Written by Christine Truong, drawing on conversations with CFOs and senior finance leaders across Australia.
This week: headcount pressure, revenue growth, and why the FP&A function may be one of the most underused assets in the business.
Cutting Costs Is Not a Growth Strategy
Headcount pressure has been real across Australian businesses for the past three years. It continues.
Redundancies, restructures, hiring freezes, role consolidation and quieter decisions not to replace people when they leave have become familiar across many sectors. It is happening at every level, though particularly at the senior end.
Margins are under pressure. The board wants action. Headcount is visible, measurable and moves quickly. So headcount moves.
Cutting costs is not a growth strategy.
At some point, the only sustainable path out of margin pressure is revenue growth. And it is very difficult to grow revenue with depleted teams, a frozen hiring line and a finance function spending most of its time explaining last quarter. The cost conversation and the growth conversation need to happen at the same time. Not one instead of the other.
This is where FP&A should be far more central to the discussion. A strong FP&A function does not just ask, “What can we cut?” It helps the business ask better questions. What are we trying to grow? Where is capital tied up? And what capability are we cutting today that the business will need tomorrow? That is a very different conversation from simply reducing the headcount line.
The FP&A Function: The Most Underused Asset in the Business
This brings me to something I have been hearing consistently in conversations with finance leaders and CEOs across Australia. Many businesses, including sizeable ones, do not have a dedicated FP&A function. Not because the capability does not exist in the team, but because financial control, reporting and operational finance already consume the available bandwidth. Deep FP&A work requires its own dedicated focus. It cannot sit reliably on the side of an already full desk.
In a recent conversation with the CFO of a listed company, it was the CFO who recognised the gap and pushed for a dedicated Head of FP&A. The CEO backed the decision, and it was only after the function was in place and the output started coming through that the value became clear to everyone in the room.
That story is more common than people realise. The need is there. It just is not always visible until someone fills it.
The sales team owns the revenue number. Marketing owns the channel. Operations owns delivery. FP&A does not own any one of those functions. But it creates the visibility, discipline and decision framework that helps them work from the same commercial picture and move in the same direction.
When it is working properly, FP&A becomes a genuine growth partner to both the CFO and CEO. Not just the function that explains last quarter. The one that helps shape the next one.
Until next edition, Christine