90-day roadmap to succeed in your new senior finance role

Stepping into a senior finance role is both exciting and challenging. You may inherit a high-velocity team with excellent workflows, or a team struggling with a tangled web of outdated processes. In either case, your first 90 days will be critical.

This guide breaks this onboarding period into three essential phases: listening and learning, making changes, and delivering early wins.

Days 1 to 30: Ask, listen, and evaluate

Suppress any urge to immediately make changes, and focus on understanding the organization. Moving too quickly can cause more harm than good, especially when you lack full context. Even flawed systems may contain critical insights you’ll need.

Embed yourself within the team

Build relationships by getting to know your team and cross-functional partners on a personal level. Then, observe the company’s communication style. You may decide to introduce more effective communication methods in the coming months, but adapt to what's working in these first few weeks.

Within your team, mentally map each person’s responsibilities, motivations, and the metrics for which they are responsible. Begin to nurture your cross-functional relationships and identify who to approach for specific questions or issues. This will help you ramp up more efficiently. 

Lastly, show you’re a team player. Even small actions, like offering insights from past experiences or sharing your favorite Excel macros, can be noticed.

Evaluate the finance function's current state

There are a few key focus areas that you should understand after your first 30 days. The following questions can help kickstart that process:

Who are the high-impact players?
Part of this will come through as you understand people's responsibilities, but it will also reveal itself as you ask more questions about the goals, priorities, and current initiatives of the team. Identify those who move quickly and can keep the bigger picture in mind while still being detail oriented.

What are the areas for process improvement?
Common areas for high-leverage improvements are updating the company's finance tech stack, optimizing how the team spends their time, and re-evaluating the team's decision-making processes. But, before making any changes, use the current systems to gather important context and understand the pain points of your colleagues.

What are the company's cash flow dynamics?
You'll want context on things like payment terms with major vendors, customer billing cycles, payroll, and supplier relationships. You may be able to find a quick win by adjusting these terms in the near future to improve the company's cash flow dynamics.

What's the forecasting and planning process?
Dig into the assumptions that drive the financial forecasts. If you're in accounting, work through the line items and how they are calculated. Understand how overarching strategy is being built. Also, always know the biggest financial risks and opportunities for the company.

Draw conclusions

By the end of 30 days, you are embedded in the team. Plus, you have a good understanding of the entire finance function and opinions on what's working and what's not working.

Days 31 to 60: Start making changes

After building a foundational understanding, it’s time to act. Use this phase to strengthen finance operations with key improvements.

Low-hanging fruit

Based on the focus areas you evaluated in your first 30 days, here are some common changes you could begin to implement: 

Communication: During meetings, create a templated process for sharing out data, learnings, and progress tracking. For action items, attach a “MM:DD” to every task (this is how we communicate deadlines at Rippling), representing an exact date for when it will be done. This drives accountability and alignment.

Automation: Take the inefficiencies and repetitive tasks that you identified in your first 30 days, and figure out ways to automate them. This is very often solved by implementing new finance software. For example, teams often spend weeks on their end-of-month close, but it could be done in just a few days with modernized spend management software.

Software licenses: See if you can consolidate any software tools, and root out the ones that are obsolete. Reduce the number of seats on software subscriptions that aren't heavily used. These kinds of changes are easy wins that reduce costs quickly.

Visibility: Finance tech stacks are often a jumble of disconnected tools that must be stitched together with Excel sheets to create reports. Consider consolidating your finance software onto an all-in-one platform to improve real-time data visibility across the organization.

Customer billing & vendor payment terms: Adjusting your customer billing cycles to collect more money upfront, like switching users to annual plans instead of monthly plans, can drastically improve cash flow dynamics. Similarly, adjusting vendor payment terms so you can pay less upfront, like paying via periodic installments instead at the beginning of a contract, is very beneficial.

Verify and update forecasts

If you're responsible for any sort of forecasting, don't passively inherit forecasts from a predecessor. Adjust them to reflect realistic, data-backed assumptions, and correct overly optimistic targets. This is a good chance to set yourself up for success with a future "beat & raise" on upcoming reports.

Lastly, trust but verify. Re-evaluate both GAAP and non-GAAP metrics, like gross margin or ARR, respectively. Establish clear KPI's like churn, LTV/CAC, net dollar retention, and CAC payback periods.

Adam Swiecicki, previously the CFO of Brex and now CFO of Rippling, wrote about the key efficiency metrics he tracks in this article.

Days 61 to 90: Share early wins, set long-term goals

By the final 30 days, you have made meaningful progress. Showcase your results and lay the groundwork for sustained success.

Highlight quick successes

Share metrics that clearly demonstrate the improvements you've made. For example, this could be how many hours you've saved the team through operational efficiencies, percentage change in working capital due to cash flow improvements, or the number of stakeholders who now have real-time visibility into company spending.

Set the stage for long-term success

Continue to make tactical improvements to build a solid foundation. But, now that you have your feet under you, start thinking more strategically for long-term success as well. Begin crafting a long-term plan to help the company reach its eventual goal, whether it’s to IPO, be acquired, or some other liquidity event. Eventually, you can distribute this plan to demonstrate that you’re a strategic thinker.

You've established your leadership presence

The early days may have involved tedious groundwork, but by day 90 you've proved that you are a person of action, urgency, and strategy. By listening, acting with purpose, and delivering early wins, you can establish yourself as a competent and strategic leader ready to drive meaningful change.

This blog is based on information available to Rippling as of December 17, 2024.

Disclaimer: Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.