How does a company within the hyper-competitive realm of Internet networking services succeed? By involving corporate finance very early in the sales and service process, according to Mark Peters, executive vice president and CFO of tw telecom.

“The finance department gets embedded early on in evaluating how we are going to work with the customer,” Peters explains. “The rules of engagement are established up front so that we’re not reacting our way through each deal.”

I recently interviewed Peters for Business Finance, and our Q&A session here contains insights on how tw telecom eliminated their annual budgets and moved to the use of a rolling forecast and a robust communication strategy to position finance to support operations in a way that helps the company thrive in a tough market. ###