CFO Chronicles: The Secrets Behind Success

Everyone Wants to Be a CFO. Here’s Why Most Will Never Make It - With Kevin Appleby

• James Donovan • Season 3 • Episode 58

Share episode

You’ve done the work. You’ve climbed the ladder. So why does the CFO title still feel out of reach?

Kevin Appleby, COO of GrowCFO and mentor to hundreds of finance leaders, reveals:

• The 3 invisible blockers keeping smart finance pros from stepping up
• Why “imposter syndrome” shows up right after your promotion
• What most people get completely wrong about becoming CFO
• The mindset shift that separates future execs from spreadsheet managers

🚨 This isn’t theory. Kevin’s helped hundreds make the leap and he's breaking down the playbook.

🔗 Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn
or learn more at growcfo.net

Send us a text

This episode is brought to you by Bill.com

Ready to take your finances to the next level? See how BILL Spend & Expense can power up your business and get that free grill at http://bill.com/cfochronicles

Ready to turn your firm into a lead-generating, profit-driving machine?
We help Bookkeepers, Accountants & Fractional CFOs generate consistent local leads, book perfect-fit appointments, and close premium clients, without cold outreach or ad guesswork.

Let’s map out your growth plan together → Book your free strategy call


SPEAKER_03:

Welcome back to another episode of CFO Chronicles, The Secrets Behind Success, where we bring you the top strategies and insights from the most successful fractional CFOs and accounting firm owners. Joining us today is Kevin Appleby, COO of Grow CFO and mentor to aspiring CFOs. With a background in finance transformation and cost reduction, Kevin has built a seven-figure business and is dedicated to giving back and helping the next generation of finance leaders. Get ready to learn from the best in the business as we dive into the secrets of success with Kevin Appleby. Kevin, thank you so much for joining the podcast all the way from across the pond, close to Newcastle, I believe you were just telling me. Today he said is a pretty big day in England with uh the Champions League starting.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for having me as a guest, James. I'm thoroughly looking forward to our chat. But yeah, here in Newcastle, it's a big day. Uh football, or soccer in your language, um, is very, very big in the northeast of England. Um my team, Newcastle United, have qualified for the Champions League, and we're playing Barcelona at home tonight, so it's a big, big day.

SPEAKER_03:

Amazing. And you're coming on a CFO Chronicle. So I mean, I don't know how those stack up on the calendar, but I would guess relatively close. Joking, um, obviously. Um, let's dive right into it, Kevin. I'm super excited to pick your brain. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and and how it led to becoming a mentor for aspiring CFOs?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, background, and while my title in GrowCFO is COO, that's really because I tend to do the techie and the more systems bits of the business, while Dan, our founder, tends to have more of a tendency to do the sales and marketing type things. But we're both accountants, we're both finance guys, both from the big four. Uh, Dan was an equity partner in KPMG. I was a principal consultant in KPMG. Sorry, I was a print need to cut this bit a little bit. Uh I was a principal consultant in PwC uh before moving on to be a director in other smaller consultancy firms. So my client ended up being the CFO, effectively, or the finance director. That typical project would be uh finance transformation, some sort of systems replacement, um, could be better budgeting, could be cost reduction, or I could end up simply being the the finance person on a much more general project. And what that led me into doing was talking to a lot of CFOs and a lot of the team members in the finance team, and quite often you'd be you'd be building the business case to make some sort of change, and you'd be asking the finance team, well, what does that activity cost you to do? And they'd give you a blank look and say, We don't really know, Kevin. That's not a line in the general ledger. So we'd go and do what we'd normally do in such a situation. We'd go do some activity analysis, we'd work out what people and resources were going into whatever it was we wanted to know the cost of, and we'd be coming up with some numbers. And I was quite surprised by the lack of ability in finance teams to do that sort of thing, to understand the real cost of things, to be able to link costs and revenues properly. And budgeting was the same. Quite often we'd go into a process of blowing up the budget, doing zero-based budgeting, and the skills that I was finding clients to do these things, which I regarded as pretty basic, they didn't have. So I ended up before COVID came along in the classroom teaching, planning, but planning, budgeting, forecasting, cost reduction, zero-based budgeting, all of those things to finance teams in the classroom, as well as still doing some consulting. And it got me into an area that I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed telling people about these things and seeing the light bulbs go on. Um, joined forces with Dan, who'd already been setting up Grow CFO in its very first one or two months. And really, since then, we've worked together because Dan was attempting to build a network of finance leaders. I wanted to bring some of my learning to an online platform because at that point classroom teaching just didn't work anymore. And so working together, we built Grow CFO. We discovered reasonably early on that there was a big community of folk who were want to be finance leaders. They might already be the number one in finance in their business, but they didn't feel as though they were in the CFO role, and they wanted to know how to get to CFO. And over a course of time, we've evolved in Grow CFO, what we call the future CFO program. So it's helping these folk to say, how do you get from where you are now to getting you into that first CFO role? And indeed, what once you get to that first CFO role, you're there. What do you do in your first hundred days of CFO? So that's cut to turn a simple question into a very long story. That's how I got involved with mentoring um future CFOs.

