Introduction

Few functions have more influence over organisational spending than Procurement. Every organisation relies on Procurement teams to source suppliers, negotiate contracts, manage vendor relationships, secure competitive pricing, and ensure goods and services are available when the business needs them.

Finance teams interact with Procurement on purchasing decisions, vendor evaluations, contract reviews, cost management initiatives, budget control, payment processes, and supplier performance discussions. While Procurement focuses on obtaining value from external suppliers, Finance focuses on cost control, transparency, accountability, and financial stewardship.

This relationship can sometimes be complicated. Procurement is occasionally viewed, fairly or unfairly, as one of the areas most vulnerable to fraud, favouritism, conflicts of interest, and weak controls. Finance may approach procurement decisions with a degree of scepticism, while Procurement may feel that Finance creates unnecessary bureaucracy and delays.

The reality is that most Procurement professionals are trying to achieve the same objective as Finance: obtaining maximum value for the organisation. The challenge is that they often pursue that objective from different perspectives.

This edition explores how Finance can partner more effectively with Procurement teams and why understanding their world strengthens your effectiveness as a finance business partner.

The Problem

One of the biggest sources of tension between Finance and Procurement is visibility.

Procurement teams are often evaluated based on their ability to source goods and services quickly, maintain supplier relationships, negotiate favourable terms, and ensure business continuity. Finance teams are evaluated based on accountability, compliance, cost control, and financial discipline.

Problems begin when Finance cannot clearly see how procurement decisions were made.

A supplier is selected despite not being the cheapest bidder. An emergency purchase bypasses normal procedures. A purchase request suddenly appears that was not included in the budget. A contract value increases significantly after approval. A preferred vendor seems to win repeatedly.

In many of these situations, there may be legitimate explanations. The issue is not necessarily misconduct. The issue is often transparency.

When visibility is limited, suspicion grows.

Finance may worry about governance risks. Procurement may feel that its professional judgment is being questioned. Both sides become frustrated.

Neither side is necessarily wrong. Procurement needs flexibility to respond to operational realities. Finance needs transparency to fulfil its governance responsibilities. Great finance business partners help create processes that provide both.

A Story

Several years ago, I was asked to support a review of supplier spending within a business unit that had experienced a significant increase in procurement costs over a relatively short period.

The initial concern was simple. Several suppliers appeared to be receiving a disproportionate share of the organisation’s business, and management wanted to understand whether the company was obtaining appropriate value for money.

As Finance began reviewing the transactions, questions quickly emerged. Some supplier selections were supported by complete documentation and competitive bidding records. Others relied heavily on operational justifications, verbal approvals, or emergency procurement requests.

At first, suspicion dominated the conversation.

Finance worried that weak procurement controls could expose the organisation to unnecessary risks. Procurement argued that most decisions had been driven by urgent operational needs and supplier capabilities rather than improper behaviour.

The review eventually revealed something important. The biggest problem was not fraud. It was poor visibility.

Many procurement decisions were reasonable, but the supporting documentation and decision-making rationale were not consistently maintained. As a result, legitimate decisions looked questionable simply because the organisation could not easily explain them.

Following the review, Procurement and Finance worked together to strengthen supplier evaluation processes, improve documentation standards, and introduce more transparent reporting on supplier performance and procurement activity.

The experience taught me an important lesson. Procurement risks often grow in the absence of transparency, not necessarily because of misconduct. Great business partnering is about creating visibility that protects both the organisation and the people making procurement decisions.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Understand the Procurement Strategy

Many Finance professionals become involved only after spending requests are submitted for approval. Great FBPs invest time in understanding how procurement decisions are made before purchases occur.

Your action plan: Meet with the Procurement team and learn how suppliers are selected, evaluated, and monitored.

2. Focus on Total Value, Not Just Lowest Cost

The cheapest supplier is not always the best supplier. Reliability, quality, service levels, delivery capability, and supplier stability can all influence long-term value.

Your action plan: Using data, evaluate supplier decisions using both financial and operational criteria and provide that information to procurement teams.

3. Improve Transparency, Not Bureaucracy

Finance sometimes creates additional controls to reduce risk. However, excessive bureaucracy can slow down operations and encourage process bypasses. The objective is not more controls. The objective is smarter controls.

Your action plan: Review one procurement process and identify opportunities to improve visibility without increasing complexity.

4. Use Data to Identify Risk Early

Procurement data contains valuable insights that often go unnoticed. Supplier concentration, recurring emergency purchases, repeated contract amendments, and maverick spending patterns can all indicate potential risks.

Your action plan: Analyse procurement spending trends and identify areas where additional oversight may be beneficial.

5. Build Trust Through Accountability

The strongest Procurement-Finance relationships are built on trust. Trust grows when decisions are transparent, documented, and supported by evidence.

Finance creates value when it helps strengthen accountability without creating unnecessary friction.

Your action plan: Work together with Procurement to define and agree on the minimum documentation required to support major procurement decisions.

“Procurement creates value through suppliers. Finance protects value through transparency. Great FBPs understand that organisations need both.” – Ajibola Jinadu

Grow With Us

If you would like to deepen your business partnering capabilities, join the October 2026 Cohort of the Finance Business Partner Masterclass at fbp.mycfong.com.

For other finance leadership, FP&A, Business Partnering, and CFO development programs, visit training.mycfong.com.

Conclusion

One of the most important lessons I learned from working with Procurement teams was that most procurement problems do not begin with fraud. They begin with poor visibility.

When supplier decisions, contract awards, pricing justifications, and approval processes are transparent, trust grows naturally. When visibility is weak, legitimate decisions can quickly become subjects of suspicion. The absence of transparency often creates more problems than the decisions themselves.

That is why organisations need both perspectives. Procurement brings market knowledge, supplier relationships, negotiation expertise, and commercial insight. Finance brings governance, accountability, financial discipline, and risk awareness.

The best finance business partners understand that their role is not to police Procurement or assume every transaction is problematic. Their responsibility is to help create an environment where procurement decisions are transparent, well-documented, commercially sound, and easy to defend.

When Finance develops this perspective, conversations with Procurement become less about control and more about value creation. The result is better supplier decisions, stronger governance, lower organisational risk, and greater confidence that company resources are being used effectively.

In the next edition of The FBP Playbook, we will explore working with Operations teams. I hope you’ll join me for that conversation.

If you found this edition valuable, please share it with a colleague or anyone looking to strengthen their finance business partnering skills. The community grows one recommendation at a time.

Until next time.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

Few functions influence organisational performance as deeply as Human Resources. HR teams are responsible for attracting talent, recruiting employees, managing performance, supporting employee development, overseeing compensation, and ensuring the organisation has the people it needs to achieve its goals.

Finance teams interact with HR on budgeting, payroll, recruitment, compensation reviews, workforce planning, training investments, and organisational restructuring. While HR focuses on ensuring the business has the right people with the right capabilities, Finance focuses on affordability, productivity, forecasting, and financial sustainability.

This difference in perspective can sometimes create tension. HR may view Finance as creating obstacles that slow down important people decisions. Finance may view HR as introducing costs that were never planned for.

The challenge is that they often approach workforce decisions from different starting points. HR asks, “What people do we need?” Finance asks, “Can we afford it and was it planned?” This edition explores how Finance can partner more effectively with Human Resources teams and why understanding their world strengthens your effectiveness as a finance business partner.

The Problem

One of the biggest sources of tension between Finance and Human Resources is workforce planning.

For many organisations, employee-related expenses represent the single largest operating cost. Salaries, pensions, allowances, bonuses, healthcare, training costs, leave obligations, and other employee benefits consume a significant portion of annual budgets. Because of this, Finance depends heavily on accurate manpower plans to forecast costs and allocate resources effectively.

The challenge is that people management is not as predictable as financial models would like it to be. Employees resign unexpectedly. Critical positions become vacant. New projects emerge. Business priorities shift. Managers request urgent hires. Retention concerns develop. In many organisations, these activities occur with limited visibility to Finance until the financial consequences begin to appear.

As a result, Finance can feel blindsided by recruitment requests, salary adjustments, retention incentives, contractor engagements, and benefit costs. HR, on the other hand, may feel that Finance does not fully appreciate the realities of managing people in a dynamic business environment.

Neither side is necessarily wrong. HR is trying to ensure the organisation has the people it needs to succeed. Finance is trying to ensure those decisions remain affordable and sustainable. Great finance business partners help bring structure, discipline, and transparency to workforce planning so that people decisions do not become financial surprises.

A Story

Several years ago, I was part of the finance team supporting a rapidly growing business unit. At the beginning of the year, the approved budget included a detailed manpower plan, and employee costs were expected to increase by approximately 10%.

For the first few months, everything appeared to be on track. Then payroll expenditure started increasing faster than expected.

When Finance performed a detailed review, we discovered that headcount had increased significantly beyond the original manpower plan. Most of the hires had legitimate business justifications, but the cumulative impact had never been evaluated holistically.

The issue was not that HR had acted irresponsibly. The business genuinely needed additional people. The problem was that the organisation lacked a structured process for assessing the total financial consequences of workforce decisions before they occurred.

By the middle of the year, payroll-related costs had exceeded budget by hundreds of millions of naira. Profitability targets were under pressure, and management had to make difficult decisions to absorb the additional expenditure.

The experience changed how Finance and HR worked together.

Rather than discussing headcount only during budget season, we introduced quarterly manpower reviews. Every proposed hire was assessed against workforce plans, budget availability, productivity expectations, and business priorities. HR maintained visibility over talent requirements, while Finance maintained visibility over financial impact.

The lesson was simple but powerful. Most payroll surprises do not happen because organisations hire the wrong people. They happen because organisations fail to connect workforce decisions to financial planning.

That experience taught me that great business partnering between Finance and HR is not about controlling people costs. It is about ensuring that people decisions are visible, planned, and sustainable before they become expensive surprises.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Understand the Workforce Plan

Many Finance professionals spend time analysing payroll costs without fully understanding the manpower assumptions behind them. The best FBPs understand planned headcount, critical roles, expected recruitment activity, replacement needs, and talent risks.

Your action plan: Schedule a session with HR to review the organisation’s manpower plan. Understand planned hires, critical vacancies, and key workforce assumptions for the year.

2. Move Workforce Discussions Beyond Budget Season

In many organisations, workforce planning receives significant attention during the annual budgeting process and very little attention afterwards. This creates surprises later in the year when actual hiring activity diverges from plan. Great FBPs help create ongoing visibility rather than waiting for year-end variances to appear.

Your action plan: Introduce quarterly manpower reviews that compare approved headcount, actual headcount, vacancies, ongoing recruitment activity, and projected year-end workforce costs.

3. Understand the Full Cost of a Hire

Many managers focus only on salary when requesting additional employees. However, the true cost often includes pensions, healthcare, training, equipment, office space, bonuses, utilities, and other employee-related expenses.

Finance creates value when it helps decision-makers understand the complete financial impact of workforce decisions.

Your action plan: Develop and model a simple “cost per employee” model to use when evaluating recruitment requests.

4. Help HR Turn Data into Workforce Insights

HR teams often possess large amounts of people data, including recruitment metrics, turnover rates, absenteeism trends, engagement scores, and performance indicators. However, not all organisations convert that information into actionable business insights. Finance can add significant value by helping HR analyse trends and quantify implications.

Your action plan: Partner with HR to identify one workforce trend that could have a future financial impact and develop a plan to monitor it.

5. Focus on Predictability, Not Just Cost Control

Finance sometimes becomes associated with saying no to hiring requests. Great FBPs understand that the objective is not necessarily lower headcount costs. The objective is better planning and fewer surprises. A well-planned increase in workforce costs is usually easier to manage than an unplanned one.

Your action plan: During your next workforce discussion, focus less on whether costs should increase and more on whether the increase has been properly planned, justified, and funded.

“People costs become a problem because organisations fail to plan for the employees they hire. Great FBPs help turn workforce decisions into workforce plans.” – Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

To deepen your business partnering capabilities, join the October 2026 Cohort of the Finance Business Partner Masterclass at fbp.mycfong.com.

For other finance leadership, FP&A, Business Partnering, and CFO development programs, visit training.mycfong.com.

Conclusion

One of the most important lessons I learned from working with Human Resources teams was that workforce costs rarely become a problem overnight. Most payroll surprises are the result of decisions that accumulated over time without sufficient planning, visibility, or coordination.

That is why organisations need both perspectives. HR brings insight into talent needs, workforce capabilities, employee retention, and organisational growth. Finance brings forecasting, financial discipline, resource allocation, and long-term sustainability.

The best finance business partners understand that their responsibility is not to challenge every hiring request or reduce every people-related cost. Their responsibility is to help the organisation make workforce decisions with greater transparency, better planning, and stronger financial awareness.

When Finance develops this perspective, conversations with HR become less reactive and more strategic. The result is better manpower planning, fewer financial surprises, and a stronger organisation overall.

In the next edition of The FBP Playbook, we will explore working with Procurement teams. I hope you’ll join me for that conversation.

If you found this edition valuable, please share it with a colleague or anyone looking to strengthen their finance business partnering skills. The community grows one recommendation at a time.

Until next time.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

Few functions are as closely connected to growth as Business Development. Business Development focuses on converting opportunities into commercial relationships. They spend their time identifying new markets, pursuing strategic partnerships, developing sales pipelines, and finding avenues for expansion.

Finance teams often interact with Business Development during opportunity reviews, pricing discussions, investment evaluations, contract negotiations, and growth planning. While Business Development teams focus on winning new business, Finance focuses on profitability, risk, cash flow, and sustainable returns.

This difference in perspective can sometimes create tension. Business Development may see Finance as slowing down opportunities with too many questions and approvals. Finance may see Business Development as being overly optimistic about deals and future growth prospects. Neither perspective is completely fair. Most Business Development professionals recognise the importance of commercial discipline, and most Finance professionals understand that growth is essential for long-term success.

The challenge is that they often evaluate opportunities through different lenses. This edition explores how Finance can partner more effectively with Business Development teams and why understanding their world strengthens your effectiveness as a finance business partner.

The Problem

One of the biggest sources of tension between Finance and Business Development is uncertainty. Unlike established operations where costs, revenues, and outcomes can be measured with reasonable confidence, Business Development often involves spending money today for opportunities that may or may not materialise tomorrow.

Travel costs, meetings, relationship-building activities, networking events, stakeholder engagement, market exploration, and business pursuit expenses are incurred long before a contract is signed. In some cases, months of effort may produce no commercial outcome at all. This creates a difficult challenge for Finance. The business development team sees these activities as investments in future growth. Finance sees costs being incurred without any guarantee of returns.

The situation becomes even more complicated when expenditure is poorly documented. Many business development activities occur in environments where obtaining invoices or supporting documentation is difficult. While the commercial intent may be genuine, insufficient documentation can create accounting, audit, tax, and regulatory challenges. Expenditure that appears reasonable from a business development perspective may become a tax-deductible problem from a finance perspective.

Neither side is necessarily wrong. Business Development needs flexibility to pursue opportunities, while Finance needs evidence to support governance and compliance requirements. Great finance business partners help the organisation balance both.

A Story

Several years ago, I was asked to review the expenditure of a Business Development team that had spent almost 40 million naira pursuing one major opportunity. The opportunity required extensive travel, stakeholder meetings, hosted discussions, and relationship-building activities across several weeks.

By the time the review began, the commercial outcome was clear: the opportunity had not converted into a signed contract. The financial exposure was also clear. A meaningful portion of the nearly 40 million naira spent lacked documentation that would satisfy finance, audit, and tax requirements.

