In his three years as CFO of Packer Fastener, Brian Hogeland has led a milestone transformation of the company’s financial operations. Joining in 2021 during a period of rapid growth, Hogeland quickly identified opportunities to streamline processes, align business goals, and introduce technology-driven solutions. With Packer Fastener’s quirky culture—known for slogans like “We’ve got the biggest nuts in town”—Hogeland’s mission was to bring structure without losing the fun spirit at the company’s core.Hogeland’s strategic mindset reflects his career-long blend of finance and technology expertise. Early in his tenure, he introduced NetSuite as the company’s ERP system, replacing manual processes that once took weeks with real-time data and automation. This shift provided leadership with instant visibility into revenue, helping drive smarter, faster decisions across Packer Fastener’s growing network.Hogeland also emphasized data-driven planning. His approach aligns financial metrics with operational indicators like employee productivity and vehicle profitability. This framework enables intentional, forward-thinking strategies, ensuring the company scales efficiently without wasting resources.Throughout his career, Hogeland has championed innovation—whether through cloud-based tools or AI modeling—making finance a proactive force for growth. His ability to blend financial discipline with technology has better positioned Packer Fastener for sustainable growth in the years ahead.

In January 2020, most finance leaders saw ASC 606 as a closed chapter. However, for Braze’s newly appointed CFO, Isabelle Winkles, the revenue recognition standard became front and center. While ASC 606 was merely a speedbump for seasoned professionals—especially for a 25-year finance veteran like Winkles—it posed a notable challenge within Braze. Many employees had never worked at a public company that had adopted the standard, making it a crucial area where alignment and understanding were essential.Winkles recognized that her role wasn’t just about managing finances—it was about educating and aligning teams across the organization. She knew that technical rules alone wouldn’t resonate with the sales team. Instead, she framed the conversation around tangible business impacts: “You have to explain to the sales team, ‘Hey guys, if we start giving people too much time to pay, this is going to change our financial profile, and we will be valued differently by the market as a result.’”By connecting financial nuances with outcomes that mattered—like market valuation and compensation—Winkles ensured her message landed. “And you start explaining that to people,” she added, “and they say, ‘Oh, okay, so this will change the stock price valuation ultimately, and that impacts my compensation.’”For Winkles, the key wasn’t just mastering technical details but crafting a message the broader organization could digest and act upon. Success came from engaging teams across functions, fostering alignment, and ensuring every part of the organization understood the financial implications of their actions.

As Aira Pineda stared out from her new office at a seemingly endless rice field, a voice inside her asked, 'What are you doing here?" Only a year or two earlier, Pineda had been among the young urban professionals populating the bustling Philippine offices of KPMG. She had excelled quickly, so much so that she was assigned to a leadership role in a major audit project just 2 years into her career. Groomed for partnership, she was part of KPMG’s "up-and-coming" class, with her sights set firmly on the top.But life had other plans. The birth of her son made Pineda reconsider the long hours and intense lifestyle required of a Big Four partner. Prioritizing family, she made the unexpected decision to leave the city and relocate to the countryside, where her son could be raised near his grandparents. This move led her to a small start-up called Scrubbed, a company with just 50 employees at the time. Her mentors thought that she was throwing her career away.What Pineda didn’t realize at the time was that this decision would not derail her career but instead redefine it. At Scrubbed, she gained broader experience in finance, and, as the company grew exponentially, so did her responsibilities. From consulting with clients to eventually becoming the company’s CFO, Pineda found her career full of unexpected turns. Her leap for personal reasons ultimately led her to a leadership role that she hadn’t anticipated—a twist in her journey that eventually set her on the path to becoming a CFO.

Max Krakowiak stood on the pitcher’s mound, ignoring the first drops of a Seattle rain. A shout from a less-than-faithful fan filled his ears as he prepared to throw his next pitch. In this moment, he had no idea that his baseball career was about to take an unexpected turn, as a random off-the-field injury would soon end his time in the minor leagues and force him to hang up his cleats. However, what Krakowiak didn’t realize then was that his days on the mound would end up providing him with lessons that would last for years to come.As he transitioned into the world of finance—initially, through GE’s Financial Leadership Program—Krakowiak began to understand that the high-pressure moments in his baseball career had indeed been not very different from those encountered in corporate finance. “In baseball, you can get the best hitters to fail seven out of 10 times,” he reflected. “You have to focus on what’s in your control—your preparation, your mind-set, and how you engage with your team.”Such is the frame of mind that has proven invaluable to Krakowiak in finance, where uncontrollable market forces can instantly and otherwise dictate outcomes.Whether he was on the mound or handling investor calls, Max honed his ability to perform under pressure. “I’ve had some bad pitching performances in front of large crowds, and it made me a little numb to that anxiety,” he shared. That resilience, combined with his experience navigating tough conversations at GE, gave him the confidence to lead. Today, as CFO of Revvity, Max tells us he still brings that same focus and poise to every decision, balancing pressure with preparation—on the mound and in the boardroom.

In the season two premiere of Controllers Classified, host Erik Zhou welcomes Matt Didden, Controller at NexHealth. The conversation begins with a recount of how Matt landed in accounting after graduating in the 2007-2008 financial crisis and realizing that the world would always need accountants. It then highlights his transition from consulting/audit to client side, and the broadening of his scope from pure financial reporting to handling a myriad of complex business challenges.The episode then turns to its primary focus: accounting considerations in highly regulated industries. Matt points to specific examples - like the anonymization of patient information in line with HIPAA before bringing it into an ERP system - where he’s had to marry accounting best practices and standards with broader industry regulation and requirements.

When Josh Schwartz arrived at Medidata, the life sciences innovation company was entering unfamiliar waters. Having just gone public, Medidata was shifting from a fast-growing startup to a more structured, scalable organization. For Schwartz, who initially led revenue recognition, this was the beginning of both a personal and professional evolution that would mirror the company’s own transformation. “It was a point in time where we were starting to bring in specialization, starting to think about really scaling up our business and thinking about the future,” he recalls.As Medidata scaled, so did Schwartz's responsibilities. His stubborn curiosity led him to explore beyond his initial role, uncovering inefficiencies and taking on more of the finance function. “I just started asking questions and driving people crazy,” he says, noting that his eagerness to improve processes soon expanded his role across finance. This growth trajectory from accounting to eventually becoming CFO in 2022 parallels the evolution of Medidata’s financial operations.Similarly, the metrics that once guided Medidata’s growth had to evolve as well. Early on, Josh explains, “We were focused on how many products our customers were using.” But as Medidata transformed into a platform-based organization, the metrics shifted. “It’s no longer about products; it’s about how much data we are driving through the platform.”This alignment between Josh’s career journey and the company’s evolving metrics highlights the adaptive approach both have taken to fuel Medidata’s latest growth chapter. Today, Josh leads a finance team that embodies the same forward-thinking approach he embraced early in his career, constantly rethinking metrics to drive growth.

Twenty-seven years ago, while in his late twenties, Mark Partin arrived inside the C-suite largely unprepared for the flood of challenges that would quickly breach his desk. Or so Partin tells us as he recalls the first of five CFO appointments that punctuate his finance leadership career.“I can and do love to suffer,” Partin comments, describing the experience as being “over my head” and demanding him to “level up,” or constantly “reach to the next level” to succeed.For Partin, who had been named CFO of a publicly traded company despite his young age and lack of prior CFO experience, success in the role can be attributed to his unique partnership with the CEO. “He allowed me to have that role, and the Board did, because he was to be my mentor, and he would help me along the way,” explains Partin. Still, there’s no question the CEO got something valuable in return, given Partin’s “level up” mindset and his willingness to work harder than anyone else.This first CFO role cemented Partin’s belief that the CEO-CFO partnership is the most critical relationship in any company. The CEO, whom Partin describes as a “driver,” depended on Partin’s success, reinforcing how essential trust and collaboration were to shaping the company’s future. This experience influenced Partin’s leadership approach in the four CFO appointments that followed, where he continued to rely on these strategic partnerships.Now, after nearly a decade as CFO of BlackLine, Partin tells us he still believes that “leveling up” and fostering strong CEO relationships are key drivers of his success, guiding his strategic mindset and leadership to this day.

It wasn’t long after Laura LaPeer left public accounting to climb the corporate career ladder that she encountered her first delicate challenge as a corporate controller. Just a year into her new role, her employer was acquired, and LaPeer was unexpectedly asked to explain complex working capital issues to the new owners. The head of finance for the acquired firm struggled to present the information clearly, and the new owners were becoming frustrated. LaPeer instinctively stepped in, simplifying the complex details and demonstrating her ability to distill intricate financial data while effectively reading the room.This experience, though it occurred prior to her joining Plante Moran, laid the foundation for her approach to leadership. By the time she was recruited as the controller at Plante Moran, LaPeer had already honed her ability to navigate complex situations and build relationships. The firm’s collaborative culture and the promise of a CFO role within a few years aligned perfectly with her leadership ethos. Her early experience not only solidified her decision-making and communication abilities but also prepared her for the strategic demands of Plante Moran’s finance function.

In the mid-2000s, the world’s attention increasingly turned toward Asia, driven by the region’s rapid economic growth – not to mention the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It was within this atmosphere of excitement and potential that Joey Wong made a pivotal career decision. Having grown up in Los Angeles after her family immigrated from Hong Kong, Wong had always been drawn to math and science, a passion that led her to MIT, where she studied economics and business. Initially, Wong’s goal was to pursue a career in government economic policy, but the lengthy academic path it required made her rethink her future. “I realized that would mean many more years of studying before I had the credentials,” she recalls. Determined to put her skills into practice, Wong set her sights on business instead. Feeling a deep connection to Asia and recognizing that her Chinese language skills could provide a competitive edge, she took a bold step and accepted an internship with Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong.Immersed in the vibrant financial markets of Asia, she initially focused on media and telecommunications companies—two sectors experiencing significant growth in the region.Today, as CFO of Lenovo’s Asia Pacific PCSD division, Wong continues to leverage her deep expertise in regional markets, utilizing the financial and strategic acumen she developed early on. Her understanding of the business landscape in Asia has made her a key player in Lenovo’s growth story, driving initiatives that capitalize on the region’s evolving opportunities.In an interesting twist, the same Beijing Olympics that helped attract Wong back to Asia also played a significant role in shaping Lenovo’s global brand image. As an official sponsor of the 2008 Games, Lenovo provided over 30,000 pieces of equipment, including PCs and servers, showcasing its technological prowess on the world stage. It’s fitting, then, that the event which in part first sparked Wong’s desire to return to Asia also foreshadowed her future at Lenovo, where she now contributes to the same brand that made headlines during the Games. In some ways, that excitement of the games not only marked the start of an era for Asia but also the beginning of Wong’s career.

The discussion centers on three CFOs—Don McGuire of ADP, Scott Blackley of Oscar Health, and Patrick Fleury of Terawulf—and their approaches to financial planning and communication. Don McGuire emphasizes ADP's predictable business model, centralizing financial planning to ensure consistent forecasts. Scott Blackley restructured Oscar Health's FP&A to better support a public company, focusing on cost structure and providing actionable insights. Patrick Fleury simplifies Bitcoin mining by using unit economics and is diversifying Terawulf into high-powered compute and AI, positioning the company for future growth. Each CFO tailors their communication to investor expectations, highlighting the importance of matching professional style with organizational needs.

When the opportunity to lead the corporate travel business at Expedia arose, Regi Vengalil knew it was exactly the role he had been seeking to further his career trajectory. Stepping into the CFO position meant overseeing a business unit with $600 million in revenue and $120 million in EBITDA, and Vengalil was eager to take on the challenge. Prior to this, he had been leading a team of strategy and M&A professionals, but the new role offered a much broader scope of responsibility.“It was a way for me to jump in with both feet to kind of get a full, you know, it wasn’t just a pure FP&A role. I had commercial finance, I had accounting. I even had a systems team. I had financial operations. So it was a full CFO role and a global team that I still knew very well, because I had led strategy for the company,” Vengalil recalls.This transition marked a critical point in his career. It was only about two years earlier, that Vengalil tells us upon joining Expedia corporate development he immediately became thrust into high-level decision-making, including a meeting with Chairman Barry Diller and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. During the meeting, Vengalil was tasked with providing input on a strategic deal. After Khosrowshahi expressed support for the deal, Diller turned to Vengalil, who was new to the room, and asked, “Hey, new guy! What do you think?” Vengalil, though it was his first week, confidently laid out the reasons why he thought the deal posed more risk than reward, despite its appeal.Reflecting on their relationship, Vengalil observed a deep mutual respect between the two leaders, forged during years of close collaboration. Khosrowshahi, who had been with the company for over a decade, had worked closely with Diller on many deals, and Vengalil noted the rapport they shared, particularly in how they approached complex issues.Diller, known for his sharp insights and high standards, preferred discussions to be clear and lucid. “If you don’t understand the complexity,” Vengalil observed, “you won’t be able to communicate it simply.” This demand for clarity pushed Vengalil to deliver concise, well-reasoned perspectives, an expectation that both challenged and strengthened his leadership capabilities. This early exposure to Diller’s precision-thinking had a lasting impact on Vengalil’s strategic mindset.

In 2012, after nearly two decades in the airline industry, Zane Rowe made a bold career pivot. Leaving behind his role as CFO at United Airlines, Rowe stepped into the tech world, joining Apple in a sales role—a move many saw as risky but one that would ultimately shape his perspective on finance leadership in the digital age. This decision marked the beginning of a transformative journey that prepared Rowe to navigate the complexities of technology, innovation, and data-driven strategies.Rowe’s time in the airline industry laid a solid foundation for his analytical mindset. Reflecting on his experience, he stated, “I recognized early on the power of data and the power of technology and how it could differentiate a good airline from a bad airline.” As he tackled the capital-intensive, data-heavy world of aviation, he developed an appreciation for how technology and data could unlock operational efficiency. His work on profitability models helped him understand how data could unlock hidden insights, a lesson that would become crucial in his later roles in the tech sector.In his roles at EMC and VMware, Rowe saw firsthand how technology could revolutionize business operations. His ability to bridge financial expertise with technology adoption became a defining strength. Now, as CFO of Workday, Rowe applies those lessons to the evolving world of artificial intelligence (AI). For him, AI is not just a tool to streamline processes, but a strategic asset that can unlock untapped value, differentiate companies in competitive markets, and drive business transformation.Rowe views AI as an extension of his long-standing belief in the importance of data. By leveraging AI to analyze massive data sets, CFOs can make faster, more informed decisions. This, he believes, enables finance leaders to be not just stewards of the bottom line but key players in shaping company strategy and future growth. Rowe’s multi-industry career journey, with its blend of traditional finance and cutting-edge technology, has uniquely equipped him to lead in the age of AI.

In 2018, Daniel Welch made a life-altering decision. After a decade in investment banking, working on high-profile IPOs and M&A deals at Morgan Stanley, Welch found himself at a crossroads. The birth of his daughter and a health scare involving his father led him to question the career path he was on. “I was mentally stimulated by the work, but it didn’t align with my personal values,” Welch reflects. Burnt out and seeking more purpose, he left the corporate finance world to pursue mission-driven opportunities in the health and wellness sector.Welch’s career pivot first brought him to Sonos, where he helped lead the company through its IPO. He later transitioned to Oura, the maker of the Oura Ring, guiding the company through a critical growth stage. These experiences solidified his desire to combine financial expertise with personal passion.In 2022, Welch found his ideal role as CFO of Kate Farms, a plant-based medical nutrition company revolutionizing the field. Kate Farms focuses on providing organic, plant-based nutrition products, free of common allergens and designed to improve health outcomes for patients in medical need. Its mission resonated deeply with Welch’s personal health journey, which began with his transition to a plant-based diet.Backed by investors like Goldman Sachs Private Equity and Novo Holdings, Kate Farms continues to grow its presence in hospitals and home care systems across the U.S., making Welch’s leadership integral to the company’s scaling efforts. His career transformation highlights how purpose and profit can intersect when leadership is guided by personal values.

When Deanna Strable was approached to take on the role of CFO at Principal Financial Group, she was taken by surprise. Having spent most of her 30-year career in leading business units rather than focusing on finance, Strable initially questioned whether she was the right fit for a position traditionally held by financial experts.“Ultimately,” she recalls, “what I learned from our board and CEO was that they really wanted someone who could partner with them in driving the company forward—someone who had the ability, obviously, not only to understand the financials but also to be able to do so within the context of appreciating and analyzing how the day-to-day impact of our operations on our financials related to our long-term strategy.”This blend of operational insight and financial expertise would come to define her tenure as CFO. Over her 7 years in the role, she led the company through significant strategic shifts. Under her leadership, Principal exited underperforming and commoditized businesses, such as retail annuities and individual life insurance. These moves were part of a broader plan to focus the company on areas with greater long-term-growth potential, including retirement solutions and asset management.Strable also reshaped the company’s financial priorities, moving beyond a narrow focus on earnings growth to a broader set of metrics, including return on equity, capital allocation, and customer satisfaction. Her emphasis on optimizing multiple metrics, rather than chasing short-term financial gains, helped to lay the groundwork for sustainable success. Strable’s career journey as CFO was a testament to the power of strategic thinking in driving both financial and long-term business growth.

Ben Averis’ journey to CFO of Yoto was shaped by diverse experiences in finance, ranging from his early days at PwC in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to leading roles in private equity-backed businesses. His exposure to the "buy and build" strategy during M&A transactions taught him the challenges of scaling businesses while maintaining their core values. Ben worked on transactions that involved integrating smaller, family-run businesses into larger corporate structures. This experience revealed to him a key risk: while larger companies could gain operational efficiencies, they often lost the customer-centric magic that made smaller businesses special.Reflecting on these experiences, Ben noted, "What you would find is that, if you got to that buy and build moment, and you integrated (the businesses), some of the magic would be lost, and you would lose a bit of the customer obsession." This insight has become central to his strategic mindset as CFO of Yoto, a founder-led company with a strong customer-first philosophy.Ben’s understanding of the "buy or build" moment shapes his leadership at Yoto, where he balances the need for growth with preserving the company’s entrepreneurial spirit. He recognizes the unique passion founders bring, especially their deep connection to customers, which can be diluted in corporate acquisitions. As Yoto scales, Ben is committed to ensuring that this customer obsession remains at the heart of the business, reinforcing that a well-run founder-led company often thrives because of its focus on delivering tailored customer experiences rather than sheer scale.

It was during the first half of 2024 that press reports first surfaced to suggest that Bitcoin pioneer TeraWulf was seeking to make a bold strategic pivot into AI and high-power compute. Along the front lines of this move stood Patrick Fleury, TeraWulf’s action-oriented CFO, whose short tenure at the firm thus far has been notable for its aggressive cost-cutting measures and bold efforts to address the company’s debt. Moreover, Fleury’s focus on the optimization of the cash flow from TeraWulf’s Bitcoin-mining operations has proved crucial in stabilizing the company during turbulent market conditions.It is perhaps surprising to learn—given his success as a CFO—that Fleury had not always envisioned himself in this role. Having spent 16 years as a strategic investor, he had been content in working from the sidelines, guiding companies through investments and strategy. Becoming a public-company CFO had never been on his radar. Still, when TeraWulf needed a leader to guide it through significant challenges, his deep understanding of financial markets and investment strategy turned out to make him the ideal choice.Fleury’s unique investor mind-set has been instrumental in charting TeraWulf’s new growth trajectory. His ability to engage investors, simplify complex industry dynamics, and clearly demonstrate “value” has been key to gaining investor buy-in for TeraWulf’s new direction. Moreover, his experience on the buy-side has provided him with valuable insight into what investors look for—transparency, potential for growth, and clear financial discipline.This ability to communicate effectively, coupled with his strategic acumen, has allowed Fleury to lay the groundwork for TeraWulf’s shift into AI and high-power compute. By looking at decisions through an investor’s lens, he has garnered the ability to build trust with stakeholders while at the same time positioning TeraWulf as a forward-thinking player in the rapidly evolving AI and data center sectors. Fortunately for his firm, Fleury’s financial leadership continues to drive TeraWulf toward a promising future in these high-growth markets. 

When Scott Blackley was asked in kindergarten what he wanted to be when he grew up, his answer was surprisingly clear: “I want to be an auditor.” This early ambition was no coincidence; his father was a partner at KPMG, and young Blackley grew up around the firm’s offices, imagining himself one day sitting at a big desk, overseeing important work. True to his dream, he eventually ended up following in his father’s footsteps to become a partner at KPMG and invest a dozen career years there.Despite achieving his childhood goal and carrying on the family legacy, though, Blackley eventually found himself at a crossroads. “It was a tough decision to leave KPMG,” he recalls, “but some of the experiences that I had had involving other people’s business problems had made me want to own them.” This realization marked a turning point in his career that fueled his desire to take on more responsibility and solve problems on a firsthand basis.This drive led Blackley to Oscar Health, where he stepped into the CFO role during a pivotal moment. Reflecting on his early days at the company, Blackley observes, “When I joined, one of the things that I walked in the door with was a commitment to myself that I was going to be thoughtful about taking the time to understand the situation and then decisive about making decisions.” Consequently, within 90 days, he would end up reorganizing the finance function to separate FP&A from the controller’s office and hiring a new leader to build a more structured finance organization—one capable of supporting Oscar Health’s ambitious plans for growth and transformation.

