Three Questions That Fix the HR-Finance Gap

Every HR leader has been in the meeting. Finance asks for the ROI on the new benefits platform. The people team scrambles to put numbers to something that was never designed to produce a clean return calculation. The conversation stalls. Both sides walk away frustrated, convinced the other doesn't get it.

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RyanMae McAvoy, a people operations leader at Blackthorne, decided to stop having that meeting. Not by avoiding finance, but by changing the entire dynamic of the relationship.

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Start with Three Questions, Not a Slide Deck

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The advice to "learn the business" has become so common in HR circles that it's practically meaningless. Everyone agrees you should do it. Almost nobody explains how.

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RyanMae's approach starts with something disarmingly simple. Walk into your finance partner's office and ask them what their three most important priorities are. Not HR's priorities. Not the company's stated mission. The three things your finance leader is thinking about every day.

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"Go ask finance what the most three important things are to them," RyanMae said. "Us to be profitable, us to be positive EBITDA, us to get more sales. What are the three things they're looking at? Because that's not only gonna give you insight into the business, it's also going to give you kind of your framework of how you're gonna come at things."

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The framework extends beyond finance. RyanMae uses the same three-question approach with every department leader, especially new ones coming into the organization. The goal: understand their priorities and position the people team as a resource, not an obstacle.

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"I don't write code. I'm not on the product team. I don't actually go in Salesforce, which is a huge element of our work," she said. "I understand the fundamentals of our business."

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That understanding pays off in specific ways. At a conference, she found herself texting the sales team about competitor products she spotted on the expo floor. Her sales team knows that if they're pitching an HR tech company, she'll share everything she knows about the space.

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Framing the Comp Tool for Finance

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Once you know finance's priorities, the framing changes. RyanMae described how she approaches a comp benchmarking tool purchase when the company is focused on EBITDA.

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"I know that we're trying to be profitable, 5X in two years, whatever that goal may be. I'm gonna frame it up as like, hey, if we invest X dollars, it's gonna allow us to do total comp statements, it's gonna allow us to level set."

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The pitch doesn't stop at HR outcomes. She walks through the cost of the alternative: losing people. "Someone leaves. What's the time loss? Six months. That's not great. What's the cost of recruiter time? What's the cost of applicant time? How much time are we taking for managers for interviews?"

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She doesn't pretend to have exact numbers. She gives ranges. And she frames every cost in terms of time, which she calls "currency."

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"Time is currency," she said. She and her husband don't have kids, and they still pay someone to clean their house twice a month. "Hourly what we make, us doing this is more efficient for our family than one of us." The same logic applies to business decisions about where to invest in people tools versus absorbing the hidden cost of manual work or turnover.

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Four Years of Trust, Not One Budget Meeting

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The relationship RyanMae has with Blackthorne's finance leader didn't happen in a quarter. It took four years. And it started with honesty about her own blind spots.

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"I'm spendy and I know that," she said about her conversations with their finance leader, Eric. "So like, I kind of need you to guardrail me on things if we're getting a little out of control."

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That candor goes both ways. "Our finance leader, Eric, he'll tell you he forgets the human element because I'll spout off facts about people as we're going through roster. He's like, definitely don't remember all of that. Glad we're having the conversation."

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Now, when RyanMae needs budget approval, she comes with three options, not a thousand-point justification. She could come with one option and call it done. She brings three because she values the input. "We trust each other enough that I come to him and say, hey, what's my budget?" That trust is the product of years of small conversations, not a single well-crafted deck.

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Equitable, Not Equal

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The episode also surfaced how Blackthorne handles a challenge common in globally distributed companies: making benefits feel fair without making them identical.

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"It's not fair, it's equitable," RyanMae said. Healthcare in the US operates as a market. Other countries have socialized systems. Blackthorne offers 12 weeks of standard parental leave globally, knowing some countries require more and others require considerably less.

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When an employee in another country saw a US salary and argued they should earn the same amount, RyanMae used data to walk through the comparison. Cost of living in the US employee's market was 10X higher. A dollar-for-dollar match wouldn't be equitable. It would be the opposite.

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"I can make data tell any story I want," she said. "So can you, especially with Claude and these models and stuff that we can all produce." Her data presentations always come with what she calls a "RyanMae note section," a written narrative about what the numbers can't capture. The data is one piece. The context is the rest.

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The "Drop Everything" List

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One of the more practical frameworks from the conversation was RyanMae's "drop everything" list: the situations that override Blackthorne's quiet Fridays, weekends, and flexible schedules.

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"Did someone not get paid? You don't mess with people's money." That's the first one. After that: someone in crisis who needs EAP or insurance support, a catastrophic life event requiring bereavement or temporary leave, or someone creating an unsafe or illegal environment in the company.

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Everything else waits. "If you Slack me on Friday and say, I can't remember my password to the HR system. Cool, talk to you Monday."

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The boundary setting extends to how RyanMae models behavior for the rest of the company. She puts therapy on her public calendar. "It says, therapy, do not book over, all caps." She books it at the end of the day because that's when her pings are quieter, but the visibility is the point. "You can be a human. You can go to therapy."

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Where the Relationship Pays Off in Hard Times

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The HR-finance partnership matters most when the news is bad. RyanMae described how budget cuts and layoffs require team buy-in, not a solo HR announcement.

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"The common misconception is if I stand up and say, hey, we're doing a layoff, there's a general assumption that I just like pulled out my cauldron, which cackled and said I was gonna ruin a bunch of lives."

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In reality, those decisions come from executive team discussions backed by data and metrics. The relationships RyanMae built beforehand mean finance can speak to the financial rationale while she handles the human impact. "I can't stand up and just spout this off. I need some support."

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That support is what the entire episode comes back to. Building relationships across departments, learning the business beyond your function, speaking in the language your partners understand. The three questions are the first step. Four years of trust is the destination.