Rather than treating the issue as a simple failed deal, Finance worked through the expenditure line by line with the Business Development team. We separated costs that had valid support from those with weak or missing evidence. We also identified where internal approvals, meeting notes, and informal records were not enough to defend the expenditure properly.

The Business Development team felt frustrated because genuine commercial work had been done. Finance was concerned because some of the expenditure could be disallowed for tax purposes and could raise questions about governance. The conversation quickly moved from whether the opportunity was worth pursuing to whether the organisation could prove that the funds had been used appropriately.

That experience taught me an important lesson. Business Development operates in a world of uncertainty where not every opportunity will convert. Finance operates in a world of accountability where every expenditure must be supported. Great business partnering is not about choosing one over the other. It is about helping the business pursue growth opportunities while maintaining the documentation and discipline needed to protect the organisation.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Understand the Growth Strategy

Business Development activities are usually linked directly to strategic growth objectives. This one is simple - you can’t partner with the business if you don’t understand its long-term goals. Finance professionals become more effective when they understand how new opportunities align with broader business goals.

Your action plan: Schedule a meeting with a Business Development leader and ask them to explain the organization’s key growth priorities, target markets, major partnerships, and expansion plans.

2. Evaluate Opportunities, Not Just Numbers

Finance professionals can sometimes focus heavily on assumptions and financial projections. While these matter, opportunities should also be evaluated based on strategic importance, competitive positioning, market access, and long-term value creation.

Your action plan: Review one major opportunity currently being pursued and identify both the financial benefits and the strategic advantages it could create for the organisation.

3. Be Skilled at Scenario Planning

Growth opportunities involve uncertainty. The best finance business partners help decision-makers understand possible outcomes rather than presenting a single forecast as certainty. Scenario analysis allows management to make better-informed decisions and prepare for risks before they occur.

Your action plan: For the next major business development initiative, create best-case, expected-case, and worst-case scenarios. Discuss which assumptions have the greatest impact on success.

4. Help Balance Optimism with Realism

Business Development professionals are naturally optimistic. Their role requires them to identify possibilities where others may see obstacles. Finance creates value by providing balanced challenge without becoming a barrier to progress. The goal is not to reject opportunities. The goal is to improve their quality.

Your action plan: During your next opportunity review, focus on testing assumptions and strengthening the business case rather than simply identifying weaknesses.

5. Measure Success Beyond Revenue

Winning new business is important, but revenue alone does not determine success. Profitability, cash generation, customer retention, implementation costs, and return on investment all matter. Finance gains credibility when it helps Business Development focus on sustainable value rather than headline revenue figures.

Your action plan: Identify the key success measures for new opportunities beyond revenue alone. Include profitability, cash flow, margin performance, payback period, and customer lifetime value.

“Business Development creates opportunities. Finance ensures opportunities become value. Great FBPs understand both sides of growth.” – Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If you would like to deepen your business partnering capabilities, join the October 2026 Cohort of the Finance Business Partner Masterclass at fbp.mycfong.com.

For other finance leadership, FP&A, Business Partnering, and CFO development programs, visit training.mycfong.com.

Conclusion

One of the most important lessons I learned from working with Business Development teams was that growth opportunities rarely arrive with complete information. Decisions often need to be made before all the answers are available. That is why organisations need both perspectives. Business Development brings ambition, market insight, and commercial energy. Finance brings discipline, analysis, and risk awareness.

The best finance business partners understand that their responsibility is not to stop opportunities. Their responsibility is to help the organisation pursue the right opportunities in the right way.

When Finance develops this perspective, conversations with Business Development become more collaborative and strategic. The result is better investment decisions, stronger growth initiatives, and more sustainable value creation.

In the next edition of The FBP Playbook, we will explore working with Human Resources teams. I hope you’ll join me for that conversation.

If you found this edition valuable, please share it with a colleague or anyone looking to strengthen their finance business partnering skills. The community grows one recommendation at a time.

Until next time.

Cheers,

Ajibola.

Introduction.

Few functions create as much tension between finance and the business as marketing. Marketing spend is often the first area to face scrutiny. Finance asks questions about returns, efficiency, and accountability. Marketing may not be able to answer them objectively, but that does not mean they are less valuable. Marketing teams focus on attracting customers, strengthening brands, generating demand and supporting growth. They are constantly thinking about customer behaviour, brand and market positioning, and competition, among other things. Finance teams focus on investment, discipline, profitability, cash flow, resource allocation and measurable outcomes.

Problems arise when finance views marketing as spending money while marketing views finance as preventing growth. Neither perspective is completely fair. Most marketers care deeply about results, and most finance professionals want the business to grow. The challenge is that they often speak different languages.

This edition explores how finance can partner more effectively with marketing teams, and why understanding their world strengthens your effectiveness as a finance business partner.

The problem

One of the biggest sources of tension between finance and marketing is that they often have different time horizons. Finance naturally focuses on outcomes that can be measured and reported. Marketing activities, however, frequently produce benefits that emerge over a longer period. A campaign may increase awareness today and influence purchasing decisions several months later.

Brand building investments may take years to deliver their full value. This difference can create frustration. Finance may challenge a campaign because the immediate revenue impact is unclear. Marketing may become frustrated because they believe finance is evaluating long-term investments using short-term measures.

The situation becomes even more complicated because not everything valuable is immediately measurable. Customer awareness, brand perception, market share, engagement, and consideration can all influence future sales even when they do not appear directly in financial reports. Neither side is necessarily wrong.

The finance business partner’s role is to bridge the gap between investment and outcomes. Great for helping organisations make smarter marketing decisions by combining financial discipline with an understanding of how growth is created.

A story

Several years ago, we were reviewing the annual plan for a business unit and looking for ways to improve profitability by at least 8% within the next financial year. Marketing expenditure was one of the first areas that came under pressure because it represented about 12% of total expenses, and a proposed cut of 25% would have delivered an immediate saving of roughly 45million naira. From a finance perspective, the recommendation looked sensible. The savings were clear, measurable and easy to explain, but the marketing team was visibly upset as the cut would have ruined their plans.

However, before finalising the proposal, I met with the marketing manager to understand the actual activities behind the budget. That conversation changed the quality of the decision. We discovered that three campaigns accounted for almost 70% of qualified leads in the previous two quarters, while several lower-performing activities were consuming meaningful spend without producing strong results. Instead of applying a broad cut, we worked together to redesign the budget, stopped low-return activities, and protected the campaigns with the strongest conversion data. We also agreed on simple performance measures for the next 90 days. Leads generated, conversion rate and customer acquisition cost.

The result was far better than the original cost-cutting proposal. We still reduced total marketing spend by about 15%, saving approximately 27 million naira. But we protected the activities that mattered most. Within six months, qualified leads increased by 11%, customer acquisition cost improved by 11%, and the business generated more than 120 million naira in revenue linked to the protected campaigns.

That experience reminded me that finance should not simply ask, how much can we cut? A better question is: which investments create the greatest return? When finance and marketing partnered properly, we didn’t just save money; we made a sharper investment decision and protected future growth.

Ajibola’s Tips: The playbook.

1. Learn how marketing creates value.

Finance professionals sometimes evaluate marketing simply in terms of budgets and expenses. However, marketing activities exist to achieve business outcomes such as customer acquisition, retention, market share growth, and brand strength. The best FB take time to understand how the organisation’s marketing strategy supports commercial objectives.

Your action plan. Schedule a conversation with a marketing leader and ask them to explain the organisation’s marketing strategy. Focus on understanding target customers, major campaigns, competitive positioning, and how success is measured.

2. Look beyond cost and focus on return.

Many discussions about marketing spend focus on the amount being spent. Strong business partners focus equally on the value being generated. Finance adds the most value when it helps marketing evaluate return on investment, campaign effectiveness, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and long-term value creation.

Your action plan. Select one recent marketing campaign and work with the team to assess both its costs and outcomes. Look beyond revenue alone and consider customer acquisition, lead generation, retention, and strategic impact.

3. Understand the difference between brand building and sales activation.

Not all marketing activities are designed to generate immediate sales. Some activities build awareness and brand preference, while others drive direct response and short-term revenue. Finance professionals who understand this distinction are better equipped to evaluate marketing investments appropriately.

Your action plan. Ask your marketing team to categorise current initiatives into brand-building activities and revenue-driving activities. Discuss the expected timeline for results and agree on appropriate measures of success for each category.

4. Use data to strengthen decisions, not to win arguments.

Marketing teams have access to valuable customer and market insights. Finance teams have access to valuable financial and performance data. The strongest partnerships emerge when both sides combine their information rather than compete over whose data matters most. The objective is not to prove one function right and the other wrong. The objective is to improve decision quality.

Your action plan. During your next marketing review, identify one decision that could benefit from combining customer insights with financial analysis. Build a recommendation using both perspectives.

5. Become a growth partner.

Many finance professionals are comfortable discussing costs, controls, and risks. Great FBPs are equally comfortable discussing growth, and growth always comes at a cost.

Marketing teams often seek answers to questions about customer acquisition, market opportunities, product awareness, and demand generation. Finance gains influence when it helps quantify opportunities and supports informed investment decisions.

Your action plan. In your next discussion with marketing, spend as much time talking about growth opportunities as you do discussing budgets and expenditure. Position yourself as a partner in value creation, not just cost management.

“Marketing creates demand. Finance ensures demand creates value. Great FBPs understand both sides of that equation” - Ajibola Jinadu.

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Grow with us

If you would like to deepen your business partnering capabilities, join the October 2026 cohort of the Finance Business Partner Masterclass at fbp.mycfong.com.

For other finance leadership, Business Partnering and CFO development programs, visit training.mycfong.com

Conclusion.

One of the most important lessons I learned from working with marketing teams was that growth rarely happens by accident. Behind every successful product, strong brand, and healthy sales pipeline is usually a deliberate effort to influence customer behaviour and create demand. The best finance business partners understand that strong financial performance begins long before revenue appears in a report. They recognise that marketing and finance are not opposing forces. One helps generate demand, while the other helps ensure resources are invested wisely. When finance develops this perspective, conversations with marketing become more productive and strategic.

In the next edition of the FBP playbook, we will explore how to work with business development teams. I hope you’ll join me for that conversation.

If you found this edition valuable, please share it with a colleague or anyone looking to strengthen their finance business partnering skills. The community grows one recommendation at a time. Until next time.

Cheers.

Introduction

Many organisations assume customer relationships are built during the sale, but winning a customer and keeping one are different disciplines. The sale may open the door, but the relationship determines whether it stays open.

That is where Business Relationship Managers, Customer Relationship Officers, Account Officers, and similar roles become so important. These teams work to preserve, deepen, and grow customer relationships long after the first transaction has taken place.

They are often the first to hear complaints, spot frustration, notice expansion opportunities, and intervene before a valuable customer walks away. Finance tends to focus on profitability, collections, contract performance, and resource allocation, while BRMs manage trust, expectations, service recovery, and customer satisfaction.

Both perspectives matter. The challenge is that Finance may approach BRMs with financial logic, while BRMs are often working from a relationship perspective. As a result, Finance can seem insensitive, and BRMs can seem overly accommodating, even when neither view is fair.

This edition explores how Finance can partner more effectively with BRMs and why understanding their world increases your influence.

The Problem

One major misunderstanding between Finance and BRMs is that they often think about customers at different points in time. Finance usually focuses on profitability, payment discipline, cost to serve, margin performance, and whether growth is creating value.

BRMs, on the other hand, often focus on the future of the relationship. They are asking whether the customer is happy and what issues are emerging.

Both viewpoints are legitimate, but the difference can create tension. Finance may recommend tightening commercial terms because a customer has become costly to serve. The BRM may resist because the customer is strategically important and has expansion opportunities that are not yet visible in the numbers. A BRM may also push for concessions to preserve goodwill, while Finance worries about damaging profitability.

Neither side is necessarily wrong. The finance business partner’s role is to understand that customer relationships have both economic value and relationship value. The best FBPs help the organisation protect both by becoming translators between profitability and customer satisfaction.

A Story

Several years ago, I worked with a business unit serving a major corporate customer. The customer generated substantial revenue and was seen as one of the organisation’s most important accounts. During a review, I noticed it required far more support than similar customers. Extra service visits were being arranged, internal teams were spending more time resolving issues, and costs were rising.

From a finance perspective, the conclusion seemed obvious: the account was becoming less profitable. My first instinct was to challenge whether the organisation was giving away too much value. Fortunately, before making any recommendation, I spoke with the Account Manager responsible for the customer.

What I learned changed my perspective. The customer was preparing for a major expansion and deciding which supplier would become its long-term partner. The additional support was not random generosity; it was a deliberate investment in trust. The Account Manager understood what the financial reports could not yet show: the relationship was at a critical stage.

If we had reduced support aggressively to improve short-term profitability, we might have protected this quarter’s margin while losing years of future growth. That experience taught me that Finance sees historical performance exceptionally well, but Relationship Managers often see future opportunities before they appear in the numbers.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Understand the Customer Beyond the Numbers

Finance professionals can sometimes assume customer value is fully visible in reports. Reports matter, but customers are more complex than revenue, balances, and profitability. BRMs often understand decision-makers, pain points, internal politics, strategic priorities, and emerging concerns. Without that context, Finance may recommend action based on incomplete information.

Your action plan: Pick one major customer this month and speak with the BRM responsible for the account. Ask them to explain the customer beyond the financial data: what the customer cares about, what is changing, and what opportunities or risks they see over the next 12 months.

2. Learn to Measure Relationship Health

Finance professionals naturally focus on financial indicators, while BRMs often focus on relationship indicators. Customer complaints, service satisfaction, engagement frequency, retention risk, and referral activity can all signal future financial outcomes before those outcomes appear in reports. Strong FBPs learn to monitor both because financial performance often lags behind customer sentiment.

Your action plan: Request access to customer satisfaction reports, complaint trends, feedback surveys, or relationship health metrics. Then compare those indicators with financial performance and look for patterns that may explain current results or predict future ones.

3. Appreciate the Lifetime Value of Customers

Many finance professionals evaluate decisions through the lens of immediate profitability, but great business partners widen the lens. A customer that looks less profitable today may still create significant value over time through renewals, upselling opportunities, referrals, and expanded business relationships. This does not mean poor economics should be ignored; it means customer decisions should be evaluated with a longer-term view.

Your action plan: Choose one strategic customer and estimate their lifetime value, not just their current-period profitability. Consider retention potential, growth opportunities, referral value, and the wider role the customer plays in the business strategy.

4. Help BRMs Balance Relationship and Commercial Discipline

BRMs often face difficult trade-offs. Customers may request discounts, payment extensions, additional services, or special handling. The easy response is either to say yes to everything in the name of the relationship or no to everything in the name of discipline. Neither approach is usually effective. Finance creates value when it helps BRMs identify options that protect both customer trust and commercial performance.

Your action plan: In your next customer-related discussion, avoid presenting only an approval or rejection. Instead, help the BRM compare a few practical options, including the financial impact, relationship impact, and possible precedent each option creates.

5. Speak About Customers, Not Just Costs

Many finance presentations focus on costs, margins, risks, and controls. These matter, but BRMs think every day about customers. Finance gains influence when it connects financial insights to customer outcomes. Instead of discussing margin erosion alone, explain how better collections could improve service consistency. Instead of only speaking about cost control, discuss how resource allocation can strengthen customer experience.