In 2021, Don McGuire received an unexpected call from ADP's HR leader, offering him the In 2021, ADP’s HR leader reached out to Don McGuire, then the company’s globe-trotting EMEA In 2021, ADP’s HR leader reached out to Don McGuire, then the company’s globe-trotting EMEA president, to gauge his interest in stepping into the firm’s CFO role. McGuire was surprised, inasmuch as it had been nearly two decades since he had veered off the traditional finance career track. During this interim, McGuire had taken on various global leadership roles far removed from the typical CFO pathway.However, as the former CFO of ADP Canada, McGuire was by no means an unlikely candidate. Still, the leap from being CFO of a single geography to being CFO of an entire publicly traded corporation would be significant, and McGuire’s experiences along his unique previous journey served to make the unexpected offer to him only more intriguing.As it turns out, back in 2002, while serving as CFO of ADP Canada, McGuire had come to a similar crossroads. Although his career in finance had been progressing smoothly, his curiosity about the broader business landscape had led him to consider a different direction. Encouraged by his superior, ADP Canada’s president—who had noticed McGuire’s strong rapport with clients during joint meetings—McGuire took a leap of faith, stepping out of his finance role and into a client services leadership position. Taking on this mission—devoid of a “C” title—was a calculated risk, but McGuire believed that by immersing himself in the operational side of the business, he could gain valuable insights and broaden his leadership skills. Very consequentially, this move allowed him to engage directly with clients, manage teams, and drive business outcomes in ways that traditional finance roles seldom offer.This bold decision set McGuire on a unique career path, ultimately equipping him with the diverse experiences that would make him an ideal candidate for ADP’s CFO role nearly 20 years later.

In this bonus episode of CFO Thought Leader, host Jack Sweeney shares insightful stories from three finance leaders, focusing on their early beginnings and how those experiences shaped their careers. Scott Healy reflects on the influence of his father, an Air Force colonel, and his deaf brother, both of whom instilled a strong work ethic and a spirit of perseverance. Tracy Curley discusses her non-traditional path, balancing business experience with academic pursuits while navigating the challenges of being a military spouse. Lastly, Svai Sanford recounts his journey from being a Laotian refugee with a third-grade education to becoming a CFO, thanks to the support of his foster family. Each story highlights the significance of resilience, family influence, and the transformative power of education and opportunity.

In this episode of Planning Aces, Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles discuss the evolving role of FP&A professionals, emphasizing the importance of relationship-building and strategic collaboration within organizations. As summer ends and fall approaches, Brett predicts a surge in business activity, particularly as companies rush to meet year-end objectives. The conversation highlights the decline in travel post-COVID, with more business being conducted via web meetings, though these are often less effective than in-person interactions. Brett underscores the need for FP&A teams to prepare thoroughly for meetings and to foster diverse thinking to achieve better outcomes. The episode also explores the challenges of integrating acquisitions, the significance of continuous improvement, and the evolving responsibilities of FP&A leaders. Ultimately, the discussion centers on the importance of strategic relationships, effective communication, and adaptive leadership in navigating today’s complex business environment.

While most CFOs climb the ranks through finance-related roles, Steinfort’s path took a significant detour—one that saw him leading a company as CEO before unexpectedly stepping into the CFO role.Steinfort’s transition from CEO to CFO occurred when he was approached by Dan Caruso, a long-time mentor and successful entrepreneur. The two had a history of working together, starting at Level 3 Communications and continuing through various ventures. When Steinfort was leading Envision, a software company he co-founded, Caruso was simultaneously building Zayo Group. Although their roles were in separate companies, they shared an office space, fostering a close working relationship.When Zayo’s CFO decided to retire, Caruso saw an opportunity for Steinfort. Despite his lack of a traditional finance background, Steinfort had accumulated significant experience in corporate strategy during his years as a consultant for Bain & Company, and meanwhile his business-building tenure as a CEO made him more than a little familiar with the complexities of strategic budgeting and resource allocation. These experiences, combined with the trust and confidence he had built with Caruso and the board, positioned him as an unconventional yet highly capable candidate for the CFO role at Zayo.Steinfort’s move from CEO to CFO, while rare, highlights the importance of adaptability and leveraging one’s broad skill set. His success in the CFO role, first at Zayo and now at DigitalOcean, underscores the value of diverse experiences in shaping a holistic approach to financial leadership.

Clemente Cohen’s finance career began in the early 1990s inside the Munich offices of Silicon Graphics, approximately 6,500 miles from the Silicon Valley company’s headquarters and 7,500 miles from his birthplace in Argentina. This transcontinental start marked the beginning of a career defined by global problem solving , adaptability and generous helpings of M&A experience. Cohen, who grew up in Germany after moving from Argentina, problem solving perspective to his role. Joining Silicon Graphics as an accountant, Cohen tells us he was able to quickly demonstrate to others a innate curiosity and willingness to go the extra mile. Frequently, his contributions went beyond traditional accounting, delving into financial analysis and supporting the company’s rapid growth. This foundational experience in a fast-paced, technology-driven environment would shape Cohen’s understanding of finance operations on a global scale. Over the next decade, Cohen’s career with Silicon Graphics expanded across continents. He held roles in Germany, the UK, and eventually became the International CFO, overseeing finance and business operations outside the United States. After a dozen years with Silicon Graphics, Cohen joined the London Office of CA Technologies , where Cohen tell us he was able to play a pivotal role in M&A activities and helped drive the company’s transition from hardware to software. After spending much of his career at large, global companies, Cohen made a deliberate decision to pursue CFO opportunities at smaller, private equity-backed firms. This shift allowed him to be more hands-on, driving business transformation and growth in a more direct way. The move was not without hesitation, as smaller companies often come with greater challenges and fewer resources. However, Cohen embraced the opportunity to apply his extensive experience in a more entrepreneurial setting.

When Salman Khan arrived in Dubai from the U.S. in the early 2000s, he was a seasoned auditor with PricewaterhouseCoopers, ready to narrow his focus on the oil and gas industry. If someone had told him then that he would one day be the CFO of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining company, Khan would have undoubtedly replied, “What mining company?” At the time, digital assets were a distant concept, and his world revolved around the complexities of oil reserves, regulations, and international finance. In Dubai, Khan honed his skills by navigating the intricacies of the oil and gas sector, gaining a deep understanding of commodity risk, capital-intensive operations, and global markets. This experience laid a strong foundation for his future role at Marathon Digital Holdings. Just as oil extraction requires careful management of a finite resource, Bitcoin mining demands a strategic approach to harnessing the limited supply of digital currency. Returning to the U.S., Khan joined Occidental Petroleum, where he quickly climbed the ranks. At Occidental, he took on diverse roles, including leading the spin-off of California Resources Corporation, a transformative experience that further prepared him for Marathon. He managed large-scale M&A transactions, scaled a business unit from $5 million to $5 billion in revenues, and navigated complex operational challenges. This period was crucial in shaping Khan’s ability to manage high-stakes, resource-intensive environments. Khan’s time at Occidental taught him to think strategically, manage risks effectively, and lead large-scale initiatives—skills directly transferable to the fast-paced world of Bitcoin mining. Today, as CFO of Marathon Digital Holdings, Khan’s journey from auditing oil fields to managing Bitcoin miners reflects a seamless transition of expertise, making him uniquely qualified to lead Marathon through its rapid expansion and ongoing success.

According to CFO Kabir Shakir, when AI giant Nvidia sought to expand its alliances in India, it knew exactly with whom to partner: “They did their homework, and they tapped on Tata’s door.” This partnership, Shakir tells us, has proven to be but one of a number of alliances in Tata’s journey toward becoming “the national AI champion for all of India.” Along the way, Tata Communications received its first order of Nvidia’s technology, whose integration has since been fast-tracked into Tata’s production processes. With Tata’s dominance in the Indian market, Shakir continues to relate, the company is now determined to capitalize on its Nvidia partnership in order to drive growth through AI innovations across its offerings. Of course, as it turns out, few finance executives may have been better prepared than Shakir to serve as an ambassador from India’s burgeoning AI appetite to U.S. technology companies. Before being named CFO of Tata Communications in 2020, Shakir—as CFO of Microsoft India—oversaw the software developer’s finance function for all of the country, gaining deep insights into the dynamics of tech-driven growth in one of the world’s most complex markets. His role at Microsoft involved managing a fast-evolving financial landscape, making him well versed in navigating the intersections of technology, finance, and global business. Not insignificantly, prior to his tenure at Microsoft, Shakir had spent 23 years at Unilever, where he advanced through various finance roles that ultimately led to major financial initiatives across multiple geographies. Beyond its Nvidia alliance, Tata Communications has formed strategic partnerships with other tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and AWS, positioning itself as a key player in the global digital ecosystem. Each of these collaborations continues to strengthen Tata’s ability to deliver cutting-edge solutions, particularly as the world increasingly embraces AI-driven technologies. Tata’s long-standing relationship with Formula 1 racing has further showcased its expertise in high-performance data transmission. The firm handles the live feed of Formula 1 events globally, ensuring seamless visual delivery of intricate performance data to millions of viewers. This partnership exemplifies Tata’s ability to manage complex, large-scale operations while maintaining the highest standards of quality and reliability. These forward-leaning collaborations—such as with AI innovators like Nvidia or through sports broadcasting and Formula 1—are central to Tata’s growth strategy, driving both innovation and market leadership in our increasingly digital world.  

In her role as CFO of California Bank & Trust, Chikako Tyler faced the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank—the second financial crisis of her career. Unlike the first crisis, the Great Recession, which forced her to leave a rewarding career in commercial real estate, this time, Tyler was prepared to take charge. In 2009, as the economic downturn decimated the real estate market, Tyler recognized the need for a change. She pivoted to banking, taking on a temporary role at California Bank & Trust, where she quickly discovered her passion for the intricacies of finance. Her journey through various roles in the bank—ranging from specialized asset analysis to risk management—shaped her understanding of the business and led her to the CFO office. By the time Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023, Tyler had nearly five years of experience as CFO under her belt. Drawing on the lessons from her diverse career, she confidently navigated the crisis. Unlike the uncertainty she faced during the Great Recession, Tyler leaned into her role, guiding her team through the tumultuous period. She championed her bankers to manage their customers proactively, quelling any possibility of panic. Tyler’s journey from real estate to banking, and from crisis to confident leadership, underscores her adaptability and strategic mindset. Her ability to transform challenges into opportunities has not only defined her career but also strengthened California Bank & Trust’s resilience in uncertain times.

In 2005, fresh into his first banking job at Citigroup, Tom Bock found himself working 63 hours straight to prepare for a critical pitch. Fueled by a desire to prove his worth, he pushed his limits, refusing to rest until the task was completed. However, this grueling experience came at a cost—his nose began bleeding, a stark sign of physical exhaustion. Despite his best efforts, the pitch fell short, leading Bock to a moment of deep reflection. At the time, Bock was someone who believed in sheer perseverance, equating success with pushing through challenges alone. But the Citigroup experience became a turning point in his career. Through discussions with mentors and careful self-assessment, he recognized the flaws in his approach. Bock learned three crucial lessons: the importance of breaking down complex tasks into manageable parts, the necessity of self-care, and the value of seeking help when needed. This experience broadened his understanding of success in finance. It wasn’t just about individual heroics but about effective teamwork and sustainable work practices. As Bock transitioned into more senior roles, these lessons became foundational to his mindset as a CFO. They guided him in balancing the demands of leadership with the realities of human limitations, ultimately shaping his approach to managing teams and making strategic decisions. Today, as CFO of Smart Financial, Bock applies these insights to ensure long-term success, both for himself and his organization.

Doug Potvin’s journey to becoming the CFO of Trinity Logistics reveals the power of adaptability and continuous learning. Initially captivated by technology in high school, Doug pursued a degree in computer science, only to discover a passion for finance during a college course. This pivot led him to the National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS), where he gained invaluable experience in loan origination and financial analysis. Despite the security and stability of his government job, Doug felt increasingly constrained by bureaucratic micromanagement. Seeking greater autonomy and a desire to directly impact business operations, Doug made the pivotal decision to transition to the private sector. He was looking for an environment where he could leverage his skills more dynamically and foster deeper connections with the business’s strategic goals. Doug’s next move was to a family-owned seafood company, where he initially served as a controller. Over a decade, he expanded his role to general manager, overseeing HR, legal issues, farming operations, and technology integration. This hands-on experience in a diverse set of responsibilities provided Doug with a comprehensive understanding of business operations beyond finance. In 2006, Doug joined Trinity Logistics as CFO, drawn by the challenge of transforming and growing the company. Under his financial leadership, Trinity Logistics grew from a $100 million to a $2 billion enterprise. Doug’s emphasis on leveraging technology and automating processes has been instrumental in driving efficiency and growth. His collaborative approach and deep understanding of business operations have allowed him to create a robust financial strategy that supports Trinity’s long-term objectives. Doug Potvin’s career journey highlights the importance of seeking environments that align with one’s values and aspirations, demonstrating how a strategic shift can lead to remarkable professional growth and success.

Todd Patriacca was more than a dozen years into his finance career when two things happened that accelerated its trajectory. The first was that he found a mentor—or, rather, that his future mentor found him. The second was that he became immersed in Lean culture. Starting his career at Arthur Andersen, Patriacca spent nearly 10 years in public accounting, a span that allowed him to gain a broad perspective on various industries. However, it was in a subsequent role as corporate controller at a private company that he found a mentor to guide him through essential areas like tax, treasury, and operations—preparing him for the CFO role that he eventually assumed. It was during these years that Patriacca was introduced to Lean principles. Initially rooted in manufacturing, Lean focuses on continuous improvement and eliminating waste. Patriacca saw the potential to apply these methodologies to finance. He began by implementing standardized processes and automation, significantly improving efficiency. For instance, 80% of accounts payable invoices with purchase orders became processed without human intervention, allowing his team to focus on exceptions and strategic tasks. Upon joining BVI Medical in 2023, Patriacca continued to champion Lean principles. He established a Center of Excellence in Poland, centralizing operations to enhance efficiency and scalability. His approach to Lean extended to leveraging AI for forecasting and inventory management, exploring opportunities to further streamline operations. When asked how far along in their career finance professionals should be exposed to Lean thinking, Patriacca’s response is clear: “As early as possible.” He believes that early exposure helps finance professionals to develop a mind-set geared toward continuous improvement and collaboration. Patriacca’s career journey underscores the transformative impact of Lean thinking, illustrating its power to drive efficiency and innovation in finance.

The year 1986 was a pivotal one for Larry White’s career in the U.S. Coast Guard. After entering the Coast Guard Academy in 1976 and graduating in 1980, White subsequently advanced through a series of intriguing roles including commanding an 82-foot patrol boat before deciding to pursue an MBA. The Coast Guard agreed to underwrite this move, enhancing his resume and eventually making him an attractive candidate for high-profile roles in Fortune 100 companies. Still, White had no intention of leaving the Coast Guard. Going forward, a decision by White to specialize in finance, rather than following the traditional rotation between operational and financial roles, was initially met with skepticism inside the military. Early in his career, it was suggested that his focus on finance could limit his promotion prospects. However, White's commitment to his specialty, combined with his strategic use of professional certifications and active involvement in organizations like the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), proved this view to be incorrect. As the first active-duty military officer to serve as the global chairman of the IMA, White distinguished himself in his field. He also contributed to the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board while serving as a captain in the Coast Guard, highlighting his expertise in public sector financial management. Following his retirement from the USCG, White’s career continued to flourish. The very next day, he signed agreements with Deloitte and the Resource Consumption Accounting Institute, where he served as executive director for 14 years. His post-retirement work focused on improving cost management practices and advocating for better education for management accountants, reflecting his dedication to enhancing financial practices. White’s ongoing involvement with organizations such as COSO (Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission), where he works on internal controls and enterprise risk management, underscores his commitment to advancing the field. He also helped to establish the Profitability Analytics Center of Excellence, which now engages a broad audience as it aims to advance internal decision support practices. White’s career is a testament to how specialization, supported by continuous education and professional development, can lead to impactful leadership and meaningful contributions within both the public and private sectors. His journey reflects the lessons learned from his Coast Guard service and his dedication to fostering change and innovation in financial management.

Brett & Jack discuss the commentary and insights of three accomplished CFOs (Sandeep Aujla from Intuit, Shelagh Glaser from Synopsys, and Seth Wunder from Acorns), while highlighting their distinct approaches to strategic finance, organizational structure, communication, and business growth.  While all three Planning Aces highlight the importance of strategic finance and organizational efficiency, their reflections differ in focus. Aujla emphasizes the integration of finance with business strategy, Glaser focuses on aligning investments with strategic goals and improving communication with investors, and Wunder highlights the importance of team collaboration and simplifying communication across different domains. Each CFO offers unique insights into how finance can drive business success in their respective companies.  

Josh Schenker may well be the only CFO we’ve interviewed who claims to have dropped out of high school—which he actually did, in order to accelerate his academic ascendance by passing the General Educational Development (GED) test, which in turn allowed him to enroll at college ahead of schedule. “I never received a diploma from my high school, so, technically, I am a dropout,” explains Schenker, who logged many hours during his high school years at his father’s wealth management company. It was there, he tells us, that he first developed a keen understanding of finance. Schenker relates that he would immerse himself in learning the intricacies of portfolio allocation and market optimization, which ultimately laid the foundation for his future career. With a strong interest in finance and business, Schenker pursued further studies in these fields, eventually earning a master’s in finance from MIT. This academic background, combined with his early hands-on experience, equipped him with the skills needed to navigate the complex world of finance. Schenker began his career in strategy consulting at PwC, where he further developed his analytical skills by working across multiple industries to identify key business metrics and optimize performance. His transition to AOL’s Corporate Development Group marked a significant step in his career. There, he participated in numerous M&A deals, including the high-profile acquisition of Yahoo by Verizon. Eager to gain deeper involvement in business operations, Schenker joined Yahoo Sports as head of business operations, a position that enabled him to hone his skills in budgeting and investment strategies. Driven by a desire for hands-on experience in running a business, Schenker then moved into the start-up world, assuming roles at companies like clean.io and Cluster. In these CFO positions, he leveraged his M&A experience and strategic insights to drive business success, which would lead to his current role as CFO at Aditude, where he continues to apply his diverse expertise in finance and business management.

In a special Trouble Shooter episode of CFO Thought Leader, we speak with Tal Kirschenbaum, CEO and founder of Ledge. Together, we delve into his career journey and the foresight that led him to identify a significant opportunity in finance automation. Tal's path, starting from his finance education at the University of Chicago and Tel Aviv University, through various roles at Intel Capital, BCG, Facebook, and Milio, provided him with a broad perspective on financial operations and corporate development. At the core of Tal's entrepreneurial vision is a keen awareness of the inefficiencies in traditional finance operations. He identified a common challenge faced by finance teams: the reliance on manual processes and siloed systems, which often lead to increased workloads and errors. This insight spurred the creation of Ledge, a platform designed to automate repetitive tasks and streamline financial data management. Tal's experiences highlighted the critical role of AI in transforming finance functions. He emphasized that AI can address the high volume of unstructured data finance teams deal with daily. For instance, AI-driven solutions can resolve discrepancies in transaction data, such as mismatched names between bank transfers and invoices, significantly reducing manual intervention. Moreover, Tal sees AI as a powerful tool for financial forecasting. By using AI to predict outcomes based on historical data and user inputs, finance teams can move away from time-consuming manual data manipulation and focus on strategic decision-making. This shift not only enhances efficiency but also addresses the acute shortage of skilled accountants by automating routine tasks and allowing finance professionals to engage in more valuable work. In today's challenging economic environment, Tal advises finance leaders to prioritize sustainable and profitable growth. He believes that integrating AI into finance operations is crucial for achieving increased efficiency and supporting complex business operations. As the market demands more from finance teams, leveraging AI can be the key to maintaining competitiveness and ensuring long-term success.

“I see the fear of failure as being so detrimental to so many people early in their career. In people’s minds, failing is often outsized, but most of the time, the things you’re dealing with when you’re up and coming are expected to involve some failure. That’s how you learn,” reflects Eric Emans, the CFO of Nintex. Emans tell us his career was built using the power of learning from mistakes and driving an expectation-based culture in finance. In fact, Emans views failure as a critical learning tool. Starting his career in juvenile rehabilitation, Emans tell us he gained unique insights into human behavior and communication, which later influenced his approach to leadership. When Emans transitioned to finance, he was determined to understand the business holistically, not just through numbers. At Bluecore, where he first stepped into a CFO role, Emans emphasized the importance of building strong relationships within the organization. He relied on mentorship and collaboration to navigate new challenges, openly seeking feedback from colleagues and industry veterans. This approach helped him avoid common pitfalls and develop a nuanced understanding of financial operations. As CFO of Nintex, Emans has continued to foster a culture where team members are encouraged to go beyond their job descriptions. He uses the metaphor of the left hand and right hand to describe the importance of both controllership and FP&A in his leadership. “My head of FP&A and my controller need to be my right and left hand. Not only do they need to be talented, but I need to be able to speak to them about almost everything going on in the company,” he says. Emans believes in empowering his team to think critically, challenge assumptions, and bring new insights to the table. “If a finance person just hands me back the analysis I asked for, that’s great. But if they go further and provide additional insights, that’s what makes the difference between a good and a great organization,” he says. It perhaps little surprise Emans’s leadership style is driven by continuous learning. He advocates for finance professionals to engage with different disciplines, understand the broader business context, and not be afraid to make mistakes.

