The Five Finance Love Languages: How to Talk to the CFO in Support
Kincy Clark, former Director of Support at Bolt with over 15 years of experience leading customer-facing teams in startups, has now embarked on a new venture after leaving Bolt, showcasing his extensive support expertise and dedication to the startup ecosystem.
Check out this video featuring Kincy Clark our upcoming speaker for November's Leadership Summit, where he shares insights on effective communication with finance teams, emphasizing the need for support leaders to speak the language of business and demonstrate the value of support beyond ticket metrics, ultimately positioning support as a value driver within the organization. This video offers a sneak peek into the compelling insights Kincy will be sharing on stage in Oakland.
Kincy Clark: Hey, my name's Kincy Clark. I was the Director of Support at Bolt for about two years. I recently left Bolt to start my own thing, but I have a depth of support experience. I've been running support and technical customer facing teams, I'd say for about 15 plus years, primarily in the startup world.
I'll be giving a talk, it's called the Five Finance Love Languages. Its subtitle is How to Talk to the CFO. So it's really about techniques that I've learned about how to communicate with the finance team to make sure that they understand support priorities, organization, and to help ensure that your priorities are understood by that team.
Finance teams deal with literally every group in the company, and let's be honest, in a company that has a support team is, probably driving revenue and sales, marketing are gonna be the finance team's priorities. And those teams typically don't have to expect finance teams to understand them.
However, the rest of the teams that form a company, that are just as important as sales, often are not well understood, and I think it's a fallacy to expect a finance team to understand how everyone else operates. You can hope that they will, and maybe they should, but the fact is most of them don't.
I take the approach of, "Hey, I'm gonna take responsibility and ownership for the conversation and I'm gonna learn how to speak their language so that there can be no confusion or misunderstanding around my priorities." And the language they speak is the language of business, which really everyone should be comfortable with speaking.
I've also found that support leaders in general, I would say customer facing leaders, maybe in general support leaders specifically are not as tuned in on the business side of things and tend to focus on other priorities that don't align well with business goals. And if you work for a company, the company's in business, and it's really important to understand that language and how those priorities are established.
I've experienced this many times, that they will have a really inaccurate understanding of what you're trying to accomplish. They have a really inaccurate understanding of the value you're driving, and they won't really have an effective way of measuring your performance or your outcomes.
So a common theme that I've seen is, finance teams and other teams really focus on tickets, and so they wanna talk about tickets because that's what they hear about. They hear about tickets from support, and I think we can all agree the volume and number and scape and size of tickets, while it's important for a team to understand, it doesn't define your value to the organization.
We don't have support teams to do tickets. We have support teams to support customers and make our customers successful. That's why we have to translate that. And it's not immediately obvious to a finance person what that relationship between, for example, tickets or medium time to resolution or some of the other statistics that they read about and they hear about.
Those are operational metrics. So it's real important that we give them a clear understanding of the value support drives. It may seem obvious to a support leader, but obvious things are often not as obvious as they should be.
I've been in a lot of organizations where the management leadership team is focused on, "We gotta reduce the number of tickets because that's gonna reduce costs." It's not really - reducing the number of tickets may have an impact on cost, but it probably is not the relationship we're looking for.
And also we're talking about the wrong thing. Should we be talking about costs or should we be talking about an investment? Support teams are an investment and they should be doing things. We don't have support teams to save money. And oftentimes if you position yourself as a cost center, and I've heard support leaders describe themselves as cost centers. If you describe yourself as a cost center, guess what? You're going to set yourself up for a scenario where you're going to be looked at as a way to save money.
So if you wanna change that narrative, and you want people to see you as a value driver and a value creator, then you have to speak a different language than that of an expense center.
It's one thing to say, "Hey, you need a support team, we keep customers. Without support, you wouldn't have any customers." All of that may be true, but if you can't really demonstrate that in a way that is palpable and can be put on some sort of measurement, you're really just saying words out loud and it's gonna fall on deaf ears more often than not.