Your action plan: Review your next presentation to a customer-facing team and replace finance-heavy language with language linked to customer outcomes, relationship strength, growth opportunities, and service excellence.

Poll

I’d love to hear your view in the comments: what has helped Finance and relationship teams work better together in your organisation?

“Customers stay because of relationships long after they forget the details of the sale. Great FBPs understand the economics of the relationship and the relationship behind the economics.” – Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If you would like to deepen your business partnering capabilities, join the October 2026 Cohort of the Finance Business Partner Masterclass at fbp.mycfong.com.

For other finance leadership, FP&A, business partnering, and CFO development programs, visit training.mycfong.com.

Conclusion

Looking back, one of the most important lessons I learned from working with Business Relationship Managers was that financial value and customer trust are deeply connected. The best finance business partners never assume that profitability alone tells the full story of a customer relationship. They recognise that while Finance measures value, BRMs often protect the relationships that create that value.

When Finance develops that perspective, conversations with BRMs become less about opposing priorities and more about shared objectives. The result is stronger customer retention, better commercial decisions, and greater long-term value creation.

In the next edition of The FBP Playbook, we will explore another important relationship for finance professionals: working with Marketing Teams. I hope you’ll join me for that conversation.

If you found this edition valuable, please share it with a colleague or anyone looking to strengthen their finance business partnering skills. The community grows one recommendation at a time.

Until next time,

Cheers,
Ajibola

Introduction

There is a peculiar irony in modern finance - The expertise that makes finance professionals valuable can also limit their influence.

We spend years mastering forecasting, variance analysis, cost structures, investment decisions, and financial discipline. These skills are essential. But technical competence is rarely what separates a good finance business partner from a truly exceptional one.

The difference is perspective.

The most influential finance professionals learn to step outside finance and see the business as others see it. They understand the motivations, pressures and trade-offs behind the numbers.

They know what worries a sales leader before quarter-end, why operations may choose resilience over efficiency, and why other functions make decisions that may not look obvious from a spreadsheet.

Many finance professionals miss this. They speak to other functions as if everyone thinks like Finance, and in doing so, lose the chance to influence.

That is why I am starting this “FBP by Function” series. We begin with Sales because few relationships reveal the tension between growth and value creation more clearly.

The Problem

Finance and Sales often work toward the same goal but experience success differently.

For Sales, success is the moment a customer commits and a contract is signed. After months of conversations, presentations, negotiations and setbacks, the deal is won.

Finance may see the same moment differently. Revenue may not yet be recognisable. Cash may not have come in. Delivery risk, margin pressure or collection timelines may still be unresolved.

This can frustrate Sales, especially when Finance appears to question a victory rather than acknowledge the effort behind it. Finance can also become frustrated when commercial excitement seems to ignore economic reality.

In most cases, both sides are responding rationally to their responsibilities. The role of the finance business partner is to hold both perspectives at once.

Great FBPs are not referees between Finance and Sales. They are translators, helping both sides connect growth with sustainable value.

A Story

Early in my career, I attended a monthly management meeting where the Head of Sales reported that the company had achieved sales of ₦400 million for the month.

I immediately felt uneasy because my report showed revenue below ₦100 million. At first, I questioned the credibility of the sales number. Then I realised the problem was not the number. It was my perspective.

The Head of Sales was referring to customer orders secured during the month. From a sales perspective, ₦400 million of opportunities had been converted into business. Contracts had been signed. That was correct.

I was looking at recognised revenue. He was looking at commercial progress. Had I insisted on viewing the discussion only through an accounting lens, I could have created unnecessary conflict and missed the business point.

That lesson had less to do with accounting and more to do with perspective. Understanding how Sales sees success helped me become a better partner to them.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Understand How Sales Defines Success

Targets are not abstract numbers to sales teams. They affect credibility, compensation, career progression and sometimes survival. Pipeline reviews, customer wins, and quarterly commitments create pressures many finance professionals do not fully appreciate.

Action plan: Attend a sales review or pipeline meeting this month. Note the five metrics Sales discusses most often and compare them with the five metrics Finance emphasises. The gap will reveal how each function interprets performance.

2. Follow Deals Before Revenue Recognition

Finance often engages only when billing, reporting or revenue recognition begins. By then, key issues may already be fixed into the deal.

Exceptional FBPs stay curious earlier. They understand delivery risks, resource needs, support costs, margin pressure and collection timelines. The true value of a deal is determined not when it is sold, but when it is delivered and converted into cash and profit.

Action plan: Select one recently signed contract and map its journey from sale to delivery, invoicing, cash collection and profitability. Identify where Finance could have influenced outcomes earlier.

3. Learn the Economics Behind the Deal

Finance people often focus on the accounting and miss the economics. But economics is bigger. Some contracts strengthen profitability and cash flow; others absorb resources, increase complexity and dilute returns.

The FBP who understands the economic engine beneath a deal contributes strategically, not just as a reporter of results.

Action plan: Analyse a significant customer relationship or deal. Review profitability, delivery costs, support requirements, payment patterns and cash generation.

4. Help Sales Win Better

Finance loses influence when it is seen only as the function that blocks deals. The goal is not to stop Sales from winning, but to help the business avoid bad deals and shape better ones.

Instead of rejecting opportunities outright, effective FBPs propose better structures, improve commercial terms, reduce risk and protect long-term value while preserving strategic opportunity.

Action plan: In your next commercial discussion, resist the urge to simply say no. Offer at least one alternative structure that balances risk and opportunity more effectively.

5. Translate Finance into Commercial Language

Influence depends not only on the message, but on the language used. Sales leaders spend their days thinking about customers, growth, competitiveness, market share and performance, not debtor ageing or revenue recognition standards.

Finance creates more impact when it connects financial insight directly to those priorities.

Action plan: Take a recent finance presentation and rewrite it in commercial language. Frame recommendations around customers, growth, competitiveness and performance.

“Sales celebrates when the deal is won. Finance celebrates when the value is realised. Great FBPs learn how to connect both moments.” – Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If this edition resonates with you, it may be because you recognise a fundamental truth about business partnering. Financial expertise is essential, but no longer sufficient on its own.

The most influential finance leaders understand strategy, operations, customers, leadership, organisational dynamics and commercial decision-making. They know how different functions think and how to create value without becoming an obstacle to progress.

If you would like to deepen your business partnering capabilities, join the October 2026 Cohort of the Finance Business Partner Masterclass at fbp.mycfong.com.

For broader programs in finance leadership, FP&A, business partnering and CFO development, visit training.mycfong.com.

Conclusion

The biggest lesson from working with Sales is perspective. Great FBPs do not diminish the excitement of winning new business because revenue has not yet been recognised. They also do not abandon financial discipline in the name of commercial enthusiasm.

They connect the two. They understand that growth and value creation are not competing objectives, but different stages of the same journey.

When Finance develops that mindset, conversations with Sales become less confrontational and more constructive.

In the next edition of The FBP Playbook, we will explore working with Business Relationship Managers.

If you found this edition valuable, please share it with a colleague, team member or anyone looking to strengthen their finance business partnering skills.

Until next time,

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

Over the last two editions of The FBP Playbook, we explored managing down and managing sideways. In both cases, the underlying principle was the same: the role of the finance business partner is to achieve better business outcomes through people.

That brings us to the final part of this series: managing up.

Managing up is often misunderstood. It is not about keeping your boss happy or navigating organisational politics. It is about helping the people above you make better decisions.

Whether those people are your direct manager, the CFO, the CEO, the executive committee, or the board, their decisions shape the future of the organisation. One of the most important ways an FBP creates value is by improving the quality of those decisions.

The Problem

One observation I have made over the years is that many finance professionals underestimate what senior leaders need from them.

We often assume our responsibility is to provide reports and information. While that is true, it is only part of the picture. Most senior leaders already have more information than they can process. Their challenge is understanding what matters, what action is required, and what the consequences of different choices might be.

This is where many finance professionals unintentionally limit their value. They become very good at producing information but not necessarily at supporting decisions.

A finance business partner creates value when they connect information to decisions, risks to actions, and trends to consequences.

A Story

I once worked with a finance professional who became frustrated that management often chose paths different from those recommended by finance. She believed the issue was that leadership did not value finance input because her analysis was strong, the numbers were sound, and the conclusions were well supported.

A closer look revealed a different problem. She spent most of her time explaining the analysis rather than helping leadership understand the decision. While she focused on assumptions, calculations, and technical reasoning, leaders were balancing operational realities, commercial priorities, execution risks, and strategic considerations.

The turning point came when she shifted her focus from explaining the numbers to supporting the decision. The analysis itself did not change, but the way she presented it did. Over time, leadership began to engage more seriously with her recommendations because she had repositioned herself from a provider of information to a contributor to decision quality.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Make sure important leaders know of you before they need you

Influence often begins before the first conversation. Long before you enter a room, people usually have an opinion of your work. They know whether your analysis is respected, whether your judgement is trusted, and whether your recommendations are reliable.

This is why reputation matters. The objective is not visibility for its own sake. It is to build a reputation associated with value, reliability, and sound judgement. This becomes particularly important with indirect leaders such as executive committees, function heads, and boards, who may know of your work long before they know you personally.

Your action plan is to deliberately increase the visibility of your value over the next 90 days. Present in a management review, contribute to a cross-functional initiative, or take ownership of a business problem that matters.

2. Master proactive engagement

One of the quickest ways to limit your influence is to wait for instructions. Senior leaders value people who identify issues early, anticipate risks, and surface opportunities before they become obvious.

The professionals who earn the confidence of leadership are usually the ones who arrive with insight, not just updates.

Your action plan is to identify two or three emerging risks, opportunities, or trends each month and proactively bring them to leadership together with their implications and possible actions.

3. Become the person who shines a light into blind spots

Senior leaders have broad visibility across the business but often limited visibility into what is happening underneath. Boards face an even greater challenge. This creates a valuable opportunity for finance business partners.

Your role is not simply to report what happened. It is to help leadership understand what is emerging, what is being overlooked, and where intervention may be required. Whenever possible, bring solutions alongside problems.

Your action plan is to ensure every issue you escalate is accompanied by its implications and a recommended course of action.

4. Help leaders execute, not just decide

Many professionals assume leadership’s role ends once a decision is made. In reality, execution is often the harder challenge.

Leaders need people who can translate decisions into action, coordinate stakeholders, track delivery, and maintain momentum. Sometimes your role is not to lead the initiative. Sometimes your role is to help leadership deliver it successfully.

Your action plan is to identify one strategic initiative currently championed by a senior leader and find a way to strengthen its execution, not just its reporting.

5. Learn to leverage the reach of your leaders

Many finance professionals try to solve every problem themselves. However, managing up also means knowing when a challenge requires access, influence, relationships, or authority that exists above your level.

Good FBPs understand how to use the reach of their leaders to remove obstacles, accelerate decisions, and create momentum when progress has stalled.

Your action plan is to identify one issue that has remained unresolved for too long, prepare a concise briefing, and engage the appropriate leader to help move it forward.

The most influential finance business partners are not the ones with the loudest voice. They are the ones leaders trust to see what they cannot see and solve what they cannot manage directly - Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

Many finance professionals spend years developing technical competence without receiving much guidance on how to influence decisions at senior levels. Yet as careers progress, that capability becomes increasingly important. Technical knowledge remains essential, but influence, judgement, communication, credibility, and strategic perspective become equally important.

That is why our training and mentoring programmes focus not only on technical finance skills, but also on the broader capabilities required to become a trusted business partner and advisor.

If your ambition is to become the kind of finance professional whose insight consistently improves decision quality at every level of the organisation, we would be delighted to help you on that journey. Start here: training.mycfong.com

Conclusion

As we conclude this series, it is worth returning to the principle that has connected all three editions.

Whether you are managing down, managing sideways, or managing up, the objective is never people management for its own sake. The objective is results.

Managing down is about creating structures that allow people to perform. Managing sideways is about creating alignment across people who do not report to you. Managing up is about helping decision-makers make better choices.

The most effective finance business partners understand that influence is ultimately measured by the quality of the outcomes they help create. When viewed through that lens, managing up is not really about hierarchy. It is about contributing insight, judgement, and perspective in ways that help the organisation make better decisions and achieve better results.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

In the last edition of The FBP Playbook, we explored managing down and discussed a principle that sits at the heart of effective finance leadership: your role is not to manage people for the sake of managing people. Your role is to deliver results through people. That principle remains true throughout this series.

In this second part, we move to a challenge that many finance business partners find significantly harder: managing sideways.

Most finance professionals eventually learn how to work with direct reports. There is usually a reporting structure, a performance process, and a degree of formal authority. Managing sideways is different. The people whose cooperation you need often do not work for you. They have their own priorities, their own pressures, and their own measures of success.

And yet, some of the most important outcomes you are accountable for depend heavily on them.

You may be responsible for cash flow, but Sales influences collections.

You may be responsible for inventory reporting, but Operations influences inventory decisions.

You may be responsible for budgets and forecasts, but department heads influence the assumptions that drive them.

You may be accountable for business performance reviews, but the underlying actions belong to other functions.

This is what makes managing sideways such a critical skill for finance business partners. Many of the results you are expected to deliver must be achieved through people over whom you have no formal authority.

The Problem

One of the most common mistakes finance professionals make is assuming that good analysis automatically creates action.

We spend time producing reports, highlighting risks, identifying trends, and explaining consequences. We expect that once people see the numbers, they will naturally do something about them.

Unfortunately, that is not how organisations work. People rarely act because a report exists. They act because they understand the implications, believe the issue matters to them, and feel some level of ownership for the outcome.

This is where many finance professionals become frustrated.

The analysis is correct. The recommendations are sensible. The numbers clearly point in one direction. Yet nothing changes.

At that point, the issue is no longer an analytical problem; it is an influence problem.

The FBP who learns this early becomes far more effective than the one who keeps producing increasingly sophisticated reports while wondering why behaviour refuses to change.

A Story

I once worked with a Finance Manager who had been asked to help improve working capital performance.

The objective seemed straightforward enough. Reduce receivables days, improve inventory discipline, and strengthen cash generation. From a finance perspective, the opportunity was obvious. The analysis showed that cash was being trapped in multiple areas of the business.

Every month, the reports highlighted the same issues.

Receivables were increasing, inventory balances continued to grow, and cash conversion was deteriorating.

The analysis was accurate, and the presentations were thorough. Nobody disagreed with the numbers.

The problem was that very little changed.

The Sales team continued making commercial decisions based on customer relationships. Operations continued making decisions based on service levels and stock availability. Procurement continued making decisions based on supply requirements. Department leaders continued focusing on the priorities they were measured against.

Meanwhile, finance continued producing reports explaining why working capital performance remained weak.

Eventually, she realised something important. She had been trying to solve an influence problem with reporting.

She assumed that if people saw the numbers, they would automatically change their behaviour. What she had failed to appreciate was that most business decisions are not driven by finance metrics alone. They are driven by competing objectives, operational realities, customer considerations, and leadership priorities.

The turning point came when she stopped leading with finance and started leading with business outcomes. Instead of discussing receivables as a finance problem, she framed them as a growth constraint. Instead of discussing inventory purely as a balance sheet issue, she connected it to cash availability and future investment opportunities. Instead of sending reports, she began creating shared ownership for the results.

The quality of the analysis did not change dramatically. The relationships did.

And over time, the outcomes improved as well.

That is the essence of managing sideways. It is not about getting people to agree with your numbers. It is about helping people see why the outcome matters to them.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Understand what matters to them, not just what matters to finance

One of the fastest ways to lose influence is to assume everyone cares about finance in the same way that finance does.

