Scaling a high-growth business is exhilarating—but it’s also when financial foundations are most at risk. What supported you as a 20-person team often crumbles under the complexity of 200 employees, multiple regions, and ever-shifting customer demands.
Cash flow visibility dims. Recruiting becomes reactive. Investment decisions begin to drift from real business outcomes. It’s during this inflection point that finance leadership becomes mission-critical.
Finance isn’t just about reporting numbers. At this stage, it becomes a strategic pillar—bringing structure, clarity, and accountability to every function. A high growth business needs more than good intentions; it needs a finance leader who can connect how the business earns, spends, and scales. One who can tighten controls without killing momentum.
The following six strategies are designed to help finance leaders take control, drive clarity, and enable sustained growth.
1. Optimise for financial resilience
First, regain total control over cash flow. Don’t rely on assumptions—go line by line. Reconcile every bank statement. Categorise transactions into clear, strategic buckets. Then align Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), outstanding payments, and actual cash collections on a per-customer basis.
With this foundation, build a conservative three-month runway projection. Keep an updated list of levers you can pull at short notice: from cost reductions to delayed recruiting or financing options. Financial resilience isn’t about over-caution—it’s about being ready to act with confidence at speed.
2. Uncover the real growth drivers
High growth doesn’t come from doing more—it comes from doing the right things better. Start by dissecting your revenue across geographies, customer types, and channels. Where are the returns strongest? Which areas are draining resources?
From there, investigate why the numbers look the way they do. Don’t make assumptions—talk to teams. Where do leads drop off? What’s holding back conversion or expansion? Pairing hard data with on-the-ground insights leads to real, repeatable growth.
3. Build predictable revenue through customer success
Sustainable revenue doesn’t come from new business alone—it comes from keeping and growing your existing customers.
Map the entire customer journey: onboarding, engagement, renewal, and expansion. Identify bottlenecks like clunky handoffs between sales and support or long implementation timelines. These friction points directly impact retention and revenue growth.
Introduce a basic customer health score to surface risk before it escalates. Ensure that every function—product, sales, support—can see it and act on it. Customer success is a team sport, and finance should help set the scorecard.
4. Align investment with business outcomes
Too often, product and engineering are seen as cost centres rather than growth engines. But every decision they make has financial implications. It’s essential to connect product development to real business impact.
This means tying product usage, pricing strategy, and roadmap priorities directly to revenue and cost metrics. Regularly review delivery timelines, feature adoption, and performance. This is how investment decisions shift from speculative to strategic.
5. Make talent KPI’s work for growth
Headcount is one of the largest investments in any business—but recruiting decisions often happen without strategic alignment.
Start by connecting headcount plans to performance metrics across departments. Which teams are driving growth? Where are there gaps? Use that insight to recruit intentionally rather than reactively.
Establish clear milestones for recruiting and maintain a rhythm of performance reviews. Then take it further: align employee incentives with company goals. When teams are rewarded for outcomes that drive the business, growth becomes part of the culture—not just the plan.
6. Run a 60-day finance transformation sprint
You don’t need 12 months to turn the tide. A focused 60-day sprint can lay the foundation for lasting change. Break the process into three clear phases:
Days 1–14: Lay the foundation
Clean up financial data, restore visibility, and establish key metrics.Days 15–30: Analyse and optimise
Identify inefficiencies, fix bottlenecks, and begin testing new workflows.Days 31–45: Operational ramp-Up
Build daily and weekly rhythms across finance and operational teams.
From Days 46–60, double down on momentum. Zoom in on what’s working. Stay laser-focused. Distraction is the biggest threat at this stage—it breaks rhythm just when results begin to emerge.