To ask what high earners do all day?

My husband is a CFO. Not a lunch or golf in sight. He works solidly all day. Meetings, operations decisions, budgeting, forecasting, data analysis, monthly spending reviews. In bad times he is in a 8am morning meeting every day, on call all weekend, on emails every evening and at his laptop til midnight. His head is on the block all day every day.

I don’t, if I’d chosen to have DC, I wouldn’t have the career I do.
I will admit to being utterly horrified at child care costs though.

For me it feels like someone brings you a problem, or a decision to be made. You have a limited time to ask the right questions and understand the issue, the options, and the implications. Then you make the decision. There’s no other grown up around, you’re the grown up.

you have to understand a lot about a lot. Not everything obviously, but you are expected to know stuff. Someone earlier said it was like an exam every day, that’s true. You have to work things out because no one else can.

and it’s pressure

Being the geeky nerdy kid at school sometimes pays off big in adulthood.

Not necessarily. Notice how many times "meetings" gets mentioned in this thread. It's back-to-back-to-back meetings with everyone connected to the company all day every day, and having to play an active part in those meetings to boot. These are high-pressured social situations, with no let-up, more than they're high-pressured intelligence ones.

The bits about making the right decisions sound easy to me (for areas in which I know my shit). Selling them, persuading other people, not being pressured into misspeaking by those with different agendas - I couldn't do that and have no interest in trying. My ideal working life is one where I'm left alone to get on with what I do very well. The back-to-back meetings life sounds exhausting.

There are certainly questions raised about how the kinds of people who end up making the decisions tend to be the extroverts who gravitate towards this life...

My husband has meetings, meetings and more meetings. Travels regularly internationally often for 2 weeks at a time, Is ultimately responsible for the QHSE for 10000+ employees and sub contractors globally. Is technically on call 24/7. Does 12 hours days. Ultimately the buck stops with him. He’s very well paid circa £200k+bonus but has made lots of sacrifices. He’ll openly admit he wouldn’t be where he is now without my support.

My husband earns 300-400k in a senior job in finance. He is meetings, all day every day. He is certainly not golfing! Either on zoom meetings with clients, or face to face meetings with clients. From 8am until 7pm.

I mainly have meetings. I'm the person contacted when something has gone wrong. When I'm not talking to people I'm mostly doing or directing PowerPoint decks that outline various strategic plan type things. i sometimes speak at events. Travel.

They spend a lot of time sitting on Mumsnet all day, moaning about not getting help with childcare costs (sorry, couldn't resist).

I spend all day in meeting and then most of the evening doing the work that arose from the meetings.

Slightly off topic, but I hear a lot about barristers' salaries plummeting in recent years and it not being worth the training etc- how would your DH feel about that statement? My DC is interested in this career but keeps being put off it, with more than one person saying it's hard to earn good money, etc. I'm not aware of the before or after so no idea what's led to any change?
£300k sounds like a very healthy salary!

Being part of a leadership team responsible for 30 different multi million pound / euro / dollar businesses.

Meetings. Risk based decision making. 3am meetings with China. 5am meetings with Thailand. 10pm meetings with America… sometimes in the same day. Being away from home most of the week / month. Weekend plans being kaiboshed at the ring of a phone. Having the back of my team and making sure they feel capable and equipped to do their job, whilst having their back if they do take a misstep and giving them the space to learn whilst managing any fallout or disruption.

I might not be saving lives or teaching the next generation of school kids… but I have a lot riding on my shoulders and there’s a lot that could go wrong if I’m not on my A game.

I work in a private school. I know lots of people who are high up and wealthy. I know if I can call them and if there’s an issue with their dc they are able to drop everything and are at the other end of the phone.
I also know some that don’t pick up. They’re clearly doing it all wrong 🤭
My dh earns well and he can be found fraternising with golf, socials and the such. Not jealous at all 😳

Generally dealing with shit from hospitals who dump all their shit on me; dealing with more shit from my directors who are dealing with shit from the centre; dealing with shit from the general public who have no idea what I do but are convinced it’s pointless because they believe the shit that is being spouted about us by our Secretary of State and media. I’m tired of the meetings, the abuse, the shit but I have a mortgage ans bills to pay so I stay and deal with it more and more.

