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Key Takeaways
- Own growth before anyone asks, and arrive with a growth thesis backed by evidence, not just spend discipline.
- Act like an owner by joining decisions while they’re still forming and running work outside finance.
- Put your view of the future in writing and build trust with the people who will choose the next CEO years before they choose.
Boards are looking at their CFOs differently than they used to.
Russell Reynolds Associates’ 2024 Global CFO Turnover Index found that 34% of CFOs who left their roles moved into a President or CEO position, up from 20% the year before. Around the same time, a Boston Consulting Group survey of roughly 500 chief executives found that more than a quarter of them see their own CFO as the biggest threat to their job, ahead of every other role in the C-suite.
Two numbers, same story from opposite ends — the CFO seat has stopped being a purely financial function and turned into a proving ground for the top job.
The finance track record will get you into the conversation for the CEO seat. Winning the seat takes more. I say that as someone who joined Dreamix in mid-2022 as its first CFO, after a decade in corporate banking, and became its CEO in September this year.
In between, there was a buy-side acquisition, a sell-side acquisition, a Deputy CEO role and an EY CFO of the Year award, but none of it would have mattered without the five things below. What follows is written from the inside, in the order I would do it again if I were a CFO today who wanted the top job.
1. Make growth part of your job before anyone asks you to
Protecting margins is the natural CFO instinct, and it is the instinct that will keep you a CFO. Chasing growth is not natural for a finance leader, which is exactly why it is the first thing I would change. In my experience, that meant leading a buy-side acquisition that accounted for half of our growth that year, bringing new clients through my own network and doing the unglamorous work of finding out whether sales or marketing actually moved revenue, so that the budget followed the results.
The data behind this is uncomfortable for our profession. Spencer Stuart’s research on CEO performance found that former CFOs are on average slower to drive top-line growth than CEOs from other backgrounds, and that only 8% of CEOs promoted from the CFO role take their company into the top quartile for revenue growth.
Boards know this, and it is the objection you will have to disprove with evidence rather than reassurance. A CFO who only talks about spend will always sound like a CFO, no matter how good the numbers are. Arrive with a growth thesis.
2. Act like an owner of the whole business
Most CFOs weigh in once a decision has already taken shape, checking whether the company can afford it. What changes everything is being in the conversation while the decision is still forming, sitting next to the CEO on the first draft of an idea rather than the final version. You stop reacting to strategy and start building it, and that is a different job from the one most finance leaders were trained for.
At Dreamix, I started doing this well before I had any title that justified it, and it is worth saying that I wasn’t a shareholder. Behaving like an owner is a choice about where you put your attention, whatever the cap table says, and the people who will decide your future notice it long before they could explain why. McKinsey found that more than 90% of CFOs who became CEOs were promoted from within, which means the board had years of watching you in order to decide whether you were running the finance function or thinking about the whole company. Russell Reynolds puts it another way: in many companies the CFO has already become the de facto COO, with IT, legal, facilities and more reporting in. If that is true of your role, run it like a COO and let people see you doing it.
3. Run something that is not finance, and get known outside it
A CFO who is only visible to the finance team, no matter how good the numbers look, will always be seen as a specialist. The remedy is to run something that is not finance, whether a division, a region, an integration or a major transformation with full cross-functional accountability, so that you have been ultimately responsible for an outcome that goes beyond reporting. The acquisition and the sale were my versions of that because a transaction touches every function in the company and someone has to own the result.
McKinsey found that three-quarters of the former CFOs promoted to CEO in the FTSE 250 had spent time outside the finance function, and the former CFOs interviewed by Spencer Stuart say the same thing in blunter terms: get away from the spreadsheets, get in front of customers, sit in the commercial negotiations.
Getting known outside finance means understanding what sales, marketing and engineering are trying to achieve well enough to be useful to them, without pretending to be one of them. The credibility comes from years of sitting in project reviews and pricing proposals, watching which teams delivered on margin and which did not, and from being useful to the engineering leadership on their problems while leaving the expertise to them.
4. Stop reporting the past and put your view of the future in writing
Financial reporting looks backward by design: what happened last month, last quarter, last year. As a CFO, I could tell you that we had taken revenue from €7.25 million to €25 million and EBITDA margin from 11.2% to 18.8%, and I could explain every movement in both. That account was accurate, and on its own it said nothing about where the company should go next.
The CFO asks what the data tells us. The CEO has to decide what the company believes because of it, commit to a course of action and carry the consequences personally. The most visible difference between a CFO and a credible CEO candidate is an opinion about the future, defended in front of people who have known the business far longer.
My first real test came a few months after I joined. In 2022, with central banks raising rates, I argued that our startup clients, then more than 40% of revenue, would struggle to raise money, and that we should move toward enterprise clients. It changed how sales, marketing, delivery and hiring worked. By the end of 2024, startups were 18% of our revenue, and over the next two years I watched software companies that had stayed heavily exposed to startups struggle with falling revenue and late payments.
So write the one-page view of where the company should be in three years and share it with your CEO before anyone asks for it. Take strategy to the board along with the results. You will be wrong about parts of it, and that is the point: a CFO who has never been wrong in public has never committed to anything.
This is also where a finance background pays off once you are in the seat. McKinsey found that former CFOs were almost twice as likely as the average CEO to run a strategic review in their first two years. The analytical habit is already there. You only have to add the commitment.
5. Build trust with the people who decide, years before they decide
Whoever picks the next CEO has to already know and trust you by the time that decision comes up, and that trust is built years earlier, in the ordinary conversations where you show up as someone thinking about where the company is headed.
In my case, the people who would decide changed halfway through. The 2024 sale to Synechron brought new shareholders, and the trust that led to the CEO role two years later was built at the negotiating table, representing Dreamix’s interests to the people who would later own it. Russell Reynolds’ CFO turnover report notes that boards are increasingly appointing CFOs as CEOs-in-waiting, and that what they want is someone who can present the company, hold their own with investors and act as a thought partner to the CEO. So treat every board meeting and every shareholder conversation as a leadership platform, because that is how the people across the table are already treating it.
To wrap up
None of this happens in a single project or in a single year. It is built by choosing, over and over, to work slightly outside the edges of the job description you were hired for, until the people around you stop noticing that the edges were ever there. The title gets you the seat. What you do with the extra scope determines whether you get the next one.
It matters beyond the CFO community too. When a client decides whom to trust with a software partnership, they are also betting on the judgment of whoever leads that company. Someone who has learned to own outcomes will treat your project the same way, as something they are personally responsible for.
Key Takeaways
- Own growth before anyone asks, and arrive with a growth thesis backed by evidence, not just spend discipline.
- Act like an owner by joining decisions while they’re still forming and running work outside finance.
- Put your view of the future in writing and build trust with the people who will choose the next CEO years before they choose.
Boards are looking at their CFOs differently than they used to.
Russell Reynolds Associates’ 2024 Global CFO Turnover Index found that 34% of CFOs who left their roles moved into a President or CEO position, up from 20% the year before. Around the same time, a Boston Consulting Group survey of roughly 500 chief executives found that more than a quarter of them see their own CFO as the biggest threat to their job, ahead of every other role in the C-suite.
Two numbers, same story from opposite ends — the CFO seat has stopped being a purely financial function and turned into a proving ground for the top job.