Bean Counters

Haaaaappy Friday,

Every winter, the five-person field crew in the northern office was light on billable hours for 8-10 weeks, normal seasonality at that latitude. When construction season hit, they’d work 6-7 days a week, 10-hour days, and bill more in a year than almost anyone else in the company. Loyal, skilled, hard-working, and profitable.

But the new CFO, 2,000 miles away, only saw one metric: office utilization had been below target for six straight weeks. The edict: raise it three points by next Friday or explain yourself in person.

Explanations about seasonality, backlog, and annual billability were now moot. The regional VP dutifully implemented the fastest mathematical fix (putz): furlough the field crew for the remaining three weeks.

Poof! Five 'under-utilized' people vanished from the utilization report. Target achieved. The red box turned green. High-fives in finance!

But word of the furloughs spread in a day. To the staff, it crystallized what the organization stood for, mocking the lofty words on the website and mouse pads. Two weeks later, the entire twelve-person transportation department, engineers, designers, and PMs, walked out together and joined a competitor. Their clients immediately followed.

With no transportation work to support, the survey crews and environmental team quickly ran out of billable work, so more layoffs. And with fewer staff to support, the workload for support services staff fell too. More layoffs. Of course, the CFO and regional VP never mentioned their own culpability. Instead, they cast doubts on local leadership. A bustling, profitable, resilient office had been gutted, the corporate equivalent of curing a hangover by cutting off your head.

Know this: It's a LOT easier to destroy an office than it is to build or fix one. Destroy it in a day. Invest years to recover.

Punchline: This is an indictment of the position, not the people.

Everyone sees the organization through the lens of their own job. Engineers see risk. BD people see opportunity. Operators see flow. CFOs see spreadsheets.

Armed with authority, rewarded for short-term optics, and insulated from the actual business, a myopic finance chief is the most dangerous loose cannon in the C-suite. They’ll burn the village to turn a red box green and then remain convinced it was warranted. Finance people should act as behind-the-scenes advisors only. They should not have the authority to make strategic business decisions, or arguably, to even communicate directly with billable staff, i.e., the business.

You don’t run a people business by counting beans. You run it by growing the farm that grows the beans. Big difference.

Have a terrific weekend!

Dave

Feedback and blowback are always welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

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