Why Communication Beats Analysis with Robert Checchia

Now, let me expand that a bit from communication to culture.

I think you've said that as a CFO, you rolled today is far less Excel, far more operations, culture, and being quote unquote, other people's therapists.

Now that's a, different level than just purely communicating.

There's a degree of empathy, interactivity, vulnerability that you have to open.

And I think there are a lot of leaders that frankly don't feel comfortable with that kind of soft skills and vulnerability.

For leaders who have built their identity around technical mastery, being strong and call it hard skills, how do you help them make that shift? And what do you think they lose if they can't make that shift? That's a great question.

First of all, I tried a lot still to emulate the good CFOs that I worked for, the good leaders that I worked for.

When you have that level of experience in one thing, in finance, accounting, that brought you to the CFO level, why would you continue to develop only that muscle? Who would you be competing with? What are you going to flex on the analysts? So it's a no-sum game.

You're only losing, right? But you could spend all that energy helping develop talents, right? And a big thing that I tell my team is I don't go up because I muscle myself up and you guys push me upwards, okay? Ever since I was before CFO, all my roles where I had some sort of leadership, some sort of team, it was you guys push me up.

So My role is to facilitate, right? And to make your lives easier and better.

So you're doing better work.

And guess what? It's a vacuum, right? You guys push me up.

One person walked by my role, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? And the other part that I wanted to mention is the best CFOs that I've worked for it's not a glorified accountant.

It's not a glorified controller role.

You have a unique vantage point of looking at everything that's happening in the company.

And even though some people will say, oh, this was amazing.

We crushed it.

We had all this revenue.

Yeah, but in the back of your mind, how much the margin was on that deal.

So it's much more involved in corporate development and instilling culture that can perpetuate good results.

When you ask me, what am I most proud of at my current role as CFO? It has nothing to do with the audit, the accounting processes, reporting, nothing like that.

It has to do with We started an HR function that focused on developing and retaining talent.

We started a function to build people up so they can continue to grow their career.

We instilled and developed new markets that we could reach out to.

And today, one of the markets that we developed is the fastest growing part of our business.