Etienne Raubenheimer, Executive Head of CFO Services, Outsource CFO

I’ll start with the vision the founders had over a decade ago. There were a lot of tech startups, and eventually these startups scaled onwards and upwards into enterprises. Within all of those accelerators and conversations, there wasn’t exactly a financial individual in the room. It was the founders, the believers and the visionaries – the entrepreneurs within that environment and network who wanted to build companies.

What the founders believed is that these companies don’t necessarily require a full-time CFO, but having someone in your corner in a fractional, outsourced position is fundamentally pivotal to an organization. You get the insights of people who have perhaps 30 to 40 years of industry-specific experience from a financial perspective, across the financial function as a whole, and they can implement that experience within those startups and scale-ups, working directly with the entrepreneurs.

That is how the founders built the organization: to help entrepreneurs succeed. That is the motto at Outsource CFO – building teams around founders and entrepreneurs to help them grow and scale, to reach their dreams, their companies’ goals and their BHAGs, or big hairy audacious goals. We want to get there for ourselves, but we also want to get there for our clients.

From there, it’s really about building out the finance function, starting from the bottom, where you have to get your financial information accurate. We call it the financial pyramid. We work with compliance and legislation, and we work to eventually get to cash and profit maximization. We then help entrepreneurs drive strategic direction, because finance is very closely aligned with the operational objectives of the company. If one doesn’t work, the other usually doesn’t work either. You can’t sell a product or a service if the finances, the metrics or the unit economics don’t make sense, and vice versa. If the product is not a good product or the price isn’t right, you always need to get those things in balance.

We try to guide these entrepreneurs on a journey towards success and build with them. As we naturally phase out, perhaps because your team is growing and you have more members, we work with you in a more functional way, where you may now need to employ a permanent person. That’s where talent solutions comes in. Cloud accounting forms the base, the CFO provides strategic direction, and automation is built in throughout through systems. And if you need further talent solutions, we also have a full in-house talent recruitment team that can place the right talent within your organization as the company grows.

Some of our founders are part of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. The drive, the network and the connections we’ve built through the EO network have been of significant value, not just in building our reach, but in building reach for other companies within the industry.

Networking works well internationally, and it works well online. But when you form part of certain locations and districts, it really helps to narrow down the scope and get more into the niches of business. What are the businesses within the Johannesburg area, and how can we help support them? They might not be aware that they can actually have fractional support for the finance function. I think there are a lot of companies that are not aware of that. This is about bringing the network of entrepreneurs together, making them more aware of what services can be offered, and showing how we can benefit from each other by working together.

In the modern era, there’s a lot of talk about automation, right? Even artificial intelligence starts from automation. The first value for clients is that they save time. The biggest value a client gets, especially a CEO or a founder, is time, because their calendar is full. They don’t have the extra availability to do a little bit more here and a little bit more there. Creating automations within the finance function streamlines it, makes it more efficient and frees up time, so the people working in the company can work on the things that matter.

I think that’s the biggest thing at the moment. People need to understand what they most need to focus on. There’s a lot of noise, and you have to pinpoint exactly what the best thing to focus on is at any given time. We try to help founders and entrepreneurs take their minds off certain areas so they can focus on the things that require their attention.

Almost fundamentally. Let me start with the fact that financial services and financial talent within the South African economy are very well placed. Our financial professionals come with really good experience and really good backgrounds. They’re well trained, and they almost always have the necessary experience to work in any organization in any part of the world.

We believe South Africa has some of the best, if not the best, talent in the world from a CA or financial services perspective. So we’re in a really good place to support other businesses – not just in other countries, but on other continents and in other industries – to help them grow. That’s really the fundamental reason our people are so well suited to supporting different companies.

Within what you mentioned, our typical services are CFO services, cloud accounting, automation and talent solutions. I believe there’s a lot of potential within the tech space, which you can call automation, and in next-level financial management, or financial function support. It’s evolving really quickly. Things that might have worked a few years ago will most likely look totally different a few months from now. 2027 is just around the corner.

I believe there are a lot of opportunities within our capabilities to build these finance functions for companies so that they can grow even better. So it’s about the building. It’s about the automation, but it’s also about focused individuals who have worked really hard over a long period to get where they are, so that they can support those businesses. From an automation perspective, there’s significant growth potential for Outsource CFO.

But we still believe that people are a core element of that growth. You don’t want to remove all the humans from the growth opportunity and just focus on the tech. There’s definitely a synergy between the two, so that’s something to look out for in the next year or two, in terms of where exactly the biggest and best opportunities are.

I guess the biggest one is a financial truth that people don’t realize. There’s a saying in Afrikaans that means buying cheap is actually buying expensive. If you don’t invest significant time or money in your organization, you might not reap the benefits. So always realize, from a financial perspective, that if you take shortcuts – not just in the finance function, your systems, your tech setup or your people, but in all parts of life – you might regret it down the line. Always make sure quality is the most important thing.

These days, quality comes at a better price than it has previously. You can find better quality for much less if you’ve got really skilled people who have the know-how to actually do that. So the biggest lesson is to make sure you don’t underspend on specific elements. You need to make sure the quality of your people, your tech and your platforms is well placed within the industry you’re working in.

With a few clients, it’s not taking action soon enough. You think you always need to be on the go, but sometimes you just have to sit back a little and analyze a bit more. I’m always appreciative of analyzing the situation I’m in, whether personal or professional, and taking into account all the things that actually matter to you.

That can happen to anyone, and it’s happened to me before: I might have acted on a certain input, and looking back now, it’s good that I took a little time to analyze the situation before jumping into things. Yet, on the other hand, it could easily have gone the other way, where we didn’t take action on something, and that might have led to a different situation or a different path. But taking the time to analyze the situation is something I did in the past that I’m grateful for.