From Steward to Orchestrator: CFO Leadership Lessons with Xavier Castellana
In this episode of The Growth-Minded CFO, hosts Alex Louisy and Lauren Pearl sit down with Xavier Castellana — former CFO at Typeform, TravelPerk, and Amenitiz, and now Managing Partner at LeaderNess.
Having guided several of Europe’s fastest-growing SaaS companies through scale, Xavi has seen the CFO role evolve from financial guardian to organizational orchestrator. His work today focuses on helping leadership teams align on vision, rhythm, and accountability — because without harmony at the top, the whole company plays out of tune.
“Whatever you build, if you don’t have alignment in the leadership team, it’s not going to work.”
The CFO as Orchestrator
Xavi believes finance leaders are uniquely positioned to connect every part of the business. Every team depends on finance — and that dependency gives the CFO both perspective and influence.
“The CFO is the only one that needs to connect with every single department in the company because every single department needs money … to generate profit, savings, or improve the quality of service.”
For Xavi, the CFO is the orchestrator of company rhythm. That means setting the cadence for reviews, conversations, and decision-making — ensuring everyone plays in time.
He explains that not every company needs the same tempo. A steady-state business might run on a monthly business review, while a high-growth or cash-tight company might need weekly or even daily touchpoints.
“Usually you have a monthly business review … When you’re talking bets, that’s when you need more of a weekly evolution. If you’re in a tight situation of cash, maybe daily.”
Finding the right meeting cadence with the leadership team, he adds, is essential to maintaining alignment. It’s not about adding more meetings, but about creating the right rhythm for the company’s stage and challenges.
“You need to decide what you talk about weekly, what you talk about monthly, and what you talk about quarterly. Once you find that rhythm, everyone can play their part — and you stop firefighting.”
Because when leadership is even slightly out of sync, the downstream effect is enormous.
“A small discrepancy at the leadership team … is an abyss in the teams. You have teams working in absolutely different priorities.”
That’s why, he says, orchestrating alignment isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the CFO’s greatest act of leadership.
Why Including Numbers in the Plan Makes it Real
Many companies, Xavi notes, have visions that sound inspiring but lack the grounding force of numbers. A plan without metrics is a story without structure.
“I asked a CEO, did you put numbers in this vision — three years, five years, ten years? He said no, but everybody’s aligned. Put some figures.”
When they did, everything changed. Suddenly, abstract goals turned concrete, and the leadership team had a shared language for ambition.
“The moment that we start to put numbers, people start to say, ‘Okay, this is exciting. Okay, this is challenging.’ Because then you start to call things by their name.”
To make strategy tangible, Xavi says every CFO should know — and clearly communicate — four essential numbers:
Revenue — the size of the opportunity you’re aiming for. It defines the level of ambition and the speed you’ll need to reach it.
Headcount — how many people it will realistically take to get there, and how fast you’ll need to grow the team.
Cash — the fuel that powers execution. Understanding your cash runway determines how aggressively you can invest.
Profitability — the health indicator that tells you whether the model sustains itself over time.
These four numbers, he says, form the language of alignment. They translate a dream into something every function — from product to sales — can plan against.
For Xavi, translating strategy into numbers is how alignment becomes execution. It’s the bridge between dreaming and doing.
Offsite vs Office
For alignment to stick, Xavi insists that leadership teams must separate doing from thinking. The office, full of Slack pings and deadlines, isn’t built for reflection.
“If you need just to do operational things, we are all used to do them at the office. But if you need to think about the dream — how do we make this dream possible — there’s no way you can do that from your laptop with emails and Slack messages coming in.”
Offsites, he says, are where strategy and relationships are rebuilt. They’re not about presentations — they’re about presence. Time to step back, recalibrate, and rebuild trust between leaders who spend most of their days buried in execution.
Xavi’s Secret Sauce for Offsites
Asked what makes an offsite successful, Xavi doesn’t mention agendas or slide decks — he talks about human alignment. Before every session, he runs a simple but powerful exercise: ask each participant to define success for the day.
“Before every session … I just write on a whiteboard and go person by person: ‘Tell me, what is your definition of success for today?’”
The goal isn’t immediate agreement but awareness. When everyone voices expectations up front, hidden assumptions surface — and alignment follows.
He also starts every discussion by focusing on what’s going right.
“If you want somebody to think positively, don’t ask about problems — ask what is going right. Otherwise, it’s impossible to keep dreaming.”
These rituals turn strategy sessions from tense debates into collaborative creation — the kind where leaders leave with energy, not exhaustion.
Working Cross-Culturally
Having led finance teams across Europe, the U.S., and Latin America, Xavi understands how cultural context shapes leadership and communication. He’s seen how easily teams misinterpret one another’s style when global companies scale fast.
“We’re really shaped by the things we’ve lived as a society, and we’re not aware until we start to work with people from different nationalities.”
He contrasts Europe’s structured approach with the U.S.’s outcome-driven one, noting that neither is superior — they’re just different expressions of focus.
“In the U.S., you give me a goal and the team and I’ll figure it out. In Europe, we say step one, step two, milestones. It’s not right or wrong — you just need to align on it.”
His advice: stay curious, not judgmental. The best leaders, he says, adapt their rhythm to the people in the room and learn to hear differences as signals, not noise.
The Takeaway: Alignment is the CFO’s Superpower
Across every story, Xavi returns to one principle: alignment is the greatest multiplier of value. A business can have capital, talent, and vision, but without shared clarity on what matters most, none of it compounds.
“It’s not about my plan; it’s our plan. The business plan is the company plan … It’s the crystallization of the strategy into numbers.”
The orchestrator CFO doesn’t just keep the beat — they help everyone hear the same music.
Full Episode
If Xavier's journey and insights sparked an idea, pass this episode to a finance friend who’s ready to be the orchestrator in their company's leadership team.
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