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Before joining The CFO Centre India in 2014, Rajarshi Datta had accumulated 18 years of finance experience and has a proven track record as a Chief Financial Officer (including at Clear Channel in India). Raj, now CEO of The CFO Centre India, has helped numerous SMEs improve their finance function and fast track their growth. In his time at The CFO Centre, one issue has remained a constant for the entrepreneurs he has met, raising funding.

Andy Collier, Co-Managing Director of The FD Centre, decided in 2002 that he wanted to move into a portfolio career. Since then, he has utilised his wide ranging FD experience to manage the North of England team within The FD Centre, before recently becoming Co-Managing Director. He has encountered numerous companies who have needed help raising funding during his professional career, so we decided to sit down and discover his top tips on raising funding.

The quicker you want your company to achieve its goals, the sooner you should consider hiring a part-time CFO.

That’s because a part-time CFO will provide your company with the high-level financial expertise necessary to scale up (things you and your team may not even be aware you need), for a fraction of the cost of a full-time CFO.

Hiring a part-time CFO provides your company with many advantages that really help it to grow and stand out in any marketplace.

A lack of cash can not only stall your company’s growth but also place its very existence under threat.

It doesn’t matter how profitable the business may be; cash flow problems can place it under severe pressure, according to the CFO Centre’s Chairman Colin Mills in his book ‘Scaling Up How to Take Your Business to the Next Level Without Losing Control and Running Out of Cash’.

“You might think you’re immune from danger because your business is experiencing a high level of growth,

Babies, as any hollow-eyed new parent will tell you, often sleep for just a few hours at a time which is why ‘sleeping like a baby’ is a practice best avoided if you have a growing business to run and need to be on top of your game during working hours.

Instead, sleep experts recommend you look for ways to get between seven and nine unbroken hours of night-time sleep.

That’s because sleep is believed to be crucial to your physical and mental well being.

If you consider what sets companies like eBay, Alibaba, Netflix, Google, Starbucks, Apple, Cisco and Dell apart from other companies, their ability to continuously innovate and create high growth will probably come high on your list.

So should the fact they’ve all successfully transitioned from start up to scale up status without losing their ability to be dynamic and entrepreneurial.

Then there’s the fact they’ve helped create thousands of full-time and part-time jobs throughout the world.

The idea of hiring even a part-time CFO may seem to some SMEs a bit OTT—like paying Quentin Tarantino to make a 90-second home page video or booking Wembley Stadium for the company’s five-a-side friendly football match.

But for companies whose ambition is to get into and survive the coveted scale-up phase, hiring a part-time CFO makes perfect sense. They know that they’re getting a finance veteran, someone with big business experience, who can provide the guidance they need to grow rapidly and help them to avoid the costly mistakes that so many ambitious SMEs make as they attempt to move into the Big League.

You might think a Chief Finance Officer’s role is confined to traditional finance activities, but todays CFO can do so much more than count beans.

In the past, a CFO’s responsibilities might have been confined to high-level accounting such as providing timely financial statements and monthly management reports, managing investments and expenses, monitoring cash flow, and managing risk. But as the business landscape has become more complex over the past decade, the role of a CFO has changed.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already transforming the way in which financial service companies are doing business.

More and more of them are using AI to process information on their customers, cut costs, save time, monitor behaviour patterns, assess credit quality, automate client interactions, analyse markets, assess data quality and detect fraud.

A pwc Digital IQ 2017 survey found that 72% of business decision makers believe AI will be the business advantage of the future.