Work / Life Balance

I wish I had better news, but if you are wanting to be a CFO of any sort of larger company, it will be next to impossible to maintain any sort of reasonable work/life balance. It actually does get better in the sense that you have more control over your schedule and can plan around important family dates, but that really does not help as much as you would hope it would.

The primary accounting schedule that focuses on quarter ends is the same even as CFO. Your intensive work is delayed about a week from earlier in your career as you probably are not directly involved in the preparation of the first draft of the numbers, but once they are available you will be reviewing them and working on the earnings release. This also activates the forecast refresh cycle as you try and dial in the guidance you will release with the earnings release.

The quarter end crunch tends to be even more condensed because of prepping for the Board meeting. You will be a key presenter at the meeting and quite often you are explaining proposed company action with the need for aboard approval. As much as you may think that you are saving time by not preparing the raw numbers, reviewing them to ensure there are no errors and preparing the explanations and message is actually more time consuming and you also need the fairly final numbers before you can close it off which means you get even more crunched by any delays.

The quarterly reporting cycle in intense, but at least it happens with the same timing from year to year. If you are just having a normal year, the only other time pressure that will push your work over the top is travel. Very often you will fly on a weekend day so you can arrive on or before the Monday start of your work week. Phone calls and emails help, but you’ll be traveling to your major sites at least once a year to meet your staff there and do business reviews. You’ll also be traveling for investor relation events and non-deal roadshows. These are more instances where you will have an illusion of control over timing but actually less ability to control it than you would like.

You have to plan travel around your quarterly earnings releases and Board meetings, so the window is more condensed. Although you can pick and choose which IR events you attend, there will be major events that you really should be at with fixed dates so you do not have as much flexibility on them. Major overseas travel takes even more time on planes and causes jet lag issues as well. You are likely to be less effective in the first few days you are back and often that means going to bed earlier which takes away family time.

Again, this is somewhat manageable as you can usually control the dates of internal meetings and move them to a time that is more convenient for you. It still takes time for the travel and the follow-up, but if there is an important birthday or school event, you can plan around it.

The other time requirement is staff coaching and development. I personally never encourage too much socializing in the office and I think that professional relationships can be damaged if overdone, but you absolutely need to spend some time getting to know your staff. So even if you are home, you can be sure that there will be so,e evenings where you get home later because of this.

The real time devourers are M&A activity and capital market deals and other major financings. There is no escaping the central position for the CFO in those deals, and you have little control over when they happen. Capital market deals normally happen after you report and before it is too close to the next reporting period. So that spacing between the major reporting deadlines can be eaten up by a deal. If your company is active in the capital markets (one deal a year), then you can expect to lose a lot of personal time in one quarter. Again, you are not the junior associate lawyer, the manager at the auditor firm or the junior investment bankers that really get slammed with the detail work, but you will still be quite busy, as the documentation gets more final you will be the go to person for most final decisions and you’ll probably be running the deal. If the deal is a rated deal, then the rating companies are going to want to hear from the CFO and probably meet them in person. That means you.

Major financings like in the project world or bank debt also take a lot of the CFO’s time. They also tend to require more internal effort as the division of labor is quite different for those types of deals than one driven by an investment bank. So you are not quite so tied to the markets and probably do not have to do a deal roadshow but you will have to do a lot more review of the internal work performed.

The final and uncontrollable work demand that is likely to swing your balance quite a bit towards work is M&A activity. Even if you are the acquirer, you will not have that much control over when it starts and once the process is kicked off, you will likely be the center of it. You not only need to do due diligence, you probably will have to raise funds in a financing as well. So you will not only have to run the buying process, you will be running the funding process as well. M&A always has extra time pressure and you have to expect the unexpected. As a public company CFO you will be filing SEC documents as well if the purchase is large, so that is another task on your shoulder.

On top of all these additional activities, you will have your day job of leadership and managing the areas you are in charge of and where the company needs your attention.

You will not have good work life balance, but you need to manage it to make the most of the opportunities you do have. You need to be able to prioritize, schedule and take more add=vantage of the friend and family time you do have.

I have emphasized the importance of communication in many of my blog posts and it is even more important outside of work. You need to know what is coming up with your family and friends and you have to know what is important. When traveling, Facebook and similar social media (I recommend keeping a smaller and more personal friends list while serving as a CFO) can be used to keep up with the activities of your social circle and to let people know where you are and what is going on with you. It does sound a little sad, but you cannot spend as much time chit chatting to catch up, so social media can be helpful.

You also need to have frank conversations with your family about what is coming up or happening with work. They can also work with you to move around some activities so you can be there.

Finally, you will have to make a choice about some friends. You will only have so much time you can spend and you will be spending it a lot with your family. Maybe use this process to shed some friends that have turned out to be a negative source of energy for you. I also find that friends that also are as busy as you are more understanding.

As I said when I started, I wish I had better news, but you will struggle with this your whole career and you will not be alone.