🏠︎ | Past Sessions | From Finance to the Boardroom, Navigating the Career Path to CFO
- Event: Finance Forum 25
- Date: 7 October 2025
- Speakers
- Chris Argent, Founder, Generation CFO, founder of Generation CFO
- Urmi Dutta-Roy, CFO and NED Portfolio Director, The Folio Society
- Sue Allan FCCA, CFO, Willerby
- Stuart MacLean, Chief Financial Officer, Brother UK Limited
- Estimated read time: 7-8 minutes
Quick summary
This session explored what actually changes as you move from senior finance roles into the CFO seat.
The panel’s view was that strong technical finance is a starting point, not the differentiator. What matters more is breadth of experience, commercial judgement, and the ability to influence decisions across the business.
They also stressed that CFO readiness is built through relationships and visibility outside finance, plus a willingness to use technology to remove low value work so the team can focus on insight. Mentors and sponsors can accelerate progression, but the biggest shift is personal, moving from owning the numbers to shaping the decisions those numbers inform.
The CFO role has shifted from control to contribution
The panel framed a simple challenge, a finance leader can either evolve with the organisation, or get left behind. Chris Argent captured that shift with a memorable contrast, the modern CFO needs to be more “Netflix” than “Blockbuster”, meaning adaptable, insight led, and built for a fast changing environment.
Across the discussion, the underlying message was consistent, strong technical finance is now table stakes. What differentiates CFOs is how they use finance to help the business decide, not just how well they report.
Build breadth, not just depth
A recurring theme was the danger of over focusing on job titles. The panel described how two roles can look identical on a CV while being very different in complexity, scope and learning. The practical lesson is to assess your trajectory by what you are responsible for, the size and variety of decisions you influence, and the exposure you get to commercial trade offs.
Urmi Dutta Roy spoke about confidence in your ability to learn, noting that senior leaders do not have all the answers, and that progression is often about trusting your capacity to grow into bigger problems.
This is where the career path to CFO becomes a deliberate strategy. Instead of trying to become an expert in everything, you build enough working understanding to ask better questions, spot patterns, and bring the right people together to solve problems.
The CFO difference, creativity, commercial focus and curiosity
When asked what distinguishes a CFO from other senior finance roles, the panel pushed beyond traditional finance stereotypes. One answer was creativity, not in the artistic sense, but in the ability to operate in the grey, to look beyond the P and L and balance sheet, and to interpret what the numbers are signalling about the business.
The other consistent differentiator was commercial focus, reading the numbers for meaning, then translating that meaning into options, risks and opportunities for the wider leadership team. In practice, that includes challenging assumptions, but also proactively surfacing insights that commercial teams can act on.
Urmi Dutta Roy also framed the mindset as three traits that can be developed, curiosity, adaptability, and a willingness to embrace technology so finance time goes into analysis and decision support rather than manual effort.
“Reconciling, you know, shouldn’t be a thing. It should happen automatically.” Urmi Dutta Roy, CFO and NED Portfolio Director, The Folio Society
Cross functional working, your influence is built outside finance
Several moments returned to a practical reality, you cannot be a strategic partner from inside a finance bubble. The panel described cross functional working as a power move for finance leaders, not because it is fashionable, but because it is where context lives.
Relationship building came up as a career accelerator. One speaker highlighted that it is not only what people think of you in meetings, it is what is said when you are not in the room, which becomes the basis for trust, sponsorship and future opportunities.
Sue Allan suggested a specific starting point, spend time with marketing. Her reasoning was that marketing teams tend to be optimistic, finance tends to be cautious, and the conversation between the two forces better decision making and improves early visibility of what is coming down the line.
Mentors, sponsors and the leap in identity
Moving from controller style roles into CFO requires a shift in how you see your job. The panel described mentoring as a way to get a different lens on your thinking, to step back, challenge habits and widen your view of what good looks like at board level.
