If history has taught us anything, it’s that the only constant in life is change.

Over the course of the last century alone there have been a litany of challenges and numerous disasters, all of which have one thing in common – they’ve all passed.

Some months from now – it’s impossible to predict the true timeline – the current situation we face with Covid-19 will too have passed. It will have left in its wake a trail of debris and destruction which we ought not minimise,

Stuart Brown joined The CFO Center in 2019, before this he accumulated more than 20 years of finance experience and has more than ten years’ experience as Country-level CFO for both International and Local Carriers. He has had a lot of success growing businesses he has worked for, so we thought it would be a good idea to ask Stuart for his top tips on scaling up a business:

What does growth mean in business?

The quicker you want your company to achieve its goals, the sooner you should consider hiring a part-time CFO.

That’s because a part-time CFO will provide your company with the high-level financial expertise necessary to scale up (things you and your team may not even be aware you need), for a fraction of the cost of a full-time CFO.

Hiring a part-time CFO provides your company with many advantages that really help it to grow and stand out in any marketplace.

A lack of cash can not only stall your company’s growth but also place its very existence under threat.

It doesn’t matter how profitable the business may be; cash flow problems can place it under severe pressure, according to the CFO Center’s Chairman Colin Mills in his book ‘Scaling Up How to Take Your Business to the Next Level Without Losing Control and Running Out of Cash’.[1]

“You might think you’re immune from danger because your business is experiencing a high level of growth,

Babies, as any hollow-eyed new parent will tell you, often sleep for just a few hours at a time which is why ‘sleeping like a baby’ is a practice best avoided if you have a growing business to run and need to be on top of your game during working hours.

Instead, sleep experts recommend you look for ways to get between seven and nine unbroken hours of night-time sleep.[1]

That’s because sleep is believed to be crucial to your physical and mental well being.

If you consider what sets companies like eBay, Alibaba, Netflix, Google, Starbucks, Apple, Cisco and Dell apart from other companies, their ability to continuously innovate and create high growth will probably come high on your list.

So should the fact they’ve all successfully transitioned from start up to scale up status without losing their ability to be dynamic and entrepreneurial.

Then there’s the fact they’ve helped create thousands of full-time and part-time jobs throughout the world.

The idea of hiring even a part-time CFO may seem to some SMEs a bit OTT—like paying Quentin Tarantino to make a 90-second home page video or booking Wembley Stadium for the company’s five-a-side friendly football match.

But for companies whose ambition is to get into and survive the coveted scale-up phase, hiring a part-time CFO makes perfect sense. They know that they’re getting a finance veteran, someone with big business experience, who can provide the guidance they need to grow rapidly and help them to avoid the costly mistakes that so many ambitious SMEs make as they attempt to move into the Big League.

You might think a Chief Financial Officer role is confined to traditional finance activities, but today’s CFO can do so much more than count beans.
In the past, a CFO’s responsibilities might have been confined to high-level accounting such as providing timely financial statements and monthly management reports, managing investments and expenses, monitoring cash flow, and managing risk. But as the business landscape has become more complex over the past decade, the role of a CFO has changed.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already transforming the way in which financial service companies are doing business.

More and more of them are using AI to process information on their customers, cut costs, save time, monitor behavior patterns, assess credit quality, automate client interactions, analyze markets, assess data quality and detect fraud.

A PwC Digital IQ 2017 survey found that 72% of business decision makers believe AI will be the business advantage of the future.[1] About 52% said they’re currently making “substantial investments” in AI,