determine how well your company anticipates, allocates, and executes.

Have you ever wondered why companies can show strong KPIs but still miss their growth targets—or worse, run into cash trouble?

It’s because most KPI systems weren’t built to drive capital decisions. They track activity, not economics—so capital keeps flowing to what’s visible, not to what compounds value.

High-performing CEOs & CFOs don’t just monitor performance. They use KPIs as capital instruments. Their scorecards surface unit economics, cash flow timing, resilience, and return on invested capital—so funding decisions become obvious.

This is why I am holding a brand new masterclass on October 16:

🔴 Live: The 6 KPI Mistakes That Mislead CEOs — and How to Fix Them

📅 October 16

🕐 9 AM PST / 12 PM EST / 5 PM GMT

👉 Reserve your seat

For CEOs, founders, CFOs, and board‑facing leaders who must make—and keep—commitments, this session shows how to turn KPIs into a leadership system that earns trust.

And if you’ve been considering joining the CEO Financial Intelligence Program, this Thursday’s masterclass is the best way to preview the frameworks we work with inside the program.

The Finance Hierarchy: From Lagging to Leading

1. Lagging KPIs — The Illusion of Control

Most companies measure what’s easiest to report: revenue, gross margin, utilization. These are snapshots of history, not indicators of future performance. They track activity, not economics—and that’s why CEOs often discover issues only after capital has already been committed.

Strategic finance measures the drivers that determine forward performance: order backlog, pricing yield, cash conversion cycle, customer satisfaction and retention, employee engagement.

When you see these leading indicators in real time, you can adjust course early—protecting liquidity, maintaining profitability, driving cash flows, and avoiding downstream surprises.

2. Cash Flow — The Economics of Survival

Cash flows are where your business reality lives. It reveals whether your operations, investments, and financing choices are sustainable—or quietly consuming value beneath the surface.

When you manage from liquidity rather than illusion, you see what the P&L often hides: timing gaps, leverage strain, and capital trapped in the balance sheet. A company that understands its cash flow in real time can act with control. It can adjust early, protect its flexibility, and maintain stability even when conditions shift.

Companies that master cash flow can survive volatility. Those that don’t eventually become dependent on external capital to stay alive.

3. Foresight — The Foundation of Stability

Once survival is secured, the next level is foresight—the discipline of using financial systems to extend runway and protect optionality.

Foresight is built through design, not reaction. It uses, among others, rolling cash flow forecasts that extend sixteen weeks ahead, dynamic modeling of working capital, and running structured scenarios for debt, reinvestment, payouts and capital access.

At this level, finance shifts from being a record of what happened to a preview of what will happen. The conversation moves from “What can we afford?” to “What must we fund to win?”

When foresight is built into the system, leaders no longer depend on static reports. They make decisions based on future liquidity and capital position—not last quarter’s results.

4. Strategy — The Engine of Value Creation

True strategy begins when capital is allocated deliberately, not reactively. At this level, financial systems evolve beyond reporting. KPIs are no longer an end in themselves; they become capital instruments—each one linking directly to liquidity, return on investment, and enterprise value.

High-performing CEOs and CFOs do not simply measure outcomes. They engineer them through integrated forecasting, disciplined capital allocation, and transparent visibility across the enterprise.

Cash flow becomes the language of strategy, not the byproduct of it.

When finance reaches this level of maturity, it stops observing performance and starts producing it. Decisions are intentional, capital is sequenced, and value creation becomes predictable.

Your competitors know this already: to connect strategy, cash flows and execution in one place you need real-time visibility, intelligent forecasts, and investor/banker-ready presentations.

Imagine if, instead of spending days on manual reporting and board presentations, and weeks figuring out how to guide the business, you just opened up your dashboards and models and you were instantly ready to analyze, report, present, and negotiate.

That’s what Financiario enables: self-updating, institutional-grade infrastructure to turn data into value and value into cash flows.

You can finally operate in real time, see what drives results and make confident decisions that compound enterprise and shareholder value,

See a 10-minute demo here to learn whu you should upgrade your finance office with us - and in 7 days or less.

All these critical concepts and many more is what this fall cohort of the CEO Financial Intelligence Program delivers —capability, foresight, and the practical infrastructure to lead confidently, challenge assumptions, command the boardroom and build sustainable enterprise value.

We kick off Nov 12 and enrollment ends when all spots have been filled.

This is the final cohort of the year so if you want to lead with foresight—not reaction—this is your opportunity. Secure one of the limited spots today.

You’ll be primed for explosive growth in 2026, while everyone else will still be figuring out how to start.

Warm regards,
Oana

P.S. Don’t forget—save your spot for the Free KPI Masterclass on October 16