The most important thing is to have all the facts available so you can make informed decisions. When people ask you what you do, they don’t want to know what your job is. They want to know what you do. If you say, “I’m a financial controller,” they will not be impressed. Your job is to manage the company’s financial resources – and that means money – and then use those resources to produce the things that people want.
If we had gotten into a conversation with someone who had expressed an interest in how to be a financial controller, we would have said: “Don’t worry about it. Just read up on it.” But most people haven’t even heard of the profession; they think you make money by doing something else. So they go looking for something else instead.
Taking a day to double check your facts is not being lazy. It is being careful. If you have to do it, you should do it well.
When I was a kid I spent an entire Saturday afternoon trying to persuade my parents that there was life on other planets, and that one day we would fly to them in space ships. They weren’t impressed; they didn’t know anything about space flight, and they certainly didn’t think we’d ever get there. But this wasn’t laziness: it was a mistake caused by not having all the facts at hand.
To make good decisions you need all the relevant data; you can’t make informed choices without knowing what’s going on.
The financial controller is responsible for ensuring that all the numbers are right. More importantly, he or she is responsible for the decisions based on the numbers.
The controller needs to have all the facts at hand so that he or she can make informed decisions. Financial controllers are often among the staff who are not allowed access to the financial data, but only to the reasoning behind it. That’s because if they understand what is going on, they might want to change things. If something goes wrong, if there is a big loss or an error in judgment, it’s their job to find out why and fix things.
The reason this is important is that it’s usually not just a simple question of “what’s the right answer?” It’s a matter of “what did the people who did the research think was the right answer?”
I’m probably going to get a lot of criticism for this essay, because it seems so obvious. But actually the evidence suggests it isn’t. In many fields, there are lots of experts, and they can have very different opinions, especially if they disagree with each other.
But in practice it’s not like that. There are lots of experts, and there is no way to listen to every one of them all at once. You can’t even listen to all of them when you do pick one; much less when there are dozens or hundreds of them. So when you ask yourself whether X is better than Y.
The financial controller’s job is to make sure the company can make money, but it is more than that. It is to make sure the company has the information needed to make good decisions.
The way it works is that you don’t trust your boss, or your directors, or your auditors, or anyone else. You trust yourself. You ask for all kinds of data, and you want to see all kinds of projections, and you know how bad things are likely to get. And if you’re doing the right thing, it will be obvious.
If you are responsible for a big enough number of people’s jobs, this job starts to feel real. You don’t have time to read the news every day, but reading your own reports week after week will tell you what’s going on in the world. If you have done your job well, it will also tell you what’s going on inside your company.
When you feel that life is passing you by, with no time to spend on the things you most want to do, don’t think about what you haven’t done. Think about all the things you haven’t done yet. Which of them look achievable? Which of them look like fun? Which of them look like they will make a difference in your life?
Often we make decisions without thinking through all the consequences and possibilities, and we pay the price for this when we find out later that we should have thought it through.
The financial controller today can be an investment manager or a trader. They are not always the same thing. The difference is one of focus, not of job title.
Investment managers are concerned with the long term, with portfolio growth and preservation. Their main job is to make sure investors’ money stays invested. Traders are concerned with the short term, with the price of things (trading) and with making money (not necessarily by selling). Traders’ main job is to stay in constant communication with their employer, spreading whatever information they’re given.
Investment managers can be fired for taking risks that do not pay off; traders can lose their jobs if their employer has a bad month.