Most teams treat annual planning like a spreadsheet exercise.
Finance builds the numbers. Everyone else nods along. Then the plan gets filed away until next year.
But real planning isn’t about producing a static budget – it’s about creating a rhythm that connects finance, operations, and delivery all year round.
In this episode of The Handbook: The Ops Podcast, Harv sits down with Adam Cooper, founder of ACC Finance Solutions and host of The Fractional CFO Show, to unpack how finance can become your business’s operating rhythm – one that brings clarity, accountability, and foresight to every decision.
Here’s what we cover:
- How to use finance as your sat nav, not your rear-view mirror
- Building a monthly rhythm that links financials, KPIs, and team accountability
- Creating a planning cycle that goes beyond budgets – with scenarios, reforecasts, and 3 – 5 year goals
- Managing cash flow and runway with discipline (and less stress)
- Why financial storytelling matters – and how it helps the whole business make smarter choices
If your annual planning still feels like a finance ritual, this episode will help you reframe it as an operating plan for the year ahead – one that helps your team navigate, adapt, and grow with confidence.
Additional Resources:
👉🏽 Follow Adam on LinkedIn.
💰 Check out ACC Finance Solutions.
🎧 Listen to The Fractional CFO Show.
👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn.
📈 Measure your business maturity and find out how to get to the next level: https://bit.ly/assess-business-maturity
📬 Stay up to date with regular ops insights. Subscribe to The Handbook: The Operations Newsletter.
Transcript
Harv Nagra: [00:00:00] Harv Nagra: Hey everyone. It’s Harv. It’s that time of year again, annual planning season. Every team’s trying to map out next year, but the thing is, most businesses still treat that process like a spreadsheet exercise.
Finance builds the numbers.
Everyone else kind of nods along because they don’t have their head around it and maybe don’t even understand its significance. The point of this exercise isn’t to tick a box or produce a P&L statement that gets filed away until next Autumn. It should be a living system, one that helps you make better decisions month to month, brings finance and operations together, and connects the numbers to what’s actually happening across the business. This week I’m joined by Adam Cooper, a fractional CFO and podcast host who’s helped hundreds of agencies and consultancies use finance as their sat nav, not their rear view mirror.
If you’re heading into planning season, this episode will hopefully change the way you see it and how you approach it.
Thanks for listening to the Handbook. This episode is brought to you by Scoro, and shout out to them for supporting my new project with The Handbook, the Business Maturity Quiz. Here’s why this matters. Most service businesses grow without a clear benchmark.
You feel busy, maybe even successful, but without something to measure against, you don’t actually know if you’re set up to scale. That’s where the quiz I’ve designed comes in. In three minutes, you’ll see where you stand across five key pillars, people, process, tech, data and growth. More importantly, you’ll get tailored advice on what to focus on next to level Up. Most service businesses, including agencies and consultancies, stall at level one or two. Only 5% ever reach the top, level five. So where do you think you sit? Find out now at bit.ly/assess-business-maturity.
Once again, that’s bit.ly/assess-business-maturity. I’ll include a link in the episode notes. Now? Let’s get to the podcast.
Hey all.
Tell me if you’ve been in a finance meeting like this, a dozen spreadsheets open on a screen share, toggling between them, each person staring at a different column, and no real context to help anyone follow along or understand what it actually means. It’s dizzying and you end up more confused than when you came in.
The best finance and ops leaders go beyond reporting. They help you see trends, the risks, and the opportunities hiding in plain sight. Because if you’re only reporting the numbers, the team might not get the early signals on delivery, resourcing, or profitability until it’s too late.
But Here’s the bigger issue. Businesses still treat forecasting like a one-off event, something you do once a year. When in reality forecasting is the heartbeat of how a business should run. It’s how you stay ahead of the cash flow issues, see margin problems before they appear, and use real data to shape decisions week by week.
That’s the focus of today’s episode, turning finance from a reporting function into a forward-looking system that helps the whole business operate smarter. Our guest today is Adam Cooper, founder of ACC Finance Solutions and host of the Fractional CFO Show. Adam has decades of experience as a CFO and he’s helped hundreds of agencies and consultancies become data-driven and forward-looking.
