At the bottom of this post you’ll get a quick round up on who’s taking the CFO seat at PE-backed companies. Scroll down for the latest from Cellpoint Digital, Hadron Energy, and Lumistry.

The company all hands, or town hall, is underutilized air time. If you think about it, it’s the most expensive hourly meeting you have as a company.

And yet… Most finance leaders treat it like a metrics death march through hell. Here's the quarter. Here are the numbers. Here's the forecast. Any questions? No? Great, back to the coal mines.

That's a missed opportunity.

You have the floor. You have the attention. And you're sitting on context nobody else has. You know which customers are actually profitable. You know why the board keeps asking about that one pipeline metric. You see the cash balance every morning.

Engineering doesn't have that. Sales doesn't have that. Marketing definitely doesn't have that.

So don't waste the airtime reading numbers off a slide they could've skimmed in an email. Your job is to weave financial context into their weekly activities.

Here are five ways to make that time count.

This seems obvious. Almost too obvious. But a surprising number of employees go years without fully understanding their company's revenue model.

They find out in passing that you only offer annual contracts, not monthly. That the supplier pays you, not the end user. That your take rate is only 3%. That services are bundled at no cost.

These aren't small details. Every resource allocation decision in the company ties back to revenue. When people don't understand the mechanics, they lack the context to make aligned decisions. Product teams prioritize the wrong features for the wrong cohort of customers. Sales reps negotiate deals that hurt near term cash flows. Product increases reliance on integration partners that kill your gross margin with API fees.

Here's a simple framework for breaking it down:

Who pays us. Start with the basics. Are they individuals? Businesses? Middlemen?

What they pay. Average revenue per customer and transaction, and the factors that move it.

When we get paid. Upfront? In arrears? Month to month? After a long sales cycle?

The size of our market. High-level TAM and how much you currently have.

Where it could take us. This is the "so what." How does the current model set up future opportunities… new products, verticals, geographies?

That last piece is what connects someone's Tuesday afternoon in Miro or Hubspot to the five-year plan.

Interest rates are staying put. Cool. What does that mean for us?

That's the question everyone's too polite to ask. And when you don't answer it, they answer it themselves. Usually with whatever they read on Twitter that day.

You're not an economist. But you are the person who can take the macro headline and make it specific to the micro of your company.

Rates staying high means our debt is more expensive. Which means M&A is probably not around the corner. Which means we should continue to invest in our new product roadmap. And which anlso means our customers may start squeezing us ant renewal if hiring contracts.

That's useful. That's something people can actually work with.

Daniel Lentz at BigCommerce had a move I keep coming back to. Quarterly all-hands, he'd put up a scatter plot. Revenue growth on one axis, profit margin on the other. Every public SaaS company, plotted.

A simple chart. No Fed commentary. Just: look, the whole market moved. We moved with it. That's not a failure. That's the game right now. Let’s play it to the best of abilities.

But there's a limit. Lentz is clear about where he draws the line:

“I don't get up in front of employees and tell them what I think about tariffs. I don't want people distracted by what they can't control."

Give people the context to understand the decisions. Don't give them new things to worry about.

Because when you leave a vacuum, people fill it. And the version of the story that spreads through Slack and the coffee machine is always worse than the one you could've told them yourself.

CFOs are terrible at this. We're wired to stare at the big number. The ARR target. The margin goal. The runway. We set audacious goals at the beginning of the year and spend twelve months measuring everything against them.

Which means a lot of good work gets ignored.

Someone on the data team just fixed the pipeline that was breaking attribution. That doesn't show up in the P&L. Someone in procurement got your biggest supplier to move from net-60 to net-45 payment terms. That's real cash back in the business. Nobody's jumping on desks. Someone in sales got a key account to flip from monthly to annual billing. Better predictability, less churn risk, cash upfront.

These are real wins. Real people behind them. And when you don't acknowledge them, you're basically saying: doesn't count until it hits the bottom line.

That's how you burn people out.

The town hall is a chance to fix that. Not in a cheesy "shout-out to Susan in accounting" way. But actually naming the work that laid the tracks for other people to move faster. The stuff that won't show up in this quarter's results but will absolutely show up in next year's.

