Speaker: Deanne Ord, Operations cordinator, The CFO Centre
What kind of person would thrive working in a portfolio world, working with SME owners +MDs?
Deanne Ord: The kind of person that thrives in a portfolio way of working is someone that has made a decision that the corporate life is no longer for them. For whatever reason, um they now have got to a stage in their life where they want to use the skills and experience they have gained over the years and channel that into helping sme business owners, so really having a passion to want to give back and make a real difference.
What skill sets would you place as high importance working with SME owners + MD's
Deanne Ord: Skill sets for me, the most important being able to communicate um soft skills, hard skills with clients in a way that they can understand. Many of our clients haven't worked with the CFO before, and some of the information that you're proposing or trying to help them understand can sometimes be a little tricky, so being able to break it down so they can understand is really, really, really important.
What are the advantages of joining The CFO Centre as apposed to going it alone?
Deanne Ord: Yeah, so because I do recruitment for W and new Zealand I get asked this question a lot, what is the difference between doing this on my own or aligning myself with the CFO Center? So people that I've spoken to that have been doing this on their own first, I've had two big things that have stood out when speaking to these people. The first one is that they find it hard to do the client work as well as the marketing and back office actively. They need to also do to support themselves when the client work drops away. The second thing is a lot of them feel quite lonely um working on their own. Um they want to be part of a team. So at the CFO Center they not only have their local team and regional director, but also global group of CFOs which are all connected via a group email and it is used very very often because the reality is we can't know everything. So having a group of CFOs around the world to be able to help when we run up against something that we need extra support with is invaluable. Um the other key thing for me and differences brand, you know, we are a well established brand around the world, so you're not starting from scratch, we've put a huge amount of education out to our marketplace around what a CFO can actually do for sme business owners, and it's really seeing a huge amount of results and awareness, which is where we want it to be.
