2005 Career & Compensation Survey

Senior finance executives are enjoying higher salaries and bonuses after juggling cost-cutting mandates, all-consuming compliance demands and growth challenges over the past two years.

For corporate finance executives, the past four years have been challenging. The accounting scandals, the recession, compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and continuing geopolitical uncertainties made for tough going within most corporate finance functions. Judging from the results of Business Finance's 2005 Finance Executive Career & Compensation Survey, finance leaders seem to have graduated from four years of hardship to new roles and new opportunities. Just ask Doug Bettinger, who at age 37 became the CFO of 24/7 Customer, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based offshore call-center services supplier with primary operations in Bangalore, India. Bettinger joined 24/7 Customer in November 2004 after a rigorous 12-year stint at Intel, which included three years in Malaysia. His intense compliance work at Intel, where he was corporate planning and reporting controller, combined with his immersion in Intel's business made him an attractive candidate to help run a rapidly growing global business, develop its compliance infrastructure and design a road map for taking the company public.

A rosy outlook and the promise of new opportunities like the one Bettinger seized are abundantly reflected in the results of Business Finance's 2005 Finance Executive Career & Compensation Survey, sponsored by Ajilon Finance. Twenty-five percent of CFOs who participated in the survey report that their total compensation increased by more than 10 percent from 2003 to 2004 (see graph 3). CFOs' median compensation rose from $195,000 in the 2004 survey to an even $200,000 in 2005 (see graph 1). In fact, median compensation rose across all job categories compared with the 2004 survey. CFOs expect to earn their higher salaries by devoting more attention to revenue growth in 2005. This objective remains their top priority, just as it was last year, but the proportion of CFOs who give "growing revenue" the number one spot increased by 20 percent over the previous survey.

Revenue growth results in better opportunities for career advancement, but it also requires a greater focus on hiring, managing and developing people -- a priority that CFOs in this year's survey describe as their third most important. Eighty-eight percent of all survey respondents consider their company's hiring outlook for the coming year to be moderate, good or excellent. And for the first time in three years, the survey shows that creating shareholder value is not the most important driver of CFOs' pay: 38 percent of CFOs point to "business and financial reporting/analysis/forecasting" as the top driver of their current compensation.