EOW Reflections: Get in the room

I had the fabulous job of chairing at the World Finance Forum in London this week. The main audience for the WFF is Chief Financial Officers for all sizes of businesses. As many of them contract with small business suppliers, it’s an ideal opportunity for me to get messages to them about the importance of paying, particularly the smallest firms, quickly and to discuss the benefits to all in the supply chain, of doing that. If small businesses get paid quicker, they are more confident that they can manage their cashflow and more likely to invest in better skills, training, innovation, jobs, updated equipment and processes. They create better products and services as a result and you as the customer reap the benefit by getting better products and services to sell on to your customers. What’s not to like.

On top of having a platform from which to spread the word, I get to meet people who are committed to continuous improvements, hear from terrific speakers and learn so much about the finance functions of bigger businesses. The processes and the technology used to operate those processes and what it can do are breathtaking. Only one person adamantly asserted that there’s still a role for spreadsheets. I suspect there were others wedded to their spreadsheets who decided to say nothing.

It was as the afternoon wore to a close that I started to think about who wasn’t in the room. It’s the good people who want to improve payment process and make their systems more accessible, convenient, and easy to onboard their suppliers to, who attend this and similar events, to hear about best practice, the latest developments and discuss implementation. How do we get the people who aren’t engaging with the need for improvements to join in and how do we convince them it would be to their benefit to learn from sharing ideas and experiences and to get with the programme?

One panel I chaired discussed the need for better relationships all along the supply chain with customers and other stakeholders. One speaker on that panel, talked about taking 18 months to work at building a particular relationship before it bore fruit. Perhaps that’s what it takes to get people to understand the need for change, improving practices and the benefits that can bring. Perhaps that’s what it takes to get people in the room too. Maybe if we start now, we can get some of the finance people who are less keen on improving processes to come along next time.

From now on – each time I get an invitation to an event where I can bring along a guest, I will try to find someone who might gain insight into the workings of small suppliers. I’m going to invite them along instead of taking someone from my own team. We need to extend our reach rather than making the echo chamber bigger. We need to spread the word. Help me. Don’t take a knowledgeable colleague as your plus 1. Take someone who might change their ways if better informed. It might take us 18 months, but success will be seeing them on a panel in a couple of years’ time talking about what they did to improve their company’s approach and behaviours and what sparked that change.