023 - YOUR ACCOUNTANT IS NOT YOUR CFO

Your accountant, and I cannot stress this enough, is not your cfo. I can't tell you the number of founders that I've spoken to that think that their accountants can do the job of their cfo. They assume that anyone with a qualification in accounts is going to be good enough to lead the executive function of their finance department.

And I'm here to tell you they are really, really mistaken. So what's the difference between an accountant and a cfo? Well, an accountant typically is someone that does your stats, your VAT returns, your bookkeeping. They make sure that you do all the things that need to be done to keep h m rrc and companies house in check, but they aren't operators.

They don't know your business in any kind of death, so they can't really give you direction on what you should be doing and the sort of decisions that you should be making. Your CFO on the other hand, should be intimately aware of what's going on in your business. They need to be advising and directing you on what to do next and how to manage your capital, where to spend that money, how to allocate it, when you should be hiring, when you should be doing a fundraise, how much you should be raising, where to raise it from, and all the other things that come with being a cfo.

The worst thing you can do is hire an accountant and assume that they will be able to do that job because the reality is they just won't have the experience. I've been brought into loads of businesses where ultimately they've hired someone very junior with an accounting qualification, call them a finance director or cfo, and assume that they'll be able to do the role.

And unfortunately, I'm here to tell you that you end up paying a lot more to pick up the pieces than to get the right person in in the first place. Do the right thing. Hire a great cfo, someone that's worked in your industry, in tech, in finance, with the experience at senior level. You will not regret it for one moment.