How to Become a CFO

Wondering where your cash is really going? It’s time to find out. In this video, Steve breaks down the statement of cash flows step by step—so you can finally understand how money moves through your business.

You’ll learn how to read and interpret operating, investing, and financing activities, spot early warning signs, and use cash flow insights to make smarter, more confident decisions.

If you’re ready to take control of your finances and stop being surprised by your bank balance, this is a must-watch.

TRANSCRIPT:

I'm Steve. I'm here to share with you my story to help you along your journey in life and in business. So growing up was challenging.

I was raised by a single mom. She had to go out there in the workforce and work her butt off in order to support me and my six siblings. There's never enough money.

We were financially poor, but we were rich in so many different ways. But going through that experience taught me a lot about work ethics. She instilled in me this, this drive, this ambition, and I wanted to be better.

I wanted a different life. And therefore I'm grateful for that experience. But I could tell you, I didn't grow up rich and grew up with any money.

And I had to figure out things on my own because when I was 16 years old, she got remarried to this guy. And this guy was a total punk and it's nothing against my mom, but I decided to leave home and move in with my sister. I ended up shacking up with her and her kids as living in her basement.

And this is how my childhood began. But at the age of 16, I left with no safety net. I had to figure out my path in life.

I had to make money. And therefore I was kind of forced into business because I found that was the best vehicle to improve my circumstances. So when I was living with my sister in her basement, I was working at Dairy Queen.

I was making $4 and 25 cents an hour. And in fact, I worked so hard that one day my boss came to me and said, Steve, you're doing an excellent job. I'm going to give you a raise 10 cents an hour.

And I thought, Oh my gosh, what is that? After you take out taxes, even at $4 and 25 cents an hour back then in the nineties, it still wasn't a lot. So I realized I had to make a change and do something different. So a friend introduced me to a landscape company is working at.

And so I worked there for a couple summers and I was making 10 bucks an hour. I was able to take my shirt off and soak up the sun. And I thought it was the best job in the world.

But then my junior year of high school, I went back to this company and they disappeared. Like their office was vacant. Their yard that was full of equipment the year before was just empty.

So I was left in this predicament. Either I go back and work in fast food or go find a job at the local target or something making minimum wage, or I go off on my own. And that's when I decided to launch my own company.

And I did that from my sister's garage. And initially I just handed out business cards around the town. So I'd go to these retail locations and I'd say, Hey, can I put a stack of business cards on your counter here? And they were kind enough to let me do this.

And then soon my phone started to ring and that's how my business launched. I started off by buying a Subaru. It was a thousand dollars.

It was army green. It was the biggest piece of junk. In fact, at one point, the car stopped going into reverse.

So I remember being out in the parking lot at like home Depot and somebody would park in front of me and I'd have to get in the car, put it in neutral and push my car back. But this is my company vehicle. And this is how I launched my business.

I started by doing service repair. So I was fixing sprinkler systems. I was charging by the hour and I was charging customers 50 bucks an hour plus parts, which I marked up as well.

And I thought this is a great gig because I can so much more than I was making before. And I could do it all on my own timeline, even though it was a ton of work, a ton of grind. And when all my friends were out there playing basketball or swimming at the pool or doing these other activities that teenagers do, I was at home creating marketing materials, making sales calls and putting together estimates to build my business.

So it kind of started off by accident, just as this side gig, doing these things on the side to get me through college and to pay for my lifestyle. And then the next thing I knew my company blew up into this multimillion dollar company at multiple employees at all of this equipment. And we were doing some high-end design build landscaping projects with pools and putting greens and outdoor kitchens and all these other features.

And it was amazing what the team and I were able to build. I think the biggest successes were working with a motivated team and inspiring team. I mean, they taught me a lot along the way I couldn't have built my business without them.

And so I'm definitely grateful for all the people that supported me and that were a part of the company and just building out the vision. And that was really cool. And because we were this cohesive team and we're aligned on like design and quality and what we wanted to achieve out there in the marketplace, we were able to build these remarkable jobs and we started winning awards.

It is really neat to go onto a job site and it was a blank canvas is a dirt yard, a brand new home. And I would envision things with my design team. Okay.

We're going to put a water feature over there. It's going to cascade down the hill. We'll put a fire pit over here.

We'll build out this patio so the family can have dinner outside. And we created these remarkable outdoor spaces. And like I said, we're winning awards and we're really impacting a lot of people's lives.

And that was the most rewarding thing for me is just working with really good people. And my life felt really fulfilled and really enriched. But at the same time, here's the crazy part.

When I was running this company is a multimillion dollar business. I couldn't even read a financial statement. My accountant would give me the income statement and the balance sheet.