They do not.

Sales cares about growth. Operations cares about delivery. Procurement cares about supply stability. HR cares about people.

A finance business partner becomes more influential when they understand the priorities that drive behaviour in other functions.

Your action plan is to identify the three most important stakeholders you work with regularly. For each person, write down the objectives they are measured against and the challenges they are trying to solve. Influence becomes much easier when you understand what success looks like from their perspective.

2. Learn to translate finance into business language

Finance professionals often communicate in financial language when the audience needs business language.

A department head may not react strongly to a discussion about working capital days, but they may react strongly to a discussion about funding future growth opportunities. The underlying issue is the same. The framing is different.

Your action plan is to review your next presentation or stakeholder discussion and ask yourself a simple question: “Am I explaining this as a finance issue or a business issue?” The answer should usually be the latter.

3. Build relationships before you need them

Many professionals only engage stakeholders when they want something. That is usually too late. Influence is easier when trust already exists.

One of the most effective partnering tips is that I invest time in understanding my peers long before difficult conversations become necessary. As a result, when tough discussions arose, they were not starting from zero.

Your action plan is to identify three key stakeholders and schedule regular conversations that are not tied to an immediate finance request. Spend time understanding their priorities, pressures, and challenges.

4. Create shared ownership for outcomes

A common mistake in finance is treating business issues as finance issues. Most important outcomes are cross-functional outcomes.

If cash flow improves, it is rarely because finance worked harder. It is usually because multiple functions behaved differently. The more ownership sits with one department, the less likely change is to happen.

Your action plan is to stop presenting major issues as finance problems. Instead, define who influences the outcome and involve them in creating the solution.

5. Earn influence through credibility and consistency

Influence is rarely granted because of job titles. It is usually earned through repeated demonstrations of competence, consistency, and sound judgement.

People listen more carefully to finance professionals whose recommendations have consistently helped the business make better decisions. That credibility accumulates over time.

Your action plan is to focus on being reliable. Deliver what you promise. Be prepared. Follow through. Treat every interaction as an opportunity to strengthen your reputation.

Memorable Quote

People rarely support what they do not own. Great FBPs create ownership, not just awareness.

Grow With Us

The most influential finance business partners are rarely the loudest people in the room.

They are the people who understand how organisations work. They know how to build trust, align priorities, communicate clearly, and create momentum around important outcomes. Those skills do not develop automatically.

That is why our training and mentoring programmes focus on practical business partnering capabilities, including leadership, influence, stakeholder management, communication, and commercial decision-making.

If you want to become the kind of FBP who can consistently drive results across functions and stakeholders, we would love to work with you. Start here:

Conclusion

The lesson from this edition is simple.

Many of the results finance is expected to deliver depend on people who do not work for finance. That reality changes the job.

Success is no longer about reporting well, analysing well, or forecasting well. It is about converting insight into action through people whose priorities may be very different from yours.

The most effective FBPs understand this. They recognise that influence is not a soft skill sitting on the edges of the role. It is a core part of how results are achieved.

In the next and final edition of this series, we will explore perhaps the most delicate relationship of all:

Managing Up: influencing senior leaders whose decisions ultimately shape the direction of the business.

Cheers,
Ajibola

Introduction

Over the next three editions of The FBP Playbook, we are going to discuss a topic that sits at the heart of effective finance business partnering but does not always receive the attention it deserves: managing people.

Most finance professionals spend years developing technical skills. We learn accounting, reporting, planning, analysis, controls, forecasting, and decision support. But when the reality hits, we find ourselves responsible for people... a lot of people. That transition can be more challenging than many expect because managing people is a completely different discipline from managing numbers.

The challenge becomes even more significant for finance business partners because we do not operate in one-directional relationships. We manage junior team members. We influence peers. We advise senior leaders. We support decision-makers across the organisation. That’s even before we consider all sorts of external stakeholder relationships.

One of the biggest mistakes an FBP can make is assuming that every stakeholder should be managed the same way.

In this three-part series, we will look at:

• Part 1: Managing Down

• Part 2: Managing Sideways

• Part 3: Managing Up

Today, we begin with managing down: analysts, finance officers, accountants, graduates, trainees, interns, and junior team members across the organisation.

Before we go any further, however, I want to establish a principle that sits at the centre of this discussion.

As an FBP, your role is not simply to manage people. Your role is to deliver business results through people.

That distinction matters because it changes how you think about leadership, delegation, performance management, coaching, development, and accountability.

The Problem

One of the mistakes I see finance leaders make repeatedly is confusing activity with outcomes.

They spend considerable time managing their teams. They hold review meetings, assign work, answer questions, monitor progress, and deal with operational issues. Yet somehow reporting quality does not improve. Forecasts remain inconsistent. Stakeholders continue to complain about turnaround times. Month-end still arrives with the same pressure and frustration.

The issue is not usually a lack of effort. In fact, many finance managers work extremely hard. The issue is that they focus so much on managing people that they lose sight of why they are managing them in the first place.

The objective is not supervision.

The objective is not delegation.

The objective is not even team harmony.

The objective is results.

The reports the business relies on, the forecasts that shape decision-making, the controls that protect value, and the insights that drive performance all come through people’s thinking and efforts. That means the finance leader’s responsibility is to create the conditions that allow those results to happen consistently.

When viewed through that lens, managing people becomes less about applying a standard leadership formula and more about understanding how to adapt different individuals to contribute to the outcomes the business needs.

A Story

A finance manager once complained that he was overwhelmed.

Month-end reporting was late. Forecasts were rushed. Budget reviews were always running behind schedule. Stakeholders constantly chased him for information, and every evening seemed to end with another task added to his list.

At first glance, it looked as though the problem was a lack of capable people.

It wasn’t.

The organisation had finance officers in business units, accountants in shared services, analysts in planning teams, and junior staff across multiple departments. The real problem was that the FBP had never properly structured how work flowed through those resources.

Everything important flowed through him. As a result, the business had unknowingly built a bottleneck and given it a job title.

The turning point came when he stepped back and mapped all his recurring responsibilities. He separated the work that genuinely required his judgement from the work that required process discipline, data gathering, analysis preparation, stakeholder follow-up, and routine monitoring.

What he discovered surprised him.

Almost 60% of what occupied his time could be performed by somebody else with the right guidance, structure, and oversight.

Over the following months, he redesigned how the work was allocated. Finance officers became responsible for gathering and validating inputs. Analysts prepared first drafts of reports and forecasts. Routine stakeholder requests were routed through designated team members. Clear review processes replaced constant involvement.

Instead of spending his days producing information, he spent more of his time interpreting it, challenging it, and helping the business make decisions with it. At the same time, the junior ones were learning accountability and judgement

That is what managing down should achieve.

The purpose is not simply to supervise junior people. The purpose is to create a structure through which results can be delivered consistently and in which they are learning and developing fast.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Separate work that requires judgement from work that requires process

One of the biggest mistakes finance leaders make is treating all work as if it requires their involvement.

Most finance activities sit on a spectrum. Some require professional judgement, commercial insight, and stakeholder influence. Others require discipline, consistency, and follow-through.

Your action plan is to list everything you do in a typical month and divide it into two columns:

• Work only you can do

• Work someone else can do with the right structure

The second column is usually much larger than people expect.

2. Allocate work intelligently, not equally

One of the myths of management is that fairness means equality. In reality, finance teams perform best when work is distributed in a way that maximises overall results.

This means understanding where different individuals create the most value and allocating responsibilities accordingly.

Your action plan is to review how work is distributed across your team. Ask yourself whether responsibilities align with capability, experience, development needs, and business priorities.

3. Build communication that drives execution

One of the fastest ways to lose momentum as a finance leader is through unclear communication. Many managers assume they have delegated because they have spoken. Those are not the same thing.

Delegation and proper execution only occur when the other person understands exactly what is required, why it matters, when it is needed, and how success will be assessed.

The problem becomes amplified when working with junior staff outside your immediate team. Unlike direct reports, they often do not have the context sitting in your head. All they have is what you communicated. If your communication is vague, the quality of the execution will usually be vague too.

Your action plan is to review every important instruction against four questions:

• What exactly needs to be done?

• Why does it matter?

• When is it required?

• What does good look like?

If you can’t answer that yourself, there’s a big chance that no one will understand what you are saying.

4. Measure outputs, not effort

One of the traps finance leaders fall into is confusing effort with performance.

It is easy to admire the employee who stays late every day, attends every meeting, and appears permanently busy. However, businesses do not ultimately reward effort. They reward outcomes.

The real question is whether the quality, timeliness, reliability, and usefulness of the output improved.

Your action plan is to review how performance is measured within your team. Make sure outputs carry more weight than activity.

5. Model the standards you want replicated

One of the most underrated tools available to a finance business partner is personal example. People rarely adopt standards because they were written in a document. More often, they adopt standards because they repeatedly see them demonstrated by leaders they work with.

If excellence matters, demonstrate excellence. If timeliness matters, be known for timeliness. If preparation matters, show up prepared. If accountability matters, hold yourself accountable first.

The standard that people experience consistently is usually the standard they eventually adopt.

This becomes even more important when managing junior professionals outside your immediate reporting line. Their relationship with you may be limited to meetings, reviews, emails, and project interactions. In those moments, your behaviour becomes a signal of what good looks like.

Your action plan is to identify three standards that matter most to your effectiveness as an FBP. It could be quality, responsiveness, preparation, ownership, stakeholder focus, or commercial thinking. Then ask yourself: “If your team copied your behaviour exactly for the next six months, would the results improve or decline?” That question usually reveals more about leadership than any performance review.

The FBP is not paid to manage people. The FBP is paid to deliver results through people - Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

Many finance professionals find themselves managing juniors long before anyone teaches them how to do it effectively. They understand finance. They understand reporting. They understand analysis. But leadership often becomes something they learn through trial and error.

That is why our training and mentoring programmes help finance professionals develop not only their commercial and technical skills, but also the leadership capabilities required to build strong teams, influence stakeholders, and consistently deliver results.

If you want to become the kind of finance business partner who creates results through people, we would love to work with you. Start here training.mycfong.com

Conclusion

The lesson from this edition is not that people are different. We already know that.

The lesson is that results are delivered through people, and finance leaders must never lose sight of that connection.

Your responsibility is not simply to supervise activity. Your responsibility is to ensure that the collective capability of your team produces the outcomes the business requires.

The most effective FBPs understand this instinctively. They do not manage people for the sake of managing people. They manage people with a clear view of the result they are trying to achieve.

Managing down is not about supervising people. It is about creating a structure, allocating resources, communicating clearly, and enabling others to consistently produce results

In the next edition of this series, we will move from managing down to a challenge that many finance professionals find even harder:

Managing sideways: influencing people who do not report to you but whose cooperation you absolutely need.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

It is April 2027. You have just finished preparing the management report for March 2027. The report is accurate, well-formatted, and properly explained. It shows a loss. It also shows a serious cash crunch.

As the finance lead, you have done a solid job reporting how bad things are. The numbers tie. The commentary is clear. The variances have been analysed. Nobody can accuse you of being careless.

But that is not the highest value finance can create.

The Problem

Too many finance professionals are excellent at explaining what has already gone wrong. They can report the loss, analyse the decline, explain the cash shortage, and prepare a beautiful deck after the damage has happened. That work matters, but it is not enough.

The real value of finance business partnering is in describing the past. It is in helping the business see what the current numbers are likely to become if nothing changes. If all you do is report history, you are useful. But if you help the business influence the future, you become valuable.

A Story

Now, rewind six months to September 2026. The business is planning a major capital expenditure of ₦100 million for March 2027. On paper, the plan looks exciting. The project promises growth, capacity, efficiency, or some other strategic benefit. Everyone can see why management wants to do it.

But the finance partner is looking at the September numbers and seeing something else. Sales are not growing as quickly as expected. Receivables are stretching. Inventory is tying down cash. Supplier payments are already beginning to feel tight. When those trends are pushed forward into a simple six-month forecast, March 2027 does not look as comfortable as people assume.

The forecast shows that if the business goes ahead with the ₦100 million capex in March, without changing anything else, it could create a serious cash flow problem. Not because the project is automatically bad, but because the timing may be wrong for the business based on the current trend. That is the kind of insight finance must bring before the pressure becomes visible to everyone.

So the finance partner does not just report September and move on. He brings options. He suggests actions that could boost cash flow before March: tightening collections, slowing down non-essential spend, reviewing inventory purchases, renegotiating supplier payment terms, and increasing the frequency of cash forecasting. He also advises management to consider moving the capex to a more stable period if the cash position does not improve.

That is far more valuable than staying silent, watching the business proceed blindly, and then preparing a beautiful report in April explaining why March ended in pain. The value was not in making the report look good after the damage. The value was in helping the business see the consequence early enough to act.

So tell me, who has more business value: the person who reported the cash crisis accurately after the ₦100 million decision had already hurt the business, or the person who used the forecast to help management avoid or manage it? Who would you promote?

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Stop treating reports as endings.

A management report is not the final chapter. It is a signal. When you review the numbers, do not only ask what happened. Ask what the current trend is likely to create if nothing changes.

Your action plan is to add one forward-looking question to every monthly review: “If this continues for the next three to six months, what will it do to profit, cash, customers, operations, or confidence?”

2. Build simple rolling forecasts.

You do not need a complicated model to start acting like a business partner. Even a simple rolling forecast can show whether the business is drifting towards pressure.

Your action plan is to build a three-month and six-month view of revenue, major costs, receivables, payables, inventory, and cash. Keep it simple enough for leaders to understand and serious enough to support decisions.

3. Turn variances into consequences.

A variance is not just a difference between actual and budget. It is a clue about what may happen next. A sales shortfall may become a cash shortage. Slow receivables may become supplier pressure. Rising costs may become margin erosion.

Your action plan is to explain every major variance in three parts: what happened, why it happened, and what it could cause if nothing changes.

4. Help the business choose actions early.

Finance business partnering is not just pointing at danger. It is helping the business decide what to do about it. When you see a risk forming, bring options.

Your action plan is to prepare two or three practical responses whenever you raise a warning. For example, improve collections, reduce discretionary spend, delay non-essential purchases, renegotiate payment terms, or review pricing.

5. Create a rhythm for early warnings. A warning given once can be ignored. A warning built into the management rhythm becomes harder to miss.

Your action plan is to create a simple monthly section in your report called “What This Could Become.” Use it to highlight the biggest trend, the likely consequence, the time frame, and the action needed from leadership.

If all you do is report history, you are a historian. If you help influence the future, you are a business partner. - Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If you are a finance professional who wants to become a better finance business partner, you must learn how to move from reporting what happened to shaping what happens next. That means building forecasts, reading trends, asking better questions, communicating risk early, and helping leaders make decisions before pressure becomes crisis.

That is what we help finance professionals do through our training and mentoring. We help you strengthen your commercial thinking, improve your business conversations, and turn management reporting into real decision support. If you are ready to stop being only a reporter of history and start becoming a shaper of the future, come and grow with us. Start here: training.mycfong.com

Conclusion

This is the real essence of finance. This is what true business partnering looks like. You do not sit back and wait to report bad news after the fact. You help shape the news before it happens.

The business does not only need someone who can explain March in April. It needs someone who can look at September and help leaders see what March may become. That is where finance begins to move from reporting to relevance.