SPEAKER_03:

I love it. I appreciate it going into so much depth. What what do you notice is the biggest gap or like that first hurdle that aspiring CFOs notice when they make that leap from their current position to becoming a CFO?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. We've done a fair bit of research on this, and actually we've we've got a list of ten, but I haven't got the list in front of me, so don't ask me beyond the top three.

SPEAKER_02:

No words. I was I was only going for one, but if we can get three, that's even better.

SPEAKER_00:

But number one, every almost every new CFO seems to suffer from imposter syndrome.

SPEAKER_03:

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

Number two reason is it's very similar, it's lack of confidence. Number three is task overwhelm. And flip back to well, why imposter syndrome, why lack of confidence? And one thing that we found is that actually only people that are actually good at their job ever suffer from imposter syndrome. It's a very strange thing about it. The people that should have the imposter syndrome and actually no good never seem to suffer from it.

SPEAKER_02:

They have all the confidence in the world, even though they're not aware that they're struggling.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so no, you are head of finance, you're the internal face of finance. You're probably spending half your week with your nose buried in a spreadsheet. And you're taking those numbers, you're talking to people inside the business about them. Okay, a lot of it's routine, a lot of it's following that drumbeat of month end, quarter end, budgeting season, whatever it might be. You move to CFO and suddenly you're not doing the number crunching anymore. Somebody else is doing that for you. So that's first step out of your comfort zone. Second step out of your comfort zone is you know the external face of finance. Okay, you're not talking much inside the business anymore, except to the rest of the C suite. You're talking to investors, you're talking to customers, you're talking to suppliers. Oh, and then somebody's saying, be the co-pilot of the CEO. A lot of CEO CFOs end up with more than the finance function to run. Think about that. Typically, where where's the first CFO position going to arrive in a company? It's not gonna be in the small organization, it's gonna be it's not the startup, it's the scale up. So scale up, lots of stuff needs to be done, and you don't have a head of everything. So who picks up all the jobs that nobody else wants to do? It's the CFO generally. So the CFO is head of estate, head of legal, head of procurement, quite often is responsible for IT. So you've got this whole breadth of things that the CFO role is is kind of picking up and probably has very little background experience in. So no wonder that people feel a lack of confidence because they're being asked to do a whole load of stuff that's hey, I never never passed my exams in this. Back in the good old accountancy exams, you learnt where the debits and credits were, you learned how general ledger worked, you learned some company law, um, you learned some management accounting. Did anybody ever teach you stakeholder management? Did anybody ever teach you people management? Um and you you are uh generally in that first CFO role pushed outside your comfort zone. So you're feeling pretty uncomfortable because you've never done this before.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, it makes sense.

SPEAKER_00:

So the imposter syndrome comes from, oh, I'm gonna get this wrong. Somebody's gonna find out. Well, actually, fairly natural.

SPEAKER_03:

Sorry, go ahead, keep going.

SPEAKER_00:

And that lack of confidence. Well, I'm not quite sure what I should be doing here because you know you you haven't got perhaps 10 years of experience of doing some of the things you're now being asked to do. You've you've kind of got to learn it as you go along. So that transition from from head from controller, head of finance into CFO, it is a major, major step change. So, not surprising that the biggest challenges are imposter syndrome and lack of confidence.

SPEAKER_03:

So, how do you help your I guess your students, your your clients who are coming in, those you're mentoring, how do you help them overcome those, for lack of better words, limiting beliefs?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, one of the things we do in Grow CFO is we've got a team of mentors. Um it's quite normal these days to have a C-suite coach. But we're saying, hang on a minute, you don't actually want a C-suite coach, you want a mentor who is uh an experienced CFO who's been there, done it, and got the t-shirt. Okay. Uh a coach would kind of talk to you about the problem you're facing and almost get you to solve your own problem by talking it through. The experienced CFO mentor would be taking a bit of a different approach and be saying, ah, I had that problem once. Here's what we did about it. Or I've found by experience this works, no, and bringing this the new CFO on that way. So where they've got uncertainties, where they've got potential doubts about what to do, that experienced mentors there at their shoulder to help them along.

