Building a space for meaningful CFO connections

The number of events CFOs are marketed to attend grows every year. In the United Kingdom, Christopher Argent, founder of GENCFO, has developed an approach to building an executive community based on what he calls “community activities.”

According to some of its members, as well as its founder, GENCFO’s focus is to create an authentic, “non-salesy” experience and community where CFOs receive real value. Although there are differences in the way networking is done in the U.K. compared to the U.S., as Argent shares, the premise of the idea is still the same: creating long-lasting, meaningful professional connections.

ADAM ZAKI: The amount of networking groups and CFO events are both increasing. How do you continue to stay competitive in a market where lots of new players, media, and companies alike, are now getting into events and groups marketed towards CFOs?

CHRISTOPHER ARGENT: I think the pandemic killed the event industry for a couple of years. Afterward, there was a perfect storm of people needing to find connection again in this third space, this place between work and home. If I am at home more and at work less, there’s less opportunity for those serendipity chats, the chats that address inter-team problems, or things like that.

That’s where communities like ours come in — in this third space. I think the experience is everything and always has been. We are a community; we are not an events company, and I am the leader of our community. It’s not just about getting a list of good speakers; it’s about getting great sponsors and having a great approach to the management of the event and its experience. For us, that means truly enabling the conversation and connection between CFOs.

You don’t have to speak at every event; you can participate just by listening and having a conversation with another member, or even using our online tools to ask questions. That is a really meaningful contribution. We also have CFOs who want to be in the limelight, which we take into consideration when we are looking for interesting people to speak to an audience of our members.

We are a community first, and we’ve done everything we can to try and support the profession of a CFO. We work hard to get the right people in the room and create a space where CFOs want to join.

In America, I find it a bit crazy that there are events with thousands of people in the room. I can’t go to a wedding with more than 200 people and say I spoke to everyone there, so I am unsure what you could get out of a conference like that, especially as a CFO. What we do are community activities, not events, but we are all fighting for the same sponsorship revenue.

How do you construct a sponsored event or community activity that isn’t sales-driven?

ARGENT: We are very upfront about our no-sales environment. If people break the rules of that community, especially ours, they are not for that community. People come to our events for three reasons: connections, education and therapy. People don’t want to be sold to. If we do something that is sponsored, we make it 200% clear that it is sponsored, and they are going to get an email from the sponsor. But when we frame it like that, members don’t mind.

How do you help CFOs who come to you and say they’re tasked with creating a brand and image, including being tasked with public speaking, but have no experience in that and don’t know where to begin with their communication teams?

ARGENT: There are two ways we provide help here. We do a community approach and a personal journey approach. For the community approach, we put our members in a cohort of similar people to help them learn from each other and develop answers to questions about lack of experience.

We aren’t brand builders, but the other part of this is the personal journey approach where we offer many opportunities for CFOs to speak. We have our monthly mastermind where CFOs can give an opinion about a topic, we have community meets where they can ask questions from the audience during a community activity, we have podcasts and academies, and large virtual events. There are just so many ways we can provide opportunities for speaking experience.

We’re a community, not a speaking bureau, but we’ve helped many CFOs improve their ability to speak in front of an audience. We also have members who, after years of being a part of the organization, want to get on stage as a way to give back to us, and it takes the pressure off. We try to provide this through a very informal learning journey. It’s a safe environment to learn, and we can provide support at every level for those who want it.

You’ve written online about unplugging from social media and doing a digital detox. Is this feasible for CFOs, and what advice would you give to a CFO who wants to disconnect from technology temporarily?

ARGENT: It depends on what their aim is for social media. I include LinkedIn as social media and a lot of people use it to find jobs, but a lot of it is about profiles and the networks around them. Depending on how big of a company they’re from, I would have them develop a communication strategy that allows them to detox.

There are plenty of times when a strong presence of a CFO on a place like LinkedIn is valuable. When there are job postings for the finance team or even a possible acquisition, a CFO with a good online presence is good for optics. CFOs almost have to put their CMO hats on and define the point of their social media efforts. Then, if you structure the channels of communication in such a way that those efforts aren’t hindered by less activity on social media, unplugging may be possible.

We’ve seen many CFOs who have a secret network of brand-building support. We’ve helped them with posts on social media ourselves. For larger organizations, CFOs usually rely on internal communication teams to support that stuff, but then you risk losing authenticity in your posts. You have to be authentic in your posts or else your efforts are unlikely to hit their mark.

I think unplugging from things like LinkedIn and social media is much easier than most people think. I deleted the LinkedIn app from my phone. That’ll get you off your notifications and make it so you have to be on a computer to use it. You have to be quite conscious about this stuff, and I understand it is hard to break a habit. But, I think it’s easy once you try. 

When considering the long term for your organization, how do the differences in communication for Gen Z play into how you foresee your network in the future?

ARGENT: I am the director of the AAT, so I see real-world accountants regularly. Many of them are Gen Z. I also employ people in this generation at GENCFO. I’ve had many conversations recently about this, and I think the answer is it’s hard to judge how to respond to an entire generation as a whole. I think young people were impacted by the pandemic; many of them studied online and communicated via messenger. Adults nowadays always knew the expectation was to meet and build professional networks in person, whereas Gen Z didn’t necessarily develop that.

I think there are introverts and extroverts in every generation. From GENCFO’s perspective, our offerings will get stronger as a remote working world continues to be the world we live in. I don’t see a decline in Gen Z because I don’t think they are much different from other generations; I just think they’ve had a really tough time.

We did research early on in the pandemic and asked CFOs if they thought working remotely would mean being overlooked for a promotion, and most CFOs said yes. I believe you have to be present, you have to contribute in person and you have to be seen to be eligible for a leadership role. I think that will continue to materialize, but at the moment I don’t think there’s a worry for our trajectory because of the communication styles of Gen Z.

Article originally posted on CFO.com.