They are making a lot of high stakes strategic decisions, for example:

• are we investing our resources into building a Kindle, or an iPod, or iPhone although this is completely new area for us/risky
• Are we expanding into an international market
• what goals we have as a company/strategy to achieve them
• lots of crisis management

Being the geeky nerdy kid at school sometimes pays off big in adulthood

But also this. The top people where i work are just very clever. Terrific memories, they seem to just understand everything and process complex information very quickly.

I can’t play golf. And I don’t really eat lunch. I have a lot of meetings (commercial, H&S, HR, finance, buying, customer relations etc) and the buck stops with me. On high days or holidays, evenings or weekends, if the shit majorly hits the fan it comes to me. I am also the person who goes to prison if we get it really wrong. I spend an awful lot of time and money making sure we don’t.

I'm not a CEO but what the CEOs I've worked with have to have is an overview of everything that's going on across their organisation - health and safety, sales, financial performance, public reputation, property, technology, marketing, operations. And, ultimately, they have to make decisions across all those functions.

Smart CEOs put smart people they can trust in charge of all these areas, but they still have to be responsible for it all. So all the meetings are because they need to keep in touch with all these people, delegate, respond and make decisions.

I used to earn a similar amount with reoccurring income, i worked very hard for 18 months then did sweet FA for 5 years

Making very pressured decisions - mostly judgement calls. Told you must reduce headcount - who can you lose (answer - none, it will be bad whichever way you do it). Regularly having to choose between many bad outcomes and determine the least worst.

Taking risks - authorising spending a million quid in legal fees to defend a dispute and having the experience and expertise to weigh it up and take a position.

Giving people difficult news.

Having to take a 100 page report which has 20 5 page sections, each of which summarises the output of a big team of people, and very quickly read, understand, assess what needs to be questioned and challenged.

My boss earns about that and his entire calendar seems to be made up of meetings, calls, meetings, “do you have a minute’s” and more meetings. He gets paid the big bucks to be where the buck stops and take responsibility for things going wrong. He’s always being told to be here there and everywhere at a moments notice as well.

DH earns more than that doing a 40 hour week with occasional travel and relatively little stress. He has niche technical skills in a boom industry that few other people have, certainly in combination with also being personable and able to work well with others. He used to do more hours, travel and deadline stress in the first decade of his career, now he’s mostly past that. He certainly isn’t a CEO or doing anything with great responsibility though. Yes there’s occasional pub lunches and team social afternoons but no golf to my knowledge.

What does he do all day? Meetings with high ups and clients giving advice and feedback, guiding and mentoring more junior staff, planning future projects and mostly a lot of technical design stuff that I don’t begin to understand.

Being the geeky nerdy kid at school sometimes pays off big in adulthood.

I'm only just in that bracket, promoted in summer. It's hard to describe without living it, it doesn't sound like much.

I'm in meetings most of the day, longer hours than I used to do but mine are OK and flexible where needed.

I help to protect the company from damaging mistakes. Try to educate people, try to find out what's going on and step in, try to stop more senior people doing stupid things.

I'd need to take ownership for things going wrong unless I could prove I'd done everything possible to stop it. And even then I'd need to clean up the mess and answer the questions.

I think what I do needs a certain type of mind and it isn't that common. Im ASD and a mathematician, I don't think that is uncommon though. I seem to see links others don't and maybe have a terrible opinion of humanity because I can quite accurately predict what stupid thing people are going to do.

Why are you asking? Are you trying to figure out a high salary career?

The people on golf courses are generally business owners networking, they probably do little else but fair chance they worked their arses off for years.

exactly what my boss does. he is pulled in every direction. anything admin is sent to me. before covid I would often have to sit around waiting for him to come back to his desk to sign stuff, go through etc. thankfully with covid wfh etc we have docu sign teams messaging etc. makes things so much easier and no as much hanging around for me. he is a very fair boss and great to work for I must say

Golf and lunch!?
Meetings, strategy, succession, risk analysis and business plans if lucky.
Putting out various fires.