The balance sheet would just go to the side because I couldn't even read that. The income statement, at least I could interpret revenue in my expenses and then the profit at the bottom line. But everything in between, I had no clue what it meant.

In fact, I couldn't tell you what the financial drivers were of my business at the time. And so therefore, I was just relying on sheer work ethic and heroics to make things happen. And guess what? As you can imagine, with no strategy and a lack of financial IQ, I failed.

And I failed in a big way. And it was like detrimental and is a terrible experience. The reason why I'm so passionate about strategy and finance is because of my early experience with my first company, my landscape business.

If you have never had to fire somebody, it's the worst thing you can possibly do. Especially when you don't want to let that person go. And that's what I had to do.

I had to stand in front of my company in front of a room full of employees who dedicated their lives to the mission and the vision and the passion of the business. They're so into the company and they work their tails off. And here I was their leader and I didn't invest in the skill sets that I needed to be effective as a CEO.

And so I stood before him and I said, look, I have to let you go. And it was a terrible experience. I could tell you, I was so depressed.

I was in such a dark place. And at that moment, I told myself I will never let my lack of acumen or my shortcomings or my, my lack of skills ever get in the way of impacting people's lives again. And therefore I decided to change from that day on.

When I was running my landscape company at the end there, I realized that I did have a skills gap, but it was too late to correct it. But I was going back to school to finish my degrees because I left college my junior year, my junior year, I was at school. My landscape business was blowing up and I decided to not let school interfere with my education.

And I walked out, I had two weeks left to school. It was crazy. And I packed up and I ran my landscape business.

I did that for 13 years. Well, fast forward at the end of my business, I realized, okay, I need to step things up. I need to build better skillsets and strengthen my capabilities.

So I was already in the process of going back to school, but when my business failed, it just accelerated everything. And that's when I realized, okay, I need to learn how to read financial statements. I need to know the principles of strategy because I'm not going to stop with business.

I'm going to create more companies because I believe that I can elevate people's lives through business. I mean, that's my whole passion. So I had to acquire the skills.

So I got my undergraduate in accounting and finance. I went on to get my master's in accounting. I got my CPA.

I studied for the test. I went through all of that. And then I got my MBA from Duke university with an emphasis in international strategy.

And that was extremely helpful to just see things across the world and see how international business operates and how I can bring those principles back into the United States to help me to be more effective in business. So when I was in public accounting, I was working for one of the world's largest accounting firms. And here I was working for a fortune 500 company, right? They're doing over $20 billion a year in revenue.

And I realized that the leaders of the company had a mission, right? They were on a mission to achieve certain objectives. And then FinOps, the financial department, all the accounting people, all the finance people, they were engaged in creating all these spreadsheets and all these financial models to show how the company could achieve the mission that the leaders were talking about. The leaders wanted 10% or 20% growth, whatever it was in these spreadsheets would support that.

So FinOps, they're busy creating these budgets and these models, and they had all these graphs and charts. And then I realized while working with FinOps that there was a massive disconnect between the numbers or the money and the mission. And that's when I realized that if this is true for this big, sophisticated, successful company, the same thing was true for small to mid-sized businesses.

And that's when I realized it was time to leave. So I left public accounting. I started back in 2009 with this whole idea, this principle of strategy plus finance equals value creation.

And it's not about just creating value for value sake. In fact, when I work with companies, it's all about elevating the lives behind those companies. So when I'm working with an entrepreneur and I can go in there and enhance value in the business across all parts of the company, it re-energizes everybody in the business.

And it's my way of driving greater meaning of this world through better practices of strategy and finance. Probably one of the biggest things that leaders can do to drive greater results in their companies is to have a system for achieving consistent results. So when I talk about strategy, it's not a one-time event.

It's not like you go and rent out a hotel room or an auditorium and you bring your top management team together for a day or two, and you pound out strategy, right? And you write it down on a piece of paper and you hang it up on the wall. That's not strategy. In fact, too many leaders confuse strategy and strategic planning.

They're two different things. Strategy is all about a set of interrelated choices that a company makes regarding where it will compete, how it will compete and how it will win. Once a business has a strategy, then it puts in place a plan in order to execute, to drive meaningful results.

But most companies out there struggle to have a system in place. And therefore they just rely on sheer heroics and hard work and just grinding things out. And that was me back in the day.

And I hate to see companies in this position because people really struggle in business. Look, business is a challenge, but it doesn't have to be so hard if you have the right system in place. And that's why I'm so passionate about what I do at Coltivar is because I go into organizations and I offer them a system to follow, to put in place a strategy, to set initiatives, and then to go out there and execute and then measure and then make adjustments along the way.

And this system drives meaningful results. When I was running Coltivar, I was engaged with a lot of businesses. I was helping them to turn around.

