Hi there,

If you rely on a CFO to “handle the numbers,” but can’t pressure-test the plan they put in front of you, finance is not protecting your strategy, it’s constraining it.

Having a finance leader is not the same as leading financial strategy. And the gap between the two is where cash surprises, stalled growth, and board tension quietly build.

Here’s what we’re covering this week:

• Upcoming live masterclasses for CEOs who want sharper financial control

• Why “having a CFO” is not enough, and how the best CEOs lead their CFOs

• What the three financial statements actually tell you, and what they hide

• The operating metrics that determine cash, fundability, and valuation

• The questions CEOs should ask finance to surface risk

Upcoming Live Masterclasses (Free) + Live Bonus

If you’re tired of post-mortems and “we’ll know next month” answers, join one of my upcoming sessions designed to give you decision leverage, without turning you into an accountant.

Unfortunately seats are limited by our webinar platform and these live sessions are always popular. Make sure to secure yours now before we run out of capacity.

The KPI Masterclass — Jan 22, 9:00 AM PST / 12 PM EST / 5 PM GMT- Register Here

How to choose the right KPIs for your company without tracking noise, managing to vanity metrics, or building dashboards that don’t predict outcomes.

Live attendees get an exclusive bonus available only during the session.

The Valuation Masterclass — Jan 29, 9:00 AM PST / 12 PM EST / 5 PM GMT - Register Here

How to drive enterprise value without optimizing a metric that doesn’t fund growth, doesn’t protect liquidity, and doesn’t translate cleanly into enterprise value.

Live attendees get an exclusive bonus available only during the session.

The Scaling Masterclass — Feb 5, 9:00 AM PST / 12 PM EST / 5 PM GMT - Register Here

How to grow your company without scaling into a working-capital wall, overbuilding overhead, or financing growth with avoidable balance-sheet stress.

Live attendees get an exclusive bonus available only during the session.

The CEO Panel — Feb 10, 9:00 AM PST / 12 PM EST / 5 PM GMT - Register Here

How prior partcipants are applying the CEO Financial Intelligence Program to grow their companies—what changed operationally, financially, and in how they lead their CFOs.

Live attendees get an exclusive bonus available only during the session.

The Gap Between Having a CFO and Leading Financial Strategy

Here’s a critcal question that CEOs ask me all the time:

“I have a CFO (or VP Finance, or Controller). Do I really need financial intelligence myself?”

Yes. Absolutely. And not because your CFO isn’t capable.

The issue is delegation without comprehension.

When you fully outsource financial understanding, you lose the ability to interrogate assumptions, challenge sequencing, or see second-order effects. You approve budgets and forecasts without knowing whether they are fundable, resilient, or aligned with your risk tolerance.

Your CFO translates strategy into numbers based on the inputs you provide. If those inputs are vague, or if you can’t evaluate the translation, you end up approving plans that look coherent on paper but break under pressure.

And when cash tightens, covenants strain, or the board starts asking harder questions, accountability sits with you. Not your CFO.

This is not about replacing your finance team. It’s about leading them.

Your CFO can tell you what the budget says. You need to know whether it survives a 10% revenue drop.

Your CFO can present financial statements. You need to read them strategically so you can see liquidity risk, operating leverage, and capital constraints.

Your CFO can model growth. You need to know whether that growth aligns with your capital structure and timing.

High-performing CEOs don’t manage the accounting general ledger. They manage the decisions that drive the numbers they want to ultimately want reported.

The Finance Cheat Sheet CEOs Should Actually Use

The point of financial intelligence is not knowing definitions. It’s being able to direct capital and execution with speed—while staying solvent, fundable, and strategically flexible.

This is the framework I teach executives because it forces the right priorities. Let me walk you through it:

Follow the cash, not the profit

Profit can look strong while cash is tightening underneath you. The companies that get surprised by liquidity stress are rarely “bad businesses.” They’re businesses where timing, working capital, and capital spending weren’t managed as first-class decisions.

That’s why winning CEOs run cash flow as a strategic lever, not a bank balance update.

Invest for returns, not revenue

Revenue is an output. Return on capital is the governing constraint. When you allocate spend based on growth targets instead of returns, you build a company that looks bigger but becomes harder to fund.

Strong CEOs force every initiative to answer a simple question: what return are we generating on every dollar deployed, and how quickly does it come back?

Name your constraints early

Growth is always limited by something: capital, capacity, or talent. The error isn’t having a constraint. The error is discovering it after you’ve already committed headcount, inventory, or fixed costs.

CEOs who scale cleanly make constraints explicit and build the financial plan around them, so strategy stays executable under real-world limits.

Assess unit economics before you scale

Scaling amplifies what already exists. If each sale is marginally profitable or cash-negative, more volume doesn’t fix it, it compounds it.

Your job is to know whether each unit makes money after the costs that actually follow growth, not just direct costs that make the P&L look acceptable.

Navigate working capital like a financing decision

Working capital is not “ops detail.” It’s cash either trapped in receivables and inventory, or preserved through supplier terms. Companies that can’t fund growth often don’t have a demand problem. They have a cash conversion problem.

