# The New CFO's First 90 Days
When Ruth Porat left Morgan Stanley to become CFO of Google in 2015, the Street expected austerity. What she delivered was more subtle: within her first quarter, she had not cut a single moonshot but had introduced segment reporting that split "Google" from "Other Bets"—forcing the company to expose the cash burn of its ambitions to public scrutiny. The stock rose roughly 16% the day those numbers landed. Porat had not changed the strategy in 90 days. She had changed what the organization was willing to *see*. That is the real work of a new CFO's first quarter: not the decisions you make, but the diagnostic clarity and the coalition you build so that the right decisions become inevitable.
The trap for a newly appointed CFO is that you arrive with a mandate to act and a résumé that rewards decisiveness. But the moves that feel most CFO-like—restructuring the team, slashing costs, overhauling the model—are precisely the ones most likely to detonate before you understand the terrain. This lesson gives you a sequenced operating system for the first 90 days: what to diagnose, whom to win, and how to distinguish the credibility-building early moves from the credibility-burning ones.
Your first job is not to fix anything. It is to build a mental model of the enterprise more accurate than the one held by anyone you'll negotiate with. You have a narrow window—roughly the first 30 days—where asking naïve questions is a privilege, not a liability. Spend it aggressively.
The numbers diagnostic. Do not accept the reporting package at face value; interrogate how it was constructed. The single most valuable early exercise is a cash conversion walk: trace how a dollar of booked revenue becomes a dollar in the bank, and where it leaks. In your first weeks, ask to see the *reconciliation* between management accounts and statutory accounts—the gap is where the bodies are buried. When a new CFO at a mid-cap industrial discovers that "adjusted " has absorbed the same "one-time" restructuring charge for four consecutive years, that is not an accounting nuance. It is a cultural tell about how the prior regime managed the narrative.
The people diagnostic. Within finance, identify your three tiers fast: who is load-bearing (the org would wobble if they left), who is capable but under-deployed, and who is a passenger. Outside finance, mapmapUsing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.View full definition → who actually controls the levers of value—the divisional GMGMGross margin is the share of revenue left after subtracting the direct cost of producing goods or services, expressed as a percentage of revenue.View full definition → whose forecasts always sandbag, the procurement head who hoards spend authority. You are diagnosing not competence but *incentive alignment*: where do people's rewards diverge from enterprise value?
The trust diagnostic. Quietly assess the finance function's reputation with the rest of the business. Is FP&A seen as a partner or a police force? Do the board and the CEO trust the numbers, or do they run shadow analyses? This determines your entire mandate. A CFO inheriting a distrusted function has a *rebuilding* job; one inheriting a respected function has a *scaling* job. They require opposite postures in month one.
Book 20–30 structured one-on-ones across functions, geographies, and the top two layers below you. Ask every person the same core questions: *What would you do if you had my job? What's the one thing we measure that's misleading? What decision are we avoiding?* The power is in the pattern. When five unrelated people name the same avoided decision, you have found your first real priority—and you found it through the organization rather than imposing it, which matters enormously for the coalition you're about to build.
The Watkins insight worth internalizing: your first-90-days playbook must differ radically depending on whether you're in a turnaround (act fast, cut, the org expects pain) or a sustaining-success situation (move slowly, the biggest risk is breaking what works). Misreading which one you're in is the most common fatal error. The CFO who arrives at a healthy company swinging the turnaround axe destroys trust; the one who arrives at a burning platform running a leisurely listening tour gets fired for passivity.
A CFO's authority is nominally structural and actually relational. You can sign off on nothing meaningful without a coalition. Sequence it deliberately.
The most important conversation of your first 30 days is defining, in writing if possible, what "good" looks like at day 90 and day 365 *with the CEO*. Do not assume alignment. Ask directly: *Where do you want me to be a brake, and where do you want me to be an accelerator?* CEOs hire CFOs for different reasons—some want a truth-teller who disciplines their own optimism, others want a financier who unlocks capital for expansion, and a few (dangerously) want a validator. You must surface which one you're dealing with, because a CFO who plays brake when the CEO wanted accelerator will be gone within 18 months regardless of the quality of the work.
Your relationship with the audit committee chair is a structural asset you must activate deliberately, not reactively. Request an early one-on-one, separate from the CEO. The purpose is not to undermine the CEO but to establish that you understand the CFO's dual loyalty—to management execution and to fiduciary integrity. When you eventually deliver bad news (and you will), the relationship must already exist. Building it during a crisis looks like a coup; building it in week three looks like professionalism.
