By Joshua Menold, MBA

Most finance leaders are trained to look backward — to reconcile what happened, report on what was spent, and ensure the numbers tie out. That’s important work. But in my experience leading and advising companies across construction, manufacturing, nonprofits, and professional services, I’ve found that the finance leaders who actually transform organizations are the ones who learn to look forward — and outward.

Over the past two decades, I’ve served as CEO, CFO, board member, and fractional advisor to companies ranging from $5M startups to $150M+ enterprises. Along the way, I’ve picked up a few hard-won lessons about what strategic finance leadership actually looks like in practice — not in a textbook.

Vision Without Execution Is Just a Slide Deck

Early in my career, I watched smart leaders build compelling strategic plans that never went anywhere. The vision was right. The market analysis was right. But nothing changed operationally. The gap was almost always the same: nobody had translated the vision into financial architecture that forced the organization to move.

When I took over as CFO at Bobbitt Design Build, I inherited a company with enormous potential and almost no financial infrastructure to realize it. There were no KPIs at the business unit level. No job costing system that told you which projects were actually making money. No dashboards that connected what was happening in the field to what the board was seeing quarterly.

So we built it — not as a finance exercise, but as a strategic one. When you give every business unit leader visibility into their own margins, their own cost drivers, their own pipeline metrics, you don’t have to tell them to improve. They start making better decisions on their own. The finance function becomes the engine of accountability, not just the scorekeeper.

Actionable Goal Development Starts with Honest Numbers

One of the most common failures I see in organizations — especially ones growing fast — is setting goals that sound ambitious but aren’t connected to financial reality. Revenue targets with no understanding of the margin structure behind them. Growth plans that ignore the capital required to fund them. Hiring roadmaps built on optimistic projections rather than scenario-tested models.

At CHE Companies, when I acquired the business, the first thing I did wasn’t set revenue targets. It was build the financial model that showed me exactly what each division’s true contribution margin was, what the overhead burden looked like across six markets, and where the real leverage points were. Only then could we set goals that were both ambitious and grounded.

The lesson: strategic goals that aren’t stress-tested against your actual financial structure aren’t goals — they’re wishes. The finance leader’s job is to be the honest broker who turns aspirations into plans that can actually survive contact with reality.

Talent Management Is a Finance Problem

This one surprises people, but I’ve come to believe that talent management is one of the most important strategic finance functions in any company.

At Tower Engineering Professionals, I was recruited to rescue a $55M M&A transaction that had stalled. When I arrived, the company had never closed its books. There was no HR Director, no Controller, no real administrative infrastructure. The deal was at risk — not because of market conditions, but because nobody had invested in building the team that could produce the financial transparency a buyer requires.

I recruited an HR Director, Controller, Staff Accountants, and IT personnel. We closed the books for the first time in company history in under 45 days. The deal closed. But the deeper lesson was this: you cannot build financial infrastructure without the right people, and you cannot attract the right people without a clear vision of what you’re building. Talent strategy and financial strategy are the same conversation.

I’ve seen this pattern repeat everywhere. At Bobbitt, hiring one sales consultant who understood our financial model improved close rates from under 10% to over 35%. At CHE, building the right team around our NetSuite implementation and AI-powered workflows has been the difference between a technology project and an actual operational transformation. The ROI on the right hire almost always dwarfs the ROI on the right software.

Process Optimization Is Where Strategy Becomes Real

Every company I’ve led or advised has had some version of the same problem: processes that evolved organically over years, nobody quite remembers why they work the way they do, and everyone is too busy executing to stop and redesign them.

The finance function is uniquely positioned to fix this because we see every process’s output in the numbers. When I look at a P&L, I’m not just reading financial results — I’m reading the story of how an organization operates. High COGS variance tells me there’s an estimating or procurement problem. Slow AR collections tell me there’s a billing workflow problem. Overhead creep tells me there’s a span-of-control problem.

At Bobbitt, we moved operations from 25% paperless to over 90%. That wasn’t a technology decision — it was a process redesign that happened to use technology. We mapped every workflow, identified where information was getting lost or duplicated, and rebuilt the process first. Then we selected the tools. Most companies do it backwards: they buy the software and hope the process fixes itself.

At CHE, we’re taking this further with AI-powered workflows that automate meeting-to-action processing, daily executive reporting, and cross-divisional communication. But the principle is the same — understand the process, fix the process, then automate the process. Technology amplifies whatever you point it at, including dysfunction.

The Board Perspective Changes Everything

Serving on boards — both corporate and nonprofit — has fundamentally changed how I think about finance leadership. When you’re in the C-suite, your instinct is to solve problems. When you’re on a board, your job is to ask the right questions and ensure the organization has the systems to solve its own problems.

That shift in perspective has made me a better operator. I now build financial reporting and governance structures with the board’s needs in mind from day one — not as an afterthought when audit season arrives. I think about risk management not as a compliance exercise but as a strategic capability. And I’ve learned that the most valuable thing a finance leader can bring to any organization — whether as an executive or a board member — is the ability to connect the numbers to the narrative.

The companies that win aren’t the ones with the best financial reports. They’re the ones where the finance function is so deeply integrated into strategy, operations, and talent decisions that you can’t tell where the numbers end and the leadership begins.

Joshua Menold, MBA, is CEO and majority owner of The CHE Companies, a $70M+ multi-division exterior construction platform. He serves on multiple corporate and nonprofit boards and advises companies on M&A, capital structure, and operational transformation through ITABWODI, LLC.