When Sandeep Aujla arrived at Intuit in 2015, he had already invested seven career-building years as a senior finance executive at Visa, and the path to the CFO office was presumably getting shorter. Still, it would be another eight years before Aujla would be appointed Intuit CFO. While there’s little question that during those eight years Aujla could have likely nabbed CFO appointments elsewhere, his decision to stay and complete yet another journey within Intuit reminds us that the shortest path is not always the best. Sandeep’s journey at Intuit began with a dual mandate: to build a forward-thinking finance team and to deeply engage in business operations. Initially, he took on the role of acting Chief Risk Officer for Intuit’s payments business, demonstrating his versatility and strategic thinking. This early experience laid the foundation for his future contributions, as he helped transition Intuit from a primarily accounting software provider to a broader platform offering services such as payments, payroll, and Mailchimp. Sandeep played a pivotal role in this transformation, co-leading the small business group and driving the strategy that shifted Intuit’s revenue base from accounting software to a diverse array of services. His ability to adapt and innovate was crucial as Intuit evolved into a high-growth, high-margin company. Despite opportunities to join other companies, Sandeep remained at Intuit, benefiting from the company’s deliberate investment in his growth. Working closely with current CEO Sasan Goodarzi and former executive chairman Brad Smith, Sandeep received mentorship and leadership development that prepared him for the CFO role. This investment, coupled with his extensive involvement in strategic initiatives, ensured that he was not only ready for the role but also deeply aligned with Intuit’s vision and culture. As CFO, Sandeep focuses on unlocking potential within the finance team and the broader organization. He emphasizes the importance of talent development, spending significant time recruiting, coaching, and nurturing top performers. His strategic mindset, honed through years of navigating Intuit’s complex business landscape, positions him to lead the company through its next chapter of growth.

Mark Khavkin tells us that from the very beginning of his career journey—a 2008 role as an investment professional with a European private equity firm—he was able to gain experience in board strategy, investor relations, and entrepreneurial exploration. This foundation allowed him to read boardroom dynamics from very early on and prepared him to anticipate a variety of operational perspectives that would set the stage for his path forward. Transitioning to Silicon Valley, Khavkin joined eBay’s corporate development team, where he learned to align acquisition opportunities with the strategic goals of business units and technology leaders—experience that deepened his understanding of operational management and strategic planning. A pivotal moment came when a former eBay divisional CFO who had served as a mentor invited Khavkin to join oDesk (later Upwork) as FP&A lead. This role allowed him to influence company culture and drive change from within the finance function. At Upwork, Khavkin tells us he sharpened his ability to integrate investor narratives with internal strategies, from marketing to product development. His ability to present a cohesive story from market opportunities to long-term strategy proved instrumental during the early milestones of Upwork’s IPO journey. Throughout his career, Khavkin has come to pursue experiences that would require a unique blend of investment acumen, strategic insight, and leadership impact. His journey highlights the importance of understanding both investor perspectives and operational realities, while crafting a narrative that demonstrates insight into both.

Karen Williams’s journey to becoming a successful CFO began with a crucial lesson learned early in her career at the UK headquarters of candy giant Mars. As a young professional, she tells us, she had failed to grasp the importance of relationship-building and expressing her passion for the business. At times, this void had kept her sidelined and stymied her professional growth, a conclusion at which she would arrive only much later, when she personally witnessed the power of networking and personal connections. The turning point came during her tenure at American Express. Immersed in a culture that valued relationships and collaboration, Williams began to understand how networking could unlock the potential of others. The open-door policy at American Express allowed her to connect with colleagues across departments, fostering a sense of community and shared purpose. It was here where she found a mentor who not only guided her through the intricacies of corporate finance and leadership after recognizing her passion and dedication but also provided valuable insights that opened the doors to new opportunities that would accelerate her career progression. Years later, when Williams ascended into the first of what would become a number of CFO roles, she carried forward the lessons learned from her experiences. She emphasizes the importance of a human capital mind-set that rewards those who demonstrate a genuine passion for the business. Furthermore—because she believes that passion drives results—she strives to create an environment where her team feels motivated and valued. By promoting internal talent and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, Williams ensures that her team is not just competent but also deeply engaged and committed.

On the latest episode of Planning Aces three dynamic CFOs—Robert Cornella (RNDC), Karen Williams (American Express Global Business Travel), and Tony Querciagrossa (Pinstripes)—share a menu of FP&A insights and experiences. Robert Cornella emphasized the importance of understanding value chain economics and achieving operational harmony within complex mergers. His experience at Coca-Cola highlighted the necessity of predictable revenue streams and balanced incentives for long-term investment. Karen Williams brought a fresh perspective on utilizing data. She stressed the need for a proactive approach in gathering and analyzing diverse data sources, alongside encouraging self-sufficiency within teams using different technology tools. Her focus on customer feedback underscores the value of real-time insights in shaping business strategies. Tony Querciagrossa reflected on his entrepreneurial journey, underlining the benefits of working in smaller companies where exposure to various business aspects is inevitable. His pivotal moment at Medline illustrated the significance of aligning financial support with organizational needs, fostering a collaborative environment to solve broader business problems. Hosts, Sweeney and Knowles, highlight the shared themes of data curiosity, the evolving role of finance in operational decisions, and the importance of cross-functional competencies. 

Mo Shahzad is not one for trivial conversations. At Relativity Space, he’s known for his deep curiosity, often engaging team members in discussions about their interests and passions. This intellectual curiosity is not just a personal trait—it’s a vital tool for his role as CFO. Mo’s ability to connect on a personal level mirrors his professional mission: translating the innovative dreams of Relativity Space’s founders into a compelling narrative for investors.

In the season 1 finale of Controllers Classified, host Erik Zhou is joined by Sarah Hinkfuss from Bain Capital Ventures for an overview of the VC investment landscape and a deep dive into her investment due diligence approach for growth stage companies. The episode begins with Sarah highlighting milestones from her career, including her time conducting water pricing research in the Middle East, her transition into tech, and her pivot from tech into investing. Underlying everything is her passion for empirical based decision making and a belief that complex problems require a multidisciplinary approach. The conversation then pivots to the investment landscape. Sarah explains the relationship between companies, VCs, and LPs, and how the macroeconomic environment is driving a “flight to quality”. The result is companies are being asked to balance growth and profitability, and increasingly making hard decisions around what to keep and what to cut. Sarah then gives listeners an insider's look at her investment due diligence approach for growth stage companies, underscoring the importance of a company’s financials in this process. She spends some time explaining why unit economics and a business model are so important and notes that it’s not just about seeing the numbers. A founder must have a clear narrative about what drives their business and where they see things going in the future. Sarah also touches on the transition from Series A to Series B, and the nuances in the fundraising process for early vs. growth stage companies. This episode is a must-listen for founders & finance leaders aiming to navigate the complexities of fundraising in today’s macroeconomic environment.

Beginning her career as an analyst, Carol Lee honed her technical skills both in pre-revenue start-ups and a multinational corporation with over $10 billion in revenue. These contrasting environments, she tells us, equipped her with a unique perspective on what it takes to be both scrappy and scalable. Early in her career, Lee immersed herself in M&A activities, gaining insights from both the buy and sell sides. As an analyst, she was able to absorb vast amounts of financial information and build detailed models as she observed high-stakes negotiations from up close. These experiences were instrumental in understanding the end-to-end processes of M&A, from financial scrutiny to integration and synergy realization. This comprehensive view became invaluable to her as she emerged as a finance leader. Lee’s tenure at 100-year-old Konica Minolta exposed her to large-scale operations and the intricacies of synchronized business processes. This period taught her the importance of structured, efficient workflows and the necessity of diverse go-to-market strategies. These insights became crucial when she transitioned to the fast-paced environment of Silicon Valley tech start-ups, where agility and rapid decision-making are essential. In her first CFO role at GoodData, a VC-backed company, Lee embraced the chaos and speed of the start-up culture. Her ability to balance structured financial oversight with the need for flexibility and rapid experimentation became a hallmark of her leadership. This balance, coupled with a deep understanding of various business scales and sectors, defines Lee’s CFO mindset today. Lee emphasizes the importance of communication, storytelling, and partnership in finance leadership. By integrating technical acumen with strategic foresight and a collaborative approach, she navigates the complexities of scaling businesses while fostering innovation and growth. 

  Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles explore the evolving role of CFOs in AI companies. Highlighting the impressive backgrounds of the finance leaders featured in the 20 leading CFOs of AI report, recently published by CFO Thought Leader. The conversation underscores the ethical challenges posed by AI and the critical role CFOs play in ensuring responsible governance. Notable examples like Krishna Rao of Anthropic and Sarah Friar of OpenAI illustrate the diverse expertise needed in AI leadership. As AI continues to revolutionize industries, CFOs are tasked with balancing innovation and ethical stewardship.

Michael O’Grady’s finance strategic moment occurred in 2014 at higher-ed tech company Ellucian. Faced with transitioning from a traditional perpetual license model to a SaaS one, he identified the need for a unified approach across all business functions. Recognizing that the company’s executives had differing visions, he proposed skipping the annual budget process to focus on a 5-year integrated plan. This comprehensive strategy, developed with input from all departments, required significant investment but also was crucial for the company’s transformation. The plan’s success ultimately contributed to Ellucian’s acquisition by TPG for $3.5 billion, demonstrating the power of cohesive strategic financial planning. Read More   O’Grady’s journey to becoming a finance executive was far from linear. In his early years, he was uncertain about his career path. He had a passion for languages, which led him to work for Berlitz, the global language education company. Fluent in three languages, he found that his experience at Berlitz broadened his perspective and honed his communication skills. Still, something was missing. Increasingly, O’Grady found himself intrigued by the complexities of business and finance. He decided to pursue further education in the latter, where his analytical mind and problem-solving skills began to shine. His first major career step in finance was at a midsize manufacturing firm. Here, he encountered the realities of budget constraints and resource allocation, learning the critical importance of aligning financial goals with broader company strategies. By the time he joined Ellucian, O’Grady had built a wealth of diverse experiences that had shaped his financial acumen. His ability to integrate different departmental visions into a cohesive financial strategy helped not only to transform Ellucian’s business model but also to self-validate his growing ambitions to become a CFO.

On Location IMA24 (San Antonio, TX) the annual America's conference for the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA)  CFO Thought Leader Host Jack Sweeney speaks to Mike DePrisco, IMA President and CEO, about the evolving importance of certifications like the CMA (Certified Management Accountant) and the newly established FMAA (Financial and Managerial Accounting Associate) to support early-career individuals. DePrisco stressed the need for personalized professional development to cater to unique career motivations and the critical role of CFOs in promoting continuous learning. The IMA is focusing on stackable digital credentials in areas like AI and cybersecurity to help professionals specialize further. Additionally, the IMA plans geographic expansion, notably into Japan, and aims to strengthen partnerships with academic institutions and organizations. Dianna Steinbach, IMA SVP growth, highlights the opportunities for growth both domestically and internationally, with a strategic push into Japan due to its need for financial management and analysis (FP&A) resources.

When she was an international studies major living abroad, Ashley Johnson tells us she met a U.S. ambassador whose unvarnished career advice subsequently led her to divert her career path away from the diplomatic corps of the U.S. foreign service. Johnson reflects, "I thought I was going into the State Department." However, a weekend spent with Ambassador Roy Huffington, immersed in discussions about the pivotal role of a strong economy, sparked a profound realization. "You cannot be an effective leader if you don't understand how to make a strong economy," the ambassador and renowned Texas oilman emphasized, leaving Ashley determined to delve into the world of business and finance. More encouragement followed when a friend from a study group introduced her to the intricacies of Wall Street, igniting her fascination with financial statements. "Financial statements tell a really interesting story," she notes, "and if you know how to read them, you're going to understand something about that company that maybe other people won't." Johnson routinely draws our attention to lessons and moments of insight, such as when she illustrates for us the origins of her unwavering commitment to thorough analysis. During a pivotal investment decision, her scrutiny of financial assumptions saved her firm from a potential catastrophic loss. "Look for those assumptions, question them again and again," she advises, emphasizing the critical role of meticulous examination in financial decision-making.

In this episode of Controllers Classified, host Erik Zhou is joined by Eugene Spevakov, Treasurer and Head of Corporate FP&A at 6sense. The conversation begins by tracing Eugene’s path, highlighting his start in civil engineering and his transition into treasury and corporate finance. The episode then dives deep into the primary responsibilities of a treasury function: cash and risk management (aka, you need to be able to move money from point A to point B safely). Eugene spends time explaining what both mean and best practices associated (tip: prioritize cash preservation, liquidity, then yield). As a part of that, he reflects on the SVB collapse a year ago, and how that galvanized a lot of companies to take a hard look at their cash and risk management processes. The conversation pivots to Eugene’s focus areas and accomplishments at 6sense. He shares how he built the company’s first official treasury function, executed a senior secured credit facility, and designed an investment portfolio to optimize yield and reduce banking fees. As a part of this, he spends a few minutes on the macro environment, including the end of the ZIRP era and the influence of geopolitics. His primary point? Manage the risk you can control, and scenario plan for what you can’t. This is a “don’t miss” episode for finance leaders looking to build effective cash and risk management strategies.

CFO Jorge Stevenson’s finance career journey begins in Santiago, Chile, where both his parents were leaders within the business community and instilled in him the importance of finance when it comes to  achieving business success. Jorge’s formal business education began with an MBA from Duke University, where he honed his finance. His professional journey includes pivotal roles at a number of different organizations. At Goldman Sachs, he gained exposure to mergers and acquisitions, financial planning, and board-level responsibilities. His tenure at Prudential further solidified his strategic thinking capabilities, working on mergers and acquisitions across Latin America, Europe, and Africa.

In the early years of Scott Henderson’s career, the dotcom bubble burst, leaving the tech industry in turmoil and many young professionals uncertain about their futures. Despite this chaotic climate, Henderson decided to take a calculated risk by joining another dotcom venture. This time, the company was a modest enterprise with 300 employees and $25 million in revenue. At the time, it was known as Salesforce.com. Henderson’s gamble paid off handsomely. As Salesforce grew from a promising start-up into a global tech giant, Henderson’s role within the company expanded significantly. He ascended through the ranks, eventually managing a team of 600 people across 13 countries. During his tenure, he played a pivotal role in integrating major acquisitions like MuleSoft and Tableau, helping to navigate the complexities of these integrations while driving corporate planning and strategic initiatives. In 2022, Henderson took on a new challenge as CFO of DISQO, a brand experience platform company. Stepping into DISQO, he was greeted by a smaller team and the economic headwinds of a post-pandemic world. Henderson immediately set about understanding the company’s structure, focusing on areas for improvement and leveraging his extensive experience to bolster DISQO’s finance operations. One of his key initiatives was to enhance Revenue Operations (RevOps), positioning it as the crucial link between the front and back offices. This strategic focus helped DISQO to navigate economic uncertainties while preparing for durable growth. Under Henderson’s guidance, DISQO transformed its finance function into a strategic partner, enabling better decision-making and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Henderson’s career journey, marked by calculated risks and strategic foresight, underscores the importance of adaptability and vision in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

Efraín Pérez Agosto began his career on the lively casino floors of Puerto Rico, where his fascination with the gaming industry was first sparked. Starting with a succession of jobs, he quickly showcased his analytical prowess and passion for finance. In search of broader horizons, Agosto relocated to the U.S. when his casino owner set down roots in Indiana. This move marked a pivotal chapter in his career, as he balanced work while completing his undergraduate degree stateside before going on to pursue an MBA. The Indiana operation offered Agosto invaluable experience in the American gaming market. His ability to dissect complex data and drive strategic initiatives began to set him apart. During this period, Agosto tells us, his pursuit of an MBA expanded his strategic thinking and prepared him for more significant challenges ahead. Upon graduating, Agosto joined Caesars Entertainment, where he soon found himself on a fast track to becoming a casino controller. After 4 years with Caesars, it was then on to MGM Resorts International, which was seeking to field a finance team for its new National Harbor resort in Maryland. Agosto headed east, where over the next 5 years he steadily advanced up MGM’s finance ladder. Eventually having beefed up his FP&A resume, he subsequently landed inside the National Harbor’s CFO office. Although his leadership there was notably tested by both the COVID-19 pandemic and a significant cyberattack, his proactive and resilient approach was able to help to safeguard the business. Today, Agosto focuses on driving growth initiatives and navigating labor market challenges, positioning him as a transformative finance leader in the gaming industry.

Robert Cornella’s path to the CFO office at RNDC wasn’t meticulously planned; instead, it unfolded organically, guided by pivotal moments and unexpected opportunities. One such moment arrived with his appointment as CFO of Coca-Cola Germany, a role that became a defining chapter in his career. Before his tenure in Germany, Cornella had already amassed a series of achievements. His journey began when he made the bold decision to relocate from the United States to Europe with E&Y. This move set the stage for transformative experiences that would shape his future.

Blending academic rigor with industry acumen- Fatema El-Wakeel, PHD has multiple professional lives inside the data strategy realm.  Her multifaceted career encompasses roles at the University of Cambridge, where she imparts knowledge as a seasoned educator, and at Unilever, where she shapes strategic data initiatives. Fatema also lends her expertise as a non-executive director (Institute of Management Accountants), showcasing her versatility and leadership in diverse settings. A crucial aspect of her professional life is the intersection of academia and industry. Fatema champions the idea that academic research can profoundly inform practical solutions, while real-world challenges can drive academic inquiry. This synergy enhances both realms, fostering innovation and effective problem-solving.

When David's Bridal, a New York City staple, filed for bankruptcy in 2018, Joan Hilson was at the helm as CFO. The experience was a crucible, teaching her invaluable lessons about crisis management and strategic pivoting. "Navigating the bankruptcy of David's Bridal forced me to re-evaluate our strategies and become more resilient," Hilson recalls. This challenging period honed her ability to steer a company through turbulent times, a skill that she would carry forward into her role at Signet Jewelers. Hilson's journey toward becoming a strategic leader was shaped by a series of diverse roles across the retail sector. Starting her career at Sterling Jewelers in the mid-1980s, she climbed through the ranks to become the company's first female vice president. Her subsequent tenures at Limited Brands and American Eagle Outfitters provided her with a broad perspective on retail operations and financial management​. At Signet, Hilson's strategic mindset has become evident in her emphasis on innovation and digital transformation. Along the way, she has helped the company to navigate the pandemic and championed significant investments in digital capabilities, ensuring that the company remains competitive in an increasingly online world. "Our goal is to offer connected commerce, allowing customers to interact with us whenever and wherever they choose," she explains​. Hilson's focus on team development has proved to be another cornerstone of her leadership philosophy. She believes in nurturing talent and creating opportunities for growth, both professionally and personally. "Growing my team and helping them to evolve is as important as achieving our financial targets," she is quick to observe.​ Joan Hilson’s journey reflects a blend of resilience, strategic foresight, and commitment to innovation—qualities that continue to drive Signet Jewelers forward in a very competitive market.

Angola might not top the list of destinations to which executives typically flock to build their careers, but for Julien Lafouge, it was the starting point of an extended journey. Back in 2001, Lafouge stepped into a pivotal finance leadership role with Technip, a technology provider to the energy industry. The unconventional geography forced him to develop a keen sense of resilience and adaptability, traits that would become cornerstones of his career. Lafouge's journey from the complexities of a country marked by political instabilities to his current role as CFO at Spendesk is a testament to his knack for building teams and uprooting borders. At Spendesk, he faced the task of restructuring the finance organization to support rapid growth. Drawing on his experience, he emphasized simplification and efficiency, and championed ROI through automation and streamlined processes. The approach, Lafouge tells us, reduced the need for additional accountants by 40%, validating the power of efficient teams. One of Lafouge’s standout moments came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was the CFO of ride-sharing company BlaBlaCar. With global uncertainties looming, he built a resilient financial model that ensured the company's survival. His ability to rally his team and navigate through the crisis was perhaps his career's greatest leadership test.  Investing in talent development has always been a key part of Lafouge’s philosophy. He believes in transforming "rough diamonds" into top performers through training and mentorship. This approach not only strengthens the team but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement and resilience. Lafouge’s journey has been marked by the pursuit of new experience, whether it’s through leveraging AI for operational improvements or raising customer service standards. His career has centered on building teams and breaking boundaries, as he has continually pushed the envelope to drive financial efficiencies.

