The Right Time and Space for a CFO

Having the instinct to take the right job and the luck to find it at the right time are easily as important to an executive’s career growth as having the right skills to do the job well, and probably more so. Take Tom Fitzpatrick, CFO of Iridium Communications. He is not a job hopper. He spent mo...

By David McCann • Nov. 8, 2011

SBICs Sizzle, Offering Alternative to Bank Loans

The U.S. government has tried many ways to get money into the hands of private companies, not all of them successful. The most recent effort, the Treasury Department’s Small Business Lending Fund, ended up disbursing to banks a slim fraction of the money it started with; the effect on bank loans ...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 4, 2011

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

The 20 Most-Profitable Industries

Sageworks Inc., a financial-information company, analyzed financial statements from thousands of privately held companies to find out which industries have been the most profitable in the past 12 months. On a pretax basis, the most profitable were primarily services-based businesses. And if you’r...

By Mary Ellen Biery • Oct. 28, 2011

Seven Principles for Avoiding Bankruptcy

Companies today are trying to navigate in turbulent, troubled times — and many can’t stay on course. Between 2006 and 2010, more than 208,000 companies filed for bankruptcy, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. The annual rate of bankruptcies nearly tripled during this period, with no ...

By Chuck Benjamin • Oct. 27, 2011

Three Tips for Creating a Reliable Demand Forecast

The devastating events in Fukushima earlier this year demonstrated once again the powerful impact of supply-chain disruptions. Couple these types of unplanned disruptions with fluctuating customer demand, and the ability to effectively manage becomes a seemingly futile pursuit. Regardless of the ...

By Shawn Casemore • Oct. 26, 2011

Good Ways to Handle Bad News

If you have bad news, don’t keep it to yourself. That was the message from a panel of turnaround experts earlier this week at the CFO Rising West conference in San Diego. While CFOs are more often than not the Cassandras of their companies, spotting crises from afar while the rest of their collea...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 20, 2011

Hiring Temp Tax Workers: Open Your Eyes!

The midsize companies that typically hire temporary tax accountants as tax season approaches should get past a couple of common delusions, suggests an executive at a prominent finance and accounting staffing firm. First, companies chronically underestimate the availability of such workers, conten...

By David McCann • Oct. 20, 2011

Finance Training for Mere Mortals

Not every finance department has the size and scale to, say, promise staffers a new job with more responsibilities in varied geographic locations every one to two years, as the famous finance rotation programs at General Electric, Ford Motor, PepsiCo, and other so-called academy companies do. But...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 18, 2011

Shared Services: The New Old Thing

In 2010, Mike Holmes was lured out of retirement by his last employer. His charge was to run the company’s shared-services center in Malaysia until he could find someone who could take his place, train that person, and then return to his happy retirement. Why did the company reach out to its for...

By David Rosenbaum • Oct. 13, 2011

More, Better, Faster — But How?

The fact that productivity, or output per employee, has shot up since the beginning of the recession is no secret. One measure, profit per worker, increased by more than 50% between 2009 and 2011. It now stands at a 10-year (at least) high of $15,278, according to recent data from Sageworks, whic...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 12, 2011

A New Era Dawns for Tatum

It’s been a dizzying couple of years for Tatum, the large CFO-outsourcing firm. In early 2010, the company was purchased by SFN Group, a provider of temporary staffing, recruiting, and permanent job-placement services. Shortly thereafter, longtime president Rich D’Amaro left the firm.D’Amaro was ...

By David McCann • Oct. 11, 2011

M&A Recovery Stumbles

While mergers and acquisitions have outpaced 2010 in the first nine months of this year, the recently ended third quarter was a slog. A notable slide in M&A activity worldwide and in the United States occurred, says mergermarket, continuing a trend started in the second quarter.After a robust...