In this conversation, Adam and I dig into what that looks like in practice, from building a financial rhythm that connects leadership and delivery teams, to improving cash flow visibility, job profitability, and forecasting discipline. Let’s get into it.
Adam, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.
Adam Cooper: Thank you very much for having.
Harv Nagra: We have a load to cover today, and we’re talking all things finance. So let’s dive straight in. So you often say that finance should be the sat nav, not the rear view mirror. So tell us what you mean by that.
Adam Cooper: Sure. So I guess the rationale for that is you should be looking forwards rather than backwards. finance with external accountants, your bookkeepers, often that’s looking at last month, last year, the tax return that you, you’ve just completed for a previous period. What we think is the best way of complimenting that is thinking about the forecasting, the planning, the analysis, the looking forwards. And what that is not to, ensure that your forecast or your plan knows every nook and cranny, every bump in the road, but directionally. It’s correct. And so you’re using the historical information, which is critical to have accurate, but you’re using that to help you plan, help you analyze, help you prepare your business for the year ahead. For the period ahead, rather than just simply looking backwards.
Harv Nagra: I wonder if one of the challenges is, it’s easier to look backwards because it’s all done and dusted and people don’t really know what they should be looking at or how they should be doing that. So we’re gonna cover some of that today. But before that, another thing that you, you said is that finance is like an operating rhythm, or it should be seen that way again.
I haven’t heard anybody say that in that exact way, so I was wondering if you could explain what that means and what that looks like.
Adam Cooper: Sure. In terms of the rhythm of your business, you should be using finance to help with that. And what that means is that on a regular basis, that might be weekly, that might be monthly, you are looking at your numbers, you’re looking at what you’ve done for the previous period, and then you are using that, as I say, as your sat nav. So how does that affect your forecast? How does that affect your plans, your personal, your professional plans,the plans for your organization, and then use that to help run your business. And this is where it’s critical because so often we look at our numbers in isolation.
Maybe you’ll have a conversation with your accountant and then you go off and you run the business. Far more valuable is where you use your forecast and your plan and your numbers to help guide those boardroom conversations. And that’s what I mean by saying it’s an operating manual, so you’re using it to help operate the business.
Harv Nagra: And who’s, who’s kind of involved in that then? Is that kind of the CFO, the FD, or do you see more people taking part in that kind of process?
Adam Cooper: I think it is driven by your CFO, your fd, your finance manager, whoever you have running the numbers in your business. And that can be full-time or part-time internal, external, doesn’t matter. Have someone who’s responsible for the numbers, and then ensure that you involve yourself as the owner, but also any senior leadership team members in that monthly or weekly rhythm.
So in those meetings, but then as important is you then take those numbers, take that information and it flows down into a set of KPIs. So you have a set of operating metrics that you use to drive your business from the perspective of the key performance indicators that flow from your finances. And so that’s vital.
So you start with your CFO and fd, it goes down to your leadership team, and then goes through the organization.
Harv Nagra: you’re kind of describing having these people together in a room as well, I suppose. And can you just take us through what that looks like in, in the sense of what are you actually going through during that session together?
Adam Cooper: So those monthly meetings that you have, should be an hour long meeting typically, any more than that is a bit the top on a monthly basis. So an hour. you’ll typically run through consistent pack of information. So you’ll have your P&L, you’ll balance sheet, your cash flow forecast, you’ll have your financial metrics, non-financial metrics, so operating metrics that you have agreed as a leadership team that you want to be tracking that tie into your finances. So it’s important that you have that meeting on a monthly basis. Then best practice in my experience is that you have a follow on meeting the next day or two after that, where the operating leaders who’ve been in that meeting then sit down with their direct reports. And again, you know, if you’re in a smaller agency, this might just be one or two individuals who sit down with one or two individuals.