At just 16, Tucker Marshall unsuccessfully sought a humble beginning at The J. M. Smucker Company—not in the back office but on its lush grounds, hoping to cut grass. Such an early rejection—due to a company policy favoring employees’ families first—did little to deter him. Instead, it left with him an indelible admiration for the company’s culture and its loyalty to its extended family. Marshall’s career trajectory—although certainly not linear—has been a master class in preparation and perseverance. Redirecting from his initial pursuit of a career in medicine after having fallen in love with economics, he embarked on a formidable journey down the corridors of finance. Starting in Chicago, he cut his teeth on investment banking and credit analysis at ABN AMRO, now part of Bank of America. This formative period honed his financial acumen, which led him to delve deeper into the intricacies of corporate finance and investment. Transitioning into private equity further expanded his horizons, immersing him in the operational dynamics of various industries from steel to automotive. Each role was a building block, enriching his understanding and skill set and preparing him for the strategic financial leadership that would define his later career. In 2012, coming full circle, Marshall finally joined Smucker’s, a company that had long stood as a beacon in his community. Rising through the ranks, he became CFO in 2020, at a time when strategic financial leadership had become more crucial than ever. Under his stewardship, Smucker’s finance function evolved beyond traditional roles, emphasizing strategic partnerships across the company, fostering growth, and enhancing shareholder value—principles far from the mind of a young man in the same place who once dreamed of simple summer days spent mowing luscious lawns.

On a remote Wyoming cattle ranch, young Jason Godley faced a dire situation: the baler attached to his tractor suddenly caught fire. Alone, with no immediate help and devoid of modern conveniences like cell phones, 12-year-old Jason had to think quickly and act decisively. His decision to drive to a neighbor’s house to use their hose not only extinguished the fire but also preserved the surrounding fields. This incident on the ranch, Godley tells us, instilled a lifelong “bias for action” and an ability for “independent thinking,” themes that would profoundly shape his professional ethos and success. Jason’s journey from the plains of Wyoming to the corporate boardrooms of global finance began at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he dealt with complex international finance and technical accounting in Denver and Paris. The skills cultivated during his youth—swift decision-making and self-reliance—proved invaluable as he navigated diverse business environments and cultures. These traits became even more crucial as Jason ascended to the role of CFO at Xactly. Here, his bias for action and independent thinking enabled him to drive strategic initiatives, particularly in improving sales and marketing efficiency. By dissecting and refining operational levers, Jason applied his ranch-learned pragmatism to enhance corporate performance and alignment, demonstrating how foundational experiences can echo through a career, influencing leadership style and business outcomes.

Lawrence Herman’s path to becoming a CFO unfolded through a series of experiences that changed his understanding of the finance world, beginning with his initial role at Goldman Sachs. Here, in the crucible of intense market dynamics, Herman cut his teeth on complex financial models, where the rigor of long hours refined his capacity to handle pressure and complexity—a foundational skill for any leader. Following his stint at Goldman Sachs, Herman transitioned to Prudential Securities, diving into the intricate world of mergers and acquisitions. This move wasn’t just a change of address: It was a strategic step into a role that demanded a deep understanding of corporate strategies and the foresight to see beyond numbers. It was here that Herman began to interact closely with C-suite executives, gaining insights into decision-making at the highest levels and learning the art of negotiation and strategic thinking. Herman’s career trajectory continued through various financial institutions, including EY and Morgan Stanley, each role offering him new lenses through which to view the business world. His expertise deepened in areas such as consulting and transaction advisory, where he navigated diverse challenges and crafted solutions that drove business growth and efficiency. As the CFO at Dwolla, Herman leverages his vast experience to guide the company through the evolving landscape of digital payments. His strategic focus on optimizing operations and integrating innovative technologies like AI reflects a commitment not just to manage finances but also to anticipate and shape future financial landscapes. Each career phase has taught Herman valuable lessons in resilience, adaptability, and foresight—qualities that define his role as a CFO today. 

When faced with unprecedented challenges, the true mettle of a leader is tested. Daniel Bisgeier, a seasoned CFO, exemplifies how continuous improvement and strategic decisiveness pave the way for corporate resilience and growth. Reflecting on his career, Bisgeier notes that significant progress often doesn't come in bursts but through "persistent effort over time and constant refinement." A poignant illustration of Bisgeier's strategic agility occurred during his tenure at MediaMath, amid the tumultuous onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis had abruptly shifted the demand environment, straining the company's working capital due to misaligned payment arrangements. Recognizing the urgent need for liquidity, Bisgeier spearheaded a proactive initiative to renegotiate payment terms with vendors and clients alike. This strategic move was not just about navigating a crisis but transforming it into an opportunity for more sustainable operations. "We had to make sure we had backup plans," Bisgeier recalls, underscoring the necessity of adaptability in financial strategy. By directly addressing the liquidity constraints with calculated adjustments, his team not only navigated the immediate financial tumult but also positioned the company for stronger financial health post-crisis. This career chapter speaks to Bisgeier's philosophy that impactful leadership in finance goes beyond maintaining the status quo—it involves anticipating changes, embracing challenges, and crafting solutions that ensure long-term sustainability. From his days as an analyst at Goldman Sachs to his current role at Constellation, Bisgeier tells us his career journey reveals a commitment to readiness where as a leader he IS ready to act when it counts the most.

Leadership in FP&A: All three CFOs emphasize the role of finance in leading and driving business performance through strategic foresight, detailed operational insights, and proactive engagement. Technology and Innovation: There is a strong inclination towards integrating new technologies like AI to enhance the capabilities of finance teams and improve business processes. Collaboration and Influence: The CFOs highlight the importance of collaboration within organizations, where finance must work closely with other departments to influence and drive business outcomes effectively.

From his early days in auditing at PwC to his current role as CFO at Prophix, Aaron Levine has had a career that has closely tracked the evolving nature of the financial leadership role. His journey has been marked by a series of strategic transitions and expansions of his skill set that illustrate the broadening demands of being a modern CFO. An important early chapter of Levine’s professional development was his tenure under Steve Vintz, who at the time was CFO of Vocus, where Levine served as a VP managing both accounting and finance. It was under Vintz’s mentorship that Levine came to appreciate the power of storytelling within financial leadership. Vintz, a very externally focused CFO, adeptly navigated public company landscapes, from investor relations to quarterly earnings calls. His ability to craft compelling narratives that resonated with stakeholders profoundly influenced Levine. This exposure revealed to Levine that effective CFOs do more than manage numbers: They tell stories through them. This realization has since become integral to his maturing CFO mindset, particularly as he looks to highlight the strategic benefits of Prophix’s software offerings. At Prophix, where Levine was appointed CFO this past January, the goal is to focus on refining the go-to-market metrics and integrating technology to streamline operations, emphasizing the narrative of growth and scalability. Throughout his career, Levine has learned that a CFO’s role is about not just financial oversight but also constructing a vision that propels the business forward. His aspirations underscore a crucial CFO skill: the ability not only to foresee financial outcomes but also to articulate them in a way that drives the entire company’s strategy. This blend of analytics and narrative, shaped by his experiences, define Levine’s CFO mindset.

The way Dan Murphy sees it the CFO position demands that leaders always be kept on high alert. It’s a mindset that had led him to habitually monitor updates and alerts related to key vendors, including banking institutions. And so it was, in first quarter 2023 when Murphy recalls spotting a vague tweet hinting at possible financial instability at Silicon Valley Bank. Despite the tweet’s uncertain implications, Murphy recognized the risks inherent in relying solely on one bank. He proposed a strategic move to company management: diversify the company’s financial reserves by transferring a substantial amount of their assets to JPMorgan as a precautionary step. His decision was not based on confirmed financial trouble at Silicon Valley Bank, but rather on a principle of risk management that prefers caution in the face of potential financial upheaval. The board approved his recommendation, and the funds were shifted in time, safeguarding the company from any financial disruption that followed when Silicon Valley Bank’s issues became widely known. This proactive maneuver not only protected the company from immediate financial jeopardy but also served as a poignant lesson in corporate finance—be prepared for the unexpected by diversifying risk. Dan Murphy’s quick response to a simple social media indicator is a testament to the vigilance required in the role of a CFO, particularly within the volatile environment of tech startups. His action taken while he was CFO of tech company Unqork reinforced the essential finance strategy of having multiple banking relationships, a practice Murphy tells us he has always championed, proving its worth in a moment of unforeseen crisis.

On this episode of Controllers Classified, host Erik Zhou welcomes Patrick Lynch, Senior Vice President and Controller of the Boston Celtics, who shares his journey from ball boy to financial leader for the team. Patrick highlights the milestones of his career, including his transition from an internship to working closely with the CFO, and the significant growth of the Celtics organization. He also imparts wisdom on how to seize career advancement opportunities and offers advice for those aiming to enter the sports industry. The discussion then does a deep dive into the world of accounting and finance for sports teams. Patrick shares his goals for the upcoming year - accurate reporting, cash management, and cost efficiencies - and then details why those things specifically matter in the sports industry. For example, while a private company, the Celtics are subject to several reporting requirements as a part of the NBA, and Patrick’s team is responsible for the integrity & synthesis of that data. Similarly, the Celtics cash flow reflects the cycle of seasons, and Patrick’s team is focused on managing the ebbs and flows. Finally, Patrick shares how he harnesses the power of technology to handle copious amounts of data, reduce manual work, and establish real time visibility. His goal in all of this is two fold - to give his team more time to do strategic work and to empower employees across the Celtics organization to be able to spend on things that will move the business forward. The episode concludes with Patrick sharing an industry story related to an auditor’s stadium walkaround. Listen now to get an exciting in-depth look at how the accounting & finance team plays a huge role in the success of the Celtics franchise.

Ask any CFO about their career-building years, and they will likely attribute their success to their adaptability and ability to render strategic insight. This tendency was recently amplified for us when we heard about the experience of Naresh Bansal, a seasoned finance executive who during a pivotal chapter early in his early career discovered that his company was about to be acquired by a larger one, Sage. His company at the time—initially an independent entity focused on aggressive growth and innovation—offered a vibrant but challenging environment that tested the mettle of its leadership. As a finance executive, Bansal was responsible for providing some of the routine financial insight required to steer the firm through rapid growth phases and was instrumental in preparing it for its public offering—a task that involved rigorous financial restructuring and compliance readiness. However, when they were acquired, the trajectory changed—and began to present a new set of challenges. Post-acquisition, about 80% of the leadership team departed within the first 6 months, which of course is a common scenario in acquisitions that can often lead to significant cultural and operational shifts. Bansal, however, not only stayed on but thrived. He navigated through these turbulent waters by leveraging his deep understanding of the company’s financial backbone and by building strong relationships with the new management. His strategic insight was crucial in bridging the gap between the old and new cultures, ensuring continuity and stability. The tenets of his approach were twofold: Maintain rigorous financial discipline to ensure the financial health of the company and work diligently to gain the trust of the new leadership. By aligning the company’s strategic objectives with those of the new parent company and demonstrating the intrinsic value of the strategic vision, he not only secured his position but also played a critical role in the integration process. This chapter of his career highlights a key lesson for finance professionals: Success often depends on the ability to manage not just numbers but also change. In the face of new corporate landscapes, it is the strategic, adaptable CFO who can turn challenges into opportunities for growth and learning.

A little more than 15 years ago, Hilary Norris had the ultimate dream job at a tech company in sunny California, a perfect alignment of professional goals and personal life. However, the idyllic scenario was disrupted when the company was acquired, a common turning point that often spells uncertainty for many executives. Facing a potential career setback, Norris was initially marked for replacement but was later asked to stay on and lead the finance operations of the combined entity. This twist in her career path wasn’t just a test of her professional capabilities but also a stark introduction to the challenges of navigating corporate cultures across borders—this time, with a German-based company that had different views on diversity and dual careers. Despite the hurdles, she saw through the integration phase with poise and strategic insight, yet ultimately decided to part ways due to cultural misalignments. The end of one chapter, however, led to a new beginning—a substantial role managing finance across 17 businesses in the Asia Pacific. This move not only highlighted her resilience but also her ability to leap into new opportunities, reshaping her career path on a global scale. Having relocated from the UK to international opportunities in Asia and the US, Norris doesn’t hesitate to emphasize the role of supportive personal relationships in career development. Norris mentions the challenges and compromises involved in aligning her career moves with her husband’s, highlighting the importance of having a partner who is flexible and supportive of career opportunities across geographies. Today, as a seasoned CFO, her journey underscores a crucial narrative in finance leadership: resilience, the ability to adapt, and the courage to embrace change define the path to success, far beyond the figures on a balance sheet.            

Kicking off his career fresh out of school, Udit Tibrewal joined the audit practice ofPricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in New Delhi, where he set about learning the intricate workings of financial compliance. The ambition to broaden his horizon and a hunger for new challenges led him to make a bold move to the United States, landing him first New York City. The shift from New Delhi’s familiar chaos to New York’s dynamic hustle coincided with a widening of Tibrewal’s finance lens. It was here, amidst the skyscrapers of Manhattan, that he began to embrace the complexity of technology companies and their menu of projects involving IPOs, mergers, and acquisitions. After enriching his expertise on the East Coast, Tibrewal ventured west to Silicon Valley, where he blazed a path from numbers cruncher to strategic operations with a goal that never varied: to influence broader business decisions that could affect a company’s growth trajectory. Throughout his career, Tibrewal has emphasized the need for continuous learning and adaptation. Whether through committing to global moves, shifting from technical to strategic roles, or adapting to new industries, he has undertaken a journey that underscores the dynamic nature of the finance function in modern businesses. 

Jeff Bray long ago learned the power of focus—a lesson he gleaned early in his career while transitioning from an analyst to a portfolio manager. He recalls a strategic moment when he realized that narrowing his investments to three to five key stocks greatly amplified his success. This principle of concentrated effort not only transformed his approach to investment management but has also been a guiding principle throughout his career, including his latest chapter as CFO of Semperis, a leading cybersecurity firm. At Semperis, Bray is today applying this bit of wisdom to navigate the company through a period of hyper-growth and complex challenges. Semperis has not only been expanding rapidly but is doing so with a focus on strategic areas that promise the highest returns—an approach Bray appears to be uniquely prepared to execute, given his understanding of the financial markets, honed over decades, allowing him to discern where to allocate resources to fuel growth and where to cut back to maintain efficiency. Top of mind for Bray is a careful analysis of sales productivity and pricing integrity. Semperis’ CFO insists on a robust framework where sales efforts align precisely with company goals and resources are invested in segments that drive the most value. This approach is evident in Bray’s resolve to restructure the company’s pricing model, to ensure transparency and consistency across Semperis’s quickly expanding number of products. Here again, Bray once more lets us know that his determined focus on pricing has been buttressed by that early career moment that continues to influence his decisions and the broader trajectory of Semperis’s success.

In this episode of Controllers Classified, host Erik Zhou is joined by Katie Slattery, VP of Accounting and Corporate Controller at Fivetran. The conversation begins with Katie’s start in Ireland at KPMG Dublin as an auditor, and traces her path from auditor to accountant. Fun fact: Katie has been the first controller/accounting hire at several high growth companies! The conversation then pivots to Katie’s current priorities at Fivetran and how she translates company-wide KPIs into team specific goals around reliable data and control efficiencies. Katie also spends some time talking about how to build a high-performing team, how to make sure an accounting team is structured to deliver on the needs of the business, and how to foster effective communication with teams and leaders outside of accounting. Given Katie’s extensive background in high growth companies, the conversation pivots to the IPO landscape, and how teams should be thinking about IPO readiness amidst the uncertainty. Katie notes that you have to be able to balance day-to-day activities with activities that prepare for the future, because you don’t want accounting to be the blocker when a company is ready to go public. Finally, the conversation ends with a discussion on the challenges and opportunities that come with being a global company. Katie spends time on Fivetran’s global operations and some of the decisions they have had to make as an accounting team as they navigate a complex tax landscape.

Back in 2016, Mitch Peipert stood at a crossroads. With a career foundation deeply rooted in the precision and rigor of public accounting, Peipert had navigated his way through the financial landscapes of various companies, honing his CFO leadership and operational prowess. Yet, nothing could have prepared him for the arrival of a new, enigmatic force at Thomas Publishing—a dynamic CEO with eyes set firmly on the horizon of digital transformation. The news allowed a small degree of uncertainty to occupy Peipert’s mindset. A seasoned finance professional, he was adept at managing numbers and ensuring fiscal health, but the prospect of working with a leader, unknown and untested by his side, cast a shadow of doubt. Would this be the catalyst for transformation, or would it be yet another detour from the path he and others sought to advance down? As the CEO began to unfold his vision for the company, a vision that went far beyond the balance sheets and financial statements that were Peipert’s realm, a remarkable transformation began to take place. The walls of the traditional finance role started to give way, revealing a new landscape where numbers were not just figures to be reported but tools for sculpting the future. Together, they embarked on an audacious journey to steer Thomas Publishing away from the sinking sands of print media decline, towards the fertile grounds of digital innovation. Peipert found himself at the helm of projects that redefined the company’s trajectory, bridging the gap between financial stewardship and strategic innovation. The CEO had not only expanded Peipert’s strategic lens but had also awakened in him the spirit of a change-maker, ready to challenge the status quo and drive the organization towards uncharted territories.

Back in September of 2021, Jeremy Johnson, Senior Vice President of Finance at Ceridian (now Dayforce), decided it was time to test his mettle—a decision that led him far from where he began, only to return with a leadership perspective somewhat different from what he expected. Determined to challenge himself and expand his horizons, Johnson left the familiarity of Ceridian, where he had steadily advanced his career for the past nine and a half years, to accept a CFO position with SmartRecruiters. Johnson’s test, however, was about to grow exponentially. At SmartRecruiters, circumstances propelled him into an even more demanding role, that of the interim CEO. This unexpected turn of events was not just a mere career stint but a transformational experience—one Johnson tells us has influenced his approach to finance leadership, infusing it with broader strategic insights and a nuanced understanding of the business. Upon his return to Dayforce as CFO, it felt like a narrative coming full circle. “This return signifies more than just coming back; it represents the culmination of my growth, challenges, and the broader leadership perspective I’ve gained,” Johnson remarks. His journey, including the unforeseen stint as CEO, Johnson tells us, has endowed him with experiences and a visionary approach to the finance leadership role. His Early Days: Johnson tells us his early career was significantly shaped by his early experiences at Capella University, where he built a relationship with CFO Lois Martin, who became a critical mentor. His responsibilities in SEC reporting and managing disclosure committees provided a strong foundation in financial reporting and regulatory compliance.

This episode our Planning Aces emphasize the importance of leveraging one's breadth of experience, stepping beyond traditional FP&A roles, and focusing on execution to bring significant value to organizations. They also emphasize the evolving nature of finance professional interactions and the idea that strategic insights can serve as catalysts for organizational change, prompting shifts in product development, market strategy, and operational execution. This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Jeff Woolard or Velocity Global, CFO Aaron Alt of Cardinal Health and CFO Bob Houghton of Pivot Bio.

Back in 2009, with a law degree in hand along with some frontline consulting experience, Jennifer Loo swung open the door at LegalZoom—where in short order she was tasked with architecting the fast-growing company's FP&A function from the ground up. For Loo, the responsibilities that would quickly surface at LegalZoom would not only challenge and meet Loo's career ambitions head on, but give rise to an entire career path, bringing with it her education, distinct capabilities, and potential. Suddenly, her diverse background, bridging the analytical rigor of consulting with the strategic nuance of legal training, made her uniquely equipped for the challenges of shaping a nascent finance function in a fast-evolving company. Meanwhile, Loo tells us, she benefited from a CFO mentor who demonstrated faith in her potential to spearhead such a critical undertaking. In her ascent, CFO Loo proved that when you're ready to embrace your unique path, indeed, the road does rise to meet you.

In a special episode of CFO Thought Leader, host Jack Sweeney converses with Evan Goldberg, Founder and Executive Vice President of Oracle NetSuite, during this month's  SuiteConnect conference in NYC.  Goldberg reflects on the company's 25 year journey, emphasizing its foundational vision that championed a unified business management suite. Goldberg also sheds light on the invaluable mentorship from Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder, which uniquely positioned NetSuite for success. As the discussion unfolds, Goldberg candidly shares his evolution from a product-focused executive to a versatile leader, adapting to the multifaceted challenges of a growing company. Peering into the future, the conversation pivots to artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting its indispensable role across industries. Goldberg envisions AI not just as a tool for tech companies but as a democratized asset NetSuite provides to empower businesses of all types. The dialogue further explores the shifting landscape for finance professionals, underscoring the strategic importance of technology in driving collaboration and innovation within organizations. Through this engaging dialogue, Goldberg's insights offer a compelling glimpse into NetSuite's past achievements and its forward-looking embrace of AI to shape the future of business.

