Commission a CFO challenge of the strategic operating plan

A strategic-plan challenge is useful when departments have plausible individual targets that may not form one feasible business plan. Give the prospective CFO the decisions management must make, such as expansion pace, service promises or the balance between growth and delivery capacity. Specify the planning horizon and approval date before asking for a proposal.

SBA business-planning guidance connects the sales strategy with financial projections and calls for an explained financial outlook. For this engagement, ask the adviser to test that connection across the operating plan. The assignment should make management's choices and dependencies clearer, with enough detail to support the decisions due now.

The CFO needs more than the final spreadsheet. Identify who owns demand, pricing, staffing, delivery productivity and major implementation dates. Include time with those people in the engagement scope. A finance reviewer cannot establish whether a proposed service commitment is deliverable merely by checking that the revenue formula multiplies correctly.

Ask each owner to provide the evidence behind the assumptions and the changes required to achieve them. For a hypothetical plan with 30% sales growth and flat delivery headcount, the review should identify the proposed productivity, mix or outsourcing changes. Flat headcount is not automatically impossible; it needs an operating explanation that can be examined.

Agree how missing evidence will be recorded. The adviser should distinguish a disagreement between managers, an unsupported estimate and a model error. Each calls for a different response, and combining them in one list of risks makes it harder to assign the work needed before approval.

Require the review to follow the consequences of material changes. If sales hiring is delayed, examine the capacity and commercial effects. If delivery expansion moves, check the timing of the associated customer commitments and spending. The output should explain which assumptions must change together to create a coherent alternative operating plan.

Choose a small number of meaningful options with management. They might vary the pace of expansion or the service model while using the same underlying demand evidence. Avoid an engagement that supplies many percentage sensitivities without identifying an action the company could actually take.

Ask the CFO to show the tradeoffs in plain terms: expected result, required resources, timing, unresolved evidence and the condition under which another option would be preferable. Where benefits are qualitative, preserve that reasoning instead of inventing a financial value to complete a comparison table.

The agreed deliverable can include an assumption-conflict register, a reconciled operating case, selected alternatives and a decision meeting. Each material conflict should identify the affected target, evidence, responsible manager and proposed resolution. Specify whether the adviser also updates the model or only provides changes for the company's owner to implement.

Accept the work when management can trace the recommendation to the operating assumptions and understand the remaining choices. A polished presentation with unresolved contradictions is incomplete against that brief. Equally, the CFO should not be required to make every uncertain commercial premise certain before presenting a useful decision.

State who approves the strategy, who maintains the forecast and who follows up on conditions attached to the decision. Agree whether a later evidence review or plan refresh is included. The company should know which new development requires another assignment and which update its own team can perform.

Preserve the approved case and the alternatives considered, including assumptions management chose despite disagreement. Compare later results with that record. The value of this engagement is a plan whose commercial ambitions, operating commitments and financial consequences can be explained together, with responsibility for the next decisions clearly assigned.