The easy mistake CFOs make scaling FP&A

Why corporate finance matters less than embedded finance in the early days

I wish I’d heard this sooner in my Intercom days.

Years back I sat down with Bill Losch, who helped take Okta from a couple hundred people through IPO. I asked him what most finance leaders get wrong when they start building their team.

His answer was not quite what I expected or what I’d considered before. Most CFOs overweight corporate work and underweight embedded work. They race to hire people who can crank out board decks, models, and KPI slides before they hire people who sit with the teams and help them understand how the business actually works.

Bill had made that mistake earlier in his career. At Okta, he flipped the playbook and went embedded first. It made all the difference.

Corporate pulls you in. Embedded moves you forward.

It’s easy to see why corporate FP&A gets all the attention. Boards ask for it. Investors expect it. Once you’re public, Wall Street grades it. The temptation is to live inside the master model and push numbers down.

But that only gets you so far.

Embedded finance is what really drives the business. It’s the finance partner sitting next to the Head of Sales or the Growth PM, asking the questions that actually change decisions this week. What incentives should we create across the sales team to drive growth? How can we best understand the channels that are most profitably driving MQLs? Where in our funnel are users dropping off and what product can we build to mitigate that?

Without these foundational understandings of how the business works, the corporate model is really just built on a house of cards. The embedded partnerships lead to a far richer understanding of the business. It doesn’t work in reverse.

Bill’s blueprint at Okta

When Bill joined Okta around 140 people, he didn’t build a centralized FP&A team first. He hired an FP&A lead who knew both worlds… someone who could hold the corporate model together but also knew how to partner with operators. Together they seeded embedded partners across the org.

There was a bias tho that he had to unlearn, and conciously work against as he built the team. And that was to more heavily staff embedded FP&A folks than on the corporate, strategic side. That changes later as IPO prep got real, but never did corporate outweigh the embedded partnership side of things.

My First Operator take

This is exactly how I think about the “first operator” role in finance. Early on, your job isn’t to sit at the highest level of the company and crank board slides. It’s to be in the trenches with the teams, helping them understand their corner of the business and make better decisions.

That’s the whole point. Not just reporting on stuff. Not just forecasting. Actually helping people test hypotheses, spot constraints, and see clearly how their work ties to results.

Finance has this unfair advantage: we get a view across the whole company. But that vantage point only becomes valuable if we’re close to the work.

A quick framework to apply right now

Think in three lanes:

Lane 1. Partner deeply.
Put finance owners inside your highest-leverage functions. Sales, Marketing, Growth, Product. Give them one concrete weekly objective.

Lane 2. Wire the loop.
Replace static budget check-ins with a weekly operating review. Let your embedded partners own the story of one meaningful change each week.

Lane 3. Keep corporate tight but thin.
Maintain one master model. Keep it simple enough to edit in a meeting. Connect it directly to what the embedded folks are learning.

A word to finance people

Here’s the part I really want finance folks to hear.

Everybody wants to be in corporate. I know I did. It feels like the sexy stuff. You get to sit close to the CEO, work on board decks, roll up the numbers. I get it.

But if all you’ve done is corporate FP&A, you’re honestly not that interesting a finance person to me.

The people I find most impressive are the ones who’ve been embedded… who have sat with a sales team and really understood how pipeline works, or dug into marketing spend and figured out what actually converts, or partnered with an R&D lead on resourcing tradeoffs. That experience makes you ten times more valuable when you do move into corporate finance, because you actually understand the guts of the business.

So if you’re early in your career, bias toward the front lines. Go deep with operators. Learn the mechanics. That’s how you become the kind of finance leader who can later run both sides of the house

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