So choose which one you want to be. A historian of what went wrong, or a business partner who helps influence what happens next.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

The other day, I heard a story about an accountant who lost his job after preparing financial statements that were later found to be misleading. It was painful because the error was not a small typo or a harmless classification issue. It affected a major transaction and cost the company millions.

What made the story even more uncomfortable was his reaction afterwards. He felt he had been treated unfairly. In his view, if the company had sent him on the right training programmes, he would have known better. Maybe he had a point. But he also did not have a point.

The Problem

Many finance professionals want to become finance business partners, but they do not treat their own development with the seriousness the role requires. They want influence, but they do not stay current. They want a seat at the table, but they are not deliberately building the technical, commercial, and communication skills needed to be trusted in that room.

Good businesses should invest in learning and development. That is true. A serious employer should care about the competence of its people. But your growth cannot depend entirely on whether your employer remembers to train you. Personal development is called personal for a reason. If you do not know what has changed in your field, the business may still suffer the consequences. And when the consequences become expensive, your explanation may not protect you.

A Story

Here is what happened. The accountant prepared the company’s financial statements and applied the principles of IAS 17 to leases where the company was the lessee. Under the old approach, leases were classified in a way that allowed some arrangements to remain outside the statement of financial position. But IFRS 16 had come in, replacing IAS 17 and requiring lessees to recognise right-of-use assets and lease liabilities for most leases, subject to limited exemptions.

He did not know. Or perhaps he knew there had been changes somewhere, but he had not taken the time to understand what those changes meant for his work. So, the financial statements went out carrying lease accounting that no longer reflected the current requirements.

Eventually, the issue surfaced during a deal. The numbers were challenged. The statements were considered misleading. The company’s position in the transaction was weakened, and the financial consequence ran into millions. By the time everyone understood the size of the problem, it was no longer an academic accounting debate. It had become a business loss.

That was what cost him his job.

Afterwards, he was still adamant that he had been treated unfairly. His argument was simple: if the company wanted him to apply the latest standards, the company should have paid for training. And I understand the frustration. Many organisations underinvest in their finance teams and then expect world-class judgement. That is not right.

But there is another truth we must face. If your competence carries business risk, you cannot wait passively for someone else to maintain it for you. The title on your employment letter does not keep you current. Your professional certificate does not update itself. Your past knowledge does not automatically remain useful because you once worked hard to acquire it.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Build a personal update system.

Do not rely on random training invitations to stay current. Choose a few trusted sources and create a routine for checking what has changed in accounting standards, regulation, tax, technology, and business practice.

Your action plan is to block one hour every week for professional updates and keep a simple note of what changed, why it matters, and whether it affects your organisation.

2. Know the rules, standards, and updates that touch your business.

You do not need to know everything about every rule, standard, regulation, policy, or market update. But you must know the ones that can materially affect your company. If your business leases assets, IFRS 16 matters. If your business has revenue contracts, tax exposures, regulatory obligations, technology risks, procurement rules, data requirements, funding covenants, or foreign currency exposure, know the updates that matter.

Your action plan is to list the top five rules, standards, or updates that affect your company and assess whether your knowledge is current.

3. Convert learning into business protection.

Learning is not just for certificates. It protects the business from bad decisions, weak reporting, audit issues, regulatory exposure, and expensive surprises.

Your action plan is to take one recent update and ask, “Could this change our numbers, our disclosures, our covenants, our tax position, or our deal readiness?” That is how a finance professional starts thinking like a partner.

4. Ask your employer to invest, but do not wait helplessly.

You should absolutely influence your company to pay for training, mentoring, courses, conferences, and resources. But request it with a business case. Explain the risk of not investing and the value the organisation will gain.

Your action plan is to prepare a short training request that shows the course, the cost, the business problem it helps solve, and the expected benefit to your role.

5. Treat ignorance as a risk, not an excuse.

Not knowing may explain what happened, but it does not always excuse the consequence. When the business is relying on your judgement, your knowledge gap can become their loss.

Your action plan is to identify one area where you are currently not confident and take one concrete step this week to close the gap. Buy the book. Join the class. Ask the expert. Read the standard. Book the mentoring session.

Bonus tip: Put development on the table before you join.

If you can, make learning and development part of the conversation before accepting a new role. Ask what the company’s L&D approach is, what budget exists for professional development, and whether support for training, mentoring, memberships, or certifications can be expressly reflected in your employment letter.

Your action plan is to ask these questions before you join a new business, so development is not treated as an afterthought once the work pressure begins.

Your employer can support your development, but they cannot own it for you. - Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If you are a finance professional who wants to become a better finance business partner, take your development seriously today. The role requires more than reporting what happened. It requires judgement, confidence, commercial awareness, technical currency, and the ability to translate finance into business decisions.

That is why we offer training and mentoring for finance professionals who want to grow beyond compliance and reporting. We help you sharpen your thinking, strengthen your confidence, understand the business, and speak in a way that leaders can trust. If you want to become the kind of finance professional who is current, credible, and useful, come and grow with us. Start here training.mycfong.com

Conclusion

The accountant in that story may have been right that the company should have invested more in training. But he was wrong to believe that the absence of training removed his own responsibility. In finance, your knowledge can protect the business or expose it. Your development can increase your influence or quietly reduce your credibility.

So do not wait until a deal collapses, an audit finding embarrasses the team, or a leader loses confidence in your judgement. Take ownership now. Learn what has changed. Ask for support. Build the business case. But never forget that personal development is still personal.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

You are a finance professional. You know you can do more. But you cannot because you are trying to play a bigger game with tools that were built for a smaller one. And then that creates something that shoots down your confidence.

The Problem

Many finance professionals are expected to become strategic business partners while still working with old tools, poor systems, limited training, and almost no mentoring. They are told to add value, but they are not given the support to understand the business deeply. They are asked to influence decisions, but they are not trained to communicate with confidence. They are expected to provide insight, but they spend most of their time fighting spreadsheets, chasing data, and correcting avoidable errors.

This creates a quiet frustration. You know there is more inside you, but the environment keeps pulling you back into survival mode. While others move ahead, you feel left behind. Not because you are incapable, but because capability needs support. Growth needs investment. And leadership needs tools that do not constantly hold you back.

A Story

A finance professional once worked in a business where management was beginning to worry about cash. Payments were becoming tighter. Supplier pressure was increasing. Payroll was always around the corner. Leaders wanted finance to help them get ahead of the problem, not merely explain it after it had already happened.

So management asked for a daily bank position every morning. They wanted to know, by 9:00 a.m., how much cash was available across the company’s bank accounts, which payments could be released, what obligations were coming due in the next 7-14 days, and what the short-term cash forecast meant for the business. In simple terms, they wanted finance to give them visibility before the day started.

The request made sense commercially. The problem was the company had refused to move properly to internet banking and other digital platforms. There was no easy dashboard. No automated bank feed. No quick download of balances. The finance professional had to call relationship officers, wait for statements, manually check emails, update spreadsheets, reconcile movements, and still try to explain what the numbers meant before management needed to make decisions.

It was almost impossible to deliver that level of visibility manually within the required time frame. But instead of making the request for better tools and support, the finance professional stayed quiet. They absorbed the pressure. They missed deadlines. They took the hit for not delivering. Over time, their confidence suffered badly. They began to believe they were the problem, when the real issue was that they were being asked to play a bigger finance role without the systems required to deliver it. Eventually, they were replaced. The issue wasn’t that finance could not do more, but because they were never properly equipped to do more.

Ajibola’s Tips

1. Identify the tools that are limiting your value.

Do not make a vague complaint that “the system is bad.” Be specific. Is your reporting tool slow? Are you spending too much time consolidating spreadsheets? Are budget owners sending information in inconsistent formats?

Your action plan is to list the three biggest tool-related frustrations that waste your time each month, then estimate the time, errors, delays, or missed decisions they create.

2. Connect your growth request to business outcomes.

Employers respond better when they can see the business case. Do not only say, “I want training.” Say, “This training will help me improve budget conversations, reduce reporting delays, and support better decisions.”

Your action plan is to write your request in this format: the problem, the support needed, the business benefit, and the expected outcome.

3. Ask before frustration turns into resentment.

Many professionals wait too long before asking for help. They suffer quietly, complain privately, and then become disengaged. A better approach is to ask early and professionally.

Your action plan is to book a conversation with your manager and explain what support would help you perform at a higher level. Make it about performance, not entitlement.

4. Build your confidence by knowing your value.

If you are nervous to ask for training or better tools, it may be because you are not yet clear on the value you bring. Confidence grows when you can connect your work to real business results.

Your action plan is to document three ways your finance work has helped the business: a cost avoided, a risk reduced, a decision improved, a process fixed, or a leader supported.

5. Do not wait for permission to start growing.

Yes, your employer should support your development. But your career is still your responsibility. Start learning the language of commercial decision-making. Study how the business makes money. Observe how leaders present ideas. Practise turning reports into recommendations.

Your action plan is to choose one skill this month, either stakeholder management, storytelling with numbers, commercial analysis, or influencing, and begin developing it deliberately.

You cannot grow into a bigger finance role using tools, systems, and habits that were built to keep you small.- Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If you are a finance professional who wants to become a better finance business partner, you need more than technical knowledge. You need better tools, stronger confidence, sharper business language, and the ability to influence decisions without waiting to be invited into the room.

That is why we offer training and mentoring for finance professionals who are ready to grow beyond reporting. We help you understand the business, communicate with authority, engage stakeholders, and turn financial analysis into practical business action. If you are ready to play bigger, come and grow with us. start here training.mycfong.com

Conclusion

You cannot keep blaming yourself for every gap if you have not been properly equipped. But you also cannot stay silent and hope someone notices. If the tools are weak, ask for better ones. If the training is missing, ask for it. If you are unsure of your value, start documenting it until you can see it clearly and speak about it confidently.

The next level will require a different kind of support. Ask for it, not just because it will help your career, but because the business also benefits when finance professionals are equipped to think, speak, and lead better.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

One of the biggest shifts a finance professional can make is the shift from being accurate to being useful. Accuracy matters. Nobody is arguing with that. The debits must go where they should go. The credits must balance. The reconciliation must tie. The report must be clean. But if that is where finance stops, the business may still be bleeding while the accounts look perfectly fine.

Every finance business partner must understand sometimes the number is technically correct, but commercially useless.

The Problem

In many organisations, finance is trained to prove that a transaction has been recorded properly. That is important work, but it is not the same as proving that the transaction still makes sense for the business. A vendor advance can sit neatly in the books as an asset. The accounting treatment can be perfect. The audit file can be complete. Yet behind that neat balance could be delayed delivery, weak controls, operational confusion, supplier negligence, or even fraud.

This is where many finance teams miss the opportunity to create value. They wait for month-end. They wait for ageing reports. They wait for auditors. They wait for someone else in the business to explain what happened. But finance business partnering requires a different posture. It requires curiosity. It requires healthy discomfort. It requires the courage to ask, “What does this number mean for the business today?”

A Story

This is one of my simplest and favourite personal stories of going beyond accounting and reporting to truly partner with the business.

In one of the companies I worked with, we had a policy of paying most of our suppliers upfront for purchases. From an accounting point of view, the entry was simple: debit vendor advances and credit cash. That treatment showed that the company had paid money to a supplier and was expecting goods or services in return.

Accounting-wise, that was correct. Very correct. The advances were assets in the books because we expected something from the vendors. But correct does not always mean relevant.

The real business issue was this: if the items were never received, the advances would continue to sit in the books. On paper, we had an asset. In reality, we may have had money that had left the business without bringing value back. Some people are comfortable waiting for an auditor to pass an adjustment months later, but an adjustment does not recover lost cash, restore missed inventory, or close the control gap that allowed the problem to happen.

So, we stopped treating vendor advances as only an accounting balance. We treated them as a business signal.

First, we tracked how long vendor advances stayed in the books after payment. The company policy was 3 business days, so that became our first line of enquiry. If the goods were not received after 3 business days, we did not simply leave the balance there. We reached out to procurement to understand what was happening.

If it got to 7 business days, we escalated to internal control and management. Anything beyond that was treated as a crisis, not as a harmless balance sheet item. And just because we started asking questions, things began to surface. We discovered cases where fake supplier invoices had been pushed into the system. In other cases, the supplier genuinely did not know they had something to deliver. Either way, the accounting balance was telling us a story the business needed to hear.

Eventually, the incidence of advances older than 3 days went down to zero. Not because we wrote a more beautiful journal. Not because we waited for audit. But because finance chose to behave like a business partner.

Ajibola’s Tips: The Playbook

1. Get to accuracy, then go one step further. Once the accounting treatment is correct, ask what the balance means operationally. If cash has gone out, what value has come back? If revenue has been booked, has the customer experience matched the promise? If inventory is sitting in the warehouse, is it moving, ageing, or hiding poor demand planning?

Your practical action is simple: pick one balance sheet or P&L line this week and write down the business behaviour behind it. Do not only explain the accounting. Explain the commercial reality.

2. Put time limits around silent balances. Many business problems survive because nobody defines when a balance becomes unacceptable. In our case, three business days was the trigger, and seven business days was escalation.

Your action plan is to identify one recurring balance in your area, agree an acceptable ageing threshold with the business, and create a simple follow-up rhythm. A number that stays too long without movement is rarely neutral.

3. Use questions before accusations. Finance business partnering is not policing with a spreadsheet. It is influence with evidence. When something looks wrong, start by asking procurement, operations, sales, or supply chain what they are seeing. Ask, “What is preventing this from closing?” or “What needs to happen for this balance to clear?”

Your action plan is to replace your next email that says, “Please explain this variance,” with one that says, “Can we understand what is driving this and agree what action is needed?”

4. Escalate with context, not drama. Escalation should not be emotional noise. It should help leaders act faster. When you escalate, show the amount involved, the age of the issue, the business risk, the owner, and the next decision required.

Your action plan is to create a one-page escalation note for any issue that has crossed its threshold. Keep it short, commercial, and decision-focused.

5. Measure the behaviour you want to change. What gets measured consistently gets managed seriously. We did not only track the value of vendor advances; we tracked how long they stayed open and whether they breached policy.

Your action plan is to create one simple metric that shows whether the business is improving. It could be advances older than 3 days, overdue credit notes, unbilled revenue, unresolved GRNs, or aged customer disputes. Make the metric visible and discuss it with the people who can change it.

The finance business partner does not only ask, “Is the number correct?” They ask, “What is the business losing if this number stays this way?”

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Grow With Us

If you are a finance professional who wants to become more valuable to the business, this is the kind of thinking you must build deliberately. It is not enough to know the standards. It is not enough to prepare reports. You must learn how to read the business through the numbers, ask better questions, influence non-finance teams, and turn financial insight into action.

That is what we help finance professionals do through our training and mentoring. We help you move from being the person who reports what happened to becoming the person leaders trust to improve what happens next. If you want to grow as a finance business partner, come and learn with us.

start here training.mycfong.com

Conclusion

The lesson from this story is simple. It would have made perfect accounting sense to book the advance and do nothing else. But that would only have been accounting. The real value came from understanding what it meant for the business when paid-for items were not coming through.

So, look around your own numbers today. Find the balance, variance, delay, or report line that everybody has accepted as normal. Then ask what it is really saying about the business. That is where your next opportunity to create value may be hiding.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

Today, I want to challenge one dangerous habit Finance Business Partners can fall into.

We often stop once an asset has been recorded, reconciled, aged, counted, or depreciated correctly. But recording an asset is not the same as extracting value from it.

The nugget is simple: every asset in the business should be able to defend its place on the balance sheet by showing what value it is producing.

