Category: Leadership & Culture

Lessons on team management, mentorship, internal controls, and building productive teams.

  • What Fades, What Lasts: The Foundations That Endure

    Bear with me a minute on a personal reflection — I promise I’ll get to the financial foundation. We were cleaning out old storage bins and came across a very old photo album in what was left of my mom’s last bit of memorabilia. A carefully curated album of old black-and-white photos. What do you…

  • Strategy, Tactics, and the Myth of the “Strategic CFO”

    Another post crossed my feed today drawing a line between a “strategic CFO” and a CFO in name only, someone doing “controller” work for CFO pay. The implication whether intended or not is that companies with CFOs involved in the close, setting processes for year end and ensuring reconciliations are done are overpaying for glorified…

  • The Tyranny of Studying Winners

    Much of modern management thinking is built on a narrow and deceptively comforting habit: studying winners and working backward. From a small set of outliers, we extract traits, frameworks, and moral lessons, then present them as generalizable insight. This habit has consequences. When winners become the primary dataset, success is treated as evidence of virtue,…

  • Is Founder Dependence a Deal Killer?

    Founder Dependence Isn’t Always a Problem — Until You Want Options I recently read a LinkedIn post highlighting a red flag in acquisitions: if the founder can’t step away and the business can’t run without them, you’re not buying a business — you’re buying a job. Yes! Great insight. Dead on. For cash-flow–driven acquisitions, standalone…

  • CFO vs Controller Discussions

    How’s It Like the Game – Can you spot the differences? But Founders don’t have time for games. They want solutions – not titles. The real question isn’t whether you need a CFO or a Controller. The question is: do you have a foundation that lets you make confident decisions and grow value? 1: The…