Finance leaders must move beyond keeping score to actively driving growth, allocating capital strategically and partnering across the business.
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For many, corporate finance feels like a foreign language, with its profit and loss statements, equity and depreciation concerns. Intimidating and complex, it often gets reduced to a back-office function: the bookkeeper tracking results and managing systems.
That’s the scoreboard mentality: tallying points after the game instead of shaping how it’s played. But that mindset is costing companies real value. According to SoFi, the average annual return for the S&P 500 over the past century is approximately 10%, indicating that simply keeping score is no longer enough to translate strategy into performance.
“Finance leaders can play a key role within an organization by thinking of their role more as a venture capitalist, where they’re collecting ideas within the business,” Frank Hopson, partner at Fortuna Advisors, shares during an interview. He believes a company should treat finance less like an accountant and more like a point guard. “By doing that, you’re going to make your business stronger because you have more ways to win across the business, but you’re taking those ideas and trying to understand which ones are actually creating value.”
Four lessons on how leaders can apply them to put finance and their team at the center of value creation:
Lesson One—Redefine The Metrics That Matter
Most companies simplify performance measures, chasing revenue without considering the costs of capital employed. Hopson argues this creates distorted incentives.
“The big issue comes down to the performance measures that a company is using across its business to judge whether or not a business unit, business segment or a person is creating value within the company,” Hopson explains. “What happens for a lot of companies is they’re using incomplete measures across the business to try to simplify.”
For example, if you tell leadership, “You need to create $1 billion of revenue next year,” there are numerous costs that go into generating that revenue. Team members develop various products, but they often overlook the costs, as they are primarily focused on the revenue being generated. Then, the finance team comes in and looks at the ideas; they only see it as 5% margin product.
“From the business unit standpoint,” he continues, “it looks like the finance team just rejects all of the ideas. But in actuality, they’re not explaining why they’re rejecting these ideas, and the better way to deal with it is to create a fuller measure for value, and that’s something like an economic profit, where economic profit is going to factor in both earnings and capital costs.”
The shift: When teams are measured by true value creation, finance moves from rejecting ideas to shaping them. Companies achieve this by building incentive systems around value, rather than volume. A single, clear financial compass fosters smarter decisions across the enterprise.
Lesson Two—Don’t Treat Capital With The Peanut Butter Spread
Frank Hopson, partner at Fortuna Advisors
Courtesy of Fortuna Advisors
In boardrooms, the “peanut butter spread” has become shorthand for a common mistake: allocating resources evenly across every business unit, regardless of potential. It feels safe. Everyone gets a slice. But just like a sandwich made with too little peanut butter, the result is thin and unsatisfying.
Hopson warns that this instinct for fairness is exactly what keeps companies mediocre. “Rather than constantly starving one business of capital when it has a lot of great opportunities just to placate another business unit and make sure that they feel like they’re getting equal treatment, instead, companies should be investing behind product or service winners,” he said. “And in those times when a business unit really needs capital, give it the capital.”
Equally spreading capital may avoid conflict within the company, but it leaves the door wide open for competitors who are willing to capitalize on where the real opportunity lies.
Finance leaders should resist the urge to make every unit feel equally supported. Capital isn’t about fairness; it’s about focus. The competition is outside the walls, not inside.
Lesson Three—Partner Deeply With The Business
Finance functions often sit apart, validating business unit plans instead of co-creating them. That separation weakens both creativity and accountability. Hopson believes the solution is embedding finance directly into strategy from the very start.
When finance only shows up at the end, ideas are often judged on incomplete metrics with promising innovations denied before they’re fully understood. However, when finance is at the ideation table, teams shape products and services with value creation in mind from the outset.
That means knowing not just the potential revenue, but also the true margins, the capital required and how the investment compares to alternatives.
“We help companies through first establishing a better financial metric, so that they can understand where value is being created across the business,” Hopson said. “Many companies don’t have a great understanding. They may know where their top-selling product is, but what’s the real margin that goes behind that? What are all the different costs and assets that are associated with the products?”
Involving finance at the ideation stage also builds stronger buy-in. Business leaders aren’t pitching into a void; they’re co-developing growth plays with partners who can connect vision to measurable outcomes. This results in fewer wasted ideas, better capital allocation, and a culture where innovation is directly tied to long-term value.
Reframing finance from bookkeeper to point guard puts value creation at the center of business strategy.
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Lesson Four—Build Forums For Ideas, Not Just Forecasts
Hopson points out that finance often becomes the “no” department, rejecting ideas without context. The fix is creating forums where teams bring forward ideas with finance at the table.
He shares, “Instead of the finance team operating outside the other departments to partner with and create these forums where people can come and brainstorm new ideas that they think of, and then you can help them filter out and say which ones have a higher possibility of creating value with that broader framework about what’s going on within the company.”
Finance leaders must stop thinking like scorekeepers. When finance experts shape the conversation, it transforms from gatekeeper to enabler. In an ideal situation, they run the offense, calling plays, distributing resources and empowering teams to win.
In a market where growth without return destroys value, and return without growth breeds stagnation, finance must stop spreading capital thin and start running the offense.