Reflecting on her career choices, Erin Sawyer tells us that one pivotal point stands out—a decision that involved moving her family across the country. This step triggered not only a geographical shift but also a change in Sawyer’s professional life, when her work alongside a CEO ultimately fueled her aspirations to become a chief financial officer. She had always been so captivated by numbers that by the tender age of 5 she had determined that her destiny lay in accounting. Her initial steps into the corporate world at Honeywell Aerospace as a cost accountant laid the groundwork for years of steady career advancement. Yet, it was her transition from accounting to a more dynamic role in financial planning and analysis (FP&A) that sparked her true passion—driving business forward through strategic finance. Sawyer’s tenure in the Yellow Pages industry during its transformational phase sharpened her skills in business transformation and strategic partnership, preparing her for the challenges ahead. However, it was an opportunity at insurance software provider Vertafore that finally aligned her with a CEO mentor, whom she greatly admired. This relationship deepened her expertise in operational excellence and marked a decisive step toward achieving her eventual CFO ambitions. 

In this episode of Controllers Classified, Brex CAO Eric Zhou is joined by Daniel Hilli, Head of Business Control at Alstom. Alstom is a multinational company that builds and services trains and signaling systems. In fact, millions of people everyday are transported by Alstom trains and systems. Given the size of the company, this episode focuses on how to implement and manage financial processes across different regions and systems at scale. This includes dialogue around when to centralize vs. decentralize reporting and budgeting processes, how to find efficiencies through digitalization and tool consolidation, and the best way to build lines of communication across global teams. Daniel also does a deep dive into Alstom’s acquisition of Bombardier and the integration implications that followed - including how to bring together disparate teams and technology and how to gain a holistic financial picture of the business and its spend in a post-acquisition environment.

Bob Purcell’s leap into the unknown wasn’t just a step; it was a giant stride toward his future as a CFO. Early in his career, Bob faced a daunting choice: join a distressed company teetering on the brink of failure or play it safe. Driven by an unshakeable belief in his abilities and a desire to test himself, he chose the former. This high-risk, high-return career step wasn’t just about salvaging a company; it was about proving to himself that he could navigate the stormiest of waters. From his initial misgivings about audit work at Deloitte to his transformative years at Amgen, where he thrived in a culture of leadership development and diversity, CFO Purcell’s journey was anything but linear. It was a patchwork of decisions and strategic moves, each building on the last. By stepping away from the comfort of well-trodden paths and embracing the unknown, CFO Purcell tells us he was able to test himself in different environments. His story encourages aspiring finance leaders to embrace challenges, trust their capabilities, and never shy away from opportunities to test themselves. As CFO of Billtrust, Purcell is today focused on creating the right set of metrics (KPIs) for the company, preparing for growth through acquisitions, ensuring efficient operations, and fostering a diverse talent bench within the finance team. Asked about the early career leap he today credits with landing him on the CFO path, Purcell tells us he recalls experiencing few butterflies. He adds: “I knew I was right. I knew I was ready.”

In the world of finance, where leadership roles await those who distinguish themselves along a select number of familiar paths, Aaron Alt’s journey to becoming a CFO stands out for its breadth and depth, transcending conventional boundaries. Starting in law, Alt quickly found his groove inside the legal world’s cornucopia of M&A advisory services. It was here where he would realize the potency of focusing beyond legal parameters—a habit that would spur a pivotal shift in his career from emphasizing legal details to prioritizing relationships and financial strategy. From the trenches of M&A advisory to the executive suites of public companies, Alt tells us, his foundational philosophy has always revolved around the relentless pursuit of shareholder value creation—a mission that involves uncovering hidden opportunities and fortifying against potential threats. “It’s allowed me to look under a lot of rocks,” Alt reflects, underscoring his commitment to safeguarding and nurturing corporate value. It’s just such devotion that 15 months ago led him to step into the CFO office at healthcare giant Cardinal Health. Alt joined the healthcare company shortly after Cardinal had welcomed a larger and more diverse board as the result of an agreement with an activist investor firm. As part of a broader turnaround plan, Alt’s expertise is now expected to be instrumental in navigating the challenges and opportunities ahead at Cardinal, underlining the company’s readiness to embrace change and foster growth for all stakeholders. To date, a comprehensive self-review of the healthcare giant’s business remains ongoing. “We’re very focused on making sure that we are generating cash flow everywhere that we can—and we believe that if we’re consistent in our strategy and clear on our metrics for success, we can get a lot of things done together,” comments Alt, who during our discussion also offers up a strategic lesson from his tenure at Target, specifically regarding the retailer’s decision to exit the Canadian market gracefully. Says Alt: “This was one of the hardest working experiences that I’ve had, and its message has stuck with me even as I’ve needed to think about other business problems: You really need to keep an eye on the fact that at the end of the day, even as CFO, it’s not just about the numbers.” –Jack Sweeney 

Twelve years ago, when Matt Wolf was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, he likely would have been alarmed to learn that his future finance career would be largely impacted by drinking and driving. Such was his destiny, though, as after a 5-year stint with the investment bank in London and New York he began to fill in his itinerary with positions in both the automotive and alcohol industries—most recently, as the CFO at DRINKS, a company at the forefront of e-commerce solutions in the beverage alcohol space. According to Wolf, his career began on a foundation of data analytics at Economists Incorporated in Washington, D.C., where he navigated the complexities of antitrust matters. This early experience instilled in him a nuanced understanding of the financial world and fueled a trajectory that would seamlessly blend traditional finance with industry regulation. In the alcohol industry, this regulatory backdrop traces back to Prohibition, which resulted in varied state-by-state regulations. What’s more, Wolf points out, both the automotive and alcohol sectors feature tiered markets with distinct roles for retailers, distributors, and manufacturers, alongside legal frameworks deeply rooted in historical context. According to Wolf, these similarities have contributed to a slower adoption of digital retail solutions in both fields, as compared to others. When asked about his “drinking and driving,” Wolf smiles: “The humor is not lost on me, but I think that in fact there are a lot of parallels between the two sectors that enable me to leverage experience from one to the other.” –Jack Sweeney 

On this episode of Controllers Classified, host Eric Zhou welcomes Sean Soper, the Head of Financial Operations and Accounting at Alchemy, to shed light on the disruptive technologies shaping the trajectory of accounting and finance. Alchemy provides the leading blockchain development platform and as such, much of the conversation narrows in on the possible applications of blockchain in accounting. Sean begins the discussion highlighting his experience working across companies that have revolutionized whole industries with new technology. He notes that a large part of his success at these companies has been from remaining curious and developing deep industry knowledge that guides how he approaches his accounting processes and procedures. Sean then outlines his priorities in his current role at Alchemy, which include optimizing the financial close process, fine tuning reporting and analytics, and managing cash.

Looking back at his 26 years at Intel Corp., Jeff Woolard has more than a few moments of important discernment from which to choose when we ask for a single finance strategic moment. Nevertheless, without hesitation, he takes us back in time to when the giant chipmaker was experiencing a recurring mismatch between the products that it was developing and the market’s purchasing trends—specifically in the PC sector. “If you were to map both what people wanted to buy and what we were building, you would see this kind of disconnect,” recalls Woolard, who upon closer observation realized that while consumer buying behaviors had remained consistent, Intel’s product designs and manufacturing processes had evolved without alignment. Woolard would propose a novel approach: redesigning Intel’s product road map to focus on four specific cost points that matched consumer demand and the company’s margin goals. This strategic insight led to a shift in how Intel approached product development, ensuring that new products were designed with these cost targets in mind from the outset. A recurring theme in Woolard’s career journey has been the necessity of continuous learning and adaptability. He underscores the significance of making an impact and adding value within an organization. He illustrates how, at Intel, the expectation and opportunity to influence business outcomes were directly pivotal in his career growth. This aspect of being able to see and measure the impact of his work is highlighted by him as a distinctive and rewarding part of his experience at Intel.

Lessons from Craig Wert’s finance career reveal the power of adaptability, problem-solving skills, and the ability to seize opportunities in unexpected places. Having started his career without a clear road map to the future, Wert later found that his liberal arts background and early experiences in investment banking had laid a good foundation for a career that might have led in any number of directions. What began to set Wert apart, however, was his innate ability to troubleshoot. Throughout his career, he was frequently called upon to solve complex problems, whether operational challenges at RCN or financial crises at Vonage. This knack for troubleshooting didn’t just resolve immediate issues, though: It also began to reveal to upper management his maturing strategic acumen and resilience. Every challenge overcome was a stepping-stone that led to increasing trust and the opening of doors to new opportunities. Today, Wert’s evolution from troubleshooter to CFO of Jobber has proven to be a journey that has endowed him with the ability to anticipate obstacles and swiftly implement effective solutions. As Jobber seeks to expand its market presence and enhance its financial structure, Wert’s troubleshooter mentality suggests that the firm will likely be taking a proactive approach to growth, risk management, and innovation inside the competitive SaaS landscape.  

On this episode of Controllers Classified, Brex’s CAO Erik Zhou is joined by Sowmya Ranganathan, OpenAI’s Controller. The conversation begins with a discussion on Sowmya’s career and her diverse experiences as an auditor and as a finance leader at both public and private tech companies, including Square and Rippling prior to OpenAI. Specifically, she highlights some of her insights for accounting during periods of business hypergrowth (i.e. when OpenAI launched ChatGPT) and the increasing need for technical savviness even as a finance professional (ex: Sowmya learned SQL as a way to manage the processing and analysis of a large data set of transactions at Square). She concludes her career overview with this advice: accounting leaders need to consider where their processes would break down if they were to grow quickly and focus their time and effort on making sure those processes are as scalable and automated as possible (hint: it requires building relationships with engineering).

It’s the type of story that we can’t resist repeating, and one that without question underscores Eric Jenny’s entrepreneurial spirit. Still, the entertainment value of his tale of zapping wasp nests with a homemade rubber band gun for a dollar a pop was at risk of eclipsing the more traditional milestones that populate a career path otherwise defined by strategic decision-making and an innate ability to identify and capitalize on opportunities. During his stints in public accounting and the tech industry, Jenny tells us, he enjoyed immersing himself in the dynamics of fast-paced technological advancements and entrepreneurial business growth strategies. At SOCi, CFO Jenny’s data-driven approach has led to pivotal decisions, such as focusing on enterprise clients, that have showcased his adeptness at steering the company through the complexities of the digital marketing landscape. Asked about his finance mind-set, Jenny recounts his commitment to curiosity and unwavering quest for greater efficiency. However, we’d argue that it’s Jenny’s entrepreneurial bent that most resonates with us—forever accented by those wasp nests. –Jack Sweeney

It was during a 9-year tenure at food giant ConAgra Brands that Alejandro Castro became involved in a companywide initiative that would forever alter his approach to leadership and strategic thinking. Born and raised in Mexico, Castro had begun his professional voyage at Price Waterhouse, where he launched a public accounting career from the accounting house's Mexico City office. After ConAgra came knocking several years later, he accepted a position within its Mexico operations that eventually led to a promotion involving relocation to the U.S. and the firm's Omaha headquarters. Castro tells us that this move was pivotal, offering him exposure to the food giant's global operations and strategic involvement at a high level that included participation on a board of directors in Asia. Still, Castro's path took somewhat of an unexpected turn when ConAgra's CEO approached him to help spearhead an initiative designed in part to boost efficient decision-making across the company. In short, ConAgra management had sanctioned the companywide adoption of the GE Work-Out methodology, and Castro was to be stationed along the implementation's front lines. Division presidents, unit leaders, and factory workers alike all now came to be spending face-to-face time with Castro so that everyone together could identify existing behaviors or practices that were undermining efficient decision-making. Castro recalls: "We were able to fix issues that had existed within the company for years and years. We did this by connecting the people who really knew what was going on—the people who were close to the job—and this quickly made a big difference." Now, what might have appeared on paper to be but one career assignment among many suddenly began to accelerate Castro's own understanding of business operations while further establishing his reputation across the company as a leader known for fostering collaboration and driving meaningful change. Says Castro: "For me personally, it was the interaction with the people and talking about the different issues that really altered my whole view of the business." –Jack Sweeney

Not unlike that of many of her CFO peers, Rachel Stack's journey toward becoming a CFO has been punctuated by pivotal transactions. No single example of this turns out to have been more complicated or rich with lessons than what Stack refers to simply as "the take-private of Zayo." However, before the path forward for Zayo was made clear, there had been a moment of strategic recalibration that would test her resolve and shape her approach to future challenges. Reflecting on this period, Stack shares: "One big strategic moment has to have been when the attempted split of Zayo into two separate entities was being considered. We thought about splitting it into a fiber company and an enterprise firm." The plan, aimed at unlocking value and sharpening strategic focus, did not go as planned. "The market's response was immediate and clear," Stack recalls. "The stock was down, I want to say, by 20%." This moment of adversity, however, was far from a setback in Stack's eyes. Instead, it became a defining moment that refined her strategic thinking. "It was a clear message from the market that they didn't think that this was the way forward for Zayo," Stack explains. The feedback from the market, which was invaluable, led Stack and her team to reconsider their strategy and ultimately reconsider the take-private transaction. "The take-private of Zayo was a significant turning point for me," Stack reflects. The complex negotiations, the building of relationships with different potential acquirers, and the ultimate decision to go with Digital Bridge and EQT showcased her ability to navigate through uncertainty and emerge with a strategic victory. "The whole experience was an entire adventure on its own," she muses, on the challenges faced during the transaction. This episode of strategic redirection, followed by the successful take-private transaction, exemplifies Stack's resilience and strategic acumen. Her journey underscores the importance of being adaptable, learning from the market, and maintaining transparency and honesty in all dealings. As CFO of Cologix today, Stack tells us, she has brought these lessons to bear, as she helps to steer the company through growth and change, while never losing sight of the fact that in moments of adversity, there always lies an opportunity for growth and strategic recalibration. 

On this episode of Controllers Classified, Brex’s CAO Erik Zhou is joined by Angelina Hendraka, the CAO at Redis. The conversation begins with a recap of Angelina’s diverse experiences across financial services, biotech, and SaaS companies. Angelina notes that while KPIs shift based on business strategy & industry, the transition from one industry to another in her career has felt seamless given finance is the universal language of business. Erik and Angelina also discuss the transition from big 4 accounting firms to controllership, and the evolution of one’s approach with that transition (i.e. from being deep in technical accounting to thinking more broadly and operationally). The conversation then turns to recapping a recent panel discussion that Angelina participated in related to women in the workplace and fostering inclusive work environments. She shares her perspective on what it means to be an inclusive leader, and what more leaders can be doing to ensure diverse representation in finance and accounting. The dialogue pivots to some critical financial topics including how to make strategic and thoughtful spend decisions in the current cost containment environment, the role of a strategic procurement function in enabling smarter spend, and important financial processes for post-IPO success, including SOX readiness.

It’s an all-too-familiar tale among the ranks of senior finance executives: A private equity firm acquires a company, reshuffles the finance team, and reserves the top finance spot for one of its own portfolio CFOs. At Qlik, though, this story had a less familiar ending—or at least one that did not include a portfolio CFO. Instead, back in 2016, when Thoma Bravo acquired King of Prussia, Pennsylvania’s Qlik, a seasoned veteran of the latter’s own finance team—Dennis Johnson—entered the CFO office. For Johnson, there’s little question that his appointment validated the 8 career years that he had already invested with the company, a period during which he had sought to routinely contribute to the company’s growth and ongoing strategic transformation. It turns out that his senior finance roles—and in particular his involvement in the transition to a subscription-based model—had demonstrated his strategic vision and capacity for managing change effectively and thus opened a new door. CFOTL: Tell us about Qlik … what doe

Elizabeth Mann began her career as a mathematician in academia, spending a decade in the field. Her initial plan had been to become a professor, on a path that would start with a Ph.D. and a postdoc. However, something was missing. Eager to engage more directly with the world at large, she pivoted her career toward finance. Mann found a door of entry at Goldman Sachs, where after initially filling a quantitative role involving complex financing structures she subsequently transitioned to investment banking and a new focus on M&A and corporate finance in the tech and media sectors. After more than decade with Goldman Sachs, she moved to S&P Global. Here, after first handling such corporate finance areas as treasury, tax, and capital allocation, she eventually stepped into a divisional CFO role. This was her first experience on a leadership team, which offered her a broader view of running a business and deepened her operational expertise. Mann’s journey led her to become CFO of Verisk, a provider of data, analytics, and technology to the insurance industry. Here, she focuses on leveraging the company’s foundation in data and analytics to enhance its offerings in the insurance sector, particularly in the face of challenges like climate change and technological advances. Her role now includes overseeing an extensive finance transformation, involving the upgrade of the company’s ERP system. Looking back, Mann doesn’t second-guess her investment of early career years inside academia—if anything, she seems to value them all the more.   Says Mann: “Those years were not wasted. I learned a lot about rigor and about how to think about things in a clear way and independent way, have the agency to come up with your own views and perspective, and really pursue an idea to its logical conclusion.” –Jack Sweeney

This episode of Planning Aces we feature three finance leaders advance  as "voices of reason," as they help to manage their company's response to the pandemic and its aftermath. They demonstrate agility, strategic foresight, and the ability to balance short-term responses with long-term planning. The discussion emphasizes the importance of FP&A professionals being adaptable and strategic in facing unpredictable market conditions.

It was the type of introduction that any MBA student would envy, and one at which David Snyder, 35 years later, still marvels. Back in the late 1980s, a business school classmate introduced him to notable investor and billionaire tycoon Sam Zell, who subsequently offered Snyder a job. Without hesitation, Snyder accepted Zell’s offer and in short order began working for him in Chicago, where he joined a group of recent young graduates whom Zell had recruited to help inside the realm of corporate acquisitions. More than any one deal or acquisition target, Snyder recalls, the greatest lessons from his days with Zell came from the sideline conversations. “Just by my proximity to Sam, I learned a lot—he had sort of a Socratic approach, whereby we would have a dialogue with him in which he would begin sharing the investor’s point of view and how an investor thinks about the operating prospects of a given investment,” remembers Snyder, who adds that from those days onward he has always “come to the table” thinking like an investor. He reports: “I’ve carried this with me through all of the ensuing 30 years.” Snyder’s exposure to Sam Zell and his work in corporate acquisitions honed his strategic thinking skills. He emphasized the importance of understanding the investor’s point of view and translating business strategy into financial terms. –Jack Sweeney 

Like many of her CFO peers, Karen Walker had an early career that was guided by abundant opportunities surrounding finance-driven decision-making within organizations. It was a path that often led Walker to engage more closely with sales and operations, as was the case at CNET Networks, where she tells us that she recognized the limitations of embracing a strictly “rules-based” approach in finance. It was at CNET that she embraced a more transformative perspective—prioritizing the customer’s objectives and challenges. This shift in thinking, emphasizing a customer mind-set, would continue as she advanced in her career. At PagerDuty, the philosophy became instrumental in addressing the company’s rapid growth challenges. Now, as CFO at Sysdig, Walker tell us that it’s this commitment to understanding customer needs that guides the company’s approach to cloud security. Her journey reflects a progressive integration of customer-centricity into financial leadership, showcasing its adaptability and efficacy in diverse business environments. Says Walker: “I think that one of the things that I have really learned over the years—and espouse as a philosophy—is that every employee—which includes, of course, finance—should really have a customer mind-set and really put the customer at the center of every decision that is made.”

This Episode is CFOTL Special Supplement.  Franklin Templeton Chief Accounting Officer Lindsey Oshita expains how challenges faced during an ERP integration following a merger and the massive IT commitment it entailed. She highlights the significance of a chart of accounts and their potential adaptations, along with her team’s successful implementation of Workday at the start of the fiscal year. Lindsey Oshita is the Chief Accounting Officer, Americas at Franklin Templeton. She’s spent 14 years at Franklin Templeton in various financial leadership positions, and was at Deloitte prior to that. Lindsey graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and a minor in Accounting.

CFO Michael Perica’s career journey began with an opportunity to work as a junior analyst for a national capital markets firm, where he would find a billionaire mentor. According to Perica, his association with the billionaire would ultimately offer him access to influential networks and unique opportunities. From his early days onward, Perica tells us, he became skilled at building connections with successful individuals—an expertise that would open the door to a diverse range of opportunities. Perica’s entry into the CFO role during the COVID-19 pandemic—which occurred remotely, meaning that he didn’t meet his colleagues in person until several months later—perhaps highlighting his adaptability. Successfully leading a team without in-person interactions speaks to his ability to navigate challenges and maintain effective leadership—as so many of our finance leader guests have pointed out. –Jack Sweeney

For Emma Brown, it was as though she had just removed the sword from the fabled stone, a moment that would challenge the inclination to persistently question her own judgment when it came to business. As is often the case, Brown’s moment of insight occurred in a high-pressure situation. Faced with poor financial visibility and the need to prevent a liquidity crisis, she championed the notion that her company’s finance team take a radical approach. Stripping everything back to basics, she delved into the fundamental aspects of cash flow, bank statements, and working capital. This back-to-basics exercise revealed that the complexity of the business—large ERP systems, convoluted reporting, and complicated forecasting structures—was hindering understanding as well as impeding effective decision-making. Brown’s strategic approach of simplifying complexity significantly boosted her confidence in navigating challenging situations within her career. The realization that complexity might indicate inherent issues within processes, systems, or structures shifted her perspective, empowering her to tackle problems with a newfound confidence. –Jack Sweeney

Four years ago, when Luigi Testa first joined LinkSquares as CFO, the Boston-area tech firm employed roughly 40 people. Today, with nearly 400 employees, the company is concerned less with growth and more about achieving a balance between growth and efficiency. To achieve this, LinkSquares management has made automation and AI adoption a priority. According to Testa, the goal was to first identify repetitive and manual tasks that could be automated to reduce the need for hiring additional personnel. This is an approach that makes financial processes more sustainable in the long run, he points out, while also helping to control expenses. Testa also notes that within the finance function, various routine tasks like billing, payment collection, and payroll processing were ripe for automation and AI implementation. Yet, while these new approaches could handle approximately 75% of these tasks, he emphasized the ongoing importance of human oversight to ensure accuracy and relevance.

