On 10 September, Jérôme Le Louer gave the afternoon keynote to around 150 CFOs and finance leaders in Bangkok, and moderated the closing panel on capital allocation and growth priorities with Ashok Jhanwar of Kenvue and Dr Yanyong Thammatucharee of Ananta Wellness. The talk opened with a company we had started working with a few months earlier: several hundred staff, healthy margins, growing fast, and no reliable answer to the question "how fast are we growing".
What the talk argued
Growth is decided by the quality of financial decisions, not the size of the finance team. Owners who have never hired a CFO cannot write the job, interview for it or judge the person until a year later. Buying a result with a date on it is cheaper than buying a seat, which is why the question changes from "how many days are you here" to "is the problem solved".
The CFO seat is becoming modular. Senior judgment a few days a month, a controller who makes the numbers trustworthy, and AI on the transactional layer. For a growing SME that is the first CFO it can afford. For the in-house CFO whose seat is full and whose transformation is not staffed, it is more CFO hands, not another CFO: a project with a deadline, an interim bridge, or an outside eye on the numbers.
The work runs as a loop. See the number: cash, the 13-week forecast, every entity on one page. Decide the strategy: what to fund, what to say no to, when to be bankable. Build what the company keeps: the people, the system, the documentation, then hand the car back. Repeat. That is the engine.
The slides
The deck was built to be spoken over, so each section opens with the argument in one line. Figures in the opening case have been rounded to keep the client anonymous.
The deck is free and there is no form in front of it. If you would like the follow-up note when it is written, send a short email and it will reach you first.
The closing panel
The panel took audience questions on capital allocation, productivity and where growth money should go in 2027. Two themes came back in nearly every question: how to make an AI investment case that a board will sign, and how to keep control of the numbers while the finance team gets smaller. Both are the daily work of a fractional CFO, which is why the keynote and the panel belonged in the same afternoon.
Jérôme Le Louer is Managing Partner at SmeCFO. Twenty-two years as a CFO in Southeast Asia, most recently CFO Asia for a logistics group across fourteen countries. About the practice and other speaking.