That doesn’t matter.
the practice of doing this and setting up the structure to allow you to do this, and therefore it grows with you. And I’ve worked in, multimillion pound up to billion pound organizations who follow this same organizational structure. So you sit down, have a follow on meeting that uses the main key performance indicators from that meeting that are relevant for your department.and so therefore the finance information from the monthly meeting flows down to the rest of the team for that month ahead. You then have weekly check-ins where you can track those KPIs, but it flows from the finance meeting on a monthly basis down to the direct reports and then a weekly catch up.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm. I really love what you’re describing there because I think part of the conversation today is that, unfortunately I think finance and operations can be quite disconnected sometimes. And these remain conversations at a very senior level or in a very closed kind of group, and it doesn’t trickle down to everyone in the organization.
And there’s a lot of room there for us to educate the rest of our teams and make sure that they have an understanding of how the work they’re doing impacts and how the business is performing as well. Right.
Adam Cooper: Yeah, no, exactly. and just to add, sorry.
Often this is quite uncomfortable, particularly for founder led organizations that are, rather than the smaller end of the scale, they may still be run by the founder who’s involved in every decision. Signs off on every invoice, pays all the bills. opening up the finances in that way can be uncomfortable and does take a bit of a cultural shift and mindset shift.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: I’m not saying is you need to open up every person’s salary to every person in the organization
Harv Nagra: course.
Adam Cooper: balance. It’s about having a controlled flow of information that gives people an understanding. Of the financial performance of the business and has them buy into it. And that way you get better performance.
you get a feeling of trust from the organization and from the individuals there, and as a result, it improves your bottom line.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm. We’re gonna move into kind of, we’re gonna be covering quite a few topics today, but, the next one I wanted to speak about was cashflow. Right? so why is that so important to a service business? And I think I’ve read something that you were saying that this is often misunderstood or neglected.
So again, if you could just shed some light on that for us.
Adam Cooper: Yeah, absolutely. there, there is the, the mantra that cash is king. And, you know, while it’s a bit cliched, it is absolutely true because effectively, if you run out of cash. You can’t pay your bills, you can’t pay your suppliers, you go under. and I’m not trying to be too melodramatic, but cash is that important to a business, and it’s vital that you’re thinking about cash at every point through your journey.
So if you’re onboarding a new client, make sure that you are looking at the payment terms that you’re putting into the contract and that it is optimal and that it ties in with your monthly and weekly cash flows and your outgoings. So that you are matching your inflows and your outflows. Similarly when you are collecting money, critical that you’ve got a controlled process around collecting late payments, around tracking late payments. And again, the accounting software packages that you can get off the shelf, Xero, for example, QuickBooks,Sage, these have. these have cashflow reports baked in. They have age debtor reports baked in, and it’s about knowing where those are. It’s about, having the bookkeeping information so that you’re tracking every element of what’s coming in, what’s going out in your accounting tool.
Not just your bank balance
And then that you’re actually, doing something about that and have people who have the responsibility within their role. And again, it doesn’t always have to be a CFO or finance director in the business. these can be external finance folk who are responsible for ensuring that your cash balance is up to date, and monitored, and that any red flags, highlighted to you as the owner as soon as possible.
Harv Nagra: so Adam,I dunno if the right way to say it is your cash runway. is there a healthy amount of is that the right way to put it?
First of all, if I’m trying to describe like how much cash you should have to, cover yourself for the coming months, just in terms of security.
Adam Cooper: Yeah.
typically you want your bank balance or your cash runway to cover, three months worth of expenses. That’s the general rule of thumb
that I advise clients to adhere to. But you need to be a bit more nuanced than that because it’s no point having three months worth of cash runway, but then you’ve got a huge tax bill coming within the next couple of months that eats into that. So equally important is to have visibility on what your cash runway is, including your tax bills and outgoings, and what your cash runway is, excluding those sort of tax and non-operating expenses. So it’s important to segment. your bank.
Harv Nagra: got cash going into, separate pots, depending on what you need it for.
Adam Cooper: And then to make sure that you are operating expenses. That’s what you’ve got, three months coverage. So keep your tax payments separate.
