'Find the path to yes': Halter CFO on how finance can drive growth without holding the business back
Fri, 18th Sep 2026 (Today)
At the CFO Summit last week, we caught up offstage with Scott Maud, CFO of Halter, to get his take on a few questions top of mind for finance leaders. Here are 2 Q&As to share with the sector:
For those in the finance sector who couldn't make it today, what were your key messages and takeaways you wanted to share on raising capital for a growing company?
I think it comes down to some key fundamentals which I've seen time and time again to be real. If you get them right, it's really effective in being successful in raising capital.
And that is making sure you've got a product that genuinely solves a customer problem, and in doing so, it creates value for them, creates benefit for them. So that's the first thing, and you want your customers to be able to talk to that and say, "Yes, this product really helps me and solves a problem."
Secondly, an investor considering investment in you wants to see that there's a massive addressable market that you can sell into. What that means is that particular problem you solve - they want to make sure that problem is repeating thousands, millions of times all around the world.
And then if you multiply the value of that problem by the number of times it occurs, there's a massive, valuable market for you to sell into. So those two things are pretty key.
The other thing, which you earn the right to have, is a unique position in the market - a strategic advantage. What makes you uniquely positioned to actually be able to capitalise on that addressable market? And in doing so, can you build a strategic advantage or a moat around your business to increase the barriers of entry for others to be able to do the same? Get those things right, and you become a very investable proposition.
You've got to thread it all together, though, with good storytelling. That's the key role of a CEO: to bring that together. I think the nature of the storytelling changes based on the stage of the company. In the early stages, frankly, you don't want to see a CFO near it - they'll just ruin the story (ha ha). But as the company matures and it becomes more important to have financial models and your story backed up by key metrics like unit economics and things like that, the role of the CFO becomes really important.
So, time and time again, I have seen that formula, those ingredients, be so important for the success of capital raising and the outcomes you get.
How do you know when you're being appropriately conservative versus when finance is actually holding the business back?
Finance never wants to be holding the business back, so you've got to find ways to say yes. So I find if you're saying no, and you find yourself feeling on balance you want to say no too often, you might have to reset your dial around your risk appetite.
What I always encourage our team to do is - yeah, people are always coming to you with ideas they want to spend money on or decisions they want made - and we need to help those people find what's the path to yes. What would we have to believe to be able to very easily say yes to this proposition for investment or allocating capital reasons? It's like, "Well, if these things were true, I would say yes to this." Often those things come back to key metrics in the business - what you're looking for from return on investment, or it could just be as simple as what are the unit economics around a particular proposal, or what's the gross margin that we're after if we commit to a particular supplier. These are reasons to say yes.
If finance is saying no or getting feedback that they're slowing the business down, finance really needs to look at themselves and work out: how can we unlock this problem? So that's how we focus on it.
What I find in a business like Halter is that the business is moving quite quick, and so quite often finance does get caught on the back foot. My job at the moment is a lot around anticipating what's going to be the need for finance to be able to keep up with the pace of the business.
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Missed the CFO Summit? Your next chance to upskill and update is at our next One Stop Update for the Accountant in Business | 12-13 October 2026 | Virtual
