Waypointers
Waypointers is the go-to podcast for agency leaders. In this series, produced by Waypoint Partners, we bring together the brightest minds in the industry and our own in-house growth advisory specialists to share illuminating conversations to grow your agency.
Bringing you insights, analysis and knowledge from the leading lights of the UK agency landscape, Waypointers is a must-listen for aspirational agency leaders.
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Waypoint Partners is an expert global growth and M&A advisory firm providing support to businesses in the marketing services and technology sectors.
Waypointers
37. Do you have the CFO your agency needs to grow?
Driving agency growth depends on a strong leadership team and that includes having a CFO who is deeply embedded within the business. Or at least that’s the way it should be. Despite this being a role that is central to agency success, conversations about what makes for a good CFO, including skillset and behaviour, gets relatively little airtime in our industry press. Ironically that changes when things go wrong, and then the CFO becomes a useful scapegoat, sometimes even finding themselves in the glare of negative publicity defending company performance and where the numbers “went wrong”.
In this episode of Waypointers, we shine a light on the value that a strong CFO can bring to any ambitious agency. Adrian Talbot, CFO at the global marketing business Miroma, is a highly experienced practitioner who believes in getting involved with every aspect of the business.
In this conversation with Waypoint partner, Matt Lacey, Adrian talks about how he’s adapted the CFO role in his image, making it a very “human centred” one. That has meant getting involved in parts of the business where a CFO might often find themselves “warned away” from or where they’d simply not think to look. In the same way that creatives might traditionally have been kept away from clients for fear of what they might say or do, CFOs may have to contend with similar attitudes.
But by building firm ties across the agencies he’s worked at over the years, with leadership teams, staff and clients, Adrian has carved out a much more holistic CFO role.