Within start-ups and scale-ups, many founders are also first-time CEOs, working through their roles with excitement but often lacking prior leadership experience.

In such scenarios, the role of the finance leader becomes indispensable—not just as a numbers expert but as a strategic partner to the founder.

For a startup CFO, balancing financial responsibilities while supporting startup founders can be both challenging and rewarding.

Why Financial Leadership Matters in Startups

1. Guiding First-Time Founders: Founders often rely heavily on their finance leader for strategic and operational guidance, especially when they lack prior business leadership experience. They look to you not just for financial expertise but for support in building the company's foundation.

2. Providing a Strategic Edge: As a startup CFO, your role extends beyond balancing books. You bring clarity to decisions about fundraising, scaling, and resource allocation. Your insights into the numbers help founders align business goals with financial realities, enabling sustainable growth.

3. Tackling Overwhelm: A first-time founder may struggle with investor relations, cash flow planning, and forecasting. As their finance leader, you’re expected to step in, anticipate challenges, and present solutions—all while ensuring your finance function operates efficiently.

Leadership Skills for Career and Business Success

Transitioning from financial management to financial leadership requires sharpening several key skills:

• Effective Communication: Translate complex financial data into actionable insights that founders and other stakeholders can easily understand.  Unless you're working within FinTech - you will often find that founders or other leaders around the business don't understand basic level accounting.  Therefore it's your job to help them understand without being patronising.
• Proactive Decision-Making: Move from reactive financial reporting to proactively driving business strategies.  Forward looking should be your focus.  It's certainly the founders / CEO - so make sure you're in line.
• Empathy and Collaboration: Understanding the founder’s vision and building trust are critical to offering meaningful support.  Think about the budget.  It's hard to build a long term budget when you don't understand what the strategic goals and vision are.

Practical Tips for Supporting Startup Founders

1. Be a Trusted Advisor: Offer insights that go beyond the numbers. Help founders think critically about business decisions and understand potential risks.  You want to develop a strong relationship whereby the two of you can trash out current challenges, issues, opportunities and options.  
2. Prioritise Financial Transparency: Build robust systems that provide clear, real-time financial data founders can rely on.  There is nothing worse than numbers and data that you can't rely on.  Don't be that person.
3. Focus on Education: Many founders don’t have a strong grasp of financial concepts. Use your expertise to educate and empower them.  I recently had to teach a founder the difference between cash and accrual accounting.  Once they understood, we had a meaningful discussion about how we can change their current P&L to be more investor friendly.
4. Anticipate Challenges: Whether it’s managing cash flow, planning for a fundraise, or setting KPIs, step in early with plans to mitigate risks.  Don't wait for someone to ask you or for the issues to arise.  Be proactive here.  Often the Finance leaders is the only person that thinks about risk.  This is your job.

Becoming the Backbone of a Startup

For a startup CFO, leadership skills go hand in hand with technical knowledge. Supporting startup founders often means stepping out of your comfort zone and into a leadership role that influences not just the finances but also the culture and future of the business.

If you're navigating this transition or preparing for a CFO role, my Financial Leadership Fundamentals course is designed to help you build the skills to thrive as a finance leader within a startup or scale-ups.

Want to fast-track your finance career growth?  Check out the steps in our Framework below to get started:

1. Sign up to our next workshop.
2. Work with me in the Financial Leadership Foundations course  that includes monthly Q&A sessions where we can discuss all of your questions and how to apply your learnings to your current role. 
3. Download the Advanced Management accounts course to showcase your skills as a finance leader to the Founder, leadership team and the Board.
4. Book at FLF Career Planning session.