If it cannot support cash, output, resilience, customer delivery, or growth, it is not just an asset. It may be trapped value wearing an accounting label.

And that is where FBPs can come in and change the story.

The Problem

Finance usually knows what the business owns.

The cash balance is reconciled. Inventory is counted. Receivables are aged. Fixed assets sit neatly in a register with cost, depreciation, and net book value.

Everything is accounted for, but that does not mean everything is earning its keep, and that is where businesses lose money.

Cash can sit idle while the business pays expensive interest elsewhere. Inventory can remain untouched for months while procurement places another order. Customers can receive more credit despite repeatedly paying late. Equipment can occupy valuable space while producing nothing.

That is why the FBP’s job cannot end at accuracy. Accuracy tells the business what it owns. Commercial finance tells the business whether ownership is creating value.

An FBP must go beyond asking, “Is the asset recorded correctly? The better question is, “What is this asset doing for the business right now?”

A Story

I was coaching a finance professional called Kemi who knew her company’s numbers exceptionally well.

The business was growing. Revenue was rising. Profit was healthy. The management accounts looked strong. But cash was always tight. Every month brought another urgent conversation about delayed supplier payments, an extended overdraft, or which expenditure needed to wait. Management blamed growth. Growing businesses need cash, they said.

At first, Kemi produced a detailed cash forecast. It clearly showed the pressure, but it did not change the conversation. Why? Because the forecast explained when cash would run short. It did not prove where cash was being trapped.

So, we stopped treating cash as a treasury problem and started testing the assets around it.

Receivables had increased faster than revenue. Several customers were still receiving fresh credit despite missing previous payment dates. One product category held nearly six months of stock, and some of that inventory had not moved for more than 120 days.

Then we reached the fixed assets. The company-owned equipment had not been used for almost a year. Nobody wanted to dispose of it because it might be needed again. Nobody could explain when.

The pivotal question was not complicated: “If the business did not already own this asset, would it spend cash to acquire it today?” For several items, the answer was no.

That single question changed the quality of the discussion because it forced each asset to defend its existence.

Kemi stopped presenting cash as an isolated number. She showed management where cash was trapped, why it was trapped, and which commercial decisions had created the position.

The business did not suddenly become cash-rich. But the behaviour changed. Credit approvals tightened. Slow-moving inventory received named owners. Idle equipment was reviewed for disposal or redeployment.

The cash problem had been visible all along. It was simply hiding inside assets that nobody had asked to justify their value.

Ajibola’s Tips

1. Stop treating assets as things the business owns. Treat them as promises the business is waiting to collect.

This is the deeper shift.

A receivable is not just a customer balance. It is a promise that cash will arrive. Inventory is not just stock on a shelf. It is a promise that the business can convert what it bought into sales. Equipment is not just a fixed asset. It is a promise that capacity, output, efficiency, or customer delivery will improve.

When Finance presents assets only as balances, management can admire the size of what the business owns while ignoring whether those promises are being kept.

That is how value gets trapped. The business keeps protecting the asset because it exists, even when the promise behind the asset has already weakened.

Action Tip: Pick one major asset balance and complete this sentence: “The promise behind this asset is...” Then ask whether the business is still collecting that promise.

2. Make the cost of delay impossible to ignore.

Most asset problems do not feel urgent because they do not shout. They sit quietly inside reports, ageing schedules, stock listings, and asset registers.

That is why management can postpone the decision. Nobody feels the cost yet.

Your job as an FBP is to translate the asset into a consequence. What is this balance preventing? What is it consuming? What decision is it allowing the business to avoid? What other opportunity is being delayed because cash, space, credit, or attention is tied up here?

A slow-moving stock report may not move people. But saying, “This category is tying down cash we are borrowing elsewhere,” creates a different level of attention.

A list of overdue customers may not change behaviour. But saying, “We are financing customers who are not keeping their side of the deal,” forces a commercial conversation.

Action Tip: For one trapped asset, write the consequence in one sentence: “If we do nothing, the business continues to...”

3. Ask the present-tense question.

Many assets survive because the original decision once made sense.

The equipment may have supported an old expansion plan. The inventory may have been bought for a demand forecast that looked reasonable at the time. The customer credit may have been extended to win a relationship the business believed would become profitable.

That past logic makes people defensive. If you ask, “Why did we do this?” people hear blame. They protect the old decision instead of evaluating the current one.

So change the question. “If we had this cash available today, would this still be the best place to put it?”

That question moves the discussion from defence to judgment. It gives management permission to admit that a past decision may no longer fit the present business.

This is where Finance becomes commercially valuable. Not by embarrassing people with hindsight, but by helping them make a better decision with today’s facts.

Action Tip: Use this question in your next review of slow-moving inventory, overdue receivables, or idle assets: “Would we choose this again today?”

4. Connect the asset to the owner of the decision.

Assets do not become productive because Finance has identified the problem. They become productive when the person who controls the commercial decision accepts responsibility for what happens next.

This is where many asset reviews fail. Finance highlights the trapped value, everyone agrees it is an issue, and the meeting ends with vague language like “we will look into it.” That usually means the asset remains exactly where it was.

As an FBP, your role is to move the conversation from awareness to ownership. Who can release the cash? Who can change the credit terms? Who can decide whether inventory should be discounted, redeployed, or written down? Who can approve disposal or repurposing of idle equipment?

Action Tip: For every trapped asset you raise, name the decision owner, the next decision required, and the date by which that decision must be made.

5. Turn the asset review into a value-release conversation.

The purpose of an asset review is not to prove that something is wrong. It is to help the business decide how value will be released.

That release may come through faster collection, better utilisation, reduced purchases, disposal, redeployment, improved pricing discipline, tighter credit control, or simply stopping a decision pattern that keeps trapping cash.

When you frame the conversation this way, leaders are less likely to hear criticism and more likely to hear opportunity. You are not saying, “This asset is a problem.” You are saying, “There is value sitting here, and we need to decide how to unlock it.”

That is the language of business partnering.

Action Tip: End your next asset discussion with this question: “What is the clearest way to release value from this asset in the next 30 days?”

Memorable Quote

“An asset is not valuable because the business owns it. It is valuable when it proves what it produces.” - Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If today’s issue resonated with you, it is because the next level of Finance Business Partnering is not about knowing more tactics. It is about learning how to make one financial truth matter enough for the business to act.

If you want to keep building the skill of seeing what others miss in the numbers, our monthly programs are designed for that. Each one helps finance professionals strengthen the commercial thinking, decision framing, and business partnering skills needed to create value beyond reporting. You can find the current programs at training.mycfong.com.

Conclusion

The FBP’s responsibility does not end when every asset has been counted, reconciled, and reported correctly.

The deeper work begins when you ask whether the asset is keeping the promise that justified its place in the business. Stay with that to understand the promise behind it, the consequence of delay, and the decision the business has been avoiding.

That is how you move from range to depth.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

Welcome back. Today we are going deeper on one skill that makes Finance Business Partnering meaningful before the report is written, before the dashboard is refreshed, and before anyone walks into the performance review.

It is the ability to ask questions that extract the truth the system cannot hold back.

Because the information that makes finance insight useful is not always sitting in the ERP, the CRM, the budget file, or the dashboard. Sometimes it is sitting with the person who knows which customer is threatening to leave. Sometimes it is with the manager who knows the team is quietly discounting to protect volume. Sometimes it is with the operations lead who knows the cost pressure is not temporary, even though the forecast still treats it as one-off.

The FBP who cannot ask the right question will keep receiving neat data and poor truth.

The Problem

Many finance professionals assume the hard part is getting better data.

So they ask for cleaner reports, better dashboards, more fields, more automation, more access, and more system discipline. All of that matters. But it still does not solve the deeper partnering problem.

The deeper problem is that businesses do not only run on formal information. They run on informal knowledge.

They run on what people know but have not documented. What people suspect but have not escalated. What people are afraid to say in the main meeting. What one team calls a “temporary issue” because calling it structural would create pressure. What one senior person already knows but has not yet allowed the organisation to admit.

If the FBP relies only on official data and explanations, it can become technically accurate yet commercially incomplete. They may explain the variance correctly but miss the reason people are behaving the way they are. They may challenge a number without understanding the pressure that produced it. They may recommend the right action to the wrong person.

This is why questioning is not a soft skill on the side of the finance role. It is how the FBP finds the missing context that makes the numbers useful.

And emotionally, this matters because many FBPs are tired of feeling like their work is reduced to reporting what happened after the real decisions have already been shaped elsewhere.

The way out is not to ask louder questions in the meeting. It is to ask better questions earlier, in the places where the truth is still loose enough to be found.

A Story

I once worked with a Finance Business Partner called Elizabeth who was supporting the commercial team in a business where gross margin had been falling for three months.

Elizabeth was not inexperienced. She was diligent, sharp, responsive, and serious about doing finance work that mattered. She did not want to be the person who simply reported the decline. She wanted her analysis to change the conversation.

So she did what many good finance people do under pressure. She went deep into the numbers. She analysed the decline by product, region, customer group, and sales channel. She separated price, volume, discount, and cost impact. She built a clean margin bridge that made the movement visible.

But she did not ask enough questions before the meeting. And the few questions she did ask sounded more like checks than invitations.

She asked, “Why are discounts higher?” instead of, “Help me understand what is happening with customer conversations.” She asked, “Who approved this pricing?” instead of, “What pressure were we responding to when this decision was made?” She asked, “Why was this not flagged earlier?” instead of, “What did people know before the numbers confirmed it?”

None of those questions was wrong. But they made the business feel as if Finance had already built the case and was now looking for someone to explain it. So people gave her safe answers. Formal answers. Answers that protected them. The account manager did not mention that a major customer had been threatening to switch suppliers. The regional lead did not explain that one competitor had quietly reset price expectations. The sales operations analyst did not say that discounting behaviour had changed weeks before it appeared in the report.

Elizabeth also spoke mostly to the people who formally owned the numbers. She missed the informal power layer: the person the team trusted, the person who knew the customer history, the person who could quietly tell her which recommendation would be accepted and which one would die after the meeting.

By the time she entered the commercial review, her analysis was technically strong but socially incomplete. The first slide landed well. The second created tension. By the third, the room had started defending itself.

When someone said, “That is not the full picture,” Elizabeth moved quickly to explain the analysis again. She filled the silence with more detail. More numbers. More proof. But what the room needed was not more proof. It needed a question that made the missing context safe to surface.

That is the painful moment many FBPs recognise. You worked hard. You were accurate. You prepared properly. Yet the room still slips away because the information that matters most was never in the report, and your questions did not invite it out early enough.

The lesson was not that Elizabeth needed to become softer. It was that she needed to question differently: with curiosity before challenge, with silence before explanation, with simple questions before complex analysis, with awareness of informal influence, and with questions that moved the room toward a decision instead of a defence.

That is why the tips below matter. They are not presentation techniques. They are the questions and behaviours that help an FBP reach the truth before the meeting becomes theatre.

Ajibola’s Tips To Help FBPs Question Better

1. Start with curiosity.

Hidden information rarely comes out under interrogation. When the business feels judged, people give Finance the official answer. When they feel understood, they are more likely to share the context that has not reached the system yet. Curiosity is not softness. It is how the FBP earns access to the truth behind the numbers.

Action Tip: Before your next business review, rewrite one question so it starts with “Help me understand...” instead of “Why did...”

2. Ask questions that force the business to slow down.

Informal truth often sits behind a neat explanation. A quick answer may be accurate enough for a meeting and still too shallow for a decision. The FBP has to create the pause where people can move beyond the safe explanation and name what is really affecting behaviour, risk, customers, cost, or performance.

Action Tip: In your next meeting, ask this once: “What are we assuming here that may no longer be true?”

3. Employ silence after important questions.

Finance people sometimes ask the right question and then rush to fill the space. But the answer that matters may need a few seconds of courage. Silence tells the room that you are not only collecting words. You are willing to listen.

Action Tip: After asking one important question this week, count 5-7 seconds before speaking again.

4. Don’t ask to be clever – ask to be clear.

You are not trying to prove how much Finance knows. You are trying to make it easy for the business to reveal what Finance does not know yet. Simple questions lower the defensive wall and help people explain the reality in their own language.

Action Tip: Replace one complex question in your next meeting with this: “What does success look like from your side?”

5. Ask ownership questions.

This is because the person with the answer is not always the person with the title. In many organisations, the real influence lives in informal networks. Someone knows what customers are saying. Someone knows which assumption has stopped being true. Someone knows who must be brought along before a decision can move. A strong FBP learns to find that person without disrespecting the formal structure.

Action Tip: When discussing one missed target this week, ask: “What would we do differently next time?”

6. Flip the lens.

A margin issue looks one way in a bridge. It can look very different to the salesperson trying to protect a strategic customer, the operations lead managing supplier pressure, or the manager who knows the target is creating bad behaviour. Perspective does not weaken analysis. It makes the analysis usable.

Action Tip: Before your next recommendation, ask one stakeholder: “If you were in their shoes, how would this feel?”

7. Ask questions that give forward momentum.

Questioning becomes powerful when it changes the next action. If the FBP uncovers context but does not help turn it into movement, the business leaves with another interesting conversation instead of a better decision.

Action Tip: End your next business conversation by asking: “What is the smallest step we can take today?”

Memorable Quote

“The FBP who only reads the report may know what happened. The FBP who asks the right question will discover what the business already knows but has not yet said.” - Ajibola Jinadu

Grow With Us

If today’s issue made you think about how much of your work depends on information that never arrives neatly packaged, take the next practical step.

Assess Your FBP Skills. Strong questioning is part of the wider FBP skill set. Take the free FBP Skills Assessment and see where you are strong, where you are exposed, and what to develop next. Take the assessment here

Get the book. If you want to strengthen how you communicate financial insight to decision-makers, my book gives you a practical way to make finance clearer, sharper, and more useful in the room. Buy the book here

Conclusion

Finance Business Partnering is not just the ability to analyse what the system gives you.

It is the ability to extract the context the system cannot give you.

That context lives in informal conversations, pressure points, quiet doubts, customer realities, operational constraints, and the people who know more than the official process reveals.

Do not only prepare your numbers. Prepare the questions that help you find where the real information sits. Ask who knows the customer pressure. Ask what the report is missing. Ask what people are not yet saying in the room. Ask who needs to be involved before the recommendation can become a decision.

Because one well-placed question can uncover more useful truth than ten perfect slides built from incomplete context.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Introduction

Welcome back. Today we are not going to talk about every tool Finance should learn. We are going to sit with one deeper problem many Finance Business Partners are quietly carrying.

The problem is not that FBPs are behind on technology. The problem is that many are being asked to adopt technology without being given a clear definition of what the role is supposed to become.

If digital transformation feels like more meetings, more reports, and more pressure, this issue is for you.

The Problem

Most Finance Business Partners already know technology matters. They do not need another keynote telling them that AI is coming, that dashboards matter, that automation saves time, or that data is the new oil.

They know.

What they often do not know is how to translate all that pressure into a sane, defensible, useful order of work. So the message lands like this: become more digital, automate more, produce better insight, support decisions faster, clean the data, build dashboards, learn AI, challenge the business, and still close the month on time.

That sounds like a transformation when written in a strategy deck. It feels very different at 7:43 a.m. on a Monday when your inbox already has three urgent requests and your forecast file is still waiting for inputs.

