The Reluctant Finance Officer

Terry was optimistic as he sat with his CEO one fall morning. His first hint that today would go well was that it had rained in the early morning and the leaves smelled of tannin as he walked from his car across the parking lot to the staff entrance at Marvelous Works charity. His next hint was that Stella, the CEO’s assistant had actually made fresh coffee and had delivered it to him with 3 sugars; she’d even been rather pleasant about it – for Stella.

As the CFO of Marvelous Works, Terry sat in the conference room waiting for Mary Kasichevski, his CEO, wondering what was on her mind. She had called him the day before to ask for this early morning conference and he was at once curious and uncaring. Whatever it was probably could have waited. She was like that – waiting till the last minute, then rushing around getting people to early meetings, always with a sort of crisis mentality. He figured that she needed the crisis feeling to get herself up in the morning. Probably better than coffee, he thought, but not necessarily easy on the ulcers most of her staff were developing from having worked under her these last 14 years.

Just at that moment, Mary came in with a rush, a quick smile, a slam of the conference room door and sat down, placing her papers on the table in front of them.

“Glad you could make it,” she said. “Sorry for the late notice. What I want to discuss with you is that I had this conversation with our Development Director, Jared Simpson last week, and he’s insisting that with our new strategic plan in place now that he needs to be able to project the number of prospects and donors he needs out about seven years. He says that his fundraising crew needs time to build the database and the prospect pool to the levels we need in order to ramp up to our anticipated revenue levels in ten years.”

Terry recognized the name, of course. That guy was all over everywhere! And an insistent fellow he was, too. Terry didn’t like him – too brash, too much in a hurry, too much trying to please the CEO, and definitely to demanding so far as financial information was concerned. He didn’t like the way Jared went about asking his staff for information, and he certainly didn’t like the phone calls to his office just made to hype things up.

“Yeah, he called me yesterday, too,” said Terry. “Wanted to set up a similar meeting with me to see if I could project budgets out to, what was it, ten years!? That’s ridiculous! We can’t even get a totally accurate budget for one year around here until after the money’s in and spent. What the heck does this guy want ten years for?”

“Well, I was coming to that,” said Mary, “but since you beat me to the punch, yes, that’s why were here. I want to ask you to see if you and your staff could get together a ten-year projection of the kinds of revenues we’ll need for each of the next ten years, and the kind of expenses we’re projecting as we head down the road our strategic plan calls for. Can you do that?”

We'll continue the story tomorrow....