I was building them, helping them to grow. And in this process, I was working with a construction company back in Chattanooga. They were a billion dollar company and they were in need of a turnaround.

So I started working with them. I was flying around the country because they had offices in Dallas, Boston, in Chattanooga. And I was helping them to formulate a strategy.

It got to the point that it was taking up so much of my time. And I was so entrenched in the business that the CEO approached me and he said, Hey, look, why don't you just become our CFO? So I thought, Hey, this is an extraordinary opportunity for me to take these principles that I'm teaching all these companies and then go put it in practice as the CFO. So I decided to leave Coltivar, take a hiatus, go work for this company.

I turned them around over this year and a half period, and I took them from a negative profitability to a positive profitability. And I learned so much along the way. So that's really cool.

Now you may be wondering, okay, what skillsets did you need in order to become a CFO? I didn't just go from somebody with no financial and accounting experience to a CFO. In fact, the reason why the CEO was so attracted to me and what I was doing is because I brought not only strategic thinking, like these strategy principles that I've been sharing with you, but I also came equipped with financial literacy. And those two things combined together really created a lot of value for this organization.

Because remember what I was talking about with mission and money? That's where a giant disconnect exists in this world. So if you want to become a CFO, you can get there really quickly. Like I did by understanding what are the drivers of business from a financial perspective, and then combining that together with principles of strategy.

So you can actually go out there and execute and make an impact where it really matters. So it required me to get the education. I spent a lot of time in the classroom.

I put in a ton of work to understand how to build financial models, how to read financial statements, and to get entrenched in that world. So I built the skills, I gained the knowledge, I got the experience by working with multiple companies, and then I was able to assume the CFO position and to be successful along the way. And then after that experience, it just propelled me to be a CFO of other companies, such as a FinTech company, a mechanical company, a consumer's goods company.

And then it just reinforced everything through these shared experiences. I think if you're in a controller position, or if you're just working in FinOps, whether you're an accounting manager or a director of finance, the best advice I can give you is to ask questions. Like, look, when I was in public accounting, I would oftentimes go out to lunch with my colleagues and I would say, Hey, you know, what clients are you working on? And they say, Oh, I'm working on this, you know, medical device provider, or I'm working with this consumer's good brand.

And then I would ask him, okay, well tell me more about the company, how much they do in revenue. And then oftentimes they'd kind of look perplexed and they're like, actually, I don't know. And I thought, that's crazy.

You're auditing their financial statements, but you don't even know how much they're doing in revenue. Or I'd ask them, how's the company capitalized? Are they capitalized with debt or equity? What's their structure? You know, what do their investors look like? Who are their customers? What are their products and services? What are their competitive advantages? And I would ask them these questions and they were just perplexed. Now, look, if you asked me the same questions back in the day, I'd have no clue as well.

I had to get there. But what I'm saying is that when you can ask questions about the business and you can step outside of the FinOps role and see things more globally, you're going to position yourself for more opportunities when you're so stuck in the numbers. And it's so easy to get trapped in the transactional and compliance side of FinOps.

Trust me, I've been there before, but if you do that, you're going to pigeonhole yourself in your career. So you have to get outside of the numbers. This means you have to look for ways to automate your processes and optimize your processes.

So you're not just grinding 60, 70, 80 hours a week just to close the books, just to get your job done. You have to be able to free up time. So you can step outside of your role and go interact with other functions like sales and marketing or legal, or just operations, get out there in the field, understand how your products and services work.

And this will open your mind to other things because look, you have the technical skills and accounting as a controller or accounting manager or director of finance. You just need to build other skills so you can be successful as a strategic CFO.

I think patterns are so critical. Look, in the past, I had these goals, but my patterns did not match my goals. You know, I'd wake up late, I'd smoke cigarettes, I didn't take good care of myself, I was overweight, I wasn't exercising, I'd snooze the alarm multiple times a day, I'd jump out of bed, I'd be late to meetings. And it's terrible, but I had these goals, and my patterns were saying something totally different.

And that's when I realized I had to change my daily patterns, my habits. Otherwise, I was never going to be able to achieve my goals. So it doesn't matter what you do. I'm not a purist. I'm not trying to judge you. There's no shame in the behavior that you do. Trust me, I've done a lot of bad things. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way. But for me, what's worked well is having quiet time in the morning.

So I like to get up super early before anybody else is awake. I like to read. So I read scriptures. I'm a man of faith. So I'll read scriptures or something uplifting. I'll write in a journal. My little man journal is what I call it. And I'll write down my feelings and my thoughts and everything. I'll capture this in this book because it'll help me to just process everything that's in my head and capture my ideas in one place.

And after I do that, I'll do some stretching. I'll work out. I work out six days a week. And then after that, I jump into my company because now I'm energized. I have the energy because I invested in myself. I invested in my health, and then I'm ready to go. And that's been a huge part of my life—just focusing on that morning routine.