There was also an important distinction between mentors and sponsors. While not everyone had formal coaching, some described senior leaders who actively pushed them towards roles before they felt ready, and that early belief created momentum.
If you are actively planning a finance leadership career progression, the practical takeaway is to build a small system of support, at least one mentor who can broaden your perspective, and relationships across the business that can validate your impact beyond finance outputs.
Scaling through people, not personal heroics
One of the more candid lessons was about trying to do everything yourself. The panel described how that approach does not scale, it increases burnout risk, keeps you in the weeds, and blocks you from taking the helicopter view that senior leadership requires.
Linked to that was a point about talent and culture. People should not be mini versions of the CFO. Teams perform better when individuals are allowed to lean into their strengths, for example analysis versus financial accounting, and when recruitment pays attention to values and fit, not only technical competence.
Technology will not fix work life balance on its own
The discussion did not treat AI as a magic answer. Stuart MacLean described how workload varies sharply with major projects, giving an example of an ERP upgrade driving intense quarters of testing, retesting and meetings.
Technology can help, but only if adoption follows. Even when tools are available, teams often use them unevenly, which means productivity gains do not arrive automatically. The realistic position was that improvements are emerging in pockets, but the bigger shift depends on consistent usage and the redesign of ways of working.
What good looks like, practical actions you can take now
This session translated into several concrete actions for anyone aiming for the CFO seat.
Questions to ask yourself this quarter- Where am I building breadth, not just repeating a role with a new title
- Which business decisions have I influenced recently, not just reported on
- Do stakeholders come to finance early, or only at sign off, and why
- What work am I still doing manually that technology should be handling
- Who advocates for me when I am not in the room, and what would they say
- Whether finance is invited into projects at discovery stage, or only at the end
- Whether your leadership team asks for insight and narrative, not only numbers
- Whether the business treats controllership as the foundation, not the destination
- Whether your team has time for analysis, or is trapped in reconciliation cycles
- Whether cross functional relationships are strong enough to challenge constructively
- Chasing a perfect CFO checklist, rather than building decision making capability
- Staying in the weeds because delegation feels risky
- Measuring progression only by job title rather than scope and complexity
- Assuming technology will change outcomes without adoption and behaviour change
- Limiting your network to finance, then wondering why influence does not grow
What good looks like in practice
A CFO ready finance leader is visible across the business, trusted as a partner, and known for raising the quality of decisions. They use technology to reduce low value effort, then reinvest the time into understanding the business, spotting opportunities, and telling a clear story about what the numbers mean and what options are available.
Conclusion, becoming a CFO is an operating model change
The panel’s most useful framing was that the CFO path is not only a promotion ladder. It is a shift in operating model, from being the owner of numbers to being a builder of confidence in decisions.
That requires range, relationships, and a mindset that treats technology as a baseline capability. If you can combine those with consistent curiosity, the career path to CFO becomes less mysterious and more manageable, even in a fast changing environment.
Key takeaways
- The CFO path is less about collecting a perfect checklist, more about building range, judgement and confidence to learn fast
- Breadth matters as much as depth, titles can hide what you are really learning
- Modern CFOs win influence through relationships, especially cross functional working and stakeholder trust
- Technology raises the baseline, it should remove low value work and create space for decision support
- Mentors, and sometimes sponsors, can accelerate the move from controllership into enterprise leadership
Speakers
Founder, Generation CFO, founder of Generation CFO and creator of the Digital Finance Function Model, known for thought leadership on agility, analytics and automation.
CFO and NED Portfolio Director, The Folio Society, award winning finance executive across public and private equity backed businesses, also an experienced Non Executive Director.
CFO, Willerby, CFO with experience across refinancing, private equity sale and a UK stock market flotation, with a strong interest in supporting women’s career ambition.
Chief Financial Officer, Brother UK Limited, CFO leading finance shared services and finance transformation across Brother’s European group, including efficiency programmes and AI enabled solutions.