By Vincent Ryan • Oct. 4, 2011

New Patent Law Highlights the Need for Speed

After years of discussion and debate, patent reform is now imminent. The America Invents Act passed Congress and was signed by President Obama last month. Among a number of notable changes are a shift from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system, and a provision that allows businesses to pay ...

By Marielle Segarra • Oct. 1, 2011

CFO Optimism Takes a Hit

Optimism among chief financial officers plummeted in this quarter’s Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey, from an index of 57 out of 100 last quarter to 49 in early September. As weak demand and economic uncertainty continued to worry them, finance chiefs who had grown more...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Oct. 1, 2011

Just Call Me Angel

When finance executive Ane Ohm joined Harqen, an early-stage company that makes tools to index and analyze recorded phone conversations, one of her reasons for taking the job was, in a sense, lofty: she hoped to meet angels. While the ones she was targeting are not quite as rare as the heavenly v...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 1, 2011

Mend Your Spend

You may have heard the saying that “small business is big business,” and with more than half of the U.S. economy populated by small enterprises, this statement has substance. For executives of small businesses, it’s important to develop this big-business attitude when it comes to your supply chai...

By Shawn Casemore • Sept. 30, 2011

How to Avoid Power-Hungry Bosses

It’s an often-told sad story: a finance executive is hired by a fast-growing private company to help it move up to the proverbial next level. There’s great professional potential and tantalizing financial upside. Soon, though, the truth emerges: the CEO, owner, or founders have no intention of le...

By Alix Stuart • Sept. 26, 2011

SBLF: Helping Those Who Need It Least?

Tomorrow marks the close of investment under the Small Business Lending Fund, a $30 billion account created last year by Congress to spur community banks to lend more to small businesses.  How successful has this effort been? Best case, according to its own projections, the Treasury Dept. expects...

By Barry Hester • Sept. 26, 2011

Crowd-Funding Draws New Attention

This past summer, Thomas Young raised more than $60,000 for his nascent ear-bud business, with no dilution to his company or bad blood between him and his relatives. The magic ingredient? Raising a little money from a lot of people, via an online “crowd-funding” platform.Young collected $61,000 o...

By Alix Stuart • Sept. 22, 2011

Risk Managers’ Anxiety Rises

Blame it on the U.S. economic slowdown, the European debt crisis, and the continued lack of job growth. For many reasons, risks managers are feeling ill at ease these days. By nature more prone to consider worst-case scenarios, risk managers are keeping a close watch on the unfolding developments...

By Sarah Johnson • Sept. 21, 2011

Help Wanted: How to Hire in Europe

A software company in New Hampshire is in the process of expanding farther into Europe. It has decided to start hiring in Germany – primarily sales and support staff – and is considering hiring for similar roles in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.While the company can use many of the searc...

By Bill Hite • Sept. 20, 2011

Breakups Overshadow Mergers

Last week was more about subtraction than addition. Two large corporate spin-offs were announced. Tyco International split into three groups: a residential security company, a non-U.S.-based flow-control products group, and a Switzerland-based commercial fire and security business. Meanwhile, McG...

By Vincent Ryan • Sept. 20, 2011

Should You Join the Cloud Crowd?

Intellicheck Mobilisa is a small public company that makes a widely used security application that helps sniff out fake IDs by scanning drivers’ licenses and cross-referencing the information it gets with government databases.  But despite 16 years in business and brand-name customers including J...

By Alix Stuart • Sept. 19, 2011

SEC Gives Small Business a New Voice

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced today that it has established an advisory committee on small and emerging companies. The 19-member committee “is intended to provide a formal mechanism through which the Commission can receive advice and recommendations specifically related to” sma...

By Alix Stuart • Sept. 13, 2011

M&A: Back-to-School Doldrums

In a run-up week to a national U.S. holiday, in which equity markets remained volatile, North American merger and acquisition activity slowed to a crawl.Twenty-seven deals were announced the week ending September 2, with a total disclosed value of $4.4 billion, according to mergermarket. That’s d...

By Vincent Ryan • Sept. 6, 2011