Your team is watching for one thing: are you a threat or a multiplier? Resist the urge to announce a reorganization. Instead, demonstrate your standards through behavior—the questions you ask in the first forecast review, the analytical rigor you model, the way you handle a bad number (curiosity, not blame). One highly effective early move: pick a single, visible process and raise its quality dramatically—say, transform the monthly business review from a backward-looking recitation into a forward-looking decision forum. This shows the team the destination without threatening their jobs, and it converts your best people into allies who want to work for the new standard.
The GMs expect the new CFO to arrive and tighten the screws—more reporting, more scrutiny, less spending latitude. Invert the expectation. In your early meetings, ask what finance could do to *help them win*: faster approvals, better unit-economics visibility, a decision they've been waiting on. Deliver one such win early. This buys you the credibility to later impose discipline, because you've established that finance is a value partner, not just a cost gate. The CFO who taxes before trading spends the next two years fighting the business; the one who trades first gets voluntary compliance.
Knowledge check
1. The lesson uses Ruth Porat's introduction of segment reporting at Google to illustrate what principle about a new CFO's early impact?
2. Why does the lesson warn that the moves 'most likely to feel CFO-like'—restructuring the team, slashing costs, overhauling the model—are dangerous in the first 90 days?
3. What is the primary purpose of a 'cash conversion walk' as recommended in the diagnostic phase?
4. Select ALL correct answers about what the lesson identifies as the core work of a new CFO's first quarter.
Select all the correct answers.
5. Select ALL correct answers about how a new CFO should approach the first ~30 days according to the lesson.
Select all the correct answers.
The difference between a CFO who consolidates authority and one who forfeits it usually comes down to three or four early decisions. Here is the discrimination that matters.
Find one quantifiable, defensible early win. Not a grand transformation—a concrete, provable improvement delivered inside 90 days. Releasing trapped working capitalworking capitalWorking capital is the difference between a company's current assets and current liabilities, measuring short-term liquidity and the funds available to run daily operations.View full definition → by tightening a sloppy collections process. Renegotiating a banking covenant with room to spare. Killing a reporting cycle that consumed 200 analyst-hours and produced nothing anyone read. The win must be *yours*, *measurable*, and *hard to argue with*. It converts abstract expectation into demonstrated competence.
Fix the plumbing before rebuilding the house. If the close takes 15 business days, or if two systems produce two different revenue numbers, address the integrity of the information architecture first. You cannot make good decisions—or be trusted—on top of numbers people don't believe. This is unglamorous and exactly why it builds durable credibility: it removes friction everyone silently resented.
Reframe one metric that changes behavior. Like Porat's segment split, the highest-leverage early move is often not a decision but a disclosure—internal or external. Introduce a return-on-invested-capital lens where the org only ever tracked growth. Expose the true fully-loaded cost of a product line that everyone assumed was profitable. Changing what the organization *measures* changes what it *does*, and it does so without you having to win every individual argument.
The premature reorganization. Restructuring the finance team in month one, before you understand who is genuinely capable versus who was merely mismanaged, destroys institutional knowledge and signals impulsiveness. You will fire people you needed and keep people you'll regret. Wait until you have a diagnosis, not a first impressionimpressionThe total number of times an ad or piece of content is displayed, regardless of clicks. Each display counts as one impression, even to the same person.View full definition →.
The indiscriminate cost cut. A CFO who arrives cutting to signal seriousness often cuts the investments that were actually working, because those show up as expense lines without visible near-term return. Blunt cost-cutting in the first 90 days—before you can distinguish value-creating spend from waste—wins applause from the market for a quarter and hollows out the business for years. If genuine cuts are required (a real turnaround), sequence them behind a diagnosis you can defend line by line.
Over-promising to the Street or the board. The pressure to signal a bold new direction pushes new CFOs to commit to targets they don't yet understand. The credibility you build by *beating* a conservative early guide is worth vastly more than the applause for an ambitious one you later miss. In your first earnings cycle, under-commit. You will never have a better excuse for caution than "I've been here 60 days."
Publicly indicting your predecessor. Trashing the prior regime feels like establishing a mandate for change. It actually signals to the organization that you'll blame others, and it insults the many people who built the systems you're criticizing—people you now need. Diagnose the past privately; frame the future publicly.
MapMapUsing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.View full definition → your intended moves on two axes: *reversibility* and *information required*. Do the irreversible, information-hungry moves last. Do the reversible, low-information moves first. This single discipline prevents most first-90-days disasters, because it forces you to ask before every action: *Do I actually know enough to do this, and can I undo it if I'm wrong?*