BEING A CFO - 40 Years in the Chair: Field Manual for Mid-Market Finance Leaders, Their CEOs, and People Who Hire Them

Anyone can learn the accounting. Being a CFO - the mid-market version, where there is no treasury department, no investor-relations team, and nobody standing between you and the lender - is something else entirely. In Being a CFO, David H. Tolly distills forty years and more than forty companies into the field manual he wishes someone had handed him on day one: the book for the player-coach CFO of the $14M to $600M company, who builds the forecast and personally defends it, signs the borrowing-base certificate with their own name, and presents to the board with no department in between. The book opens with the frame the CFO literature skips: "CFO" is one title describing three different jobs - the doer-of-everything at small companies, the orchestra conductor at large ones, and the player-coach in between - and excellence in one seat does not travel to the others. From there it walks the five concentric responsibilities of the role; the four relationships that make or break a tenure - the CEO, the board and sponsor, the lender, and the team; the operating disciplines, from the 15-day close and the weekly cash rhythm to the five questions that crack any company open in a single conversation; and the phases of the job, from the first ninety days through the exit. The hard chapters cover the work most books pretend doesn't exist: the distressed company, M&A from both sides of the table, the investigation that arrives on a Tuesday morning, the interim and fractional career - and the inner game: composure, identity, and staying whole when the company is burning. Each chapter opens with what it solves and closes with what to do next. The cases are real, with real numbers - including the failures. Written for sitting and aspiring CFOs, controllers on the rise, and the CEOs, sponsors, and boards who hire them, Being a CFO is the leadership chassis underneath the entire Hidden Series.