When did you last put your own finance team's pay through the same test you apply to every other function?

It is a pattern I see often enough that I now ask about it early. The CFO who argues hardest for paying a scarce operations role properly is frequently the same CFO who holds the finance team's pay to the tightest line in the building. Nobody decided that. It happens because you set the budget, you model restraint, and approving a rise for your own people feels like marking your own homework.

So the team that closes the month, builds the forecast and fields the auditor's questions ends up paid as if it were the easiest function in the business to refill. It rarely is. Mid-level finance is tight, mobile talent, the kind recruiters ring on a Tuesday afternoon.

Then your senior accountant resigns the week before year-end. She takes the reconciliations only she understood, the workaround for the ERP report nobody ever fixed, and the working relationship with your audit manager. Her replacement costs more than the rise she asked for, arrives after the deadline, and spends months learning what walked out the door.

The restraint was real. It was aimed at the one team whose pay you can see most clearly and defend least comfortably, which is exactly why it stays low.

Budget season is when this gets locked in for another year. Run your finance team through the same scarcity test you would run on any other function, and ask a peer on the leadership team to sign it off, so the decision stops depending on how you feel about approving it.

Left alone, next year's budget will fund the recruiter instead.

For years I counted a long supplier relationship as a saving already banked.

"Too many years in this to walk away now."

I heard a version of that from an operations manager at a food manufacturer in Geelong, about the freight carrier the business had used since before he joined. He meant it kindly. The account manager knows the dock times, sends a hamper at Christmas, and picks up the phone at six in the morning when a truck is late.

If that is your instinct too, it is a sound one. Most operational pain comes from things breaking, and a supplier who never breaks feels like the opposite of a cost. Testing the market also sends a message nobody wants to deliver to someone they like: we are not sure we trust you. So the relationship renews, and nobody would call that a decision.

The trust is real. What it buys has quietly changed.

Then the fourth renewal came round, and the carrier's proposal looked exactly like the third. Same service schedule, same pricing model, a modest uplift and a polite covering letter. A competitor pitching for the same lanes arrived with consolidated pickups, a live tracking portal and a rate card built around your actual volumes, because a supplier trying to win your business leads with the best thing it has, and a supplier who already holds it has no reason to. None of that is bad faith. It is a rational read of a customer who has shown, cycle after cycle, that it will not look.

So the improvements sit on the incumbent's side of the table. Available, priced, never introduced.

The fix leaves the carrier exactly where it is. Run a credible market test every few years on the relationships you value most, and mean it, so the incumbent has to put its best offer in front of you rather than its last one. Most of the time you will renew. You will renew on different terms.

The CFOs who get the most from their longest relationships are the ones who test them as if a switch were possible, and let the incumbent win it again.

Your carrier already has a better proposal written. Nobody has asked for it.