Make sure you got them, and that you are paying into that every time a transac transaction comes through. But then, yes, in terms of runway, always recommend three months worth of operating expenses. so therefore, if you know you have some external shock or you lose a client, you’ve got that, that insurance policy and that gives you time to, to sort things out a little bit and give, gives you that visibility.
Harv Nagra: can you give us some advice? There’s sometimes, things get,we all have terms of payments, which often, I shouldn’t say often don’t get, honored, but maybe that’s the, maybe that’s the case. but, do you have any advice for when stuff gets, overdue? How to get control of that kind of situation? Because we all wanna put our foot down, but then sometimes client relationships get in the way and it’s well, we still have deadlines to meet.
Any kind of advice you have on that when things get a little bit too, overdue.
Adam Cooper: Yeah, no, absolutely. it’s vital and I’d actually take a step back and start before you onboard the client. So we typically work with our clients and businesses, to do credit checks. On every business that we work with. So every client that they take on, you’re doing a check upfront that they’re going to be a reliable partner for you.
And obviously you can’t plan for every, eventuality, but this will do a check on the directors. It will do a check on late payments to other suppliers. so you are going in with your eyes open. Secondly, you wanna make sure that in your terms and contracts, you’ve got very clearly stated exactly what your expectation is.
Some contracts, might have been inherited from previous businesses, or might have been, done through ChatGPT or whatever, and they might not always consider that. and the clarity of that is critical. So make sure you’ve got a clause in the contract that states, you will pay 14 days after receipt of invoice.
And it’s, it’s incredibly clear. Then, as you say, onto the collections piece, what you want to be doing is once that invoice has gone out, you want regular reminders and these can be set up automatically through your accounting system. And then you want to have someone who’s tracking, that we’re coming up to the deadline and the, and then there’s an escalation policy. what I mean is that you’ve got a structured policy that you follow, which says, if you are one week late, this is what happens if you’re two weeks late, that’s what happens. So effectively you’ve got a four week process after which you then escalate it to debt collection and you then escalate it to legal. now obviously this is the policy, right? So you follow this as a rule of thumb for the agency, but then it’s down to you as the agency owner. To decide maybe you are comfortable giving a little bit of extra credit here, or you are not wanting to escalate to debt collection quite so quickly there.
So it’s important that there’s the art as well as the science, but it’s, critical that you’ve thought out that whole life cycle from onboarding the client through to legal potentially.
Harv Nagra: ultimately they’re only good clients. They’re only clients when they’re paying you. if they don’t pay you, they’re not clients. You’re doing charity and that’s a different, and, very valid approach that you might wanna take. You might wanna do work for free. you
Adam Cooper: might certainly wanna do charity work, but you are taking on clients with a view to
Harv Nagra: Yeah.
Adam Cooper: you. And if they’re not paying you.
Harv Nagra: Yeah.
Adam Cooper: you have to have maturity. You need to be sensitive to the relationship, but at the end of the day, it’s a business. You need to get paid. You’ve done the service. So it’s, it’s ensuring that you are, you’re sticking to your policy because again, that takes the emotion out of it.
It allows you to be objective rather than subjective. And particularly where you’re a small business, where you as the founder, you might have all of those relationships by removing yourself slightly from that process, it makes it easier to escalate, and then also bringing in a third party to do that escalation, whether that’s third party debt collection, third party finance,or legal.
Again, it removes you and your emotion from that conversation.
Harv Nagra: Yeah, really good advice. And I’ve seen, not to dwell on this point too long, but some horror stories around this as well. If you leave it outstanding too long, something can change in the business. Like they could go out of business and things like that. And that does happen sometimes.
Adam Cooper: Absolutely. and I think it’s, having that policy in place and sticking to it means that it just becomes routine. It’s not something that you have to think about because you know, right, we are two weeks overdue. This is what happens.
Harv Nagra: Yep.
Adam Cooper: and as you rightly say, if a business goes under and effectively goes to the administrators, then you are, you may well be at the back of the queue in terms of getting payments.
So critical for your own cash flow, for your own people to make sure that you’re chasing those debts on a regular basis and putting in place a policy.
