The role of the CFO keeps expanding. Technology has absorbed much of the transactional work that once defined the job, and boards and investors now expect the CFO to shape strategy, drive growth, and operate as the CEO’s closest partner.
Capacity is the hard part. According to Consero’s 2026 Investor-backed CFO Report, 57% of CFOs remain skewed toward operational work — a figure that has barely moved since 2022. The mandate has grown faster than the time available to meet it.
Consero works alongside CFOs at growing, investor-backed companies every day, and the strongest ones share a recognizable set of habits. Here are the six traits that define a strategic CFO, plus a look at how the role itself keeps changing.
- Put growth at the center of the job
- Integrity and skillful communication
- Insight into the company value chain
- Leverage the right metrics
- Link strategy and finance
- Find, hire, and develop talent
1. Put Growth at the Center of the Job
The traditional CFO earned a reputation as the executive who gives a firm ‘no’ whenever colleagues propose a risky venture.
Today, the job is judgment. A strategic CFO learns to recognize the opportunities with real potential, decline the ones that carry too much risk, and enable the company to grow whenever it can.
CFOs remain the protectors of company finances — and they’re now also accountable for making sure every major project in the organization creates value.
2. Integrity and Skillful Communication
That dual accountability demands natural integrity and skilled communication. Transparency has to start in your office, because the CFO forms working relationships with more of the company than almost any other executive:
- The CEO
- Unit leaders
- The board and investors
- Regulators
Spend real time with all of them — especially the unit leaders, since they supply the information you need to do the job well.
3. Insight Into the Company Value Chain
To know the real performance potential of your business, you need a holistic, unbiased view of the company’s value chain. That means looking across every area:
- What customers need
- How operations run inside the organization
- What suppliers contribute
By knowing how everything operates, you can pinpoint where the problems are and which areas deserve your attention.
That knowledge lets you advise the CEO on specific actions and initiatives — and it helps you master the essential operational metrics alongside the financial ones.
4. Leverage the Right Metrics
A successful CFO develops and follows the right metrics, because metrics determine what you and the CEO know about the company.
Popular measures like share price and EBITDA describe what already happened. They say little about where future value will come from.
Top strategic CFOs build their own metrics — specific to the company and its industry. These metrics should give insight into things like:
- How to improve customer value
- Whether resources are deployed where they earn the most
- How business planning links to developing improved capabilities
Some of the metrics that achieve this are:
- Market share as a percentage of market potential
- Operating profit after capital charge (OPACC)
- Market favorability rating
Treat these metrics as living tools. Evolve them over time, and build them from all the data available across the organization.
5. Link Strategy and Finance
You can’t help your company grow without being good at both strategy and finance. The CEO needs you to deliver the insight itself, ready to act on.
The top CFOs find ways to turn business strategies into finance strategies. As Jack McCullough, founder of the CFO Leadership Council, puts it: “It’s the person who can synergize strategy and finance who will have an impact.”
6. Find, Hire, and Develop Talent
Every growing company needs new talent, and it’s the CFO’s job to:
- Find it
- Manage it
- Develop it
This matters most inside the finance department, where the talent market has turned brutal: 51% of finance leaders report their departments are understaffed, and most take four months or longer to fill a senior accountant or analyst role, according to Consero’s 2025 Finance Leaders Survey.
Talented finance personnel add far more value than traditional finance staff — and the CFO who can find, keep, and grow them holds a durable advantage.
The Expanding Role of the CFO
These six traits compound into a mandate that keeps absorbing new territory. Earning that expanded mandate takes deliberate work on three fronts.
Credibility comes first. Externally, the CFO owns the investor narrative — you should articulate the company’s story and product as clearly as the CEO does, and build rapport with investors long before you need them. Internally, trust arrives through relationships — put yourself out there and earn it.
The CEO partnership deserves the most deliberate investment. Strategic CFOs ground an overzealous CEO with objective data, commit to deliverable plans, and say plainly when something won’t work. A CEO can promise and miss; the CFO has to deliver.
Stay close to the business itself. Finance is the one function besides the CEO’s office that touches sales, marketing, product, and support. Use that access to understand each function and the people running it — that context is the platform strategic value gets built on.
Get Time Back to Focus on What Matters
Every trait on this list takes time, and operational work steals time first. A CFO buried in the monthly close, AP approvals, and report production never gets to the value chain, the metrics, or the CEO partnership.
Getting the daily back-office finance and accounting off the CFO’s plate works like a capacity dividend — and it has become standard practice: 87% of investor-backed finance leaders now work with a third-party finance and accounting partner, according to the same 2026 research.
Consero’s AI-enabled Finance as a Service platform runs that operational backbone with enterprise-grade systems and an expert team, delivering faster, more accurate financials at a lower cost than building everything in-house. Request a consultation to see what your finance function looks like when the CFO’s time goes to strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions CFOs ask about growing into — and beyond — the strategic role.
What should a strategic CFO report to the board?
A short, stable set of KPIs. Vet each one before introducing it, because once investors see a metric they expect to keep seeing it. Trends carry more meaning than any single data point, so report direction over snapshots. Extend the same transparency down into the company — the employees responsible for driving a KPI should see it as regularly as the board does.
Do strategic CFOs make good COO or CEO candidates?
Often, because the scope of a strong CFO grows naturally with tenure — in a high-growth company, the role can evolve every six months. CFOs who want a broader seat hire people better than themselves to cover blind spots, learn the language of other departments, and take on cross-functional work before anyone assigns it. Do the work and the title tends to follow.
When should a CFO bring in a finance and accounting partner?
When operational work crowds out strategic capacity and hiring can’t close the gap — a common position, given that most finance departments report being understaffed. A Finance as a Service partner takes over the transactional backbone (close, AP/AR, payroll, reporting production) on integrated systems, which frees the CFO and the in-house team for the strategic work in this article. The decision point arrives when you’re spending more time producing financials than acting on them.
