Ask a €500M industrial company how it runs its finance function and you get a system: a close calendar, controls, an audit. Ask how it runs strategy and you often get a two-day offsite, a slide template inherited from a former CFO, and whatever the strongest personality in the room believed going in. 78% of mid-market companies report running strategy with an internal team and no method at all.
This is not a talent problem. The executives in these companies are as capable as any I have worked with in larger groups. It is a structural one. They are too big for strategy to happen in the founder's head and too small to justify a large firm's fee — so the process that decides where the next five years of EBITDA come from is the least structured process in the building.
What "no method" costs
Every offsite starts from zero. Assumptions are never written down, so they are never tested. Trade-offs are avoided because there is no mechanism that forces them among peers. And the output is bullets, so nothing can be modelled when the market moves. The company is not badly run. It is running strategy the way it ran finance before it had a CFO.
What a method gives back
A fixed sequence of questions the team answers itself. The licence, from outside the peer group, to make a trade-off stick. A one-page model rather than a deck, so a scenario can be run against it. And a monthly review that connects the page to the P&L. None of this requires a large firm. It requires a system and one senior person who will hold the room to it.
Monday
Ask your CFO to describe the finance close in five steps. Then ask your leadership team to describe the strategy process in five steps. If the first answer comes easily and the second does not, you have found the gap — and it is the more expensive of the two.
