Food for Thought When Crafting Your Controller Narrative
Welcome! As I mentioned, we are interested in making your voice part of our episode format. The idea is to record short interviews with controllers like you who may want to share a recent leadership insight, comment on a previous episode, or pose a question to future CFO guests. Your insights or questions will be packaged as a component of a future episode featuring a long-form interview with a traditional CFO guest. Our Controller Voice segment will run in the middle or perhaps towards the end of a given episode. Typically, a segment will run no more than 10 minutes.
We introduce participating controllers by name, title, and company. Our goal is to bring forth insights related to different business and career challenges that you and other finance professionals face on a day-to-day basis.
Our Controller Voice segment will involve a set of three questions. Our goal is to achieve a conversational tone for the segment, so we srongly advise guests NOT to rely on notes during the recording.
1. Tell us a little bit about yourself …
Boil down your career background into three concise and lively sentences. This can be challenging, but we want the listener to be intrigued by your background. Keep in mind that you are not handing them a resume. Your response is intended to give the listener a reason to want to hear more from you.
2. As someone who has built their career as a successful controller, what is top-of-mind for you today?
3. The Follow-Up Question
This question will relate to whatever has been shared.
Please Don’t Let Speakerphones Come Between Us
Many people listen to podcasts while driving, working out, cooking, or working at their jobs. These are places where other conversations are either impossible or unwelcome. Listeners are most often alone, creating an optimal environment for a speaker’s thoughts to make a more personal connection.
Part of our mission at CFO Thought Leader is to make finance leaders more approachable and accessible.
There’s little question that speakerphones are ideal for analyst briefings or earnings calls, when groups of people are being supplied detailed information.
However, speakerphones add distance between the speaker and the listener—they are off-putting and counter what is arguably the true value that we offer our guests: the ability to form more personal connections.
For this reason, as well as others, we strongly discourage the use of speakerphones or Polycoms and ask our guests to rely on a hand receiver or headset.