Your first 90 days: how to be a success
The first 90 days in a finance leadership role set the tone for everything that follows. Get them right and you build a reserve of trust that carries you through the hard quarters. Get them wrong, usually by moving too fast or too slow, and you spend the next year recovering. The good news is that what works is well understood, and most of it is discipline rather than genius.
1. Listen before you change anything
The instinct is to arrive and prove your worth by fixing things. Resist it. Spend your first weeks understanding before prescribing. Meet your team, the budget holders, the board, the auditors and the bank. Ask how things work and why they’re done that way.
Diagnose before you operate. The new leader who reorganises in week two, before they understand why the current setup exists, usually breaks something that was working and loses the room in the process.
2. Find one early credibility win
Trust at this level is earned with evidence, not title. Look for one visible, achievable win in the first weeks. A cleaner, sharper board pack. A faster month-end. A cash-flow insight nobody had surfaced. A clear answer to a question the business had been fudging.
It doesn’t need to be dramatic. It needs to be real and visible, the kind of thing that makes the CEO think, quietly, that they made the right hire.
3. Build the CEO relationship deliberately
The CFO and CEO relationship is the job. Everything else flows from it. Invest in it from day one. Understand how they like to receive information, how often, in what format, and how much detail they want versus the headline.
Your role is to be the person who tells them the truth about the numbers, clearly and without drama, and whom they trust to do it. That trust is built in the first 90 days through small, consistent, reliable interactions, not grand gestures.
4. Secure the basics: cash, controls, reporting
Before anything clever, get the fundamentals solid. Know the cash position cold in your first week and understand the runway. Check the controls. Make sure the reporting is accurate and timely.
Nothing erodes confidence faster than a finance leader surprised by their own numbers. Nail the basics first, visibly, and you earn the right to do the more interesting work later.
5. Don’t over-promise
In the early enthusiasm it’s tempting to commit to a long list of improvements. Don’t. Under-commit and over-deliver in your first quarter. A reputation for doing exactly what you said you would, on time, is worth more than a bold plan half-delivered.
Pick a small number of things, do them well, and let the results speak. Credibility compounds.
The honest summary
Listen before you act. Land one real, visible win. Build the CEO relationship on purpose. Secure cash, controls and reporting before anything else. And promise less than you deliver.
Do that for 90 days and you build the trust that makes the rest of the role possible, and that eventually makes the case for your next rise.
A year in, when you’ve delivered, you’ll want to know you’re still paid fairly for it. The Finance Pay Index tracks what your role pays across the real UK market, so you always know where you stand. Free and anonymous.
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