Hi {{first name|there}},
If your finance function is still organized around reporting cycles instead of decision cycles, your leadership team is operating with a major structural disadvantage.
Most CEOs assume that as long as accounting is clean and forecasts exist, finance is “covered.”
But the real question is whether your finance team is able to enable your strategy—or merely documents it after the fact.
The difference is not semantic. It determines how capital gets deployed, how risk is surfaced, and how value is built over time.
In today’s issue, I want to reframe a distinction that too many leadership teams underestimate—and show you why it has direct implications for growth, control, and valuation.
Here’s what we’re covering this week:
Upcoming live masterclasses to help you scale revenues and enterprise value without losing control
The AFP FP&A Forum in Indianapolis: March 23-25
How accounting, FP&A, and Strategic Finance serve fundamentally different leadership purposes
Why most organizations overinvest in reporting and underinvest in decision systems
How CEOs should think about finance as an integrated value-creation engine, not a set of functions
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 to help you make better decisions faster, without turning you into an accountant.
Seats are limited by our webinar platform and these live sessions are always popular. So make sure to secure yours now before we run out of capacity.
Live attendees get access to exclusive bonuses and offers only available during each session so make sure you attend live or you will miss out.
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 directly into enterprise value.
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.
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, their impact and their valuations.
Here is a cheat sheet for upskilling in 2026: Join your finance peers at the 2026 AFP FP&A Forum to level up on agile planning and forecasting, leveraging AI and analytics, transforming finance processes and integrating technology into your workflows. You’ll hear real examples of automation in action, learn frameworks to make planning more responsive and build strategies that help you lead through change with confidence.
Between interactive roundtables, industry meet-ups and receptions with 400+ practitioners, you’ll walk away with insights and connections to tackle your biggest challenges this year. Learn more.
Accounting, FP&A, and Strategic Finance serve different leadership purposes
Accounting Creates Trust — But Not Direction
Accounting is the foundation of credibility. It records what happened, enforces discipline, and ensures compliance. Without it, nothing else works. But that’s where its role ends.
For CEOs, the danger is not weak accounting. It’s mistaking accounting outputs for strategic insight.
Clean books tell you whether controls exist, whether transactions were processed correctly, and whether the organization can withstand scrutiny.
But you know what they do not tell you? Whether capital is being allocated optimally, whether growth initiatives will compound value, or whether today’s decisions will constrain future flexibility and options.
When leadership teams lean too heavily on accounting reports, decision-making becomes backward-looking by default. Strategy discussions turn into variance explanations. Capital allocation becomes incremental rather than intentional. The organization optimizes for accuracy instead of outcomes.
High-performing companies respect accounting for what it is: a control system that creates trust and reliability. But they do not ask it to answer questions it was never designed to solve.
FP&A Improves Visibility — But Not Ownership of Outcomes
FP&A sits one step closer to the CEO’s world. Forecasts, budgets, and variance analyses help leadership anticipate near-term performance and manage execution. When done well, FP&A highlights operational issues early and creates a shared language around expectations.
The limitation is subtle but critical. FP&A is typically constrained by the planning horizon and assumptions it inherits. Forecasts project trends forward. Budgets codify decisions already made. Variance reports explain deviations after the fact. This improves visibility—but it does not establish strategic ownership.
For CEOs, the risk is believing that better forecasts equal better decisions. They don’t. A perfectly accurate forecast of a misaligned strategy still leads to poor outcomes. FP&A can tell you whether you’re on track. It cannot tell you whether the track itself is the right one.
Organizations stall when FP&A becomes an end in itself—when forecast accuracy is mistaken for strategic effectiveness, and when planning cycles are disconnected from enterprise value creation.
At that point, finance is managing performance inside constraints rather than helping leadership decide which constraints should exist.
Strategic Finance Engineers the Future — Before It Shows Up in the Numbers
Welcome to my world.
Strategic finance starts where accounting and FP&A stop. Its purpose is not to report performance or predict next quarter. Its purpose is to deliberately shape financial outcomes over multi-year horizons.
This is where capital allocation, growth strategy, risk management, and valuation converge.
Strategic finance asks fundamentally different questions.
Which initiatives deserve capital, and why?
How do we engineer cash flows to achieve our objectives?
What constaints must we meet for the strategy to succeed?
How do funding choices affect control, flexibility, and future access to capital?
For CEOs, this is the layer that transforms finance from a support function into a leadership system.
Strategic finance connects operating decisions to enterprise value. It forces trade-offs into the open. It stress-tests ambition against liquidity, leverage, and execution capacity.
Most importantly, it reverses the planning logic. Instead of extrapolating the past, it starts with desired outcomes and engineers the path to get there. Growth targets, margin structure, capital structure, and exit optionality are designed intentionally—not left to emerge.
This is why investors, boards, and lenders increasingly underwrite the system behind the numbers, not just the numbers themselves. A company that demonstrates disciplined strategic finance signals credibility, foresight, and control—long before results fully materialize.
Why Strategic Finance Is Hard to Build In-House
Strategic finance is genuinely difficult for most SMBs to build internally—not because teams aren’t smart, but because the skill mix is rare and the system design is unforgiving. Clean accounting and basic forecasting don’t translate into an integrated decision engine.
The gap I see repeatedly is teams that can explain last month’s results, but can’t quantify the forward impact of today’s decisions. That’s how companies end up in post-mortems, not in control. They miss early signals, finance growth with the wrong capital, and discover constraints only after the market forces them.
Strategic finance requires multi-year modeling, scenario architecture, capital allocation logic, cash and covenant visibility, and outputs that hold up in front of boards, lenders, and investors.
Most teams simply aren’t staffed or trained to design that from scratch while running the business.
The right infrastructure compresses time and turns what used to take weeks into minutes of executive-ready financial intelligence and decision support—because the logic, governance, and outputs are already engineered.
That’s exactly what the CEO Financial Intelligence Program and Financiario are built to deliver.
The Program trains you to drive cash flow, risk and capital decisions with discipline and foresight, in just 18 hours over 6 weeks.
And if you want to compound your speed and effectiveness, Financiario takes your accounting data, turns it into leadership decisions in just 7 days and sets it on autopilot - integrated forecasts, scenarios, and board-ready reporting in one coherent platform. It’s thousands in investment to protect decisions worth millions in enterprise value.
The next cohort of the CEO Financial Intelligence Program starts February 11 and right now you can still join with an exclusive one-on-one 60 minute strategy call with me as a bonus.
If you want to see what strategic financial leadership actually looks like in practice—and what the absence of it does to companies under pressure—join one of my three live masterclasses this week.
The Valuation Masterclass — Register Here
The Scaling Masterclass — Register Here
The CEO Panel — Register Here
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.