Harv Nagra: Excellent. So we’re gonna talk about forecasting next, and that’s the bit about, using finance as your sat nav to guide where you’re going. First of all, what should you be forecasting? And then tell us a bit about whether there’s a, good way to look at it.
Adam Cooper: So in terms of what you should be forecasting, lots of businesses and business owners don’t forecast. I think that’s important to, to acknowledge and that may well be because they haven’t got the time. They’re too busy selling, too busy on delivery, maybe because they’re, they think it’s not accurate or businesses changing so rapidly or they think it’s the job of the accountants.
And I would say no to, to all of those, it’s critical to forecast, thinking about your business, stepping out from the day to day and thinking about your personal and professional goals from a financial perspective, allows you to see where you’re going, allows you to align what you’re doing with the strategy that you’ve got and your objectives. So in terms of how, again, you can do incredibly intricate 17 spreadsheets, connected models that forecast. I would say for you know, the audience of this podcast, you’re not needing something that complex and actually that will discourage you from doing it because of the complexity. I think you wanna focus on your revenues. Your costs and your cash. If you focus on those three elements on a 12 month basis, you’re gonna be directionally correct. And again, this is coming back to the SAT nav. You don’t need to to know exactly, what month something’s gonna happen back to what we were saying before, and then you can revise it. So a quarterly re-forecast or refresh of your forecast, and then looking on a month to month basis, how you’re tracking versus that forecast is critical.
But yeah, to summarize, keep it simple. Just look at revenues, cash and costs. If you forecast those and you are directionally correct, then you’re doing better than the vast majority of agencies
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.so revenue, cash and costs. and you know, you were saying that this needs to be done, regularly. it’s not like an annual exercise ’cause obviously so much can change in that amount of time. But can you tell us about this process? Like how does that work? does this sit with the fd, the CFO, or who else needs to be involved in that process and how does that work?
Then how do those other profiles come into feed into this?
Adam Cooper: Sure. So, the best forecasts, forecast process that I’m involved in have two elements. They have a top down element and a bottom up element. And so to explain, you’ll have a. meeting with all of the budget holders, all the people who are responsible for the budget. And that will typically be led by the CEO managing director and the CFO, or the finance director, whoever’s basically responsible for pulling it all together. they will do a sort of kickoff meeting where they talk about their assumptions, their expectations, how to, how they want to go about the next year. That will typically align with the strategy and what the plans are for the year. The budget holders then go away and do a bottom. Up budget. And what that means is they should be looking at the revenues for their business unit, for their areas, the costs for their areas.
If they’ve got separate bank accounts, the bank accounts for their areas. So you have that bottom up approach. then gets fed up to the CFO, and the CEO, they then pull it all together.
Mm-hmm.
from a top down perspective, they’ll look at the consolidated numbers, the consolidated revenue costs, and cash, and go, actually, we’re 10% too high here.
We’re 5% too low there. and then go back to the business unit owners and the budget holders
Harv Nagra: we need to save, 50,000 here. We need to make an extra a hundred thousand there. Then there’s a round two that comes back, and then you’ve got your final budget that’s around this time of year, as you say, so around September, October time.
Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: then you’ll lock it in January, upload it to your finance system, and then you
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: actuals versus that budget, through the year. And then, as I say, final point that’s worth mentioning is doing some scenarios.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: I mean by that is doing a realistic. Plan, that’s what gets uploaded to, to zero, let’s
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: or Sage.
But then you’ve got a realistic, sorry, an optimistic and a pessimistic version.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: purpose of that is, if we’re trending over the first three months, we’re, 10% higher. Than we thought we, we might be. There will be some milestones or triggers that you want to implement that will be linked to your optimistic plan, right?
Harv Nagra: hire an extra two people here. We need to,we’re ready to start a service line there. We’re ready to open a new office because we’re ahead of plan. So you have that optimistic plan in your back pocket. Similarly, if you’re behind where you expect it to be, you might need to cut some costs.
Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: need to, stop some subscriptions or, uninstall a particular piece of software. Potentially we’re people based businesses, there might be some decisions to be made around the shape of the business.