CEOs should treat working capital as an investable asset with targets, owners, and accountability.

Calculate true costs to protect profitability

Hidden costs are how profitable-looking businesses quietly erode. Delivery complexity, onboarding, support burden, customization, rework, discounting, and churn risk all belong in the real cost structure.

If you don’t know true costs by product and customer segment, you will misprice, misinvest, and misread performance.

Engineer outcomes instead of reporting results

Operating finance reports what happened. Strategic finance designs what will happen.

Winning CEOs expect finance to build a forward system—one that links drivers to outcomes, shows tradeoffs, and makes risk visible early enough to act.

The Three Financial Statements: What They Tell You—and What They Hide

CEOs often have access to all three statements and still don’t have control—because they’re using the wrong statement for the wrong decision.

The Income Statement tells you if operations and pricing work. It hides cash timing and capital strain.

A strong P&L can coexist with an unstable balance sheet or deteriorating cash conversion.

The CEO-level question isn’t “did we hit margin,” it’s “are we structurally profitable in a way that funds the operating model we’re building?”

The Balance Sheet tells you what you own, what you owe, and what’s left over. It hides momentum and operational efficiency.

The balance sheet is where the real constraints show up—liquidity, leverage, covenant exposure, and capital flexibility.

CEOs should treat this as a strategic document, because it determines what you can do next quarter when the market shifts.

The Cash Flow Statement tells you where cash came from and where it went. It hides reality through timing and one-offs.

Cash flow is the scoreboard for fundability. It tells you whether you can self-fund operations, debt service, and growth—or whether the business is dependent on outside capital.

The key is separating recurring operating cash from timing swings and nonrecurring items so you don’t mistake temporary relief for structural health.

The Metrics That Drive Executive Decisions

You do not need 40 KPIs. You need the few that explain whether the business model produces cash and returns as it scales.

Here’s a short list to get you there:

Gross margin tells you whether your unit economics work before overhead and growth spend. If gross margin isn’t structurally strong, every other metric becomes harder to fix.

Operating cash flow measures actual liquidity generation. This is the metric that funds headcount, inventory, debt service, and resilience when conditions tighten.

Free cash flow after debt payments is your real strategic flexibility. After lenders are paid and required reinvestment is covered, what’s left determines whether growth is fundable and sustainable.

Return on invested capital (ROIC) tells you whether growth creates value or consumes it. This is the CEO metric for disciplined capital allocation.

Cash conversion cycle shows how long cash stays trapped from spend to collection. Improve this and you often “find” cash without raising it.

CAC payback tells you whether growth is sustainable and how quickly you recover acquisition spend. If payback is too long, scaling becomes a financing problem, not a marketing problem.

The Questions Every CEO Should Ask Finance

The fastest way to upgrade your finance function is not demanding better reports. It’s demanding better answers.

About profitability: 

Are we building margin by product and customer segment—or averaging it into a number that hides weak pockets? Which parts of the business generate cash, and which consume it?

About liquidity:

What is our debt-service safety limit under downside scenarios? If customer payments stretch by 30 days, what is the cash gap and what actions close it?

About growth:

Does our model strengthen as we scale, or does complexity and capital intensity rise faster than revenue? What funding mix is required for next year’s growth, and what does that imply for control, covenants, and optionality?

About capital:

What return are we generating on each dollar deployed, and what threshold justifies incremental investment? What initiatives look attractive on the P&L but degrade cash and balance sheet flexibility?

About risk:

Where are we most exposed to a 20% revenue drop—cash, covenants, fixed costs, customer concentration, or working capital? What constraints are limiting strategic options right now, and which ones are self-imposed?

These questions don’t replace your CFO. They make your CFO more effective—because they force strategic thinking instead of report delivery.

If you’re not yet able to ask these questions, I can help.

The CEO Financial Intelligence Program

The next cohort of the CEO Financial Intelligence Program starts February 11.

Over six weeks and just 18 hours, you’ll master the 20% of financial insights that drive the majority of outcomes in a business—through a CEO lens.

You’ll master:

• How to read the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement without getting lost in the details

• How to tell if the business is financially healthy (and where the risks actually are)

• How to decide where to invest, what to cut, and what to fund next

• How to forecast cash so you don’t get surprised by a shortfall

• How to manage risk before it becomes a crisis

• How to use debt intelligently and avoid getting boxed in by lenders

• How to increase value by improving the business fundamentals that matter most

You’ll also get practical frameworks for communicating financial updates in a way that gets decisions made, aligns your team, and builds confidence with your board, lenders, and investors.

Over 113 executives have completed the program in the past several months and the feedback has been fantastic. Read their testimonials here.

If you want to bring your CFO, COO, or other executives, the discounted pricing makes it easy to build financial intelligence across your leadership team.

Enrollment still includes the option for a 1:1 strategy call so we can tailor the program to your specific business before the cohort begins.

If you’re ready to lead financial strategy instead of reacting to it, this is where that shift happens.

100% Guaranteed. Plus lifetime recordings and all the practical resources you need to be successful.

Warm regards,
Oana

PS. Spots are limited for each masterclass. If you want in, secure your seat early—and plan to attend live to receive the exclusive bonus.