It’s no secret that Moderna’s R&D efforts have expanded well beyond the realm of COVID-19. CFO Jamey Mock tells us that today the company has more than 40 drugs in its pipeline, with targets such as respiratory, late-stage, oncological, and rare diseases. As he explains, this diversity means that the biotech innovator is reliant not solely on one product or therapeutic area, which makes for less risk than would be the case if the company had only a single product focus. Meanwhile, Mock leaves little doubt that the finance function is not excluded from the firm’s appetite for innovation, when he details how Moderna’s innovative use of mRNA technology is a key factor in de-risking its R&D investments. Mock emphasizes that mRNA is the body’s information molecule, and Moderna can quickly reprogram it to target different diseases. This adaptability and flexibility make it easier for the company to adjust its approach if initial trials or results are suboptimal.

Jim Moylan is perhaps our first CFO guest to list the leasing of oil rigs as one of the experiences that best prepared him for a CFO role. Of course, he makes it clear that the experience is worthy of mention not so much because of what he was selling but because he was selling at all. “The best way to learn what a company does and understand its value proposition is to be a salesperson, and I have told this to people everywhere that I’ve been,” comments Moylan, whose stint as a salesman helped to kick off a 22-year career climb inside the ever-evolving world of energy company Sonat, Inc. Sonat would provide Moylan with an expansive and varied career narrative. Having become known inside the company for his FP&A savvy, Moylan had a tenure that spanned a variety of leadership roles and included overseeing corporate strategy during a period of time when the company executed four acquisitions and two divestitures. He would also serve as president of one of the company’s largest subsidiaries. Today, while Sonat resembles a sturdy bookend at one end of Moylan’s career, Ciena—the networking systems company where he has now logged 15 years as CFO—could likely serve as the other. At Ciena, supply chain challenges have remained top-of-mind in 2022. “The priority for the company and for me personally is to address our supply chain problem, fix it, and repair our image in the minds of our customers—because not only have we disrupted our business, but also we’ve disrupted their businesses,” remarks Moylan, who notes that Ciena’s product offerings depend on the regular replenishment of parts inventories comprising some 10,000 SKUs. As with many finance leadership resumes, long tenures as well as the transactional nature of the finance field are what punctuate Moylan’s career. Turn back the clock to 1999, and Sonat was being acquired by El Paso Energy, a move that led Moylan to step into a CFO role at SCI Systems, the first of a succession of four CFO appointments for him within a mere 8 years. Reports Moylan: “If it didn’t work for me, it didn’t work for me—and if I learned that quickly, l would leave.” –Jack Sweeney

When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American expats being deployed by digital disrupter SMB printer Vistaprint of Boston, Mass. For the next 5 years, Quinn would be involved in a string of business acquisitions that would grow the digital printer’s European revenues from nothing to more than $500 million annually. Based in Barcelona, Quinn spent roughly 3 weeks of every month traveling to other parts of Europe to evaluate the operations of different businesses as he and other executives sought to determine whether there was a solid business case for acquiring a company. “I had the luxury of seeing into firms at both the executive and middle management levels, so I was able to acquire an understanding of how the executive team was operating and how the decisions that they would make would trickle down within the operation,” explains Quinn, who adds that as deal activity grew, Vistaprint ended up deploying a corporate development team from Paris to complete some of the initial due diligence.   As the number of acquisition candidates grew, Quinn was tasked with taking a deeper dive into a target company’s operations, so he would often spend a number of days with company’s leadership team in order to better assess whether there could be a cultural fit. “’Can this be one plus one equals three?’ would usually be the question that you were trying to answer,” continues Quinn, who points out that the answer to this hypothetical query was also dependent on whether his team believed that the acquisition candidate would succeed post-merger under a flat management model. “We believed that flatter was better and that this was really an efficient way to grow,” comments Quinn, who notes that along the way he acquired a deeper understanding of manufacturing logistics as well as the pre- and post-sale dynamics of go-to-market strategies for both B2B and B2C companies. However, his central role would always center on supplying the answer to the question of whether there was a strong business case for advancing a potential deal. “When they brought something to the table through the pipeline, I would vet the business case first from our ability to execute it and then from a cultural perspective,” recalls Quinn, who stresses the significance of understanding and respecting cultural norms as well as local competitors. Says Quinn: “If you’re going to go international, you must go all in and be prepared to make the investments to win in local markets because you’ll be facing local competition within their own primary market.” –Jack Sweeney

Greg Robbins began his career inside the realm of Big Six accounting houses, an experience that he tells us laid the foundation for a career in financial operations and strategy. However, he credits much of his leadership style to his time at Red Bull, where he learned that real development comes from hands-on experiences, insightful feedback, and formal training, a philosophy that he has carried forward throughout his career. At Red Bull, Greg participated in several leadership development programs—including the "Scott Spooner Experience"—that profoundly influenced his professional approach. Spooner, a former special forces operative turned consultant, brought with him a unique perspective on leadership and resilience, emphasizing the importance of mental and physical endurance in challenging environments. This experience broadened Robbins's understanding of the qualities of leadership beyond the conventional corporate framework.

Our discussion with Christine Chambers has been going on for only a little more than 5 minutes when she tells us that she remembers sitting on the steps of a London flat years ago while contemplating life’s many twists and turns.   It seems that the accommodation—which she had only recently acquired and unquestionably counted as a milestone in life—had with little warning come to present a dilemma. At that time back in 2007, when Chambers was working as a financial analyst inside the UK operations of Seattle, Washington–based RealNetworks, the company suddenly offered her a promotion to work within its US operations. The treasured flat became toast. “Six weeks later, I was on a plane headed to the U.S.—and I think that this speaks at least a little to my nature of being adaptable and open in terms of welcoming opportunities that have arisen,” comments Chambers, who would first join RealNetworks stateside in its Washington, D.C.–area outpost before receiving an invitation from the company’s CFO in 2010 to relocate to Seattle to join its corporate offices.   Eleven years later, Chambers would be appointed CFO of RealNetworks. Of course, career paths are seldom linear, and indeed Chambers’s CFO appointment at RealNetworks would arrive only after a 3-year stint as an FP&A leader with Rosetta Stone and two more as a planning and budgeting executive at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “I have always really leaned into my network for opportunities,” remarks Chambers, as she stops to consider the different doors that she has been able to swing open along the way.   “By learning within my network," she observes, "I have sought to understand the dynamics within companies and the challenges and opportunities that they bring.” The power of Chambers’s network was no doubt in play when PetMeds CEO Matt Hulett, a former colleague at Rosetta Stone as well RealNetworks, announced her appointment as PetMeds CFO in August 2022. Says Chambers: “Matt and I very much understand the dynamics and challenges faced by organizations that have large, addressable markets and may have undervalued assets that need to be turned around. We have seen this both at Rosetta Stone and now at PetMeds.” –Jack Sweeney

If Mark Seidel had told us that he had spent many of his high school evenings peering through a telescope at the stars, we would have likely believed him. However, Seidel—CFO of space security start-up True Anomaly—swiftly short circuits the familiar narrative of a space-loving youth. Instead, he draws our attention to his early entrepreneurial endeavors on eBay (he achieved power selling status while in high school), and, as for his finance career, he tells us that he has long preferred not to narrow his lens but to widen it. Indeed, such was the case at Goldman Sachs, where he spent 7 career years as an investment banker. “At Goldman, I was a generalist, so I got to cover all different types of industries and transactions—which means that the breadth and scope of the types of topics were incredibly wide,” recalls Seidel, who notes that it was this same preference for a wide lens that drew him to the CFO role. Observes Seidel: “The CFO role is a cross-functional one. While strategy can mean different things to different people, for me it really fits within my scope, my roles, and my responsibilities as a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Michael Kennedy first stepped into the CFO office at the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) in 2018, he was surprised to learn that the association was spending $8 million annually on office space across the country. “Why were we in these offices?,” asks Kennedy, voicing the question that helped to kick off the first of what he now characterizes as a multichapter digital transformation. As it turned out, the 93 offices occupied by the MDA were a legacy of the organization’s historic Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, a once-massive annual fundraising event for that had lost its mojo in the Age of the Internet. “MDA wanted to have an office near every local television station that was participating in the Telethon broadcast,” explains Kennedy, who notes that the MDA offices needed to compete with local Girl Scout troops and firefighters to secure fundraising airtime on the local affiliates.    “But the fact is that we had stopped doing the Telethon 8 years before I arrived,” reports Kennedy, who adds that the $8 million that the MDA had once paid in real estate fees now goes entirely to support MDA’s causes and mission—a development that the pandemic no doubt helped to accelerate. He continues: “We now have a 100 percent remote office environment.” Still, the pandemic put much of the transformation at the MDA into a holding pattern, as fundraising events and activities came to a near standstill. According to Kennedy, however, the MDA is now on its way to matching and even surpassing pre-pandemic fundraising levels, as it opens yet another impressive chapter in its healthcare history. –Jack Sweeney

It was back in 2016 when Lauren St. Clair realized that it was time to raise her hand. Online marketplace giant eBay had just completed a deal to acquire the Spanish online ticket platform Ticketbis, and St. Clair, a 9-year eBay veteran, was itching to get overseas. eBay had entered the online ticket business in 2007 with its acquisition of StubHub, and the addition of Ticketbis now promised to fatten StubHub’s international revenues, a development that St. Clair realized would likely require eBay’s finance function to beef up its leadership overseas. “People knew that I wanted to live overseas, and it was just good timing with regard to me leaving the group to which I had been assigned,” explains St. Clair, who arrived in Bilbao, Spain, in early 2017 eager to open a career chapter as CFO of StubHub International.   Of course, St. Clair had already spent some time overseas as a student and a finance adjunct on various international FP&A assignments. However, an overseas appointment was different, and in fact the opportunity for such a coveted stint called to mind for her some valuable advice that she had once received from one her early mentors. St. Clair recalls: “He told me, ‘Build your reputation and take time to build a connection to the corporate office, so that when you raise your hand to go abroad, you’ll be top-of-mind there.’” –Jack Sweeney 

The Goldman Sachs “anti-raid” team was between conference calls with an embattled client company when word came that a senior member of the target company’s management team had unexpectedly died. Looking back, Tom Fennimore says that the next few months of his early career years at Goldman then became a transition point—or period of accelerated learning. “It was a very sad situation—they were in the process of being raided,” explains Fennimore, who lists the anti-raid transaction as one of two times when Goldman ultimately offered Fennimore an opportunity to “step up.” The second example came after the resignation of a managing director responsible for the bank’s automotive sector. “I got a battlefield promotion when they said, ‘Hey, we want you to do this, and—depending how you do—we may not replace you,” recalls Fennimore, who notes that while he savored the opportunity and enjoyed success in the role, certain parts of it had little to do with his skillset. “I have a little bit of a baby face,” points out Fennimore, who also comments that members of management teams within the automotive sector were known to value seniority and often had lengthy tenures of multiple decades themselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, Fennimore remembers one bit of related post–board meeting feedback with a little bite: “’Hey, look, you did a great job,’ they told me,” he reports. “‘The board loved you, but they did have one comment: This guy’s too young. They would feel a little more comfortable with somebody with a little more gray hair in the room.’” As for the embattled client company that had unexpectedly lost a key member of management, Fennimore’s youthful appearance turned out to not be enough to deter an invitation for him to fill the company’s sudden management void by relocating to Toronto for a number of months. “The person who passed away was in the middle of the transaction, so it reflected in a good way on me that the client had enough faith in me to have me go up there to live and help them to get things done,” explains Fennimore, who more than 20 years later is not yet sporting any gray hair. In conclusion, he adds: “It’s great to be given a lot of responsibility at a young age, but there will be some unique challenges. You try not to take things personally and to just move on.” –Jack Sweeney

The episode features Mark Lampe, CFO of Monte Vista Farming Co., discussing the significance of understanding labor and its impact on business success. CFO Lampe discusses the significance of labor and the challenges faced in managing a workforce of over 140 individuals engaged in almond production, emphasizing the importance of a cohesive and hardworking team in a challenging industry.

Phenom CFO Davinder Athwal tells us that he has a personal connection to his company’s mission. Near the beginning of our talk, he shares a touching story about his father, a highly skilled individual who struggled to find a job in the UK. This personal experience fuels his passion for Phenom’s mission: to help a billion people to discover the right work. It’s not just about finding a job; it’s about finding the right job that matches skills with aspirations, as Athwal is eager to explain. The Phenom platform is not just another job-matching site, he points out. Using pattern recognition technology to match candidates with jobs, Phenom’s approach goes beyond what’s written on a resume to recognize all of the essential skills needed for a particular job—even those not listed on an application. Athwal joined Phenom during a challenging time in the industry, one that led to a strategic moment when he had to make the decision to prepare the company for cash flow break-even—a move that would turn out to be not only critical but also crucial for the company’s future survival and growth.

The podcast episode features CFO Christopher Crawley of Hoffman Hospitality Group, discussing challenges related to managing labor in the restaurant industry. Hoffman Hospitality Group, a family-owned restaurant company, adapted to the pandemic by introducing food trucks and online kitchens, enhancing their financial processes. Crawley shares his career journey, including experiences in audit, finance, and operations, emphasizing the importance of adapting to change and understanding business metrics. He highlights the complexity of managing operations in the restaurant industry, involving regulatory compliance, financial intricacies, and shifting consumer preferences. Crawley discusses the challenges of fluctuating profit margins, labor management, and adapting to market changes, emphasizing the role of technology in addressing these issues.

The Three Phases of Teresa Chia’s Career: Teresa Chia’s journey to becoming a CFO is divided into three distinct phases. The first saw her honing her skills in investment banking and private equity at Credit Suisse in NYC. The second found her in the insurance industry, where she discovered her passion for the field and learned about its complexity and regulatory aspects. The most recent phase has seen her also serving on the boards of various companies, a testament to her industry connections and expertise. The Shift in Focus: After two decades of focusing on strategy and capital deployment, Chia felt a shift in her interests. She wanted to be more involved in the execution of growth plans and building the infrastructure for such growth. This led her to the role of a CFO, where she could leverage her finance knowledge while also contributing to strategic execution.

CFO Natalie Laackman discusses the importance of empowering and enabling operational teams to identify ways to add value to clients, especially in the face of escalating costs, and how this approach helps in building client relationships. She shares her experience of being involved in 75 to 100 M&A deals during her career and highlights the intellectual stimulation and strategic thinking involved in such transactions. CFO Laackman emphasizes the significance of building credibility, gaining the trust of peers, and providing leadership not only in finance but also in running the business effectively. The conversation touches on the evolution of technology in finance, including the application of AI and big data analytics, as well as the importance of focusing on inventory management and supply chain optimization amidst challenges like the pandemic and supply chain issues.

Doug Lindroth discusses the changing landscape of software company valuation, emphasizing the need for balanced growth, operational efficiency, free cash flow, and positive earnings to attract investors. He shares his experiences, including the challenges faced during the dot-com crash, navigating the complexities of public accounting rules, and his transition to the role of CFO. The discussion highlights the importance of clear role definitions, specialized finance teams, and leveraging data to drive strategic decisions within the organization.

Back in 2017, Donald McClure had only recently been appointed vice president of FP&A at Brinks Home Security when the company’s CFO at the time decided that it was the right time for retirement. Unbeknownst to McClure—and perhaps even to the firm’s subsequent new CFO hire—a transformative chapter was about to get under way at the security firm that involved a massive restructuring and Chapter 11 bankruptcy. For McClure, a 6-year Brinks veteran who had already had a hand in multiple debt refinancings, the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process proved to be yet one more experience that would advance him down the CFO path. “We ended up negotiating a prepackaged restructuring, whereby we utilized the Chapter 11 process but at the same time sort of did all of the work in advance,” recalls McClure, who tells us that he quickly became the newly hired CFO’s “Number Two.” Whether it was while consulting with the firm’s general counsel or with its CEO, McClure's CFO kept him ringside as they together educated others as to the ongoing process and its desired outcome. “We were telling the story of the company in an environment where we were not just trying to refinance but also taking the constraints off to ask, 'What is the right capital structure for this business?,'" reports McClure, who notes that multiple financing partners were being engaged at once. “At one point, we had four different types of debt and various stakeholders at the table trying to help us to figure out how we were going to structure this—it was really eye-opening in terms of understanding the importance of what we were doing and how the stakes were real," explains McClure, who adds that once the restructuring was in his rearview, he felt that it was time to move on. Says McClure: “I knew that my work would be kind of done at this point, so I had been looking around and was able to find a company looking for a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney 

It’s a question rooted in surprise headlines that has now become one of 2023’s favorite conversation starters for finance executives inside the tech realm: “Where were you when you heard the news about Silicon Valley Bank [SVB]?” For Tipalti CFO Sarah Spoja, the query instantly summons memories of being seated between two of Tipalti’s financing partners: JP Morgan and Hercules Capital, Inc. Or perhaps we should say two of its "future" financing partners. Spoja, along with Tipalti’s attorneys, had gathered in a conference room with prospective partners to finalize the terms of a deal designed to secure a $150 million debt-raise for the growing business. Looking back, Spoja tells us that the date of the gathering will forever be etched in her mind: Thursday, March 9, 2023. Within the next 24 hours, Silicon Valley Bank would be closed by the California Department of Financial Protection & Innovation, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would be named its “receiver.” The public would receive no advance notice of the bank's closing. Still, the escalating challenges at SBV were no secret, and as Spoja met that Thursday in March with Tipalti’s prospective investors, SVB (which had been solvent only 24 hours earlier) would be broke within hours as depositors rushed to withdraw their funds. Thus, the terms of Tipalti’s debt-raise were not the only business that Spoja was seeking to finalize as she took a seat at the table. Besides securing the $150 million in debt, Spoja and her treasurer were simultaneously tracking the removal of Tipalti funds from SVB in real time. “For finance people, the thought was ‘Okay, I need to protect my company, so I need to do X, Y and Z before wire transfers are cut off,'" she recalls. "But at the same time, in the backs of our heads, we were all thinking, 'I really hope that this isn’t going where it looks like it's going.'” Meanwhile, the terms finalized on Thursday, March 9, ultimately sealed a $150 million debt deal that would be announced by Tipalti in early that May. Why hadn't either of the prospective financing partners experienced cold feet in light of the escalating developments at SVB? Spoja tells us that “tougher diligence conversations” had already taken place to help to placate concerns about a changing economic climate. What’s more, she says, a “mutual trust” had been established that had allowed the deal to not to get stalled.    Still, you can’t help but hear the winds that were howling outside the doors of Tipalti’s March 9 meeting. Says Spoja: “It was a moment that a finance professional would always remember, particularly if they were in tech—because we all generally have a story.” There's little doubt, though, that Spoja’s story is better than most. –Jack Sweeney

The corporate headquarters of Bend All Automotive may have been a mere 30-minute drive from KPMG’s offices in Waterloo, Ontario—but Melissa Howatson had to put in a 6-year career investment at the accounting house before she came to realize that it was time to go the distance. Not unlike those of many of her peers, Howatson’s years in public accounting were laden with mentorship generously supplied by a partner (and a number of senior managers). KPMG was an enviable launchpad populated by many professionals who remain in Howatson’s life today, as she explains when we make inquiries to better understand the motivations and choices made by this future CFO.  When Howatson arrived inside Bend All’s corporate offices in late 1999, she used the preferred door-of-entry for accountants far and wide: controllership. She would have a lengthy tenure there (10 years), which leads us to prod her in hope of better exposing what she perceives to be the return on this career-years investment. In the early 2000s, it seems, auto parts manufacturer Bend All may well have had traditional expectations for whoever filled the role of controller that didn’t necessarily include undertaking menu of strategic finance initiatives.  Looking back, Howatson tells us that she now wishes that she perhaps had been “more deliberate” when it came to acquiring financial planning and analysis experience during the early years of her career. Still, she lets us know that she satisfied her growing appetite for financial insight by tapping finance expertise that resided with professionals outside Bend All’s existing accounting and finance functions. “We had a very strong engineering leader who was very financially astute, so I would really lean in to try to understand how his part of the business worked,” recalls Howatson, who notes that she eventually sought to build her own “tight” network of professionals across the company. “I had to build my own network in order understand how the key inputs could help me to build a financial plan, but this was something that I really had to learn on my own as I went along,” she continues.   Fast-forward a few years, as Howatson finds herself in a conference room seated alongside Bend All management and a number of bankers. The topic for discussion is the potential sale of the company, and Howatson is expected to participate in a management presentation. “This was when I realized that I needed to practice those skill sets,” explains Howatson, who reports that although she had never really feared presenting to groups before, the possibility that she’d be presenting to the future owner of the business presented circumstances altogether different. She adds: “While our CEO and president covered a lot of  the material, I appreciated the chance to present. I was a little nervous, but it did help that I had the confidence of the CEO behind me.” –Jack Sweeney 

