Episodes

In this episode, Kevin Appleby interviews Felix Velarde, author of best selling business book Scale at Speed: How to Triple the Size of Your Business and Build a Superstar Team. Felix is also the founder of 2y3x.com, a growth acceleration program. Felix has distilled some of the best strategies he’s learnt over twenty-five years of leading businesses of varying sizes into an easy-to-read framework. He expertly lays out the journey a business needs to undertake to scale. He breaks it down into d...

Mike Henebery has been involved in private equity transactions for most of his career. He’s recently co-founded Titan Partners. Titan has just completed its first 8 figure fundraising deal helping fast-growing technology business Wise secure minority funding from Inflexion. Mike’s Career in Fundraising and Private Equity Mike is a qualified accountant, starting his career in Arthur Andersen. He quickly moved away from audit and into the world of deals and fundraising transactions. His 30-year ...

On this episode of the GrowCFO Show Susana Serrano-Davey and Kevin Appleby discuss how to Build Consensus so that your proposal is accepted without challenge. Have you ever wondered why some people can turn up to a meeting, present their proposals, and have them accepted without question? Yet at the same time, you bring your proposal forward and you get a hard time and no decision. Why? What are you doing wrong? The answer is you probably aren’t doing enough outside the meeting room to build c...

Pinky Jangra teaches resilience to individuals and teams. She joins Kevin Appleby on the GrowCFO Show to explain how to create a resilient finance team. About Pinky Jangra Pinky has delved into many branches of human development and behaviour, enabling her to build a rich understanding of the human experience – mind, emotions, body, behaviour and soul. Pinky has been teaching her own courses since 2015. She delivers her proprietary Resilience Training to a variety of audiences online, in pers...

Tom Berry joins us on the GrowCFO Show to talk about communications. Tom is passionate about building businesses, creating brilliant places to work, teaching kids and making people happy. His background is in journalism and communications. These days he teaches business in a secondary school and has several non-executive directorships. We discuss communicating in a crisis. Communicating in a crisis isn’t easy Tom’s main advice is “Don’t Panic”. Communicating in a crisis needs to be calm and cl...

One of the first tasks you have as a new finance leader is creating a blueprint for your finance function, and the other parts of the business you have responsibility for. Susana Serrano-Davey tells us how she uses a heat map for change to determine what needs to be done and in what order. Susana outlines a five step process to create a heat map for change. You have just arrived in your new finance leader role. Chances are you have been hired to fix stuff. Besides the things you know you have ...

Kevin Appleby is joined by, VP of professional services at Board International, Karlo Bustos to discuss the resurgent CFO and how the CFO can be the strategic adviser. What is the resurgent CFO about? The resurgent CFO is a white paper that looks at empowering finance leaders for change. The research was undertaken to examine a hypothesis. To understand how finance leaders globally work through data and how they use this data to empower decision making. How do they transform their organisatio...

Kevin Appleby is joined by GrowCFO’s Founder and CEO Dan Wells to discuss CFO training and how GrowCFO tries to cater for everyone’s needs in their training programmes. Why was there not a good place to go to to get all of your CFO training together? This links to why GrowCFO was set up. A lot of finance leaders asked Dan where they could go for CFO training and he had a look to see if there was anything on google etc. It was really hard to find anywhere. There were random courses and videos b...

Kevin Appleby is joined by Clarity First Founder, Davina Stanley, to discuss the 5 biggest communication traps. Davina goes into these in detail and how we can avoid falling into them. 1. Assume that shorter is always better Shorter text is not always faster to read. It is important to recognise that a shorter piece of writing may actually be more complicated to understand. It can take the audience longer to grasp the meaning and join the dots. Laying something out in clear steps may involve u...

In this episode of The GrowCFO Show Dan Wells and Kevin Appleby discuss the 9 biggest challenges faced by finance leaders and what you can do to address some of the underlying issues. We hear about the biggest finance leader challenges all the time from our GrowCFO members, and its given us a great insight into the issues you need help with. What are the 9 biggest finance leader challenges? The challenges fall into 3 broad areas. The first one concerns making more impact. The issues that you r...

Kevin Appleby is joined by GrowCFO mentor, Susana Serrano-Davey, to discuss storytelling and how it is useful in the CFO role. Where does storytelling come into the CFO role? No matter what job you are in, you can think about becoming a good storyteller. Not only do you want to get your point across but you also want to make an impact and getting people on board. You can use the recipe that storytellers use and apply it to our own communications. It is a presentation technique which uses stor...

There’s a big gap between the skills and competencies you need as CFO to those you have as Head of Finance. The GrowCFO competency framework provides a great way of assessing your readiness for the top job. We use the framework as part of the Future CFO Programme. It usually highlights a lot of potential development areas for our students. One of the challenges for you as a prospective CFOs is prioritising your personal development plan to address the most important competencies. Module 3 of the...

