We’re in the era of daily scenario planning

Uncertainty has been a major theme for CFOs in 2025. Are we in a recession or not? Will AI rewrite (or erase) vast swaths of the workforce, or become an essential tool to be integrated into workflows? How do you plan for federal policy when it can swing with the president’s pen or get backtracked by the Supreme Court? CFOs are running a lot of scenario models these days. But this isn’t the first time uncertainty has gripped the CFO desk.

So how’s a CFO to manage in an era of heightened uncertainty? To learn a thing or two, we interviewed a wide range of finance executives about another recent extreme spike in uncertainty: the Covid-19 pandemic, when CFOs also went into scenario planning overdrive. They had to make plans for if their sales went to zero, if suppliers couldn’t fulfill invoices, how much money they needed to survive, and thousands of other questions. Many CFOs were doing daily scenario planning sessions.

A silver lining of all that turbulence is that it might have laid the groundwork for more robust financial planning in the years since. Read on to find out.

Interviews have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Adam Rymer, vice president of finance at Chipotle in 2020: We have a very conservative balance sheet. We have no debt. We have what we believe to be ample cash on hand at the time. It’s probably just over a billion dollars. But what was amazing, when you look at these different scenarios, either a significant revenue impact or no revenue for a period of time, it’s amazing how quickly you can burn through money in that scenario…And so it was intense. You realize, as conservative as you are, nobody is prepared for a situation where you can have weeks and weeks and weeks of zero revenue.

We definitely started to run different scenarios for how much cash we had on hand and how much we would burn through. And the most dire scenario would be, we cannot operate our restaurants. Basically, our sales would go to zero. How do we retain our people? How do we continue to pay our people, knowing that we weren’t sure if this is going to last a week, two weeks, a month, but we want to do what’s right by our employees, and continue to pay them. But also have them readily available when we are able to open that we can open quickly, because in order to be really successful at Chipotle requires quite a bit of training.

Samir Kanuga, CFO of Royal Paper Converting, a bath tissue company, during 2020: It was making the playbook on the go. We didn’t have a scenario for having to allocate to our customers. Unfortunately, that’s what had to happen. We went through all of our customers…and worked with our manufacturing team to see how we could produce in the most efficient manner and get it out to the customers that needed it. And so the first thing was work with our customers and create an allocation schedule.

Neil Cohen, chief financial officer for Windsor Capital Group, which owns Embassy Suites hotels, in 2020: Beforehand, I’ve always had a cash flow management schedule running 13 week cash flows. [During Covid], I was almost doing it daily on all these hotels, updating it as we got more news. So it was constantly having to adjust based on what was going on in the economy.

David Stephenson, CFO of Airbnb in 2020: The immediate piece was, we were losing so much business so quickly that our revenue was declining, and then we were starting to see massive requests for cancellations and refunds…We lost 80% of our business. And then all of a sudden, as we were modeling it out, we were on track to lose a billion dollars in that first quarter, which then became really significant because this is a third of the cash that we had on hand, and so it became a real issue really quickly.

Jaap Tonckens, CFO for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, the shopping mall conglomerate, in 2020: These once-in-100-year events are coming ever more rapidly. These are the gray swans that are becoming a flock. Being prepared for the unexpected, that should be a mantra for every CFO worth his or her salt. Being prepared that your business can withstand a shock, not to the point where you run a business that’s lazy, lazy capital structure, but what are the options? Scenario planning has become ever more important.

Mark J. Hawkins, president and CFO of Salesforce in 2020: A lot of people wouldn’t think a Dow 30 company could be replanned every single week. Well, I’m here to tell you if they thought that, they underestimated the Salesforce team…Weekly planning in every way, all the way down to cash flow. Me looking at cash flow every single week, the conversion cycle, every single special situation, we wanted to know about it and do our part with this great company.