Reset 100, Part 2: Business Strategy

In Part 1, leadership was about climbing from reporting to driving. Strategy is where that hard-won standing gets spent — the where to play half of the company’s game, and the clearest place a modern CFO either shapes the direction or merely funds it.

The role has shifted fast. You’re now expected to sit on the strategic decision-making team — and if you’re not helping set the path, you’re at minimum bringing the financial-impact lens to every call on it. When the ground moves under a business — a downturn, a new technology redrawing the market, or simply the turn of a cycle — it’s the right moment to re-evaluate strategy. Not as four boxes to tick, but as four moves that build on each other: read the market and your place in it, align the executive team around that read, reset the KPIs that follow, and lay the financial path to hit them.

Revisit the market and competitive landscape#

Most markets have been through the wringer in recent years — a pandemic that was a boon for some and a near-death for others, rate shocks, and now AI redrawing whole categories. Some companies thrived after almost dying; others are unwinding after touching unprecedented heights. The landscape a company operates in has shifted under it, often more than the company has noticed, which makes this the right time to step back and re-read the dynamics.

In collaboration with the executive team, work through a hard set of questions:

• How have recent shocks changed your existing and prospective customers — what they need, and how they buy?
• Does the current softness in the market touch your core customers and ICPs?
• What are your customers’ priorities for the next one to three years, and how have they shifted?
• Is your value proposition still aligned with those priorities — and can you align it further?
• Which new competitors have emerged, and how well capitalized are they?
• How have existing competitors evolved or responded to the market?
• Where does their value proposition differ from yours, and is it better matched to what customers now want?
• Can you tie the rise of a competitor to a real change in buyer behavior?
• What is your total addressable market today — has it grown or shrunk over three years?
• How has your market share moved?

Answers to these let you place the company in the market against its competitors and open up strategies to respond: a new sales channel or marketing motion; doubling down on part of the product or adding a revenue stream; sharpening customer service or adjusting pricing; cutting spend in one area or hiring for a rare capability in a new geography. Whatever it surfaces, this relook at the landscape reliably opens new ways to approach the business.

Align the exec team on competencies and differentiation#

Once you have a grip on the market and on your own competencies and differentiation, share the findings and get the executive team aligned. These reviews shouldn’t happen in a silo — others are usually already involved — but it’s still critical to lay the whole picture out and force genuine alignment across departments.

Done well, everyone airs their view, challenges your assumptions, pushes you to make the case more factual, and brings their function’s perspective. That shared read becomes the basis for the company’s objectives over the next one to three years — and alignment up front is what makes the execution actually land.

Re-evaluate the KPIs#

The right outcomes need the right objectives — and the more measurable they are, the likelier you hit them. With fresh objectives in place, review the leading and lagging KPIs that drive them: the focus metrics, their definitions, exactly how each is calculated.

As businesses grow more complex, track both leading and lagging indicators, so you can judge the efficacy of the input and the final impact — and feed both back into the next plan. And look beyond the standard financials. The evolution of your sales and recruiting funnels is a treasure trove of real-time signal on a fast-moving market — signal most teams never examine until they’ve already missed the cue.

Plan for three years, budget for one#

Targets without a funded path are just hopes. Most businesses have gestation periods longer than a year, yet most plan and budget for just twelve months. That nearsightedness leads to chronic under-investment in long-term value — a real disadvantage in a fast-moving market.

Treat planning and budgeting as separate but interdependent exercises. Budget at GL-code level for the coming financial year; plan for three years at a minimum. A three-year plan is the only way to see revenue streams that need investment in Year 1 but only pay off in Year 2 or 3 — GTM bets, back-office capacity, anything with delayed ROI. Without it, those high-value line items simply never make the cut. And revisiting the Y2–Y3 plan at the end of Y1 is a sharp test of how well you executed, and whether the competitive dynamics played out the way you expected.

Taken together, these four moves — reading the market, aligning the team, resetting the KPIs, and funding the path to hit them — let a CFO hand the executive team a shared, honest context for the next twelve months, and chase the market far more deliberately than they otherwise could.

Next in the series: budgeting.