A CFO who is good at financial integrity management but struggles with assessing situations and being visionary won’t be a CFO for very long. I see CFOs facing this challenge in companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 companies to startups. In my role on the RoseRyan management team, which includes interviewing candidates, and as […]
“Business, much like life, is not a movie and not everyone gets to have a storybook ending.” Those were the farewell words of Gigaom founder Om Malik after the San Francisco tech website shut down earlier this year, unable to pay its creditors. Every startup is its own unique opportunity, but so many are cut […]
Companies will no longer have to call out extraordinary items on the income statement following the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s recent issuance of an accounting standards update. This change, which affects transactions that are considered both unusual and infrequent, goes into effect for fiscal periods beginning after December 15, 2015. As someone who has been […]
Having been involved in accounting for over 30 years, I have seen quite a few changes in accounting requirements, all enthusiastically introduced to “help the reader understand the financial status of a company better.” I have to say that I believe the opposite is happening. Reading (interpreting) accounts is getting harder to do, as more […]
I have seen a wide range of public-company CFOs in my work at RoseRyan and I’ve been one myself, having spent 13 years at Nasdaq-listed companies between 1997 and 2009. So when a RoseRyan client considering an IPO recently asked me what qualities are vital for a public-company CFO, I came up with the following […]
You are the CFO of a public company and your CEO suggests you invest in Bitcoins, as their value has gone up a lot over the past few weeks, and he thinks that will continue. He says it will make the bottom line on the income statement look stronger. What should you do? You’ll first […]
It wasn’t long ago that real-time financial information was available only to those who worked in companies with expensive data collection and analysis systems. CFOs of less-wealthy companies had to make decisions on the basis of historical information (or hunches, never a good idea). Lacking timely information, they had to forgo decisions that could have […]
On September 1, 2012, the state of California started to collect sales tax from Amazon after a years-long argument over whether the Internet company should pay such a tax. In just the first four months of collection that tax amounted to $96.4 million. A good deal? Maybe, but you could argue that this apparent win […]
A few years ago, well before I joined RoseRyan, I met a recruiter who was trying to fill a CFO opening in a fast-moving start-up. The role sounded interesting, until the recruiter said the CEO was looking for a young candidate as they were less likely to want a “work-life balance.” Immediately, I knew the […]
Entrepreneurs are constantly setting up companies as new business opportunities arise. It’s called innovation, and that’s what Silicon Valley is all about. VCs put their money into these companies to help them grow with the expectation that they will make a great return on investment themselves—and they perform significant due diligence and risk assessment before […]
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