SPEAKER_03:

Interesting. That's cool. Yeah, that the additional support, I can see how that would go a long way. I've I've personally invested in mentors and coaches, and um it I certainly wouldn't be where I'm at today without making that investment. So, again, for anyone listening, I've said this before in episodes, it highly, highly recommended. It's just it's a launch pad to get ahead. So you just avoid all of those ditches that someone else has already hit and learned from.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And a key thing about mentoring is if you decide you want a mentor, well, you've got to find the mentor that's right for you, which is why we don't we don't employ any of our mentors full-time. Because rather than have a small team that you could fill a diary with, we want to offer a bigger team to say, find the right mentor for you, because the chemistry is so important. Do you get on? Does that person have the right background? Like no, if you're deep in SaaS B2B, do you want a mentor whose background was retail? Probably not. Yeah. If you're in in the financial sector, we've got mentors that are very experienced in the financial sector. You want somebody whose experience is relevant, relevant to you, and you want a chemistry on a personal level, somebody you can get on with.

SPEAKER_03:

What do you say to those who look at having a mentor as a coach, and there's do you still believe that I guess stigma that it comes from a place of weakness compared to a place of strength?

SPEAKER_00:

Um I think we're getting away from that, actually, James. I think what we tend to find is that actually the people that identify that they need a mentor are quite often the strongest people around, anyway. So they're definitely not weak. Often the weaker people might take that view that the the need for a mentor is showing their weakness, and that it's it's actually quite wrong. But I think these days most people realize that having a coach, having a mentor is quite normal, and as you say, it is the way to accelerate things.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, 100%. Um Kevin, when you were growing up, is this what you envisioned you'd be doing as a career? Like tell me, tell me a little bit about what your what your um childhood Kevin thought he'd be doing in the future. What was your dream as a kid?

SPEAKER_00:

