Are you a Grow CFO or a No CFO?
Are you a growth accelerator or growth governor?
Here’s how finance leaders can shed their Dr. No reputation and confidently say yes to faster growth.
Finance leaders tell us all the time they wish they could say “yes” more. They are tired of being viewed as the corporate money police constantly patrolling the company coffers and keeping a tight grip on the purse strings.
CFOs specifically are tasked with making tough decisions about where to allocate an organization's financial resources, so saying no can feel like the safe choice. But is it always the best one?
Financial discipline, after all, isn't just about saying no; it's about spending strategically while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to new opportunities. Challenging every new request is both time-consuming and demotivating for teams. It can lead to teams not spending when they should be to hit company goals.
Marketing, for example, spends money on paid advertising, events, search engine marketing, and more to drive leads, pipeline, and ultimately revenue. Most CFOs, however, want to scrutinize those requests so much that the cumbersome approval processes prevent needed spend from happening or discourage teams from asking altogether. Such red-taping potentially blocks new revenue sources.
“You can cut marketing spend as much as you want; it’s never going to get you to where you need to be.”
These CFOs are not deliberately saying no; they just don’t have an easy way to justify saying yes even if they support the initiative.
Without the capabilities to enable smart employee spending, many CFOs put up so many roadblocks that it’s holding back their company’s growth. But that’s all changing.
Read on to discover how global finance leaders can shed their “no” reputation and confidently say yes to the opportunities that drive business growth.
What you’ll learn inside
Why "no" doesn’t have to be the default response
How to proactively control spend when you say yes
Why unblocking smarter spend can drive business growth
Three examples of when ‘no’ actually hurt a business
Grow CFO vs. No CFO: What’s the difference?
So, what does it mean to be a Grow CFO vs. a No CFO? It means you're focused on enabling business growth, rather than slowing it down.
A Grow CFO is focused on helping the company increase revenue and profitability through smart spending. A No CFO tends to control spend at all costs (no pun intended) to prevent any excessive spending and minimize financial risk.
Let’s be clear: control is a good thing. Since most company spend happens outside the finance team, CFOs need control and should strive to control spend before it happens, especially for a business in high-growth mode.
Controlling spend becomes an issue, however, when it comes at the expense of business growth. This often manifests as a CFO’s blanket “no” to any new budget request, regardless of whether it can help drive revenue.
CFOs, controllers, and other finance leaders simply don’t have the tools to empower marketing and other employees to spend with confidence. So what do they need?
First, they need a way to proactively provision spend with built-in controls, because they simply can’t be everywhere all the time. And they need to increase control while reducing manual work by automating approval flows and leveraging AI to catch policy violations. And above all, they need a real-time, unified source of financial truth that enables them to say yes with confidence.
Why CFOs say no.
So why can’t CFOs say yes to more opportunities? It comes down to trust.
The core function of a CFO is to minimize financial risk and maximize profitability for the business. Employee spend inherently jeopardizes both of those things.
When CFOs cannot trust that employees will follow the company’s travel and expense policies every time they spend by card, payment, or reimbursement, it’s difficult to approve new spend requests.
Legacy card and expense solutions digitized some of the documentation and approval processes, but this only saves a little time on receipts at best. It’s still a retroactive approach. Without proactive controls and real-time visibility, typical solutions fall short of enabling the confidence — and the trust — that finance leaders demand.
But what if CFOs could trust employees to think about spending money the same way they would? Or better yet, what if employees didn’t have to think about how to spend money at all?
With smart spend limits, integrated card controls, and global policies, a modern card and spend management platform prevents rogue spending before it happens, allowing CFOs, controllers, and other finance leaders to be more trusting, flexible, and strategic.
“It’s important to not get so far into the expense cutting. It’s not just about tomorrow or next year, it’s about some future that’s further out. And you’ve got to make investments to get there.”
How CFOs can say yes with confidence.
