When you can't fund everything on a wishlist, ask partners what they actually need most. A $5M budget might mean choosing between a Hawaii offsite and hiring for priority work. Understanding their real goals makes the trade-offs easier to negotiate.
If you're gonna go to your business partner and say, hey, gimme your wishlist, let's see what we can do. Make sure they understand they're not getting everything on their wishlist, right? Just because you're asking for it doesn't mean it's gonna be in the budget. Right. But you start with it and then you go over and say, okay, how do we solve for as much of this as possible given that you can't spend more than $5 million in this team or whatever it is? So now you gotta say, well, where's the trade-offs gonna be? You want to, maybe you shouldn't go over and do that team offsite in Hawaii and instead that will allow you to go over and do this other thing that you wanna do. And so that's the trade-off and that's the discussion. And it's where it's really more about that connection with the business partner, understanding what their goals are that they're trying to achieve.
Trust and Leadership Lessons for FP&A From 100+ Top Leaders with CFO Jon Laudie