I remember childhood Kevin. I I must have been about 13 or 14, and I was off school, not for not particularly well. And my dad was a child accountant, effectively a CPA in the United States in public practice. Small firm, just two partners. Uh member of the same institute that I'm now a member of. And I was wandering around the house, pretty bored, and there was a pile of accountancy magazines on his desk at home. I sort of picked one up and started flicking through it, and I saw the adverts at the back. And at the time, all of the big headhunting firms, the way everything was done back then, was through paper advertising and very old-fashioned stuff. They were advertising these fantastic jobs in overseas locations with salaries that look quite eye-watery. And I thought, there's probably something in this. But as time went on, actually, I I moved away from that thought in that that original thought, oh, be an accountant, be able to go for those. And dad said, Well, yeah, be an accountant, it's a great qualification in business, you can do anything with it. So I did an accounting degree, which would have given me nicely some exemptions from the professional exams to get them done a bit quicker, but then left university with the feeling, oh, the last thing I want to do is be an accountant. So I applied for all these marketing jobs. And there were a couple of big corporates that were doing the standard, what we call in the UK, the milk round around the universities, doing their recruitment thing. And I'd applied to them to join their marketing teams. And suddenly I ended up on an interview. And then passed the interview and found myself on a on a panel at their head office or wherever. And each time, oh god, Kevin, you're you're not on the on the on the final piece for marketing, you're on the final piece for finance. And I suppose didn't get either of the jobs because I was not prepared. Probably showed that I wasn't particularly enthusiastic at that stage. Then I thought, perhaps somebody's trying to tell me something here. And I ended up doing the logical thing at this point and going joining a firm of accountants in public practice and qualifying as a member of the Institute of Chart Accountants in England and Wales. So to answer to your question, as a youngish person, no, I moved away from this thought of finance completely. But I knew as soon as I was training to qualify that I didn't want to stay in public practice, I wanted to be in industry. So literally the day I passed my exams, left public practice and moved briefly into the insurance industry, but then ended up spending 10 years in the chemical industry. Nice with what was then ICI, which was number one in the FTSE hundred. So pretty big organization and moved up through there. Uh and really, career from there to where I am now was never planned. And people talk about plan your career. Well, hey, you never know what's around the corner. And the the business that I was with in ICI was sold. Uh was sold to a German company, BASF. And because I was a European business accountant, two-thirds of my job went to Germany on day one. And I ended up doing some post-acquisition stuff to make the business work. And I ended up they acquired another business, this time from Zeneker, who had recently divested from ICI, uh, and helping BSF onboard this this other business. But it was pretty clear I didn't have a job in BSF. Okay. Did I ever plan to be a management consultant? No. The my assistant in the accounting office said, Kevin, I know you're looking for jobs. I've just seen this. Coopers and Librand are recruiting management consultants. It sounds like just the sort of stuff you you you like doing. Fine. I'll fill an application for me and see what happens. Never mind. Three months later, I'm on the induction course at Coopers and Librand, who had just become well, who had just about to become PwC. Never planned to be a management consultant, but I was suddenly a management consultant. And the next thing that happened, no, for a large part of my career as a management consultant, I worked in the UK public sector, not the not private business, which again was a complete accident. Uh last big project I did in the chemical industry were we were looking at capital spares on the plant because huge multimillion dollar asset. How do you keep it running? How do you keep it fixed? Well, you're going to keep a lot of spare parts in. So I don't I looked at the policy the policy, the stockpile, and everything like that. So I'm on the induction dinner and in Cooper's. And the resource manager says, Oh, Kevin, uh there's not much kicking off at the moment. You might have to sit on the bench for a couple of weeks before we find your project to join. Tell me a little about what you've been doing. I said, Well, yeah, chemical interest. I've just done this capital spares project, Gary. Oh, funny you should mention that. We've got a project going on looking at capital spares for the British Army. I'll give Alan, the project director, a phone call. And my next day, Alan rings me, talks about what I've been doing, tells me about this project in the army. Kevin, would you like to come and join the project till Easter? My mistake, I never said Alan, which Easter? Three years later, I'd become a defence consultant by accident. A lot of accidents. And I I I remember one of what we were doing, the the the British Army, in fact, the entire UK public sector at the time, didn't do accruals. Did purely cash accounting. There wasn't a balance sheet. The the UK government at the time forced all of the public sector to go into proper resource accounting and have balance sheets. So suddenly the the military had to work out how do you put all of this stock onto the balance sheet? How do you put all these assets onto the balance sheet? And we were doing Army Assets Project, which was literally how do we take the stock and assets of the army and put them into the into the into the books. And there's some great war stories from there. Like at the time, Sun Account Systems Union, which became Oracle, um, we were putting in their fixed asset register. We were the biggest single implementation of Sun Account fixed assets in on the globe. And we set it away, trying it out for the first time, doing the monthly depreciation calculation, and realized very quickly it was going to take three weeks to do the depreciation calculation. At which point, Alan, my project director, was saying, give me the list of assets and the spreadsheet, I'll do it by hand. No, Alan, you've missed the point there. So that little stories like that, no, and working out have we got all of the assets in the asset register? So there we are, we've got what's in the army systems, but and worked out what to put in there. But then we've got a copy of Jane's Defense sitting on the desk as well. Oh, Jane's Defense says we should have nine AS90s. Why are there only eight in the asset register?

SPEAKER_03:

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, Kevin, I'm I'm really curious. I want to switch gears just a little bit here. I want to hear a little bit more about um, not to I guess maybe pun intended here, but how how are you guys growing Grow CFO? Like, let's quickly talk about the marketing strategies that you guys deploy, um, that you and your team deploy to continue to grow Grow CFO.

SPEAKER_00:

We have a fantastic marketing team. Zoe Cooper and her people are doing all of the marketing for us. And it's a tough call because there is a lot of noise out there. Um things that used to work stop working. We've got to change attack all of the time. Um, but we're looking to get as bigger penetration on social media and on email that we can. Email still works. The open rates and so on are probably lower than they ever used to be. But what are we doing? And there's there's several bits to the Grow CFO business. There's there's Grow CFO membership. We've got a platform that's full of courses, self-serve courses, and some of them are live virtual classroom courses. Uh, you get access to them all by being a Grow CFO member. And they're they're aimed at CFOs and finance members of the CFO's team. So a great way, if you're a CFO, to get your team, make sure they're trained up, is by the team membership. Um, so one of the things we're trying to sell are memberships. Okay. And we're not directly marketing memberships anymore. Back in the early days, and we did uh the founder members offer to get the initial bunch in, we did Black Fridays, things like that. Now we're at that stage that there's enough word of mouth around that know about us. A lot of what we're doing from a marketing point of view is is awareness. But we realize that everything we did in the early days was geared to selling individual memberships.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

To grow a business like ours, you've got to sell a lot of individual memberships to get bigger. So the the change in tack that we've had is we're saying, well, actually, we're we're very much focusing on corporates.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Not not big corporate, not your big listed companies, uh, because they've got so much already set out in terms of training for people. What our core market, I'd say, is scale-ups and the middle market. And talking to the the learning development people, to the finance people, and saying, you know, we'll do your package for your finance team and we can cover things off. And we've got things built into the the the training um materials, such as the there's uh there's a boot camp for FPA.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay, nice.