Should you automate the report? Rebuild the forecast model? Clean the source data? Learn Power BI properly? Use AI to draft commentary? Redesign the budgeting process? Build a dashboard? Challenge the sales assumptions? Create cost alerts? Prepare the board report?

Without direction, technology does not feel like leverage. It feels like one more way to disappoint people faster.

This is the part we need to say out loud: many FBPs are not resisting technology. They are resisting the emotional weight of unclear expectations.

If technology is supposed to make Finance more strategic, why does it so often leave the FBP feeling more exposed, more interrupted, and more behind?

A Story

I once worked with a finance professional called Kemi who had been told by her CFO that Finance needed to become more tech-enabled.

Kemi was not afraid of the future. She had started experimenting with dashboards. She had used AI to draft management commentary. She had even built a small tracker that reduced one monthly reconciliation from three hours to about forty minutes.

On paper, she was the modern FBP everyone says they want: curious, proactive, commercially aware, and willing to learn.

In reality, she was tired in a way that did not show up on her job description.

Every technology conversation created another expectation. Sales wanted live revenue visibility. Operations wanted cost alerts. The CFO wanted board-ready commentary faster. The CEO wanted scenario analysis. Accounting wanted automation for journals. Nobody was wrong. That was exactly why it was so difficult.

During our session, I asked her, “What is technology supposed to help Finance become in this business?”

She paused. Then she said, “I think they just want us to be faster.”

That one sentence explained the stress. If the goal is speed, Kemi should prioritise automation. If the goal is better insight, she should prioritise data structure and analysis. If the goal is stronger commercial challenge, she should prioritise decision conversations. If the goal is better control, she should prioritise process discipline.

But when everything is called “digital transformation,” the FBP cannot tell which work deserves their attention first. So they try to carry all of it.

Once Kemi separated the conversation into three lanes- automation, insight, and decision support- the noise reduced because she could finally say, “This is the lane we are working on now, and this is what we are not trying to solve yet.”

The Deeper Shift – Ajibola’s Tips

1. Stop asking, “What tool should we use?” Ask, “What pressure are we trying to remove?”

The most valuable technology conversations start with pain, not software. Where does the FBP lose time? Where does the business wait too long for an answer? Where does Finance repeat the same explanation every month? Where do leaders make decisions with partial visibility because the insight arrives too late?

Do this: Before discussing any tool this week, write down the pressure you want removed in one sentence: “The pressure we need technology to remove is...” If you cannot name the pressure, you are not ready to choose the tool.

2. Choose one lane before you choose one solution.

Most technology overwhelm comes from mixing different ambitions. Automation is about removing manual effort. Insight is about explaining what is changing and why. Decision support is about helping leaders choose a better action. These are related, but they are not the same job.

Do this: Take one current finance technology idea and place it in only one lane: automation, insight, or decision support. Then ask, “If this succeeds, what will be easier, clearer, or better for the business?”

3. Define what should disappear, or admit you are adding work.

This is where many finance transformations become emotionally expensive. A new dashboard is added, but the old report remains. A new automation is built, but the manual check still survives. A new process is introduced, but the meeting it was meant to replace continues. The FBP ends up maintaining the past and building the future at the same time.

Do this: For every technology improvement, complete this sentence: “If this works, we will stop doing...” If nothing stops, be honest about the trade-off. You are not reducing work yet. You are investing in a new layer of work.

4. Make the business own the decision, not just the request.

One reason technology work becomes frustrating for FBPs is that the business often asks for outputs without committing to the decision those outputs are meant to support. A dashboard is requested, but nobody agrees what action will be taken when the number moves. A forecast model is improved, but leaders still delay the hard conversation. Better technology should not only produce cleaner information. It should force clearer ownership.

Do this: Before building or improving any report, ask the business leader, “What decision will this help you make, and what will you do differently when you see the answer?” If they cannot answer, pause. The request may not be insight work yet. It may just be another information habit.

5. Protect learning time like a business deliverable.

Many FBPs are expected to become more digital in the gaps between urgent work. That is not a strategy. It is a recipe for guilt. If the role is changing, learning cannot remain invisible. The FBP needs protected time to understand the tools, practise on real problems, and build confidence without feeling like development is stealing time from delivery.

Do this: Block one recurring hour each week for one capability, not one tool. For example, “better variance storytelling,” “faster scenario modelling,” or “cleaner data preparation.” Then apply the learning to one live finance problem, so it becomes useful, not theoretical.

“Technology does not make Finance strategic. Direction does. Technology only accelerates the direction you have chosen.” - Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If today’s issue resonated with you, it may be because you are not struggling with technology itself. You may be struggling to understand where your FBP capability should go next, and which skill gap is quietly making the work heavier than it needs to be.

Assess Your FBP Skills. The free FBP Skills Assessment helps you see whether your current strength is reporting, analysis, insight, partnering, or commercial influence. When you know where you stand, technology becomes easier to prioritise because you can connect it to the capability you are trying to build. Take the assessment here

Conclusion

The future FBP will need to use technology. That part is settled.

But the stronger FBP will not start by chasing every new tool. They will start by naming the pressure technology should remove, choosing the lane that matters now, and deciding what old work must disappear if new work is going to be sustainable.

That is what protects the FBP from becoming the unofficial owner of every digital idea in the business. It gives you language. It gives you boundaries. It gives you a way to say yes to transformation without saying yes to everything.

Start this week with one sentence: “Technology should help Finance become better at...” Then choose one lane. Then name one piece of work that should disappear.

Cheers,

Ajibola

Welcome back, and sorry for the long break.

Today’s issue is for the finance professional who has finally built the courage to say what needs to be said, only to watch the body language in the room quietly tell you that the decision makers either do not care, do not agree, or would rather you stop talking.

The Problem

I have been a finance professional for about two decades. I have worked in and with large multinationals across the world, including the US, Europe, and Africa. I have sat in rooms with senior leaders, supported major decisions, built models, challenged assumptions, advised businesses, and helped organisations see what the numbers were really saying.

In some circles, I am even considered an authority in this space.

And yet, on some level, I still struggle to get some business owners to listen to me, or act on my advice, when it comes to financial matters - the particular space where I am the expert.

Sometimes the evidence is overwhelming. Sometimes, the common sense is obvious. Sometimes the risk is sitting right there in front of everybody.

And still, the business owner nods, shifts in the chair, changes the subject, smiles politely, or says, “Let us see how it goes.” Other times, they flatly ignore my advice and do the complete opposite of what the expert just advised them on.

I am telling you this because if, with all that “clout”, experience, and evidence, it can still be a struggle for me, then I can only imagine what it feels like for you when you are still building your reputation in your finance career.

Some of you know what to do. You can see the risk. You understand the numbers. You have even built up the courage to say the words. But the response from the room seems to tell you, quietly or loudly, that your advice is inconvenient or, worse, irrelevant.

The Story

There are moments when I am sitting with a business owner, and I can already see where the conversation is going.

The numbers are clear. The trend is not hidden. The cash pressure, margin leakage, pricing issue, cost creep, or control weakness is not theoretical. It is visible.

I explain what I am seeing. I connect it to the business impact. I show why waiting will make the problem more expensive. I try to be respectful, clear, and commercially practical.

And still, there are times when the response is not action. It is body language.

A pause that says, “I hear you, but I am not ready to deal with this.”

A smile that says, “You may be right, but I do not want this to become today’s decision.”

A quick change of subject that says, “Let us move away from this before it becomes uncomfortable.”

If I am honest, those moments can still be frustrating. Not because I expect everyone to accept my advice immediately, but because I know what delay can cost.

And that is the part I want you to hear clearly: struggling to get people to act does not automatically mean you are weak, inexperienced, or bad at finance.

Sometimes, you are dealing with fear. Sometimes ego. Sometimes politics. Sometimes denial. Sometimes, it is a business owner who already knows the truth but is not emotionally ready to face the implications.

That does not excuse why they ignore your expert take. It just explains why influence requires more than evidence.

Ajibola’s Tips: What to Try When They Do Not Seem Ready to Listen

First, a caveat: none of this is a guarantee. Humans are unpredictable. Business owners are not spreadsheets. They carry pressure, fear, ego, history, hope, and sometimes avoidance into the room. You can do everything well and still not get the response you want immediately.

But we cannot afford to be quiet. Ever. Irrespective of the feedback, our responsibility is to keep making the financial truth as clear, useful, and actionable as possible.

1. Name the business risk in plain language.

Do not begin with the spreadsheet. Begin with the consequence the business cares about.

Instead of: “Our cash conversion cycle has deteriorated.” Say: “If we continue like this, we may not have enough cash to pay priority suppliers on time in the second half of next month.”

The first version sounds like finance. The second version sounds like a business problem.

2. Put one decision on the table.

A warning without a decision creates concern, not movement. If you want action, make the next step unmissable.

The decision is not “please understand the financial risk.” The decision may be: “Approve a temporary freeze on non-essential spending, prioritise these three supplier payments, change this pricing assumption, pause this commitment, or assign one owner to chase these overdue collections by Friday.”

That is harder to dodge because it asks for a choice, not sympathy.

3. Attach a deadline to the decision.

Finance risks often become expensive because everyone believes there is still time. Your job is to show when time runs out.

Try this sentence: “This decision is needed by Friday because after that point we will either delay supplier payments, draw down overdraft, or cut another commitment at short notice.”

A deadline changes the conversation from “interesting concern” to “decision window.”

4. Document the decision without sounding defensive.

This is where many finance professionals get stuck. They know they should document advice, but they are afraid it will sound political, threatening, or self-protective.

The tone matters. You are not writing, “I told you so in advance.” You are writing, “Here is the business issue, the options discussed, the decision made, the owner, and the follow-up date.”

Documentation is not a weapon. It is a memory system for the business.

5. Use informal relationships to make the formal conversation easier.

There is a reason more deals are done over dinner tables than in boardrooms. By the time people enter the formal room, many of them have already decided what they are comfortable hearing, resisting, or supporting.

This does not mean manipulation. It means a relationship. Sometimes the best way to make your financial message land is to speak to the right person before the meeting, test the concern informally, understand the real objection, and let them hear the risk without the pressure of performing in front of others.

A short conversation after the meeting can also do what a formal presentation could not. “I noticed we moved past the cash risk quickly. Is there something I am missing, or is there a better way to bring this back so it gets a proper decision?” That kind of question can reveal the politics, fear, timing issues, or hidden constraints behind the silence.

Influence is not only what you say in the room. It is also the trust you build before the room, the clarity you offer inside the room, and the follow-up you sustain after the room.

A Simple Script You Can Use

“Based on the current numbers, the main risk is that [business consequence] may happen by [date]. The decision required is whether to [specific action] by [deadline]. If we delay, the likely consequence is [business impact]. My recommendation is [option], because it protects [cash/margin/control/customer commitment]. I understand there may be other considerations, but I do not think we should leave this undecided.”

Grow With Us

If this resonated, it is probably because you do not need more generic finance advice. You need the confidence, language, and structure to keep speaking when the room makes it uncomfortable.

Assess Your FBP Skills. If you are struggling to turn insight into action, start by finding the real gap. Is it technical depth, commercial judgement, communication, or influence? Take the free FBP Skills Assessment and get a clearer view of where you stand today. Take the assessment here

The Finance Business Partner Masterclass. If you are ready to stop being the person who only reports the problem after the fact, the Masterclass will help you build the tools, language, and confidence to shape decisions while they can still be changed. Join the Masterclass here

Conclusion

You will not always be listened to the first time - or even the first 10 times. I am nearly two decades in, and I still know what that feels like.

But do not confuse resistance with proof that you should retreat. Sometimes the room is uncomfortable precisely because the truth has finally arrived.

This week, choose one recommendation you have been avoiding because the last response discouraged you. Rewrite it into four parts: the risk, the decision, the deadline, and the consequences of delay.

Then say it again. Calmly. Clearly. Usefully.

Cheers
Ajibola.

The Problem

Operations can look productive, committed, even heroic at times and still be bleeding value every day.

People are busy. Orders are moving. Managers are intervening. Teams are firefighting. From the outside, it can look like momentum. But inside the work itself, the same problems are repeating: the same corrections, the same confusion, the same delays, the same waste dressed up as “just how things are here.”

And that is where value leaks out of the business. Everyone knows that it can be better, but no one truly takes ownership in making it better.

You see it in many scenarios like picking the wrong order and fixing it later. In remaking what should have been right the first time. In paying overtime to recover from poor upstream decisions. In apologising to customers for issues the business has quietly normalised. In burning capacity on totally avoidable problems. All of these come at real financial and emotional cost to the business.

This is exactly where many finance professionals also lose. Because for the most part, they do nothing – they’ve accepted things for what they are. While that’s bad, there’s an even worse action that looks like they are working, but makes no difference.

They wait for the evidence to show up neatly in a report. But by then, the waste has already happened. The team has already absorbed the frustration. The customer has already felt the consequence. And finance arrives late, armed with numbers, but disconnected from the experience that produced them.

A new FBP who wants credibility in operations must see this differently.

The spreadsheet is not enough.

Your value is not just in reporting the cost after the fact. Your value is in helping the business see where pain has become routine, where routine is destroying margin, and where real practical change can give a stretched team relief as well as results.

That is when finance stops sounding observant and starts becoming useful.

A Story

I once worked with a finance professional supporting a manufacturing and distribution business that had become very good at coping and very bad at stopping the causes of the pressure it was coping with.

Let us call him Chidi.

Each month, the costs worsened. Each month, the explanations sounded reasonable. Power issues. Urgent orders. Supplier delays. Machine downtime. Staff shortages. Customer changes. Nothing sounded false. But somehow, all of it together kept leading to the same destination: more pressure, more cost, less control.

The operations team was not careless. They were tired. They were doing their best inside a system that kept forcing them to solve the same problems in different forms.

At first, Chidi did what many finance people do. He challenged the cost lines. Overtime was too high. Scrap was rising. Repairs were above budget. The numbers were correct. But the conversations stalled, because accuracy is not the same as usefulness.

Operations felt scrutinised, not supported.

So he changed the conversation.

Instead of asking why costs were high, he sat with the operations lead and asked a better question.

“Where does work get done twice?”

That question changed everything because it did not accuse. It exposed friction.

They found repeated picking errors driving returns. Rework caused by unclear order details. Overtime caused by late changes from sales. Emergency purchases caused by poor planning. None of these issues looked big enough to command attention on their own. Together, they were draining margin every single week while everyone stayed too busy to step back and name the pattern.

Then Chidi did the part finance is uniquely placed to do well: he translated the pain into money.

Not to embarrass operations.

So the team could finally see which problem was costing them most, and which fix would give them the quickest relief.

The first fix was simple: a clearer order handoff between sales and operations. It did not solve everything overnight. But it reduced rework, eased pressure on the team, and created the kind of win that makes people believe improvement is possible.

That is the moment finance becomes valuable to operations: when it helps a struggling team feel less trapped and helps the business keep more of the value it is already working so hard to create.

Ajibola’s Tips

Here’s what I recommend you do to address this and show your value

1. Look for repeated pain before looking for large cost lines.

Big cost lines are visible. Repeated pain is more dangerous because it disappears into routine. I have seen businesses quietly surrender huge value through small failures that happen so often nobody reacts to them anymore.

You should find where work is being repeated, corrected, chased, remade, refunded, or escalated. When the same frustration keeps showing up, there is usually a cost underneath it that finance can make visible. This shouldn’t be hard to find; if you do your job well, you’ll see it in totally avoidable costs

Action Tip: This week, find, “Where does work get done twice?” Write down the top three answers.