Harv Nagra: Yep.
Adam Cooper: yeah, that I would say would be the main things that you need to think about.
Harv Nagra: Really good advice. And having those plans, ready ahead of time means that you’re not scrambling and trying to figure it out as you go if something goes off the rails. Right.
Adam Cooper: percent.
Harv Nagra: You know, going back to the point about forecasting regularly, the way you described that there, that sounds like the annual exercise of setting a budget and what you’re expecting.
Right. But what about, forecasting more frequently? Like how does that come into play ?
Adam Cooper: Right. That, so that would be your annual planning cycle,
Harv Nagra: Yeah.
Adam Cooper: now for the next 12 months.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: you’ll have a reforecast. So
Harv Nagra: Okay.
Adam Cooper: that would be every quarter
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: how you’re performing against that original plan and you would reforecast, and that wouldn’t be such a detailed exercise. You could do that at a higher level because it can be quite time consuming and you do tend to get diminishing returns. So I would always recommend an annual planning cycle and then a quarterly reforecast.
Harv Nagra: Excellent. we’re gonna talk about profitability next, and when we had the previous call, you were telling me that it’s incredibly rare to see this done well in even those 50 plus kind of organizations.
Why? Why is that?
Adam Cooper: It’s incredibly difficult. the accuracy of the data is hard. The, the way of, tracking time and it’s, it is typically time tracking that, where organizations fall down, doing that accurately, comprehensively, having realistic targets around capacity and around utilization. All of comes into your profitability reports.
So yeah, that is incredibly difficult to do well and accurately and needs a lot of training and education. And then that’s the carrot, explanation of why you’re doing it and the reasons for, and the benefits of doing it. That’s the
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: then the stick of making sure that people are filling out their time sheets, making sure that there’s accuracy there.
So I’d say
Harv Nagra: Yep.
Adam Cooper: is a big challenge around the accuracy of profitability. another challenge is about those, uh, sort of non-delivery costs or those centrally allocated costs. How are those apportioned? Are they apportioned? It’s
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: to. To look at just your delivery staff and look at the contribution that they’re making and say, oh yeah, we’re a 25% profit margin business.
Everything’s going well on these clients, on these accounts, on these projects, but you’ve forgotten that. central costs and central pot of costs. you’ve gotta make sure you’re allocating those, your rent, your rates, your support so everything needs to be allocated in to give you a meaningful bottom line profit for every project, every client, every account, every part of the business.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: a big exercise to do it well and do it accurately,
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: beneficial to do that and something that we recommend a lot of our businesses do and work with a lot of our businesses to do right.
Harv Nagra: And it’s so important, like that education piece comes, in so importantly, right. first of all, for all the doers to be tracking their time accurately, but then, the project managers having control of their expenses, their purchases, time and be watching that on a regular basis ’cause you don’t want to shock at the end of the project ’cause then you can’t do anything about it.
Adam Cooper: I think that’s exactly right and it’s worth mentioning that, often you’ll start with, client profitability, let’s say, and your, or project profitability, job profitability, and you’ll look at that job. you’ll have a budget for it, and then you’ll look at it at the end. And as you rightly say, it’s too late.
At that point, you want to be tracking the burn on the project through the life of the project. Then you want to have a project wrap up at the end of the project. And so it’s, it is critical to, to have that clear budget and plan. then be tracking against that plan and then do that wrap up. And if you miss any one of those three elements, then you’re not, you’re not, utilizing the profitability reporting in the right way.
And you are, you’re not tracking your projects in the right way and you can’t do anything about it.
Harv Nagra: Good advice. So Adam, we were talking about forecasting that kind of annual planning exercise and like you were saying, when this episode goes live is around the time when people are doing that exercise in their organization.
So I think that’s great, but from that operations or finance perspective, we were talking about the exercise and you having kind of three scenarios, ideal, best case, worst case. What separates a plan that’s actually gonna guide your hiring, your utilization and your delivery decisions, rather than just doing kind of a tick box exercise.
