In the corporate sector, there is still a limited view of the kinds of contributions that CFOs may make to the firm. Finance professionals are still restricting their responsibilities to accounting and taxes. What about strategy and execution, though? What about using behaviours to shape leadership and a thriving strategy? Accounting, compliance, and taxes are certainly our foundations, but they exist to allow us to construct something more.

Through trust ties, CFOs develop stronger relationships with investors. For this, they must use logical thinking while remaining honest and empathic in all of their discussions. Finally, demonstrating a favorable attitude toward cooperating on investor goals, along with active listening to develop in collaboration, will not only be the engine for a successful relationship, but also have the power to build a better, bigger, and healthier firm.

Agustin Correa is a financial specialist with over ten years of cross-functional and worldwide experience in business and market research, accounting, taxes, credit, and collections, and as a financial controller in both the advertising services and consumer goods industries. He is Wunderman Thompson’s CFO for Colombia and Central America, and he combines excellent analytical abilities with insights to encourage transformation and create corporate success for clients.

Getting into Finance

Many years ago, Agustín had the chance to work for the very first time in the FP&A department. He got the notion at the moment to see how interesting that may be. At first, he was struck by the extent of participation this position might have in all finance department choices, from tax strategies to cash management, while also accounting, audit, and procurement to comprehend the implications of various business decisions.

On a second stage, he noticed this career blended with experience and a deep understanding of all business areas from different industries (Supply Chain, Marketing, Sales, HR) could take his career into the next level, becoming able to have a complete understanding of business and any decision making impact, while at the same time being able to articulate a strategy with concrete executional milestones to achieve goals. Meaning this that as a CFO he could have direct impact not only on the bottom line but the top line.

Within Agustín’s career, he was exposed to progressive experiences in financial and business roles and worked in many sectors throughout Latin America while leading international global and regional responsibilities in Europe, allowing him to visit and work with many individuals and nations from unique origins and cultures. He began his career in Argentina 17 years ago in the retail business (1 year), then went into advertising services (5 years), and ultimately, before returning to WPP, the sports goods industry (7 years). He asserts, “My continuous development strategy is oriented to the understanding of new business trends and technologies to implement within our clients and our own business.” Agustín is also passionate about developing continuous leadership skills.

Wunderman Thompson

Wunderman Thompson is a multinational organization with 20,000 employees in 90 countries that is part of the WPP Group. The company’s goal is to become a client’s growth partner consultant business by delivering creative, data, and technological solutions.

It has a diverse clientele in Colombia and the Americas, with needs ranging from athletic goods to automobiles, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, tobacco, entertainment, crypto-financial, and social media, among others.

Marketing and advertising, like many other businesses, are continuously reinventing how to become more relevant to customer needs. Everyone speaks about the necessity of creativity at the center of a company’s demands, but I feel there is still no agreement (in our field) on what this phrase means and how to apply it to business. One of the main issues comes around resistance to moving forward and the (not) understanding that brands are here to facilitate people’s needs rather than show people how cool they are.

Wunderman Thompson Colombia has been able to move forward into a new definition of what marketing and advertising brand solutions mean. Agustín says, “We believe on the constant evolution of brands at the speed of culture in this world of rising consumer expectations and disruptive technologies.” He further shares, “Through our ambitious plan, we have the power to transform brands’ perception and contribution to society, and through our clients, we have the power to change positively people’s life.” With this clear mindset for the company, the team has been able to tackle its clients’ needs to transform their business and improve their share market in Colombia and Latin America. As a result, the firm is building growing relationships that consequently impact positively on its P&L.

The Work Profile

At Wunderman Thompson, Agustín’s role since 2018 was to restructure and transform the company from a traditional creative agency to a growth partner firm, by leading cultural transformation and creating its vision for the business, while at the same time, all efforts were invested in building this vision through talent acquisition and developing the people’s skills.

