it’s worth your time to ask about what they do know.
by ed mendlowitz
call me before you do anything: the art of accounting
one time i had a client who became his company’s ceo. this was a public company and i knew him as well as i could know someone whose tax returns i prepared and met with two or three times a year and spoke to over the phone another two or three times a year.
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at one meeting i asked him how he spent his days and how he managed the transition to ceo.
he had a ph.d. in chemistry. his career took him from technical product development and manufacturing to marketing for his nyse-listed chemical products company. he described a typical day (i could write a book about that).
the real shock for him was the amount of time and attention he needed to spend on financial data. he estimated it was about a third of his time. he said he knew virtually nothing except his own narrow budgets.
for the first few months after becoming ceo he spent about an hour and a half every evening with his cfo learning about the financial reports he needed to understand and how to master them. these meetings seemed like a mini mba program and only eased when he started to feel confident enough to ask questions and not feel embarrassed.
i know the importance of financial data and the power of informed uses, but to hear this from a nonfinancial person was very enlightening and gratifying. i also learned the benefits of understanding what clients do in their jobs, and now i almost always ask them.