And the other thing I'd say is just prioritizing good, better, and best. My ecclesiastical leader, his name is Dallin H. Oaks, he gave this great talk that changed my life when he said, look, the problem isn't that we're focused on the bad things in the world. For type A people like myself, and probably like you, that's not the issue. The issue is that we're so caught up in the good things at the expense of pursuing the best things.

So when we can prioritize, and we can say no, and we can focus on what really matters—what truly matters—and I'm not just talking about work, because family and relationships are way more important than work. But when we can hone in on what matters the most, we'll have a very enriching life.

When it comes to spending and investing, there's one difference—it's ROI. You invest to achieve some type of return on investment. You spend just to survive.

So if you think about it, paying rent or paying just your monthly housing costs is hard—whether you own a home or you're just paying rent. You have to cover your monthly expense, and for most people, it's really challenging to come up with that money because it's really expensive to live, right? But you get to choose your own hard. So whether you pay rent or whether you pay a mortgage, that's up to you.

And the same thing is true in life—how we spend our time is really important. Because you can spend your time engaged in certain activities, but if there's no ROI, then you're just doing a bunch of activities, but you're not really generating value and you're not pursuing things that are super meaningful.

Now, look, this is something I am still working on. I am not there. I am far from perfect in this area. But I think about activities with my kids where it's like, oh my gosh, my kids—they're just on me all day today, and I'm just trying to get my work done, and they want me to spend time with them, but I gotta send out these emails and finish this presentation. And oftentimes, I have to remind myself to say, look, it's not about spending time with them—I gotta reframe my mind. It's about investing time with them.

So when I start thinking about my time in that context, then it changes everything. Because I'm not just spending time with my kids, I'm investing in this relationship that's going to blossom over the coming years.

But there are certain activities with work—I'm not investing time in crossing off my to-do list. I'm spending time just doing tasks. But there are other activities where if I invest my time in those items, such as increasing my education, building new skills, strengthening my capabilities, then I'm going to create an ROI into the future.

And I think that's really important—to understand the difference between spending your time and investing your time.

So I've written three books before. The first one was called "Delivering Value." I had to get that one out of the way. I laugh at it when I go back and I read where I was in life, but it was good. I mean, it is good. But there are definitely things I'd probably do differently.

My second book was called "Outsizing: Strategies to Grow Your Business, Profits, and Potential," and that is all about business. So I talk about how to put in place a strategy, how to execute, how to drive financial value in organizations. I'm really proud of that book because it took a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of research to bring it all together. And it's been really valuable, not only to me but to the people that I work with. So I'm very proud of that book.

But my most recent book is completely different from anything I've ever done because not only do I talk about finance, but I also share my personal story. And it's not like my story is any different from anybody else, but I've definitely had some ups and downs along the way. And it's changed the way I look at money. And that's why it's called "Reclaiming Rich" because I've had to shift my mindset in the way that I look at life and abundance. And capturing all those thoughts in a book that I can share with the world has been super rewarding for me.

If you're listening to this and you want to become a CFO one day, like I said, you have to step out of the day-to-day and you have to understand the bigger picture of business. This requires you to learn principles of strategy and to strengthen your financial skills. I mean, that's so critical. And trust me, when I was going through those accounting classes or those finance classes, sometimes my head just wanted to explode and I had the worst headache oftentimes. But I put in that work to learn how to build financial models, how to read financial statements, and how to apply strategy in business. And that's made all the difference in the world.

So it's a grind. Like, if you want to become a CFO, it's a grind. But the rewards are definitely worth it.

So that's my advice for you. Number one, check your patterns, because that's what I had to do. I had to look at my patterns and change things up in my life. I had to instill discipline in certain areas of my life so I follow through on my goals. But then really, I had to invest in myself.

And I love how Warren Buffett answered that question. When somebody asked him recently about inflationary times and where to invest, he said, look, the best investment you can make is in yourself because it will only amplify your value over time. So don't just build the skills that you need right now today—also look at building skills that the world will demand in 10 to 15 years, and you'll set yourself up for success.

But look, I'm also a worrier too, and an overthinker. Sometimes, instead of just trying to force things—and that's what I try to do oftentimes—I try to force my will. Sometimes we just need to take a step back and we have to receive. And that's a big lesson that I've had to learn. And I'm still learning.

You can have all the goals in the world. You could have this intended strategy. But you just have to allow yourself a little bit of grace and just have patience. Because wonderful things are coming your way.

I completely believe in you. I'm so glad that you tuned into this video because it means the world that I've been able to share my experiences. I'd love to hear from you. So drop some comments down below or feel free to reach out to me because I would love to support you on your journey to success.