Why I Use CFOO
For a long time, I owned both the operations and the financial stack at a bootstrapped software company. In smaller companies that combination is less unusual than it sounds. The work needs to get done, and there's no one else to do it.
What I didn't appreciate until later was how much that combination changed how I thought about strategy.
When every dollar comes from customers, timing matters. Headcount, process, and story all have to match what the business can actually carry. You can't outspend a hiring mistake; you can't outpace a process the team isn't ready for; you can't outrun a pricing decision that the model doesn't support. The decisions in each function constrain each other, and you feel that most clearly when one person is responsible for all of them.
Inside the company, none of this had a title. The question was whether the budget was sound, the reporting was clear, and the business could keep moving.
Outside the company, the language gets more particular. An investor reading financials wants to know who built them. A founder pressure-testing a plan across hiring, cash, and execution needs to know who they're talking to. So at Callings.ai I'm building the operating and finance backbone for an AI job hunt platform, and the work has the title CFOO because that's what the work is.
The thing I keep coming back to: turning ideas into an operating model that can hold its weight. And in the meantime, I'll keep doing whatever moves us toward the goal: chopping onions, ordering toilet paper, or posting on social media.