Adam Cooper: Yeah, I think, that’s a great question. ’cause effectively the worst kind of planning is where you’ve spent weeks and weeks putting together a plan. it’s outta date before you’ve started. You’ve put it in the, you’ve put it in the drawer, and then it gathers dust. These need to be living, breathing, documents that you use for operational decision making and how that manifests is effectively involving of your team in that bottom up planning as well as top down, as I mentioned, where you have just a top down exercise, then no one buys into it. It effectively is just a finance and senior leadership team exercise. and you are missing out on a huge amount of value. So by involving the team, the wider team, in a bottom up element to the forecasting cycle, then ensuring that you’ve got key performance indicators that are coming out of that plan. So those will be financial and non-financial KPIs that are relevant, uh, you know, smart, three to five per business unit that are being tracked on a monthly basis against the plan. So you are, you’re tracking monthly financials and monthly non-financial KPIs, on a monthly basis, and holding.
The business unit to account for that, and that way it becomes an operating manual. That way you’re using it in your monthly finance meetings, your monthly business meetings, you’re tracking your KPIs of your team. All of the stuff we said before, that all comes from your annual planning cycle. So yeah, it’s, yeah, critical as you say, to ensure that becomes a living, breathing, operating manual that’s discussed in the boardroom and within the operations, not just by finance and the CEO.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm. Adam, I was reading one of your blogs and I think it was talking about the role of finance as a storyteller.
can, can you just kind of elaborate on that for our listeners?
Adam Cooper: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think this is particularly true in my world where. I’m a CFO for a number of creative businesses, and they’re often run by, by creatives who’ve
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: business. They’re entrepreneurs. They’ve got a great idea. they’re not numbers guys and girls, they don’t, necessarily want to be focused on that.
But what they do want to do is make sure that they’ve got the cash in the bank, that they’re making, the returns that they want to be making, and their business is viable and allows ’em to hit their goals.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: do that if they. if they don’t enjoy looking at numbers, if they’re not comfortable with spreadsheets, just sharing a spreadsheet with them or pointing them at a screen where they can see a whole bunch of numbers, it’s not gonna do the desired effect.
What you need to do as a finance professional, as an operations guy or girl who’s responsible for the numbers or responsible for an area of the budget is tell that story. And that’s what’s so important within those monthly finance meetings, within that planning cycle. it’s using the numbers to tell that story, bring
Harv Nagra: Hmm.
Adam Cooper: to what the owner, cares about, you know, ultimately what’s important for them, and make sure that the numbers are telling that story and allowing them to make decisions based on the numbers in a way that they understand rather than just giving them a spreadsheet.
You need to be a, a business partner, and supporter of the senior leadership team as a CFO, not just someone who pulls the numbers together and hands over a spreadsheet.
Harv Nagra: And I think this is really where finance and operations can work really closely together to develop and communicate that story. because you can have all the metrics all lined up in your dashboards, but if nobody really knows what that means or why that’s an actionable point, or how that’s gonna impact us in the coming months, then that’s not really helping anyone make better decisions.
Your eyes just go a bit blurry when you see a bunch of metrics.
Adam Cooper: And I think that’s where the, I say the term business partner, that’s why it’s so important. You know, the, the foundations absolutely have to be right. The bookkeeping has to be right. Your numbers need to be accurate, but that’s table stakes effectively. Then to really make a difference, finance need to be in the room.
They need to be in the boardroom. They need to be communicating and explaining those numbers and helping the senior leadership team make those decisions. Making sure that every decision has some, ROI calculation, finance analysis and planning around it, rather than, again, just delivering the numbers.
So that storytelling, that ability to influence using the numbers in a way that the, the business understands is critical.
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm. We’re, we’re coming up towards the end of the conversation, Adam, but just throwing a question out to you in terms of what you see with businesses you support, is there any kind of things that you see really well run organizations doing that the rest of us can learn from that hasn’t already been mentioned today?
Adam Cooper: yeah, I think, uh, we’ve talked about forecasting. We’ve talked about planning, but we haven’t talked about longer term planning. And the best organizations I work with don’t just have, monthly reports, quarterly reforecast or annual plans.