Kevin Appleby is joined by GrowCFO’s Founder and CEO Dan Wells to discuss the launch of GrowCFO’s Finance leader support Forum. Finance leader support Forums overview GrowCFO’s community support Forums help finance leaders to share knowledge, seek advice and solve common issues. They allow free or Premium members to quickly benefit from the combined knowledge and experience of your finance leader community. Many finance leaders are spending too much time delivering recurring finance tasks tha...

Kevin Appleby is joined by Ian Kaye, CFO and executive coach, to discuss how to present with confidence and how to improve confidence. What is your background and how did you learn to present with confidence? Firstly, Ian trained as an accountant at one of the big 4 and worked in industry for 5 years. This led him to be based in Hamburg, returning after 2 years to do a full time MBA. Directly after his MBA, Ian moved to GE as a consultant. Ian’s roles have usually been business as usual finan...

Kevin Appleby is joined by Andrew Tapson, experienced portfolio CFO, to talk about becoming a CFO to fast growth startups. How did you start being a CFO for various companies? As a teenager Andrew was surrounded by peers who were massively influenced by others and the group above. This is shown as 5 went on to be engineers and 5 to accountants! He at first wanted to be an accountant but then realised he wanted to get into business as he saw it as the place to be. Andrew went to the big six (a...

Kevin Appleby is joined by Paul Marchant to discuss his fast track to CFO at the Rail Safety & Standards Board. Where did the fast track to CFO start? Paul qualified at a small firm in Birmingham and then proceeded to move into politics for a few years. The political world gave him certain skills that are still useful in his current role. He then transferred back to finance 7 years ago. Paul’s role when moving back into finance was an management accountant role at the RSSB. Management account...

Kevin Appleby is joined by consultant, David Tuck, to explore how to set a transfer price. He also looks at transfer pricing advice and how effective it is. There has been a shift in transfer pricing David tells you there is a mystique of complexity around transfer pricing. It does not need to be that way if you have modest international aspirations. Is transfer pricing all about tax? Or public image of company? David explains how there has been a real shift. Proactive tax planning to aggress...

Kevin Appleby is joined d GrowCFO mentor, Susana Serrano-Davey, to discuss how to give feedback properly. How do you start preparing a manager to give feedback properly? Susana explains to you that feedback is a craft that we acquire over time and experience. You will go through a learning curve to reach the point of giving feedback properly. To prepare a manager for giving appropriate feedback some companies have training in place, however, Susana says that this is a good step but can’t be t...

Kevin Appleby is joined by Tony Shafar to discuss dealing with difficult conversations and how you can make them less difficult. Why do people avoid difficult conversations? Someone may not be forthcoming to have a difficult conversation with someone if they feel they will get a negative reaction from them. Tony explains that this is usually driven by them not having done the task the way they thought it should be done. Tony expands into how you can make someone more open to have these conver...

Kevin Appleby is joined by David Appel from Sage Intacct to discuss reporting for a SaaS business. 5 Stages of SaaS business growth David Appel discusses with Kevin the 5 stages a SaaS business will go through, also what they need to accompany them: At this stage the simple goal is to create product market fit. The next stage is for you to prove you can sell your product and hire reps. Here, David explains, the focus needs to be on billing and cash flow. The metrics are around customer acqui...

Kevin Appleby is joined by Chris Tredwell to discuss this years GrowCFO finance systems survey and how the results will help them structure future sessions. The finance systems survey Chris explains what the survey’s purpose is and the benefits using it brings. He touched on an area of benefits that hearing the results from peers or the people who actually use the systems bring. It brings to light what people think about the finance systems they use. This helps GrowCFO to structure their sess...

Change is an important part of the CFO role. Change is a big part of a transaction, a business restructure or a systems implementation. The CFO is involved in leading all three. We look at each of these in this weeks podcast. The CFO’s role in business change can’t be underestimated, the CFO is a catalyst for change. GrowCFO’s future of finance functions group meets every Tuesday over Zoom. I’m looking at Change and specifically how it relates to finance transformation on the last Tuesday of ev...

The CFO and CEO’s roles have an important relationship. On this episode of the GrowCFO Show Kevin Appleby looks closer at this relationship with Richard Medcalf, founder of Xquadrant . Richard is a mentor to CEOs and tells you how the CFO should work with the CEO and also how to make the jump from the CFO role to the CEO one. About Richard Medcalf Richard studied at the University of Oxford and is now a leadership strategist to top tech CEOs. He is the founder and CEO of Xquadrant. Imposter sy...