Striking Growth-Profitability Balance Is ‘Secret Sauce’ for CFOs

The cost realities of unfettered growth have CFOs shifting focus to their organization’s profitability basics.

This, as the role of financial teams pivots more broadly to adding organizational value by helping other departments make faster and relevant data-driven decisions.

PYMNTS’ Matt Nesto recently sat down with Milan Parikh, CFO at workplace equity platform Syndio, to talk about the evolving role of the CFO office as a critical “support system” to the rest of the company, and his thoughts on the future of work.

Businesses Batten Down the Hatches

“We’ve been a high growth company funded by top tier venture capitalists,” Parikh said, “and [for us] it used to be the growth at all costs right now mentality — now, that’s flipped to more of the basics, which is growth and profitability.”

Syndio isn’t alone in taking that approach.

Many finance leaders, particularly those at the helm of agile, venture-backed teams, tell PYMNTS that they are moving from a sole focus on revenue and growth key performance indicators (KPIs) toward placing greater emphasis on driving profitability with solid financial returns.

“How do we balance what may have been happening around growth at all costs, to now looking at things through the lens of both growth and profitability? And what does that do to our spend and allocation of resources?” Parikh added.

In the face of a laundry list of macroeconomic headwinds that include historic inflation, rising interest rates and dampened consumer sentiment, businesses across all sectors are increasingly reassessing their internal processes as they look to realize efficiencies and cut costs in the year ahead.

By taking a holistic perspective, finance leaders can better support overall organizational goals.

Implementing a Support Structure

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a long-standing message, and one that Syndio has taken to heart.

The platform helps companies achieve transparency around workplace equity by leveraging digital technology and software to give organizations continuous insights and analysis to monitor the impact of their employee payroll spend tracked against equity KPIs.

Parikh told PYMNTS that as CFO, he takes a similarly holistic approach to the impact his finance and accounting teams can have across the broader Syndio organization.

“It could be spending time with sales [team] on driving sales to conclusion or working with engineering on how we scale to deliver the products that sales needs — it’s really a combination of looking at efficiencies right across the organization, looking at cross-functional collaboration and communication, and thinking about how it all needs to react to the macro environment,” he said, adding that every day is different and fluid.

Parikh emphasized that investments in software and technology are key to creating more efficiencies and delivering faster results.

Giving Up Your Legos

Even those routines meant to help can eventually become a hindrance. Parikh told PYMNTS that part of his focus as CFO is to get different Syndio departments to “give up their Legos.”

“As you scale everybody is doing everything, and you want to make sure people are focused on the right things — so how do you get people give up some of the Legos that they’ve played with in the past, and show them there are different ways to get that done?”

The answer, he said, is to point people toward the areas they could be spending more time on if they were able to give up some other parts of their day-to-day. “[In this way] they can refocus on what’s good for the business and understand why it’s important for the next stage of Syndio’s growth we’re entering into, tying it all back to transparency.”

The Future of Work

As a workplace solution, Syndio is highly attuned to the shifting contemporary ecosystem of hybrid, remote or full-time in-office employment policies.

“From a CFO perspective, payroll is the largest P&L line item,” Parikh said to PYMNTS, “and when you have happy employees, you have a higher retention rate. The number one thing you want to take care of is your own employees.”

Syndio itself embraces a remote model.

“Fundamentally, I think it comes down to how do we keep people productive no matter where they are,” Parikh added.

“One of the things that’s beneficial for me as the CFO is not having a huge facilities line, right? We don’t have this big overhead of an office and trying to manage it,” he noted.

As to where he sees things going in the future?

“I think there’s some revolt and some rebellion that’s happening right now [around the return to office]. So I think we’re going to come to a new paradigm in terms of what balance means around being in the office versus working from home,” Parikh said. “I think that striking that balance is the nut people are still trying to figure out how to crack.”