SPEAKER_00:

Seven two-hour workshops over uh a week, one a week, something similar for finance business partnering. So we've got things that we can go and offer teams of people to do. Okay. And really, in terms of growing the business, marketing the business, that's been the shift. So talking to corporates as opposed to individuals.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

You mentioned um you have a great team, there's a lot of different companies out there. What would you recommend to other firms when they are looking for a partner to work with when it comes to their marketing? Like what are some of the I guess traits or criteria they should be vetting for?

SPEAKER_00:

You've got to look for somebody who understands your business. You've got to look for somebody who understands the sort of client you want to go for. Like I've always had this thing around professional services firms that you go to their websites and they tell you we're this, we're that, they talk about their values. Well, hey, every professional accounting firm has this set of values, every set has this set of ethics. What they traditionally never did was actually told the client what the benefit was for the client of working with them. Why would you choose us over anybody else? What's the benefit for you? So I think you've got to have the marketing firm, the marketing team, that know how to take that approach and know what the pain point is that the client is suffering, what the ideal client is suffering, and really be able to talk to that pain point.

SPEAKER_03:

That's awesome. Um last question for you here, Kevin. This has been really insightful. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

SPEAKER_00:

That's a tough one. Best piece of advice. Um I think the best piece of advice is just do it. Don't ask for permission. Say sorry later if you if you get it wrong or you step on somebody's toes. Go for it.

SPEAKER_03:

Just Nike, just do it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, just do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't go around asking for permission to do it. Say sorry when you do it. When if you if you didn't have the permission you thought you had, say sorry afterwards.

SPEAKER_03:

Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and we have a saying in my part of the world in north northeast England. Shy burn shy bans getting out. Now, a lot of that is in in Geordie, which is based on Viking, but it's basically shy children get nothing.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I like that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

It's it sounds like uh the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Yeah. To a certain degree.

SPEAKER_00:

Indeed. Yes.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, awesome. Kevin, this has been fantastic. How can how can the listeners get in touch with you, continue the conversation, learn more about Grow CFO?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh well, I'm on your podcast, James, but I've got my own, and I think you're gonna guest on that as well in a week or two.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, looking forward to that.

SPEAKER_00:

Tune into the Grow CFO show, which is a a huge mixture of uh our alumni, our mentors and trainers, sometimes some of our tech partners, two of the latest technology. It's a whole mixture of things that are interesting for CFOs and finance teams. So have a look on there. Go to the Grow CFO website, www.growcfo.net, and you can become a free member of Grow CFO, uh, which will get you onto the mailing list. You'll see everything that we do, you'll get the regular weekly newsletter, and we do a couple of times every month, we do free webinars. And anybody can come along and join a gross join into a grow CFO free webinar.

SPEAKER_03:

Awesome. We'll make sure we put all those links in the show notes in the description so people can certainly take advantage of that. Kevin, again, thank you so much for coming on, sharing all of your insight. And I I can't wait to jump on and meet with you again in a couple weeks for for your podcast.

SPEAKER_00:

Brilliant. Looking forward to it, James. Thank you again.

SPEAKER_03:

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of CFO Chronicles, the secrets behind success. I hope you found value in today's conversation. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. If you enjoyed today's discussion, please rate and review the show. It helps others discover the insights we share here. Second, if you're ready. Ready to take your business to the next level and attract the high-end clients you deserve, head over to accountingleadsnow.com or click the link in the show notes to book your strategy call. It's time to position yourself as the advisor your clients need. And don't forget, you can connect with me on LinkedIn to stay up to date on what's happening in the world of accounting and financial growth. We've got exciting topics coming up, so stay tuned for the next episode of CFO Chronicles. Until then, keep pushing forward. Your growth is just one strategic move away.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for listening to CFO Chronicles, the secrets behind success. We hope today's episode provided valuable strategies to help you attract more high-paying clients. Be sure to subscribe, follow, and share with fellow professionals. Connect with us on LinkedIn and leave a review or comment to join the conversation. Your feedback helps us bring you the best insights in finance and marketing. Until next time, keep striving for success and unlocking your business's potential.