Businesses can’t save their way to growth, so what would help CFOs feel more comfortable saying yes to initiatives that drive impact? Finance leaders tell us that to be more flexible and say yes more, they need:
Budgets and spend limits
Proactive card controls
Up-to-the-minute visibility into overall spend
Faster, more accurate closing processes
With Brex, CFOs can say yes more because they get an AI-powered spend platform that provides:
Smart budgets, which help allocate capital and drive predictability in costs across the organization and enable them to:
- Pre-approve spend for any use case.
- Easily administer and provision spend limits.
- Manage reporting across cost centers and entities.
- Track actuals against budgets in real time.
Customizable card controls that help proactively manage spend before it happens, enabling them to:
- Enforce policies globally.
- Automate required documentation.
- Streamline approval workflows.
- Instantly reduce limits or close a card.
Real-time visibility to understand where money is going, how to allocate resources, and better budget and forecast. They can use customizable dashboards to:
- Track every dollar spent across use cases.
- Analyze data and drill down for specific trends.
- Make more informed decisions in real time.
- Instantly move money or rebalance budgets.
“The ah-ha moment for me as a finance leader was — I can put everything in Brex. If spending is approaching limits in one area, I know in real time and can talk to leaders about possible tradeoffs.”
AI-powered automation to streamline receipt, invoice, and accounting processes, which allows them to:
- Reduce manual work.
- Minimize errors.
- Close the books faster.
- Focus on driving growth.
Of course, there will always be some spending that CFOs should say no to. Requests that don't map to company goals, lack a clear ROI, or duplicate resources will still get a hard pass.
However, saying “no” doesn’t need to be the default response. Promoting a culture of financial discipline and taking a balanced approach to decision-making empowers organizations to spend wisely and potentially capitalize on new opportunities.
Real examples of when ‘no’ hurt a business.
We told you that finance leaders tell us they wish they could say yes more and capitalize on new business opportunities. Here are some examples of a few of them who wished they could take a “no” back.
When PO red tape blocked a grassroots value-add.
An employee for an app-based mobile delivery company had an idea to offer add-on ice to orders during the warmer summer months. When he asked for a spend limit on a corporate card to run the experiment, the finance team said no. They first required a purchase order for that amount of money, which could take days or weeks to get approved. So a grass-roots initiative that could have driven incremental revenue — and customer delight — never got off the ground.
When last-minute business travel mattered most.
A small but growing software company was in the final stretch of a competitive deal with its first enterprise customer. Numerous product, engineering, and sales team members spent weeks building a tailored, branded demo to make the final pitch. The team wanted to go the extra mile and fly cross-country to the company’s headquarters and present in person instead of virtually. Finance declined the request because last-minute flight and hotel costs for six people were cost-prohibitive. The team found out weeks later that the competitor who won the deal presented in person.
When marketing got deterred from driving growth.
A marketing team wanted a discretionary budget to run an innovative ad campaign that could take advantage of a viral moment and potentially grow the business. They had the budget to run a small pilot, which showed promising results. But the finance team wasn’t confident that marketing would be able to budget a larger investment appropriately and track ad spending in real time. They rejected the request for a bigger investment, and the company missed out on a potentially significant brand and revenue boost.
“As finance leaders, we are often tasked with taking away people’s budgets, saying no to new hires, or saying you can’t expense this or that. Brex helps us enable spend with confidence and say ‘yes’ more often.”
— Teddy Collins, VP of Corporate Finance, SeatGeek
Spend with confidence.
The Grow CFO understands that their role is not just about micromanaging finances (controlling spend). It’s also about using data to make informed decisions that will drive tangible business impact (empowering smarter spend).
But until today, CFOs haven’t had the tools to adapt to emerging business opportunities. Brex makes it easy to empower employees to spend wisely by proactively approving spend with built-in controls that are auto-enforced wherever spend happens.
See why our AI-powered spend platform with integrated card, expense, travel, and procurement solutions can help finance leaders like you go from a No CFO to a Grow CFO and help your business thrive.