For those executives residing inside the private equity and investment banking realm that aspire to someday occupy the CFO office, it’s not uncommon to seek out an “operator’s role” – one that allows recruiters “to check the box” and confidently present a leadership candidate (operations credentials intact) to a company’s management team or board members.  “Inspect your chute carefully and jump smart,” might be the abbreviated advice for those looking to land inside an operations role.  Once inside, the goal is to canvas the corridors and collaborate with the company functional areas and managers the banking world seldom sees.  Sometimes such operations stints are little more than a year long, while others last several years and incorporate roles at multiple companies.   For Michael Linford, whose chute opened wide, the operations tour of duty was at Hewlett-Packard, and the multiyear stint would arguably afford him more operational insights than any aspiring CFO could hope to glean. “When I joined the decision to separate HP’s consumer business and the enterprise business had been made,” explains Linford recalling his 2015 arrival within the firm’s M&A integration team.   The historic split up of Hewlett-Packard company was structured so that the former company would change its name to HP Inc., spin off Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a newly created company and sell off its enterprise services business. “As the slpit off was happening we knew we had to continue to grow the company. …There was a duality to it.  If you want to achieve change, you must continue to buy and sell companies at the same time,” comments Linford, who tells us he quickly became involved with helping integrate a recently acquired networking firm that had stumbled since being acquired. “The networking business had been growing quickly, but as it came into the HP mothership it had just stalled, so we spent a lot of time getting that business back on track – and this was as the larger separation was underway – so we were tasked with building a real business and at the same time shed these other businesses,” explains Linford, who tell us the role taught him to be mindful of distractions.   “If you didn’t focus on getting the value from the acquisitions that were being made – what is left wouldn’t have any value,” comments Linford, who tell us the networking business would ultimately become a “material part” of the business.   Roughly two years into his M&A stint, Linford joins HP’s software business where he would serve as finance leader for the newly formed HP Enterprise.    “That was where I encountered one of the hardest problems I’ve ever had to solve in my career,” comments Linford, who tells us the succession of business separations within HP led to a talent shortage as employees found themselves attached to one or another entity.    “By the time we got to the software business separation, there was nothing left in the cupboard. And so, we had to stand up a whole new technology stack to operate the business. And we had to hire a whole new team to support the business,” remarks Linford, who once more emphasizes the stiff price for indulging distractions.   He explains “Staying focused on the job at hand while all this change is happening around you is a tremendous leadership challenge, and its alongside the technical, operational and finance challenges that were all very real for us.” – Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about Affirm .. what does this firm do and what are its offerings today? Linford: So Affirm’s mission is to build honest financial product that improve lives. We’re a payment network that helps consumers purchase the things they want and need. And we help merchants grow their businesses. Many people, especially millennial and Gen Z consumers, are not happy with the choices they have for their existing credit products. They do not want to be revolving on credit cards. They do not want the ball and chain that comes with compounding debt. And with Affirm, they don’t have to. We have never charged late fees. We don’t compound interest on interest. We give consumers immutable certainty of the cost of financing when they check out. We can bring 0% as well as interest bearing products to help merchants offer a differentiated set of financing offers to their consumers. And in all of this is with an eye towards attacking what we think is a lot of areas of potential future benefit for consumers and harm that happens today where consumers do fall into a lot of traps. I have nine siblings. I grew up as one of 10 people. And I like to tell folks that I don’t care how wealthy you are, financially caring for 10 human beings is something that will put an incredible amount of stress on your financial life. And so for me growing up, there was always a constraint on even access to credit. And my parents were certainly not immune from those who fall into the spiral of never ending credit card debt. And I saw what Max was building and I said, this is going to be something that has the opportunity to change the world. And that was my criteria. To answer your question, I did not want to work. If I was going to get out of bed and I was going to stop my four times a week running routine and going to the gym, I was going to do all that. I wanted it to be on something that I thought had a good chance of changing the world. And with that audacious statement, which truly, it’s a lot of audacity to say you want to get out of bed and change the world. I wanted to do it somewhere that I thought was going to do it responsibly. And the combination of financial services, technology, solving a real problem for consumers, to never charge late fees, and then to position yourselves with real principles, we like to say that we will never profit off of a consumer’s misfortune or mistake.

When Ralph Leung relocated to Hong Kong from Morgan Stanley’s New York offices, he was a newlywed eager to energize the financial world as one of the bank’s senior deal makers for the Asia Pacific region. Four years later, when he accepted a call from a U. S. recruiter, he had been credited with having helped led numerous transactions (mostly IPOs) from the region, including Alibaba Group’s historic $25 billion IPO. What’s more, Leung had become the father of two. “It was time to go back home,” recalls Leung, who would relocate to San Francisco’s Bay Area after accepting a finance leadership role for an online video and entertainment company.  Looking back on his Hong Kong years, Leung tells us that the experience was a departure from his previous Morgan experience because it involved advising more early-stage founders and entrepreneurs.    “I learned what Series A, Series B, and Series C meant and how to grow a business from different capital perspectives,” continues Leung, who credits the experience with having helped to open the door to CFO roles within early-stage companies. Still, Leung tells us that some of the best learning experiences from his banking years came from transactions that never occurred, including one IPO that after 2 years of persistent effort failed to capture the necessary investor attention.    “It was taking a lot of time to educate investors, and while we thought that we could get over the hump by using industry research and really demonstrating how the company could be a profitable business, we underappreciated the difficulty of advancing the narrative,” explains Leung, who tells us that the IPO was “shut down” when the company opted instead to reposition itself according to investor feedback and give itself an operations boost to make it more attractive to investors. “So, the business responded and made some changes, rather than just trying to have us sell through certain obstacles,” reports Leung, who adds that ultimately the business went public a year or so later.   He concludes: “Some obstacles just have to be respected and resolved.” –Jack Sweeney

Of the different acquisitions with which Jason Leet became involved at ExactTarget of Indianapolis, Indiana, there’s little question that the seventh was the most impactful on his finance career. As it turned out, this would also be his last acquisition—or perhaps we should say his last ExactTarget acquisition, given that this time it was ExactTarget itself that was being acquired. In 2013, ExactTarget became not only the largest company that tech wunderkind Salesforce had ever acquired but also the first publicly traded one. Over the next 9 years, Leet would work on more than 40 acquisitions for Salesforce, including an additional four publicly traded firms. What’s more, over this period he would lead the finance team that took charge of what he calls Salesforce’s “best-in-class M&A machine.” However, turn back the clock to his ExactTarget days, and it’s easy to see that for a number of months, Salesforce did indeed flip Leet’s world upside down.  “I was involved in some of the diligence, so I was aware of what was going down several months in advance,” explains Leet, who had joined ExactTarget in 2006, as he vividly recalls for us the company’s impressive climb upward—along with its disappointing 2007 decision to pull its IPO due to Wall Street’s economic collapse. “Never waste a good crisis: Having that IPO door slammed became a pivotal moment in our future success,” comments Leet, who tells us that ExactTarget then turned to private investors for funding, which allowed the company to generously invest in the business at a time when many firms were curtailing their spending.    After consecutive years of impressive revenue growth, ExactTarget went public in 2012, after which Salesforce came knocking on the door with a $2.5 billion deal in 2013.    “Since this was Salesforce’s first acquisition of a publicly traded company, there was a sense of being in it together with the Salesforce folks with regard to how this whole thing was going to work,” remarks Leet, who tells us that when word of the deal first surfaced, he fed his enthusiasm for the career chapter that lay ahead by buying a copy of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s book Behind the Cloud. ”To me,” he continues, “the acquisition was an opportunity, first, to support the business—but as you go through an integration, it’s also a chance to follow different lanes of experience, with an eye toward growing with your different teams.” For Leet, this growth would remain inside the realm of M&A, where his 9 years at Salesforce would be what he describes as always being “fresh,” as he became engaged with the different management teams of the companies that Salesforce acquired and sought out knowledge to help in determining how best to invest in the acquired firm to maximize post-acquisition top-line growth. From the ExactTarget acquisition on forward, Leet tells us, M&A has consistently broadened his view of the role that finance plays in business and exposed to him how often the “people part” is the most time-consuming yet most vital aspect of the success of an acquisition. Leet concludes: “My team and I had this sense of ownership, in that we took personally the success or failure of the acquired companies—and because of this, we were able to step up and play a broader leadership role.” –Jack Sweeney

Brett and Jack draw parallels between the challenges faced by our three featured Planning Aces as they seek to optimize the talent resources and processes in their different organizations. The pressure to align strategy and execution is increasing, and all three CFOs share their responses to these external pressures. Brett also touches on the adoption of AI in finance. With AI, the depth of analysis and speed of feedback are significantly enhanced, leading to faster decision-making and more innovative ideas as revealed by CFO Steven Cirulis of Potbelly The episode features planning insights and commentary from Tony Boor, CFO of Blackbaud, Michelle, Hook, CFO, Portillo’s and Steven Cirulis, CFO Potbelly. OUR COHO

Roughly 20 years ago, Neha Krishnamohan arrived as a college freshman on Duke University’s Durham, N.C., campus, intent on pursuing a career that would someday grant her the agency to develop a product or therapy capable of solving a healthcare problem. Having grown up among family members with different careers in the medical field, Krishnamohan had inherited a deep interest in medicine—although she felt that her tendency to want to be more “hands-on” might make engineering a more suitable field of study. “As far as I was concerned, I was going to go to work for a Medtronic or a Pfizer, where I would come up with a great new product,” reports Krishnamohan, who after enrolling in Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering chose biomedical engineering as her major. As Krishnamohan was ratcheting up her engineering studies, one of her professors made a lasting impression on her by enlivening their discussions with tales of past experiences as a Wall Street banker. “The idea that the financial merits of a company really inform its decision-making and that you as a finance person are at the center of critical decisions that need to be made was intriguing, to say the least,” recalls Krishnamohan, who along the way began thinking of investment banking as perhaps an alternative path along which to achieve her goal of developing a medical product.    As her college years progressed and Krishnamohan applied to a number of investment bank internship programs, eventually she nabbed a spot at Goldman Sachs, which subsequently offered her a full-time position upon her graduation in 2008.   “This was a tumultuous time to be starting a career in investment banking, but I think that it helped to lay a foundation for me with regard to the importance of being prepared for the worst,” explains Krishnamohan, who would remain at Goldman Sachs for a period 13 years, 11 of which were spent inside the firm’s healthcare investment banking group. Krishnamohan ended up being named a Goldman vice president in 2015, about midway into her lengthy tenure with the firm. In this same year, while Krishnamohan was tasked with helping a Boston-based client to prepare for an IPO, a snowstorm prevented her manager and Goldman colleagues from attending the company’s “drafting sessions,” wherein the firm’s management and lawyers would toil for many hours over a period of days to create its IPO documents. As Krishnamohan remembers, “I knew that the room was going to be looking to me for the right guidance, so I embraced this and found myself having a point of view, asking questions, guiding them through the story—and I saw that people were listening. It was a remarkable 3 days.” “Leadership doesn’t have to have all the answers,” she adds. “You have to listen and drive toward decisions that have conviction.” –Jack Sweeney

It was late 2020 when Michelle Hook ended 17 years of fruitful career-building at Domino’s to accept a CFO appointment at fast casual restaurant chain Portillo’s.   “The two things that I was looking for were to be passionate about a new brand and to feel a culture fit,” recalls Hook, who adds that she had long imagined someday leaving Domino’s to join a smaller company that she could help to grow. “I just didn’t care about going to a bigger company or ‘X,’ ‘Y,’ or ‘Z,’” continues Hook, who tells us that she ultimately took a leap of faith with regard to there being a culture fit at Portillo’s. “I actually never stepped into our headquarters until my first day on the job and had met in person only with the CEO, since this was during COVID times and the rest of the hiring process had been done on Zoom,” comments Hook. Fast-forward 15 months to when the Omicron variant was still grabbing headlines and inflation had begun to rattle the economy—and Hook could not escape the notion that the traditional Portillo’s restaurant needed to change for the post-COVID world. “I thought to myself, I think that we’re overbuilding our restaurants—we need to think about where the puck is going,” remembers Hook, who notes that Portillo’s dine-in customers in today’s post-COVID environment account for only roughly 35 percent of the chain’s volume. “I had come from Domino’s, which didn’t have these big dining rooms and had built out a heavily digital business,” remarks Hook, who reports that Portillo’s digital business represents only 20 percent of overall sales. This subject soon surfaced at an executive strategy session at which Portillo’s CEO, Michael Osanloo, tasked Hook and Portillo’s head of marketing with leading an initiative dubbed “Restaurant of the Future.”    “I think that Michael knew that I’d take on the project by using a data-driven lens,” comments Hook, who points out that the project has involved “time and motion studies” involving specific restaurants and their conveyance activities within the kitchen.       “Getting the engine right in the car is super important to us,” she says. “This will bring benefits not only on the cost side of things but also for our team members, who will find it easier to complete their work.” –Jack Sweeney

We are near the end of our discussion with CFO Svai Sanford when he permits us to unlock one last door to his past. Unbeknownst to us, 20 minutes earlier, Sanford had handed us the key to its lock in the form of a short story. The story had begun with Sanford receiving a job offer, to which he had replied, “Are you sure? I do not have any experience in this sector.” His future boss had replied: “You will figure it out.” At first, we were left wondering whether there had been something more that the future boss had known about Sanford—perhaps a piece of contributing evidence that had made him feel confident that Sanford could acclimate and succeed. “There’s something in me that has always allowed me to figure things out,” Sanford had confided. Sanford’s choice of words—“something in me”—had been interesting. Certainly, there is no shortage of problem-solving exercises along any CFO’s path, but he had already told us that his career track had likely been different from that of other CFOs—and we had sensed that the “something” to which he had been referring had not yet been disclosed to us. Still, as Sanford had helped us to check off the requisite CFO career milestones via his engaging and modest narrative, we eventually had heard about his arrival in the C-suite—which for a moment had led us to consider how Sanford’s success story is not remarkably different from that of other CFOs. However, that’s exactly why it’s so remarkable, or so we later realize. As we enter the final minutes of our discussion, we learn that Sanford had arrived in the United States as a 13-year-old refugee from Laos, who with only a 3rd-grade education had entered a Kansas City high school while not yet speaking a word of English. How does someone enter the C-suite some 20 years later after having surmounted such adverse circumstances? Here’s where we find the key that Sanford gave us. In the words of his former boss, “You will figure it out.” –Jack Sweeney

When Charly Kevers took his mentor’s advice and swapped a corporate development role at Hewlett-Packard for a tour of duty as a director of HP’s investor relations arm, he looked forward to tackling a variety of IR requisites, including crafting the messaging that follows a change at the top. Two years and four HP CEOs later, Kevers exited HP knowing that his IR term (with its extra helping of CEO turnover) had afforded him a stint unlike any before it at HP. “It’s a highly stressful role when you are standing in front of the Fidelitys of the world and they’re asking you a lot of questions beginning with ‘What does it mean for the business and what does it mean for my stock,’” explains Kevers, who subsequently stepped into a corporate development role at Salesforce.  “That experience has since helped me by allowing me in many cases to rationalize things by saying, ‘Well, this is not as bad as what I dealt with there,’” comments Kevers, who these days, as CFO of Carta, appears to be focused as much on internal communications as he is on external PR. “Having worked mostly for public companies, I‘ve been trained to not talk about any number that isn’t public information, but here at Carta, we are very transparent,” remarks Kevers, who adds that he is routinely surprised by how Carta employees respond to numbers. “We’ve been very transparent about where we want to save money and have sought to explain why we care about gross margin and metrics like sales efficiency and other things that contribute to profitability, and I have been surprised by how much people will care about them and then take ownership of them by finding ways to improve these metrics,” reports Kevers, who notes that Carta’s efforts to achieve greater  transparency are visible on the company’s P&L, which now reports the gross margin for different product areas along with product-specific marketing and R&D spending. “We can now look at how the Rule of 40 applies to every one of our product areas, so the board room discussions can be much more in-depth when it comes to discussing tradeoffs” observes Kevers, who seems to harbor as much enthusiasm for transparency outside the boardroom as he does for clarity inside its doors. “If you’re transparent and explain what metrics need to be watched,” he says, “doing so really does help to drive productive discussions between finance and the rest of the business.” –Jack Sweeney

Looking back, Jeff Coulter is not exactly certain how he landed a spot on a team tasked with designing and implementing the first-ever budgeting and reporting processes responsible for tracking Procter & Gamble’s marketing dollars on a single worldwide system. “P&G had hundreds of disparate setups that we had to bring into one system globally,” explains Coulter, recalling the effort behind the information systems upgrade with SAP software that many at the time (the year 2000) deemed to be a historic milestone not only for the packaged goods company but also for industry at large. Coulter had been plucked out of Procter & Gamble’s Iowa City office, where he had been working as a cost analyst for such products as Pantene and Scope. The new assignment required Coulter to relocate to Cincinnati, where for the next 2 years he became involved in multiple aspects of the implementation, including the rollout of SAP end-user training across P&G globally. “At the time, any career management at Procter & Gamble was essentially the result of a benevolent dictatorship—you were basically told where you were going to go next,” remembers Coulter, who adds that the experience and training that he gleaned along his P&G way made his time there a very worthy investment. Still, Coulter was eager to return west. Living close to family had always been a priority for the young finance executive, and Cincinnati turned out to be not so short a stint.   Consequently, while geography is perhaps not the first reason that people give for having joined Intel Corporation, for Coulter—who would first join the chip maker’s Portland, Oregon, complex—it was certainly among his top three impetuses. To move from a consumer products company to a technology company may seem unconventional, but Coulter tells us that his love for learning and his growth mindset helped him to adapt quickly at Intel, where he would remain for the next 6 years. He emphasizes the versatility of finance, which allows professionals to work across various industries. Says Coulter: “I love learning business models and figuring out how they’re making money and how to optimize that.” –Jack Sweeney

The year was 2015, but for Jeff Laborde, a seasoned finance leader kicking off his second C-suite tour of duty, it seemed as though the conference room that he had just entered had transported him back to 2005—or was it 1995? Across the way, an executive who had noticed Laborde’s presence stopped the meeting and queried: “Jeff, what are you doing here? Why are you in my meeting?” Caught by surprise and somewhat tongue-tied, Laborde recalls, he registered a less than articulate response to the question that had quickly swallowed up the room’s attention.   Having only recently joined the company as CFO, Laborde was seeking to sit in on a number of meetings in order to better understand how the company operated. Given that this particular gathering had been expected to discuss go-to-market priorities for the upcoming quarter, Laborde had made it his business to attend. “I was only following my instincts, and it came as a shock to me to find their swim lanes so impervious to being swapped or crossed,” continues Laborde, who adds that the experience highlighted for him the importance of fully understanding a role’s limitations before accepting an appointment. It wouldn’t be long, though, before Laborde’s career transported him back to 2015. “I realized that I wouldn’t be happy in the strict silo of finance without understanding what’s around the corner,” he remembers. Still, Laborde tells us, finance leaders who expect to cross lanes and enter different operational areas of the business must always be approachable, while at the same time being prepared to experience what he refers to as “Oh crap!” moments.   He doesn’t provide us with much further detail here, but we assume that such instances involve developments that are perceived to put the operations of the business at significant risk. Nonetheless, Laborde’s advisory is less about managing risk per se and more about serving as a reminder to finance leaders to be mindful of the nature of their response to crisis. “Stay calm, get your facts straight, don’t overreact—and just know that these moments are going to come,” emphasizes Laborde, who characterizes such moments as the status quo for CFOs who make looking around corners a priority. For those finance leaders who do not, Laborde tell us, time travel remains a viable option. He observes: “You shouldn’t assume that you’ll be welcome within core areas of the business. There are some CEOs and ownership structures that don’t expect or want the CFO to go there.” –Jack Sweeney