2. Avoid judging before understanding the root causes.

Finance loses trust quickly when it comments on operational cost without understanding operational strain. Most teams are not protecting waste because they love waste. They are protecting their ability to survive the day.

You should go and see the work. Visit the floor, the branch, the warehouse, the service team, or the process owner. The fastest way to sound less theoretical is to understand what the pressure feels like where the work is happening.

Action Tip: Spend thirty minutes with one operational team and observe one process from start to finish. Note where delays, corrections, or waiting happen and why.

3. Convert friction into money because people prioritise what they can finally see clearly.

Teams may know a process is frustrating. They may not know how expensive that frustration has become. I have seen attention change the moment repeated errors were translated into wages, materials, delivery costs, refunds, or lost capacity.

Your role is not to dramatise every inefficiency. Your role is to make the important ones undeniable enough that the business can stop living with them as if they are normal.

Action Tip: Pick one repeated operational issue and estimate its monthly cost using time, materials, refunds, overtime, or lost sales.

4. Attach ownership to leakage without turning it into blame.

Waste and inefficiency survive when everybody can describe it and nobody is truly responsible for changing it. One team blames another. Another team blames the system. Finance records the damage. And the pattern continues.

You should help the business name the process owner, the trigger, and the decision that must change. Ownership is not punishment. It is the first moment a problem stops floating and starts becoming fixable.

Action Tip: For one leakage issue, write down the owner, the trigger, the cost, and the first decision that must change.

5. Choose fixes that make life better for the team, not just cleaner for the report.

Some finance recommendations are analytically correct and operationally dead on arrival. I have learned to ask whether a proposed fix makes the work simpler, clearer, faster, or less painful for the people doing it.

If the business can feel the improvement, they will support it. That is how finance earns the right to influence more than the monthly variance discussion.

Action Tip: Before proposing a fix, write one sentence explaining how it helps operations do the work better, not just how it reduces cost.

“Leakage becomes most dangerous when people stop seeing it as a problem and start treating it as the normal cost of getting work done.” - Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If today’s issue resonated with you, it may be because you have seen this happen already: good people under pressure, waste hiding inside routine, and finance expected to explain the damage without being taught how to influence the cause.

The Finance Business Partner Masterclass. This is where I teach finance professionals how to become genuinely useful to the business by seeking and seeing problems earlier, asking better questions, and influencing the operational decisions that protect value. Join the Masterclass here

No Nonsense Finance Business Partnering. If you want the practical thinking behind this series in one place, get the eBook and start applying it to the real tensions inside your own business. Get the eBook here

Conclusion

Operational leakage is dangerous because it trains people to live with avoidable pain.

The team gets used to correcting the same mistakes. The manager gets used to approving overtime. Customer service gets used to apologising. Finance gets used to explaining the variance. And eventually the business stops asking whether the pattern itself should still exist.

That is the real danger: not just waste, but acceptance.

Do not accept it too quickly.

As an FBP, your role is not to stand outside operations and comment on the damage. Your role is to help the business see where pressure is creating waste, where repeated behaviour is destroying value, and where one practical intervention can make both performance and people’s working lives better.

Start where the pain repeats. Follow it until you can price it. Respect the pressure behind it. Then help the team remove one leak they can feel disappear.

Cheers,

Ajibola

The Problem

Many businesses do not really have pricing. They have negotiation habits disguised as pricing strategy.

The listed price may exist but, in practice, very few people respect it. The salesperson negotiates. The customer pushes. The manager approves. The CEO intervenes. And in the end, the final price depends on pressure, mood, relationship, month-end desperation, and how badly the business wants the deal.

Then finance is asked why the margin is weak, or revenues are lower than expected.

The overall impact may be that the volumes sold may increase, but because pricing is flexible, the revenue may shrink. Shrunken revenue almost always leads to cash problems that the finance professional is blamed for.

This is common in unstructured businesses. Pricing becomes personal to the chief decision maker. Every deal is treated like a special case. Every customer comes with a story. Every discount is defended as necessary.

But I have learned this the hard way: once everything becomes an exception, discipline disappears.

And when discipline disappears, the business loses far more than margin. It loses trust in its own numbers. Forecasts become soft. Sales incentives become distorted. Teams learn that policies are flexible if the pressure is loud enough. At that point, the issue is no longer pricing. It is leadership.

For a new Finance Business Partner, this is often one of the strongest early wins.

You do not need to become the pricing police. But you do need to help the business see the difference between a smart commercial decision and a recurring margin leak.

A Story

Some time ago, I worked with a finance professional in a distribution business. Let us call him Emeka.

Emeka was sharp, commercially aware, and eager to prove that finance could do more than report yesterday’s damage.

The company had a formal price list. But the real pricing lived somewhere else. It lived in WhatsApp messages. In hurried approvals from the CEO. In sales calls. In side comments like, “Just give them something small so we can close.”

Emeka’s first instinct was the instinct many finance people have, which was to challenge the discounted prices one by one.

It failed.

Every conversation became defensive. Sales explained the customer context. The CEO backed exceptions because the business wanted volume. And finance began to look like the department that understood spreadsheets but not the market.

So Emeka changed the conversation.

He stopped asking, “Why did you discount this deal?”

He started showing the pattern instead.

He reviewed 40 recent deals and grouped them by discount level, customer type, salesperson, and gross margin. Then he showed the business something it had never really seen clearly before.

The biggest discounts were not always protecting the biggest accounts. Some discounts were simply habit. Some were being given to customers who paid late. Some were attached to deals with impressive revenue but weak contribution. And once the room saw that pattern, the emotional argument for “just this one exception” began to lose power.

The question in the room changed.

Not “Should we grant a discounted price?”

“Which pricing points are actually worth the margin we are giving away?”

That was the moment pricing became a serious business discussion influenced by the FBP.

Ajibola’s Tips

1. Study patterns before you challenge behaviour.

This is one of the first shifts that separates reactive finance from influential finance. When you challenge one deal, sales can defend it with context. When you show a pattern across many deals, the business is forced to confront the behaviour more honestly.

I have learned not to begin with accusation. I begin with evidence. Show where discounts are happening, who is approving them, which customers are receiving them, and what they are doing to margin. The goal is not to win an argument. The goal is to make the truth difficult to ignore.

Action Tip: Understand where revenue leakage is coming from and trace it back to pricing behaviour. Review the last thirty discounted deals and group them by customer, salesperson, discount percentage, approval source, and gross margin. Then ask one question: where is discounting acting like a strategy, and where is it acting like a reflex?

2. Separate strategic price discounts from lazy price discounts.

Not every discount is bad. Some discounts are commercially smart. They open a valuable customer, clear slow stock, protect a long-term relationship, or support a deliberate campaign. But some discounts exist for a much weaker reason: someone wanted the conversation to end, or wanted the deal badly enough to stop thinking clearly.

That distinction matters. Because the danger is not discounting itself. The danger is when the business cannot tell the difference between a calculated commercial move and a habitual surrender of value.

Action Tip: Choose ten recent discounts and write the reason for each one. Force the business to classify each as Strategic, Defensive, or Lazy. The debate that follows will teach you a lot about the culture behind the numbers.

3. Push and communicate price floors.

In many businesses, people do not know the lowest acceptable price. That is where confusion begins. i.e the price at which it becomes lower than cost or at a very unreasonable margin. Sales thinks it is being flexible. Finance sees the damage after the fact.

A price floor gives the business a line. Below that line, the deal must earn stronger approval or a clearly strategic reason. Without that line, every negotiation begins with hope and ends with avoidable leakage.

Action Tip: Pick your most active product or service lines and calculate the lowest acceptable price after direct cost, delivery cost, commission, and minimum margin. If the business cannot define the floor, it cannot protect the value above it.

4. Make approval rules simple enough to survive real life.

I have seen pricing controls fail because finance created a policy that looked intelligent in a document and became useless under commercial pressure. If the sales team cannot remember the rule in the heat of negotiation, the rule is not ready.

Your discount rule should be short, visible, and tied to decision rights. Who can approve what? At what level? With what margin impact? Clarity creates consistency. Complexity creates loopholes.

Action Tip: Draft a one-page discount approval rule with three levels: sales discretion, manager approval, and executive approval. If it takes more than a minute to explain, simplify it.

5. Frame pricing discipline as sales protection, not sales restriction.

Businesses resist pricing conversations because they assume finance is strangling them. I learned to frame it differently. Poor pricing does not only hurt the company. It hurts good salespeople too. It weakens commissions, creates unfair internal competition, attracts difficult customers, and makes targets harder to sustain.

When finance protects pricing, it is not attacking the business. It is helping win business that is actually worth winning. That is a far more powerful message than “finance says no.”

Action Tip: Prepare one commercial argument for pricing discipline that your sales team would genuinely care about, not just one that makes finance comfortable.

“Pricing without discipline is not a sales tool. It is margin leaving the business with permission.” - Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If this issue resonated with you, the next step is not just to notice pricing problems after they damage performance. The next step is to build the commercial confidence to influence pricing decisions before value is lost.

The Finance Business Partner Masterclass: This is where I teach finance professionals how to move from reporting margin losses to shaping the decisions that protect value. We’ve started the June 2026 sessions, but you can still join the Masterclass here:

No Nonsense Finance Business Partnering. If you want the practical ebook behind this series, get the eBook and start applying the ideas inside your own business. [Get the eBook here]

Conclusion

Pricing discipline is not about making the business rigid. It is about making the business deliberate.

A strong Finance Business Partner does not enter the room to embarrass people or block every exception. That is the shallow version of finance partnering. The real work is harder and far more valuable: show which deals are worth the price being sacrificed, which customers are quietly being subsidised, and which habits are slowly becoming policy.

If every price can move, margin will move too. And if margin keeps moving without discipline, the business eventually stops knowing what performance really means.

So start with evidence. Find the pattern. Build the floor. Make the approval rule simple. Then help the business sell with confidence instead of bargaining from panic. That is how finance stops being seen as a scoreboard and starts being trusted as a serious commercial partner.

Cheers,

Ajibola

The Problem

Profit can be patient. Cash is not.

Profit sits in reports. Cash sits in decisions. Salaries. Suppliers. Rent. Stock. Tax. Loan repayments. Emergency transfers. That urgent call from the CEO asking, “How much do we actually have?” Even if a company makes profits, it cannot pay dividends if it doesn’t have cash.

That is why cash chaos feels different.

When margin leaks, the business may not notice immediately. When cash is tight, there is very little wiggle room.

In many businesses, cash is not really managed. It is chased. Collections are reactive. Supplier payments are emotional. Purchases are driven by pressure. Receivables age quietly until they become a crisis. Payables are handled by whoever shouts the loudest.

Then finance is expected to explain why a profitable business still has no money.

That is your opening.

As an FBP, you may not control every cash decision. But you can bring rhythm, visibility, and discipline to the decisions that shape cash.

And when you help the business breathe, people listen and trust you very quickly.

A Story

Some time ago, I was working with Ngozi, a finance manager in a growing service business.

The business was profitable by all measurable metrics, but every day was a slugfest.

The CEO would ask what could be paid. Suppliers would call. Staff reimbursements would sit pending. The operations team would push for urgent purchases. Sales would promise that customers were “definitely paying next week.”

Ngozi was frustrated because the accounts said the business was improving. But the bank balance kept telling a different story. It was always weird because every financial report she prepared showed that the company was doing well. This usually caused serious doubt over her credibility. You can imagine what this looks like in a business.

When we looked more closely, the issue was not only poor collections. It was the decision rhythm. Nobody was reviewing expected inflows and committed outflows together. Payment decisions were being made one by one, under pressure. Customer promises were accepted without follow-up dates. Stock and supplier commitments were approved before cash timing was clear.

So we helped her build a simple weekly cash view.

Opening balance. Expected collections. Critical payments. Optional payments. Risks. Owner. Date.

Nothing fancy. The first meeting was uncomfortable because the truth was finally visible. A customer payment everyone assumed would arrive that week was already ten days late. A planned purchase would have pushed the business into another shortfall.

Ngozi did not solve every cash problem that week. But she changed the conversation.

Cash stopped being a surprise. It became a decision that she helped facilitate. That is much better value than just reporting the shortfalls.

Ajibola’s Tips

1. Treat cash as a weekly leadership issue, not a month-end finance topic.

I have seen businesses wait for management accounts to explain a cash problem that had been forming quietly every week. By the time the report arrived, the impacts of those decisions were too late.

You should bring cash into the rhythm of the business. Cash decisions are too important to be left until a report is ready.

Action Tip: Create a cash view with six lines: opening balance, expected inflows, required outflows, optional outflows, cash risks, and closing position. Ensure that the business leaders see this and talk about it.

2. Separate profit confidence from cash confidence.

Due to accounting conventions, a business can be profitable and still come under pressure if customers pay late, stock moves slowly, or supplier terms are poorly managed. I learned not to let a positive profit number calm me when the cash cycle underneath it was weak.

As an FBP, part of your value is helping the business understand where profit is trapped: in receivables, in inventory, in poor payment timing, and in commercial decisions that look attractive but damage liquidity. Force those conversations by showing exactly where the money is trapped.

Action Tip: Pick your latest profit report and link it to cash. It should show you and the management team how profit and cash are linked together and, if not, where the money truly is.

3. Ask for dates, not promises.

I have heard “the customer will pay soon” too many times to mistake it for useful information. Soon is not a cash forecast. Soon does not pay suppliers. Soon does not fund payroll.

You should train the business to speak and work with ABSOLUTE dates, owners, and amounts. If sales says a customer will pay, ask when, how much, and who is following it up.

Action Tip: Review your top ten receivables and add three columns beside each one: promised date, owner, and next action.

4. Make payment decisions visible before they become political.

In many businesses, cash often goes to the loudest pressure or who has the biggest backing, not the best decision. One supplier calls repeatedly. One manager has direct access to the CEO. One urgent request jumps the queue.

Your role is to make the trade-offs visible. When cash is limited, every payment is also a decision not to pay something else.

Action Tip: For the next payment run, group payments into Critical, Important, and Deferrable before approvals are made. Clearly show the trade-off if payments in the critical sections want to be bypassed.

5. Connect cash discipline to business freedom.

Some teams hear cash control and assume finance is blocking them. I learned to frame it differently. Cash discipline is what gives the business room to move.

When cash is visible, the business can negotiate better, plan purchases better, avoid panic borrowing, and protect relationships. That is not a restriction. That is breathing space.

Action Tip: Transparency is the major play you have here. Show clearly how the business has used cash to force conversations on how to use it better.

“Profit tells you the business has value. Cash tells you whether the business can survive long enough to use it.” - Ajibola Jinadu

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Grow With Us

If today’s issue resonated with you, then the next step is to build the skill to turn finance information into decisions the business can act on.

The Finance Business Partner Masterclass is where I teach finance professionals how to move from explaining numbers after the fact to shaping the choices that protect growth, cash, and profit. [Join the Masterclass here]. Only 2 days to go.

If you can’t join us and you want the practical book behind this series, get this eBook and start applying the ideas inside your own business. [Get the eBook here].

Conclusion

Cash chaos is not always caused by a bad business. Sometimes it is caused by good activity without rhythm.

Nobody is joining timing, commitments, and decisions into one clear view. That is where the FBP becomes useful.

When you help the business breathe, you earn trust quickly.

Tomorrow: We will look at what happens when a business does not really have structured pricing and how you can fix it.

Subscribe so you do not miss it.

Cheers,

Ajibola.