Shannon Power is the CFO of Scope AR.
As a CFO and transformation leader, I’ve witnessed countless boardroom conversations focused on increasing company valuation. Most often, the dialogue centers around revenue growth, margin improvement, market expansion and mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Never have I heard anyone else suggest increasing enterprise value through culture. In my experience, the most underestimated, underleveraged and highest return-on-investment (ROI) lever for increasing a company’s valuation is our people.
Investing in employees, not just in terms of compensation or benefits but by genuinely empowering, educating and engaging them, unlocks exponential potential. I’m not talking about engagement scores. This is about cash, growth and increased valuation.
Here are three moves any CFO can make to start increasing enterprise value through strategic investment in their people.
1. Connect the dots: Teach the business of the business.
If your people don’t understand how the company makes money, they can’t possibly help you make more of it.
At a previous employer, I inherited a back-office finance and operations team and was immediately tasked with cutting costs by 10%. But after interviewing every person on that team, what I learned was that we had a highly educated group with a lot of institutional/tribal knowledge and an untapped desire to contribute. The missing link? Business context.
We launched a series of end-to-end operational workshops, walking through how a sale turns into revenue, how delays in one function ripple downstream and how back-office costs impact margin. Suddenly, the team wasn’t just checking boxes, they were asking better questions, identifying process bottlenecks and collaborating across teams to propose changes that directly impacted costs and time to revenue.
The insight here is simple but powerful: When you invest time to ensure your employees understand the business of the business, they start acting like owners. Owners find ways to drive efficiency, cut costs and grow value.
2. Shift from management to empowerment.
You don’t scale excellence through micromanagement. You scale it by building the conditions for people to lead from where they are.
That same back-office team, once equipped with business context, started surfacing process improvement ideas on their own. But they needed leadership that would trust them to try, fail and improve.
We shifted from telling them how to do their jobs to focusing only on the outcomes. We started asking them what they would change. We trained them in automation tools like Excel macros, basic Python and paid artificial intelligence (AI) subscriptions. We established a simple reward system for implemented ideas that saved time, improved accuracy and reduced costs.
It worked. We didn’t need consultants, a major system overhaul or a layoff to surpass our goal of 10% cost reduction. We needed empowered employees who understood the business and felt ownership of the outcomes. Over time, we reduced cost per transaction, improved cycle times and, most importantly, created space for the team to take on more strategic work.
3. Build capacity, then reinvest it.
Here’s the part most leaders miss: Unlocking productivity through empowerment is only half the game. The real value comes when you reinvest that capacity.
When we freed up over 30,000 person-hours of finance and operations work, we didn’t pocket the savings and move on. We hit our 10% cost reduction target and then redeployed the remaining hours to higher-value activities, such as customer and account insights, partner enablement and customer engagement. The front-line people gained leverage, and revenue per head improved. The back office became known for operational excellence that every department wanted to partner with and be a part of. Our attrition rate was quickly approaching zero.
If your team saves time and you don’t redirect that time into business growth, you’ve left value on the table.
Bottom line: This is a CFO’s job.
As CFOs, we are stewards of capital. Increasingly, we must also be stewards of culture and capability. Valuation is not just a function of revenue and margin; it’s a reflection of how effectively you deploy your resources, and your people are your most valuable resource.
Here’s the challenge: For your next board meeting or strategic off-site, don’t just stick to your usual valuation levers, like pricing strategy or go-to-market (GTM) alignment; also show the multiplier effect of investing in your people. What are you doing to invest in your people? How are you empowering them to contribute to growth? Where are you enabling innovation from the inside out? Your next breakthrough in valuation may already be sitting in the back office, waiting to be unlocked.
The secret to higher valuation isn’t in the next acquisition or pricing model; it’s in your team, and the return on that investment is exponential.
The information provided here is not investment, tax or financial advice. You should consult with a licensed professional for advice concerning your specific situation.
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