You're in the business of audacious goals. Fine. But you have to chunk that up. Mark the milestones. Otherwise people are just running toward a finish line they never seem to reach.

And that gets really old.

Here's something that happens more than it should: you put a revenue chart on the screen and half the room glazes over. Not because they don't care. Because they can't see themselves in it.

An engineer ships a feature. Cool. But does she know she's working on a $25 million product line? Does the entry level support rep know the accounts he's helping are worth $3 million a year? Does the marketing manager know her campaign is feeding the only international segment that's actually growing?

That's a problem. Because if people can't connect their work to the outcomes, they're just guessing at what matters.

Ken Stillwell, CFO at Pega, thinks about this a lot. He's got a framework: Why. Why me. Why now.

Why are we doing this thing. Why does it matter to your team specifically. And why does it matter today.

That's not some Mad Men marketing spend convincing you to smoke. That's just being a good communicator. One message doesn't land the same way across every team. Sales hears "we're cutting R&D spend" and panics… where's my product innovation? But if you connect it to "so we can invest more in lead gen and marketing to make more money off our current products in order to fund our future roadmap” suddenly they see the trade-off. They're in on the decision instead of anxious about it.

Stillwell nails it:

So when you're up there running through the results, make it tangible. That $25 million product line? Name the team that built it. That churn improvement? Tie it to the support org that fixed the onboarding experience. That sales efficiency gain? Credit the RevOps work that made it possible.

People want to see themselves in the number. Help them find it.

You know what matters. Gross margin. Net retention. CAC payback. Whatever. You stare at these numbers every day. You dream about them. You're sick of them.

Your employees heard them once in onboarding and haven't thought about them since.

Remember that they don’t remember.

Pick the three that actually matter this year. Repeat them until you're sick of hearing yourself say them. Then repeat them again. Why this metric. What the target is. What we can do in the near term to move it.

Maria Izurieta, CFO at Huntress, is a big believer in this:

Showing people the numbers isn't the same as explaining the numbers. Anyone can put a gross margin chart on a slide. The work is connecting it to decisions. Why we're not hiring that role. Why we're pushing back on that deal. Why we walked away from that customer.

And there’s a payoff: when people actually understand the math, they stop bringing you bad deals in the first place. Sales starts qualifying out the low-margin stuff before it hits your desk. Product stops pitching features for customers who don't pay. Procurement gets religious about payment terms.

You're not the only person protecting the model anymore. You've got a whole company doing it with you.

Izurieta learned this firsthand at a prior company. They had gross margin at a company level, but hadn't built it down to the customer level. So they did the work. And they found something ugly.

Here's where it gets good. Because they had the data, and because they shared it, the sales team wasn't defensive. They were motivated. They wanted to help.

She even took it to the company town hall. Explained the decision publicly. Here's what we found. Here's what we did. Here's why.

That's an unlock. People like being treated like adults. They want to do right by the business. Especially in VC and PE-backed companies where everyone's holding equity. They're owners. Give them the information to act like an owner and not a renter.

Look, the town hall is never going to be anyone's favorite hour of the quarter. You're not going to get a standing ovation. People are going to check Slack. Someone's camera will be off the whole time.

But it's still the one moment where you have the whole company in one room, looking at you, waiting to hear how things are going.

Don't waste it on a slide deck they could've read in an email.

Explain how the business works. Connect the macro to the micro. Celebrate the wins that don't make the headlines. Help people see themselves in the numbers. And hammer the metrics that actually matter until everyone can say them in their sleep.

(And then hammer them again).

That's it. That's the job.

You've got the context. Use the airtime.

In this episode of Run the Numbers, I sit down with Ken Stillwell, CFO and COO of Pegasystems, to explore the realities of leading from the second seat. Ken shares lessons from guiding Pega through the shift from term licenses to ARR and ACV, including how to rework sales compensation without losing trust or momentum. We discuss the limits of KPI obsession, the importance of directional clarity over false precision, and why private equity often drives sharper execution than public markets.t

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Download the 2026 Finance Guide: Lessons from the Trenches to get the tactical frameworks used by top PE-backed leader for FREE.