The CFO's role is to manage resources. That's his only job, the resources. And that is the language you have to speak. It's great that you have all these intangible outcomes, but the fuel, the engine, the coal is all money and that's the resource that they control. So you have to be able to communicate with them in a way that they can translate that to a financial outcome. Not necessarily a financial revenue or more money for the company or profitability, but you gotta pay your team and your team doesn't work for free.
So that's money. If you wanna pay your team good salaries, you really need to be able to demonstrate that they create great value.
I have an accounting background from college, and I studied cost accounting, which is a very specific form of accounting where you're trying to understand costs. I was looking at that time at overhead centers. Things like finance teams, ironically, are considered overhead, human resources, those types of teams were all considered overhead.
So I was looking at how to allocate those costs. I brought a lot of accounting knowledge with me and just over the time as I grew my career and got into more senior leadership roles, I'd say it culminated at Bolt where I had an opportunity to work with a really good finance team that was also willing to listen and work with me.
At that point in my career, I got all these ideas that I wanted to put together. And that was one of the amazing opportunities at Bolt, was we had the resources where I could do some things. And this is one of the things that I really had been wanting to do for some time. So this latent interest in accounting, a good understanding of accounting because I could go talk to them in an accounting language and I could have some adult conversations with them that they weren't expecting to have with a support leader. They weren't expecting me to talk about expense categorizations and all the other things that kind of go into that, and so the outcome was just some really good mind shifts on that team and I recognize yeah, I wish someone had a shared this with me a lot earlier than my career. I definitely could have benefited, because I definitely crossed doors with more than a few accounting and finance teams in the past where I was getting hacked, they wanted to cut stuff and I couldn't articulate what the impact was because I was getting frustrated and I was being defensive.
My experience at Bolt really sealed the deal on, yeah, I need to do it this way. This is a much more productive way to do it than fighting and complaining. The big shift, there were actually several things that happened. The first was an acceptance of my resourcing model. So they model, and I'll talk about this in more detail, they model teams growth. And they, and again, if you let the finance team model your growth, they're gonna model it their way, they're not gonna model it the way that makes sense necessarily. So I got them to accept a staffing and resourcing model. And that means what are they budgeting. So a lot of support leaders are gonna think like staffing in terms of who works when, where. No. We're talking about, how much money are you getting next year to hire and retain people?
That's the model we're talking about. So they got them to accept the model. But the big thing I got them to accept was the value proposition of support. I got them to stop thinking about us as a cost center that does tickets and just focusing on Kincy, reduce tickets, reduce the number of tickets.
Tickets are important signal, maybe you don't wanna reduce the number of tickets because maybe the tickets are telling you important information about your product and your customers. I got them to really shift their mindset and really understand the value of the team for where Bolt was at that time, is more around understanding the product and the customer environment.
That's the value we're bringing. We're not reducing operational costs as value. I'm telling you really important things about the product. I got the finance team to really understand that in a way that, I would argue, other teams maybe did not understand fully and appreciate the value, and that really created some great conversations internally about how we are positioning ourselves in the market. At the end of the day, those are the conversations we wanna have. It's like, how are we driving a business, not how can I get support more money? How can we be successful as an organization?
That's the conversation you wanna have. And how do you contribute to that? I think as a manager, this is less important. You need to be aware of it because when you do get that call to be a director or VP or head of support in another organization, this stuff's gonna come pretty quick.
And if you're not prepared to have those conversations, you can quickly get on the wrong end of things. It's just something to be aware of. And then as your career grows, as you start to move into more senior leadership roles, this becomes much more important. I think the earlier you start on this, the better.
If you as a leader can communicate this, your stock goes up. One thing I'll share, we're picking on support. It's support driven, but we're not the only group that struggles with this. Success struggles with this. Professional services sometimes struggles with this, kind of depending on what phase of the business they're in.
Engineering, strangely enough in the tech world, can often struggle with this because again, their value propositions aren't necessarily crystal clear. Product team. So a lot of teams struggle with this language, but I'm offering kind of some tools that are very support specific for support leaders.
That's my background, that's my experience, but really I've got some feedback about this, that a lot of people should be looking at this video, not just support people.
Check out this video now featuring Kincy Clark our upcoming speaker for November's Leadership Summit. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
