GrowCFO Show

A product’s strong gross margin does not always translate into strong profit. When support, sales, customer service, and other indirect costs are left out of product-level analysis, a high-margin product can consume more resources than it generates. In this episode, Pauline Healey explains why businesses need to look beyond headline margins to understand the true cost of serving each product and ...

For fifteen years the software P&L was a settled question: hosting was a rounding error, gross margins held above 80%, and investors underwrote growth against a predictable annuity stream. That assumption is breaking. AI and cloud infrastructure has become one of the largest and least predictable costs on the P&L, moving faster than most finance teams have built the vocabulary or forecasting di...

Rapid advances in AI are transforming how finance teams forecast cash flow, detect fraud, and automate routine reporting, raising difficult questions about what happens to traditional roles when machines can achieve in minutes what once took analysts days. At the same time, many economies are grappling with skills shortages in some areas and structural unemployment in others, especially among younger p...

High-achieving leaders often pride themselves on attention to detail, relentless drive, and demanding the best—from themselves and everyone around them. Yet the very qualities that fuel success can quietly erode team confidence, autonomy, and performance. When expectations become uncompromising, people stop taking initiative, avoid risks, and operate in fear of making mistakes. A critical leaders...

In today’s finance function, the question is no longer whether AI will have an impact, but whether it will fundamentally change team size and structure. This landmark 300th episode of The GrowCFO Show asks directly: will AI actually reduce finance team headcount, and how should CFOs prepare? Dan Wells, Founder & CEO of GrowCFO, examines how automation, machine learning, and generative AI are ...

Becoming a CFO by 33 takes far more than technical finance skills; it demands strategic breadth, deep business exposure, and the confidence to operate at board level. In this GrowCFO Show episode, Kevin Appleby talks with Audrey Lagresle, CFO of Automobile On Direct, about how she reached the CFO seat so early in her career and why today’s CFO must be a value creator and change leader, not just a...

A CFO role is no longer just about reporting the numbers; it’s about driving strategy, shaping growth, and leading with commercial insight. For ambitious finance professionals, understanding how to deliberately design a career that accelerates you into that top seat has never been more important. From gaining the right breadth of experience to leveraging technology, networks, and non‑traditional ...

For tax professionals wondering what comes after traditional compliance work, this episode offers a practical roadmap for evolving into a more strategic, better-paid role. As AI and automation increasingly handle routine tax tasks, the real opportunity lies in stepping up as a trusted financial guide to business owners, not just a form-filler or historian of the past

In th...

AI is now embedded in almost every corner of the finance function, powering forecasts, reports, and board-ready insights at unprecedented speed. Yet when powerful systems are plugged into weak data, broken processes, or poor governance, they don’t just make mistakes, they do it with absolute confidence and immense credibility. For CFOs, the real risk isn’t that AI is wrong; it’s that ...