Charting a Path Forward
Top Priorities for CFOs in 2024
The CFO role has evolved over the years, expanding from its traditional financial focus to a broad range of strategic responsibilities. Today's CFOs wear many hats – from financial planning to compliance and risk management and strategic decision-making, among many others. In an environment marked by rapid technology advancements, market volatility and regulatory changes, CFOs play a crucial role in guiding organizations through challenges to build resilience and maintain profitability.
In this blog, we delve into CFOs’ top priorities for 2024, drawing from a recent Gartner survey, and explore how leveraging sale-leasebacks can unlock capital to address these priorities.
1. Leading Transformation Efforts
Embracing technology and automation remains a top challenge for organizations. Recognizing the crucial role of technology in enhancing business efficiency, compliance and competitiveness, CFOs will focus more on leading digital transformation efforts, both within their departments and across the entire organization.
CFOs are integral to driving business transformation, especially in evaluating the best initiatives to adopt and their contribution to the bottom line. As companies scale, continuous implementation of emerging technologies becomes essential for efficient growth management.
2. Evaluating or Improving Financial Strategy
Managing the finance function is a core responsibility for CFOs, and is vital for business growth and continuity. With the current economic and market volatility, CFOs will focus more on evaluating and improving the finance function's strategy.
A robust financial strategy is essential to meet short and long-term financial goals and ensure positive business outcomes. It offers a better understanding of the company's present financial situation, assesses potential risks, outlines income goals, identifies competencies, investment strategies and funding options necessary to realize those goals.
3. Improving Finance Metrics, Insights and Storytelling
Understanding financial metrics and insights is crucial not just for CFOs, but the whole organization. As such, leveraging data visualization can help simplify complex concepts, streamline reporting and foster collaboration across the organization. This can enable companies to tell stories and drive better understanding of their messaging among core audiences, including investors, which can potentially boost valuation. CFOs will prioritize improving finance metrics, insights and storytelling to achieve these and other benefits.
4. Leading Change Management Efforts
CFOs will also prioritize leading change management in 2024. Resistance to change among employees is a common challenge often triggered by factors like fear of the unknown, lack of trust in leadership or loss of control. Effective change management is thus vital to organizational success. Strategic leadership promotes consistency, builds employee trust, enhances cost management and enables organizational agility, among other benefits.
5. Optimizing Costs
Optimizing costs is yet another area of precedence for CFOs in 2024. Strategic cost management is essential for the realization of organizational goals, especially in volatile times. Possible initiatives include, promoting cost-consciousness across the organization to reduce operating costs, adopting new technology and automation to address inefficiencies, embracing data-driven decision-making and improving vendor management.
The Key to Make it All Happen
The success of an organization's financial initiatives hinge on the availability of capital. Particularly in an uncertain rate environment, access to liquidity is essential in providing companies with flexibility and growth capital. For companies that own their real estate, sale-leasebacks offer an alternative capital source to support CFOs’ 2024 priorities. These transactions enable companies to access immediate funds while maintaining operational control of their facilities.
However, several considerations must be addressed to determine the suitability of a sale-leaseback for a business. First, sale-leasebacks only makes sense if the company owns its real estate. Additionally, a strong credit profile is necessary and a willingness to commit to a long-term lease is essential.
The W. P. Carey Solution
With all the conditions met, a sale-leaseback is a handy strategy that CFOs can explore to raise the much-needed capital to support the above priorities. At W. P. Carey, we have helped many companies in North America and Europe leverage this financing solution for over 50 years.
If you're considering unlocking capital for your operations this year through a sale-leaseback, contact W. P. Carey today!
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Sale-leaseback vs. Traditional Debt: A Company’s Guide to Evaluating the Options
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Carey’s Carey Tenant Solutions platform, for example, is designed to support tenants beyond the initial acquisition through follow-on investments, including build-to-suits and expansions, redevelopment and renovations, and energy solutions. That makes the selection of a buyer-landlord an important component of the sale-leaseback decision. Just as companies consider the terms, capacity and flexibility of a lending relationship when evaluating traditional debt, they should assess whether a prospective real estate partner can support their longer-term needs. The economics at closing matter, but so does the ability of the partner to accommodate the business as it grows and changes. Looking beyond the cost of capital The decision between a sale-leaseback and traditional debt financing is ultimately bigger than the cost of one source of capital versus another. It is a decision about capital allocation. Companies should consider the amount of capital the business needs, its existing capital structure, the strategic importance of owning its real estate and how effectively newly available capital can be deployed. Interested in exploring whether a sale-leaseback could complement your broader capital strategy? Contact W. P. Carey to learn more.
Where Opportunity Exists in European Real Estate Today
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