Through developed vision and strategy, Agustín’s objective in the execution was to divest from complex stakeholder, management, and legal entity structures and to put efforts into one unique vision driven by the investment (and development) in talent with martech capabilities, maintaining creativity as the foundation of all of our solutions and human experience in the center.

The result of this was a more diverse, agile, and simple business. WT Colombia improved in 2019 by 19+ points percent in its profit margin and speeded up its cash generation dramatically by building new internal (SOX compliant) processes and more valuable relationships with its clients; that also brought, as a result, big improvements in the firm’s net sales. Agustín mentions that WT’s focus has always been to invest in its talent and martech capabilities, and it developed creative approaches that allowed the firm to reduce its operating costs by 1.4 million dollars a year since 2019, also with a strong taxation and administratively less expensive structure. He further states that since then, the firm has been able to keep improving all of their KPIs. Four years later, it is considered globally as a top creative company, among the top 10 fastest growing offices in the world and most profitable ones.

Greatest Challenge in the Finance Sector

As Agustín sees it, doing business in the new normal has underscored the importance of accurate and strategic financial planning paired with strategic flexibility, both aligned tightly with organizational goals for business performance. Finance executives are entrusted with identifying immediate and long-term solutions to extraordinary difficulties, such as streamlining internal procedures to fulfill stakeholder expectations and developing strong connections with vendors to maintain supply chain resilience.

As a result, firms must learn about emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, data analytics, and robotic process automation. Finance must comprehend and use financial business analytics, risk management systems, and new business models based on cooperation, creativity, communication, resilience, and adaptability.

The Role of a CFO

“Believe in the power of leadership, behaviors, and culture to drive strategy,” says Agustín. He believes that one can be the best technical resource for the company, but without the best talent on your side, you won’t be able to show and implement all of your capabilities at the speed that the current changing environment requires.

“Keep humble and flexible to new and different approaches.”

According to Agustín, a CFO needs to be involved in all operational and financial technologies to be implemented in the company, since his or her broad knowledge of the company. All areas are obsessed with technology and implementing it to “check” a need. But misconnections among implementations on business make companies not able to get full power of technologies when taking decisions and taking slow (many times not fact based) decisions. All company areas lose much of their time on reconciling information from different sources, while CFOs should get this automatically and invest their time/effort on analysing and decision making. At the same time, the ability to create KPIs mixing operational and financial insights is a MUST and this could not be structured without commercial finance’s lead, as a result of being the most acknowledged area of the operation.

Agustín also believes that people need to keep building the CFO role into the Chief Value Officer they are becoming every day, making every decision count on the business P&L. He says, “We need to communicate with all levels and areas of the organization and share our business perspective to become a financial proposition in all areas of knowledge and foundations when doing business.” 

Wide Future Perspective for Upcoming Years

On a short-term basis, Agustín feels that Wunderman Thompson needs to stabilize an operation that is growing 50%+ on its top line in 2022. It is a big responsibility and a challenge to ensure the firm has the correct business structure to fill current supply. At the same time, this is a great opportunity to accelerate its strategy execution and best talent through investment.

On a 5-year landscape, he finds the company needs to keep diving into its strategy. He says, “We need to become bigger and healthier as a business, more relevant and focus on our ideas being built around clients. Building relationships and great experiences with all of our stakeholders. Because with this, we will continue to inspire and contribute to building a better, inclusive and fair world.” 

Agustín states that WT will keep growing and investing on martech and commerce capabilities. It has strong assets, experience and credentials among them and this will help it to strengthen reputation in the market. He asserts, “We need to continue building our consultancy strength that makes possible to understand our client and connect internal silos within companies while partnering to develop a brand strategy that fosters to invest where company has current opportunities to achieve a higher growth and thrive experience from functional departments so that all of them are looking for the same goal that ultimately rebounds on their customer.” He also believes that technology needs to be seen as the way to connect internal experience within the company and externally with customers, in order to ensure best experiences from consumers with the brand you are working for. In a summarized way, those associations are a MUST if the business wants to develop real E2E solutions to its clients and build strong relationships between brands and consumers.