They’ll have a three year plan, a five year plan. So part of what you do as a finance professional and supporting the business owners is asking them where do you want to be as a business owner in three years, in five years? Do you wanna sell your business? Do you want to,take on additional funding because you want to open up a new office in, in the US in, three years time, you know, whatever it might be.
it’s having your financial plan, your annual plan, linked to a three year, a five year plan. So you’ve got longer term objectives and goals in sight. Uh,
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: strategically work towards that. Again, if you’re only doing an annual plan, you are not, you know, 12 months isn’t a long time away, and so it’s, the most effective businesses are run with a three year or five year plan.
So I would encourage, any business owners listening to this to start thinking about that at this time where you are
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: financial planning, what’s beyond the end of 2026? It’s not that far away.
Harv Nagra: Right. really good advice. Adam, can you tell us a bit more about your podcast?
Adam Cooper: Yeah. No, absolutely. So thank you. the fractional CFO show, it’s a regular conversation, for small business owners who want to improve their finances, profits, and cash flows. we release every couple of weeks. It’s on Spotify. All the usual platforms. and it’s myself and a guest.
Uh, you’ve been kind enough to come on it, so looking forward to releasing that one. And, yeah, it’s, myself and a guest, we’ve got a really good back catalog, about 60 or so episodes now out there. So there, there’s something for everyone in the
Harv Nagra: Mm-hmm.
Adam Cooper: space, to hopefully help. and then that’s released by myself and the firm.
So it’s ACC solutions, and you can find us on all the platforms, and so that all the podcasts are hosted on our website. And yeah, if you need any fractional CFO advice always happy to have a chat.
Harv Nagra: And that’s what your business does consulting and fractional or primarily fractional.
Adam Cooper: Yeah, no, we do consulting, fractional, projects. We’ve got a small team, so there’s seven of us. we do fractional finance, lots of agencies, consultancies, some tech, healthcare, property. So we’ve got a good range. And yeah, we do all sorts. So we’re very happy to have a chat and see if we can help you improve your, your finances.
If you don’t have a full-time FD or CFO, please,come and check us out.
Harv Nagra: Excellent. Where can people go and find information about you or your business then?
Adam Cooper: Sure, just, search up, ACC Finance solutions.we’re hopefully top of Google. we’re on LinkedIn. look me up Adam Cooper on LinkedIn. That’s where I try and post, every few days. And yeah, lots of information on the website, blogs and podcasts, et cetera.
Harv Nagra: Excellent. We’ll put links to all of that in the episode notes as well. Adam, it’s been absolute pleasure having you on the podcast today, so thank you so much for being here.
Adam Cooper: Thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Harv Nagra: A few things really stood out to me from that conversation with Adam. First forecasting isn’t just about plugging numbers into a spreadsheet once a year. It’s about creating that visibility all year round. When finance and ops come together to reforecast regularly, you spot issues sooner, whether it’s resourcing, margins or cash flow, and you actually have time to fix them.
Second job, profitability should never be a surprise. If you’re tracking time, resourcing and delivery properly, you should always have a live picture of where the money’s going and whether a project’s on course.
And finally, our role as finance and ops leaders isn’t just there to report the numbers. It’s there to tell the story behind them. The moment leaders and teams start understanding that story, you move from reacting to results to steering the business forward with confidence.
If you’re heading into planning season, hopefully this episode has given you a few ideas on how to turn your finances into a living system. One that actually helps you run the business better.
And I can’t let the opportunity slide. Scoro is a platform that lets you run your business with confidence and be more data-driven.
A lot of what we spoke about today is done so much more efficiently when you have a consolidated platform that allows your team to work efficiently, track and plan things in a single place and see what’s happening live.
Now if you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with someone who would find it useful.
Join the conversation when you see Adam or I posting about it on LinkedIn, and of course, sign up for the Handbook newsletter so you get a cheat sheet with all the key takeaways from each episode in your inbox. The link is in the show notes. That’s it for me this week. Thank you so much for joining us.
