Episode 29: A CFO’s Guide to Building Business Goals, Relationships, and Managing Risk

Editor’s Note

Our guest, Ravi Narula describes the growing strategic role of the CFO, how to be a better business partner to his peers, how he tackles risk management, and the future of AI technology, especially during today’s volatile economic times.

Ravi’s growth mindset is simple: connect actions to goals. “Having a clear line of sight to what our long-term goals are and then connecting our short term actions to long-term goals becomes very critical,” he said.

Ravi sees the value of technology adoption as a critical enabler to his finance team, and reveals the rigor behind technology investments. It’s not just about showing the value at the time of purchase, it’s also having a clear business case and roadmap to show ROI across multiple milestones for the business in the future.

Ravi said, “How do we justify technology adoption and get some real hard ROI and benefits out of it? It’s important that we connect some of these actions and data we get. And not only at the time of decision making, but after implementation. [We should] do an annual assessment [to look at] what can we do differently to adopt this thing even more? And not only looking at technology that is live. How many users are using it? How well accepted within the organization?”

Ravi has over 20 years of CFO experience, and he’s helped turn several technology startups into large, mature, public companies. On this episode, Ravi describes the growing role of the CFO, company risk management, and the future of AI technology.

This CFO podcast is an excellent guide for finance leaders and CFOs who embrace thought leadership from their peers, and who are looking for examples of how others CFOs are managing risk, driving growth, navigating the complex and expanding role of the CFO.