Do you sometimes feel like you need to clone yourself?

Too many things to do. Your staff are all busy. You could recruit, but it would take weeks to get the person up to speed and you just need something done now. You need a business partner you can trust on the end of a phone who can just get stuff done to the standard that you would do it yourself. 

Step 1 - How would you do it if you had time?

• Learn as you go. If you're like me and there's a task you've never done before, you wouldn't write out a set of steps and then delegate them to a team member. Instead, you would try the task yourself first, thinking carefully about when to stop and re-evaluate your approach, when to ask for advice and when to persevere. 

• Consider the bigger picture. Most tasks involve interacting with colleagues in other teams. These negotiations can be sensitive as this may be just one of many workflows where you need to collaborate, so the person in those negotiations needs to consider the bigger picture.

• Simplify for next time. If you're like me, you don't feel like you've succeeded in completing a task properly unless it takes less than half the time to complete next time. So you would take a screen recording, use AI to summarise the steps, and look for automation opportunities along the way, whether they be with spreadsheets, low code tools or AI-enabled process automation tools.

Step 2 - Find someone you can delegate to who would follow Step 1

This is the tricky part. Company directors are considering recent advances in AI and asking their managers to achieve more with fewer human resources. But this requires more precious time spent learning and implementing the latest tech, and it certainly doesn't solve the problem where you have 6 weeks of work to get done over the next 3 weeks.

Even if you can get approval to hire temporary staff, it will probably take several weeks to train them to do the task in the way that you would have done it.

An easier approach

Reach out to Lucia Business Partners. We provide expert resources at short notice, but we are not a recruitment firm. As a firm of Chartered Accountants, each deliverable is reviewed by a Director who has served as CFO of a large organisation. We also bring expertise in process automation, AI, data analysis etc. so you'll find that your task is much quicker and easier next time. We rapidly build and refine working prototypes of data analysis and process automation tools, then we validate them with stakeholders, so you don't have to write massive requirements documents or fret about whether the developers are going to interpret the requirements in the same way as your stakeholders. 

Above all, we put ourselves in your shoes. We know what it's like to be a CFO with 6 weeks of work to complete in the next 3 weeks. We also know what a relief it is when someone offers to help and then delivers quickly to a high standard, just the way you would have done it yourself. 

About the Author:

Alastair Cranswick is a Senior Business Partner, specialising in helping businesses achieve scalable processes for retaining customers and talent, so they can attract capital for further growth.

Alastair has served as CFO of a publicly funded institution with over $500 million under management. During this time he realised the importance of skills in advanced analytics and process automation. He therefore went back to university to gain post-graduate qualifications in data science from an elite group-of-8 university.

His next role involved working on an end to end design and implementation project for a critical business system. Alastair's role on this project was to represent the interests and views of the CFO, who was busy with other operational and strategic tasks.

Since then, Alastair has served as:

• Head of Consulting for a firm specialising in Artificial Intelligence; and

• Head of Data Science for a top-tier consulting firm specialising in growth strategy.