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Communication and the Business Partner
Posted by Helen Lumb - 17 th June 2013
What is a business partner?
…..an individual or company who has some degree of involvement with another entity’s business dealings.
But what does this really mean?
My definition of a business partner is someone who sits in the heart of the business. We fully understand the business model, financial and non financial key performance indicators, we are able to set strategy and/ or understand and implement business strategy. We understand the impact of varying different business actions and are able to communicate effectively throughout. The expertise, collaboration and breadth leads to enhanced business decisions which in turn leads to enhanced financial performance.
A finance business partner is a finance professional who takes on this role.
The terminology of finance business partnering has usually been synonymous with large global organisations and wide scale finance transformations, but my aim with this series of blogs is to demonstrate that this approach is actually common sense and can be applied to any business regardless of size. You will notice if you read my first blog that this is an approach I have used for many years and most of my latter career has been working with smaller entrepreneurial, high growth business and the approach is just as sound.
How does this enhance performance?
I think the first thing to consider is what do we mean by performance? I am going to take this to mean financial performance, a tangible result in something like Sales or Gross Margin or Cash or some other financial key performance indicator. In reality, any strategic aim that has a measure around it, fits the bill. These are all measures of how a business is performing and a finance professional is often expert in reporting these, which makes them ideally placed to be the business partner.
The strategic aim of improving financial business performance however, will usually sit deep within the business, the finance professional is often only asked to measure and report. But what if the expert in these financial measures, became the collaborator, working hand in hand deep within the business and the business manager, to support and drive this financial business performance? What if the business manager embraced this finance professional and their skills and a partnership was created?
One of the keys to success is in the word “partnership”
The business partner must be collaborative, ie have all the necessary communication skills to converse with the business unit and the business manager as well as with the finance unit. In fact, in my own experience, in smaller organisations, there may be only one finance professional, and it is therefore extremely important in this instance they can wear both “hats” of business partner and maintain financial control, compliance and measuring activities.
However, communication skills are not the only requirement. Engagement is absolutely necessary to success. The business partner must actively engage themselves with the role and with the business and become a trusted colleague. The business and business manager must become engaged with this new role, have buy in to what they are there to achieve and trust that they are there to add value.
A combination of Communication and Engagement leads to Performance
My next blog is entitled “Entrepreneurs and Accountants” where I demonstrate how this approach is totally scalable and cost effective, for businesses who are unable to have a full time finance professional that can devote to this role, in fact also how it can work where no full time finance professional is employed by the business.
Future blogs and articles will talk about how to go about achieving this in practice.
Please read my blogs, give me your comments and feedback, follow me on Twitter where I will post when I have added new information or send me your email address to Helen.lumb@indigoperformance.co.uk and I will contact you when a new post has been added.
Helen Lumb is director and co-