While the leadership journeys of many of our CFO guests began on an upper floor of a glass-and-steel skyscraper affording a wide-angle view of a cosmopolitan metropolis, that of Blackbaud CFO Tony Boor started at street level in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. Less than an hour’s drive north of El Paso, Texas, Las Cruces is home not only to the main campus of New Mexico State University but also to a crowded schedule of holiday festivals and a varied collection of retailers—including motorcycle shops such as the one that Boor first visited in the mid-1970s. “When I was 13 or 14 years old, I walked into a motorcycle shop to buy my first bike and they ended up hiring me to sweep floors and haul trash,” recalls Boor, who over the next 10 years segued from maintenance to the service department, to parts management, to sales management, to being general manager of the store. “Thinking back now on being that young and running a business, I realize that I got a chance very early in my career to experience a firm from the other side of the desk, as I oversaw people much older than me and dealt with things like payroll, books, and accounting,” continues Boor, whose hours at the shop populated his high school and college years. Nonetheless, in a family with a father who worked at the nearby White Sands Missile Range as a nuclear electrical engineer and other sons who were embarking on engineering careers of their own, the motorcycle shop entry on Boor’s resume did not go unnoticed. Thus what might be surmised to have been a collective sigh of relief may have been heard when he decided to pursue an engineering degree at New Mexico State, thereby keeping safe the Boor family tradition. Or would it? “I was actually in my senior year of college when I decided that I didn’t want to be an engineer because I knew from working in the motorcycle shop that I loved business,” reports Boor, who remembers his parents not being at all pleased that the timing of his decision was coming so “late in the game.”     “It ended up taking me a little longer to be done with school, but I did switch over to accounting,” explains Boor, who would subsequently work for a number of the original Big Eight accounting houses before stepping into the ranks of corporate finance professionals—where the same qualities that had once served him well at the bike shop appear to have propelled his climb upward. Says Boor: “A lot of what I learned in those very early years of my life and career had a big impact on how things have gone for me, even in these finance leadership roles.” –Jack Sweeney

Evan Goldstein tells us that it was at the end of another long day—after a week of long days—as he was walking to the parking lot adjacent to Genentech’s offices that he received a “gut punch.” Becoming more self-aware of others is something that many finance leaders have told us that they have needed to lean into during their career, but few have shared with us the pivot to self-reflection as vividly as Goldstein, whose multi-decade finance career boasts an unusual dual-chamber architecture centered on 10 years at Genentech and another 11 at Salesforce. “I refer to myself as a serial monogamist when it comes to my professional career and the longevity that I’ve experienced at both of these companies,” explains Goldstein, who credits his extended stay at both firms to the power of three: the people, the mission, and the innovation. Still, Goldberg wants us to know about the long day that ended in Genentech’s parking lot. For young finance career builders, arriving at the end-of-day parking lot can be somewhat likened to a runner breaking the finish-line tape, not to be awarded a medal, though, but to be met with the refreshingly cool evening air that routinely rewards a long day’s work. It was in just such environs that Goldstein chose to thank a younger Genentech colleague for their hard work on an important and ultimately successful “deliverable.” “After having just been promoted to the manager level, I had taken over short-term planning in the corporate organization and had hired this person—whose role I had had in the past,” reports Goldstein, who earlier in the week had presented the “deliverable” to Genentech’s leadership team. “Here we had had this really successful outcome, and this employee was just doing phenomenally well,” comments Goldstein, who found himself alongside his young report as they made their way to the parking lot together. “Thank you for all of your hard work,” Goldstein remembers saying—to which the employee then replied: “Yeah, well, I don’t think I want to do this.” Such a response was like a punch to the gut, Goldstein recalls, and one that not even the fresh evening air could ease.     The employee explained further: “Evan, you’re telling me what to do, and you’re not letting me figure it out.” Looking back, Goldstein realizes that he was shortchanging the opportunities that he provided to others by failing to allow them to grow and develop along the way as they “added their own flavor to the process.” Says Goldstein: “This was one of my turning points from a managerial leadership perspective—when I started to realize that it’s not just about what you deliver but also how you deliver it.” –Jack Sweeney

Marco Torrente kicked off his finance career inside the Milan, Italy, offices of SC Johnson, the household cleaning products giant headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin. All told, he would end up spending 7 years in various finance roles at Johnson—including that of controller—while relocating first to London and then eventually to Geneva. Looking back, Torrente tells us that the family-owned company created a “flexible culture” that valued autonomy and direct communication—two qualities that have been instrumental in shaping his approach to finance leadership.

Perhaps it would be fair to speculate that were it not for the changing dietary habits of Americans and surprise arrival of a global pandemic, Steven Cirulis would likely not be occupying the CFO office at Potbelly Sandwich Shop. The pursuit of new alternative proteins inside the land of agtech has in recent years led more than few venture capital firms to seek out the advice of strategy executives familiar with the mathematics behind the evolving menus of fast dining establishments. Having held a succession of top strategy roles with the likes of McDonald’s and Panera, Steven Cirulis found his budding popularity within the VC community to be little more than a rewarding satisfaction—that is, until late 2019, when he decided to put some of his VC-related activities aside to accommodate an advisory gig with publicly-held sandwich shop Potbelly.   “They had been looking for a CFO at the time, but I was really enjoying my work on the venture capital side of things,” recalls Cirulis, who adds that the arrival of the pandemic changed everything. “I ostensibly became the person whom they turned to and asked, ‘Okay, what do we do here?,’” continues Cirulis. Within the next several weeks, he busily implemented a list of cash preservation edicts, triggered the renegotiation of bank covenants, and—along with Potbelly management—announced a pay cut, instituted an employee furlough, and applied for a PPP loan. Along the way—perhaps not more than a month into the pandemic—Potbelly proposed to Cirulis that he join the company as CFO and chief strategy officer. “Why would you join a restaurant business at the start of a pandemic?,” rhetorically reflects Cirulis, in highlighting but one of the queries that crossed his mind at the time. Nevertheless, Cirulis tells us, “I jumped at it.”   Three years later, with the virus now in the rearview mirror, Cirulis makes it clear that the pandemic will never fully escape his view: “Getting forgiveness on that PPP loan was a great day in my career as a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney

No matter how many phone calls Matt Gustke receives during the span of his finance career, none will likely be more memorable or important than one he received nearly 22 years ago. At the time, Gustke, a research analyst for a major bank, was spending his days assessing the carnage piling up in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble burst. “The times were really weird, and uncertainty was everywhere,” comments Gustke, who despite the tech sector’s dotcom bust chapter assures us that he thoroughly enjoyed his research days—and in fact he may well have remained in research if not for a fateful phone call. “He was without a doubt my favorite executive at my favorite company,” comments Gustke, recalling the late Rajiv Dutta, who as the CFO of eBay at the time called Gustke to invite him to lunch. “The lunch turned into a full day, which then became a dinner and a meeting with the whole team, which then a week later led to my joining eBay to build out its IR function,” recalls Gustke, who as a research analyst had already established a rapport with Dutta by having frequently queried the CFO and summoned his comments as part of his regular research coverage. “At the time that I joined eBay, I honestly viewed it as sort of a 1- to 2-year working sabbatical during which I would get to see a company from the inside, but I eventually ended up being part of the eBay family for 12 years,” continues Gustke, who once more credits Dutta with extending his “leave” and ultimately helping to point him down the CFO path. Gustke tells us that Dutta was often known to be generous with praise: "I guess it was a couple of years into my eBay journey when Rajiv came up to me and said, 'You know, investors don't want to talk to me anymore because they just want to talk to you, which is freeing up so much of my time to do other things—so I want to say thanks.'” However, as it turned out, Dutta had more than praise in mind. “The next thing he said was, ‘And now I need you to go into a different role—what would you think about leading FP&A for eBay International?,'” reports Gustke, who after giving Dutta an affirmative response first began serving in his new international role from California before relocating to Switzerland for additional finance responsibilities that would eventually lead to heading up eBay's European finance team. As he continued to grow his experience across multiple finance disciplines, Gustke became a candidate for more senior leadership positions. In 2010, he garnered what would be his first CFO appointment when he was named CFO of StubHub, the online ticket broker acquired by eBay in 2007. Still, Gustke wants us know that one of his most important lessons wasn't gleaned from life among finance's rank-and-file but instead at a research team's conference table—and perhaps the very one where he first met Dutta. Says Gustke: "Long ago I stopped worrying about asking stupid questions in meetings. I figured that if something wasn't clear to me—and I'm at least of average intelligence—it wouldn't be clear to someone else. It turns out that more often than not, my questions led to better conversations, new insights, and a clearer mandate as to what was to be done after the meeting." –Jack Sweeney   

If Paystand CFO Scott Bennion were to break his three-decade-long finance career into different chapters, the software finance leader would likely agree that he and many of his peers have recently opened a new one. As a starting—or concluding—point, the chapter that has just ended might simply be titled "The Data Set," in order to focus our attention on the means by which Bennion and others of his ilk have over the past decade extended their lines of sight into the business well beyond those of any previous generation of CFOs.    For Bennion—who remembers tracking CD shipping costs during the desktop computing era—the latest marker or evidence that a new page has been turned has been made visible by Paystand’s product engineering and development team. “After having deployed AI tools and generative AI, we’re able to actually see a 4x increase in productivity by our product and engineering teams so far,” reports Bennion, who minces no words when asked about AI's impact on company finances. He continues: “From a finance perspective, I see a massive opportunity for improved ROI through doing more with less. From a legal perspective, I see that we need to be making sure that we do this in a smart way so that we don't accidentally hit any legal third rails.” Bennion believes that the adoption of AI tools within SaaS organizations is not unlike what he previously observed firsthand in the open-source software environment. “New tech is often a developer-led initiative that comes into the organization through the side door, but once it's in, you need to embrace it,” observes Bennion, whose resume includes a stint as CFO of an open-source software company. Moreover, when it comes to some of the legal concerns associated with AI, Bennion suggests that just as happened in the open-source world, commercial licensing will be used to address some of the go-to-market concerns related to potential software infringement. As far as Bennion is concerned, when it comes to AI, the hands of time have already begun to move.     “You need to embrace it," he advises. "You can’t not embrace it." –Jack Sweeney

Of all of the career experiences that Robert Goldenberg has acquired on his way to the CFO office, you would think that his stint with a bankrupt landscaping company would not be apt to make his list of all-time opportunity door-openers. Still, when we asked Goldenberg to look back to share the experiences that first propelled him into the C-suite, the landscaping business came to his mind. To wit: It was back in 2015, when software developer 6sense was interviewing to hire its first full-time CFO, that Goldenberg—a career investment banker—nabbed an interview spot with the firm’s part-time finance leader. “He told me that my investment banking background was great, but that 6sense needed someone who could start at Ground Zero and had more tactical accounting experience,” recalls Goldenberg, who assured the executive that he completely understood—before suggesting that they dedicate the interview’s remaining time to accounting questions. “He grilled me for 20 minutes and then said, ‘You’re great!—I’m going schedule your next six interviews,’” continues Goldenberg, who was soon hired after having made the rounds with five senior executives and one board member. When it came to accounting practices, the part-time finance leader no doubt had anticipated that the seasoned banker sitting across the table may have had a blind spot—an addressable affliction, but certainly one that can frequently lengthen the path to the CFO office.   “In this instance, it was an objective fact that I was better than the average investment banker when it came to accounting,” explains Goldenberg, who credits one banking deal more than any other with sharpening his accounting knowledge—which brings us back to the bankrupt landscaping company that he had been tasked with selling whose books had been susceptible to recurring chaos. “In my experience, very small landscaping companies in bankruptcy are not known to have solid internal accounting functions,” observes Goldenberg, who adds that for a span of 3 months he had made the company’s dated accounting systems the center of his world. In fact, Goldenberg himself would make journal entries and seek solutions to reconcile old accounts. Consequently, his deep dive into the company’s books provided him with a base of accounting knowledge that he has continued to retain and build on to this day.     “When you get exposure to something and it’s critical that you learn it with some measure of competency,” Goldenberg reports, “I find that the resulting learning compounds over time—even when it’s not related to your day-to-day job.” –Jack Sweeney 

The big-city addresses that frequently prettify the office locations of esteemed accounting houses have continued to be a reliable draw for 20-something-year-old accounting grads eager to be counted among urban professionals.      Thus we would not have been surprised to learn that back in the late 1980s, when recent grad Jim Caci was assigned to Arthur Andersen’s Roseland, New Jersey, office, he experienced what might have been called a “ho-hum” moment. Not so! Unlike the real estate occupied by his big-city peers, Caci notes, “Roseland” afforded him more access to Andersen partners, who were arguably more approachable outside the accounting house’s big-city confines. What’s more, the New Jersey site tended to operate in a more independent fashion than AA’s marquee offices, a cultural attribute that perhaps made it an ideal location from which to spearhead a pilot program to provide a unique menu of services to small technology companies. “The idea was that from among these small companies would ultimately come the next Microsoft, but we would have already begun working with them when they were at only $5 million in revenue,” explains Caci, who reports that Roseland became one of only a handful of AA offices to test the program.   At the same time, the Roseland office had some plus-size neighbors, including AT&T Corp., whose headquarters at the time were a mere 25-minute drive away in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Caci tells us that this is when his career benefited from both geography and timing. At the time, Arthur Andersen had been engaged by AT&T to help with the formidable task of splitting up the firm into its Baby Bell operating companies, per its historic agreement with the U.S. government. The multi-step nature of this undertaking and regular management updates that it demanded led Caci and other Roseland denizens to frequently commute to Basking Ridge. Says Caci: “Here I was at the beginning of my second year out of school, and I was being asked to help present to the senior leadership of AT&T.” –Jack Sweeney 

It’s perhaps no secret that this podcast can be rather rigid when it comes to our policy for welcoming guests: Invitations are reserved for CFOs and CFOs alone. In fact, we regularly turn away book authors, consultants, and even CEOs. Such was the case for David Pennino, CEO of LogicSource, who recently was “pitched” to us as a potential guest. As always, we issued a templated email reply specially crafted to politely inform a dutiful communication professional of our “CFOs-only” mantra. This being said, LogicSource’s CEO has arguably nabbed a plus-size supporting role on our latest episode without having recorded a single word. Although unexpected, this was perhaps an eminently understandable development, given the central role that Pennino has played in the career of Niki Heim, LogicSource’s CFO, who easily met our necessary criteria and subsequently accepted our invitation. Still, when it comes to Pennino, CFO Heim does not serve up the familiar cadence of CEO kudos, any more than she attempts to tell us that Pennino is some kind of all-knowing C-suite Yoda forever imparting career wisdom. Instead, she swings open the door to a conference room of the past. The year is 2014, and Heim, a newly hired controller, is fielding questions from LogicSource’s private equity investors. Pennino is confident that she has the makings to be the company’s next CFO, but not all those gathered feel as certain—including Heim, who now tells us that at the time, she felt that she was not yet ready. “I’m very grateful that I had Dave Pennino, who was honest and open with me—he’d say, ‘Listen, here’s what I’m hearing—I believe in you, but you have to believe in yourself and you have to keep going,’” explains Heim, who adds that the company’s CFO had exited the company only days before her arrival, prompting the company’s investors to scrutinize the firm’s recent finance hire all the more. “During every single presentation that I gave to the board and to investor meetings, I was on edge—I needed to prove myself but always make sure that I was doing what Dave believed that I could do,” remarks Heim, who would shortly begin serving in an interim CFO role despite having her own misgivings about her CFO readiness. “Along the way, I would hear people say, ‘The work is going to come before the belief in yourself,’ and that was me—it was almost like my self-confidence wasn’t fully there yet,” comments Heim, who besides receiving confidence-boosting support from her CEO also began to extract feelings of self-worth from each new board encounter. “The board would be asking me to do something, and I would need to just go and figure out how to do it—I always found a way, and there were a lot of times early on when I was in the office at [6:00] in the morning and left at midnight,” recalls Heim, who tells us that once the work came, her confidence began to arrive soon thereafter. Says Heim: “More and more people and investors would call me up personally, and I’d be able to answer their questions.” –Jack Sweeney

For many professionals, the period stretching roughly from March 2020 to December 2022 will forever be known simply as “COVID,” as in “I changed jobs during COVID.” Thus it was for Erin Colgan, who in July 2020—after having invested 9 years within the finance rank-and-file of pharma giant Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and 8 years with PwC—opted to become the 20th employee of a promising biotech start-up. Still, Colgan’s game change was prompted not by COVID’s well-earned reputation for employment displacement nor by the allure of start-up dreams but by what recruiters have long referred to as “the call to leadership.” For Colgan, this meant joining Boston-based Sensei Bio as senior vice president of finance, a title that guaranteed her the status of being the firm’s senior most finance executive. At the time of her appointment, the pandemic had already begun to be recognized as having certain accelerant qualities for business, which were perhaps nowhere on display more than inside the biotech realm, an industry that was experiencing a COVID-fueled adrenaline rush. “It was only about 6 weeks after I joined the company that we found ourselves meeting with banks to talk about how we could go public to capitalize on the market being especially hot for biotechs,” explains Colgan, who alongside her CEO spearheaded an IPO process that ultimately raised $152 million for Sensei Bio in February 2021. However, as Colgan was to learn, a more formidable leadership challenge still lay ahead, as a Phase 2 drug trial rendered disappointing results and the biotech market at large suddenly began to cool.      “Six months past our IPO, some data on a Phase 2 program came in that wasn’t what we had hoped for, so we huddled,” recalls Colgan, who reports that the company’s cash runway then became top-of-mind as management debated whether the capital markets for small-cap biotech firms might turn around in 6 to 9 months. “I said, ‘Let’s assume that this period lasts a lot longer and see how long we can stretch our cash while still enabling ourselves to achieve what we feel is most important,’” continues Colgan, who tells us that Sensei Bio ultimately advanced down her preferred path, which allowed the firm to extend its cash reach by a year and a half. In the 6 months that followed, Colgan remarks, the finance, science, and medical areas of the business achieved a shared mind-set that allowed them to work together in the new, capital-constrained biotech environment.   In January 2022, nearly a year after Sensei Bio’s IPO and 6 months after Colgan had made her compelling argument to extend the firm’s cash coverage calendar, she was named CFO—an appointment that we would wager she had sealed up a half-year earlier when certain hard decisions had been called for.   Colgan observes: “You can’t make those types of decisions ‘later.’ You have to make them early and often.” –Jack Sweeney

This episode of Planning Aces features the FP&A insights and commentary of  CFO Dev Ahuja of Novelis, CFO Alex Triplett of Appfire and CFO Rick Rosenthal of Clara Analytics. One of the key topics co host Brett Knowles drills down on is the difference between complicated and complex problems. Brett uses the examples of manufacturing a car, which is complicated, and raising a child, which is complex. The distinction is crucial in understanding how to approach problem-solving in an organization. While complicated problems can be solved with the right formulas or spreadsheets, complex problems require more. They demand strong interpersonal relationships and effective communication. It’s not just about having the right tools or processes, but also about having the right people who can use these tools effectively. Planning Ace CFO Dev Ahuja brings some perspective on the role of people in finance transformation. CFO Ahuja shared insights into the structure of his finance organization at Novelis. Despite being well-established, the organization needed a renewed focus on the role of finance in driving decisions and adding value. Dev emphasized the importance of finance being a thought partner and actively shaping strategy. He also highlighted the need for a strong talent pipeline and succession planning. This ensures the organization has the necessary depth of talent to drive its vision forward.

Among the different career highlights that Chris Kramer shares with us, perhaps none is as memorable as what might be called his “Indiana Jones moment.” Having distinguished himself as a “technical accountant” during the first half of his career, Kramer was often dispatched to observe and scrutinize the accounting practices of prospective acquisition targets in foreign lands—a succession of deployments that led him to frequently encounter unexpected circumstances. Such was the case one time in the mid-2000s, when he entered the UK corporate offices of an acquisition prospect and found himself casting his eyes upon something that he “had never seen before.” Somehow, in doing his due diligence, Kramer had found a big bound book: a company ledger.  Given that few details populate this ledger tale, we’ll assume that he may have been engaged in some polite conversation with the UK office’s accounting team when it occurred to him that he needed a network login code. This request led to one UK accountant subsequently winking at another, who from what seemed like out of nowhere produced a large brown volume—or perhaps it was black, or maybe blue, and perhaps the company was mostly using QuickBooks but had relied on bound ledgers prior to 2004. Kramer doesn’t tell us. However, the words that he uses to illustrate his “find” arguably echo the tone and sentiments of an archaeologist making a heroic discovery.  “It was incredible—a physical ledger, which I then had to ‘translate’ before taking it back to corporate!,” exclaims Kramer, whose depth of technical accounting knowledge and range of M&A experiences had made him an invaluable asset for deal-minded CFOs. However, Kramer tells us, he would have appreciated having a broader view of finance earlier in his career, which would have allowed him to see beyond accounting and position himself to acquire more acumen across different finance disciplines such as IR and FP&A. “I was very far down the accounting track in the realm of chief accounting officers before I began speaking to CFOs and CFO recruiters and spending time inside these other disciplines,” reports Kramer, who tells us that his deliberate push to acquire a wider view of finance didn’t always feel like an upward climb. He continues: “I went from having this massive team as a chief accounting officer to being an SVP of FP&A with only a fraction of the number of people who previously reported to me.” –Jack Sweeney

While the 2008 financial crash turned out to be a reliable source of career lessons for many of our finance leader guests, Joel Campbell may be the first CFO to share with us a customer support lesson learned from the crisis. Back in 2006, Campbell, a seasoned treasury executive, had been recruited to help to build a robust treasury function for Ameriprise Financial, the recently spun-off financial planning division of American Express. “Those first 2 years were really about finishing this spin-off process, but the day that’s burned infamously into my mind is September 16, 2008,” remembers Campbell, who reports that this was the day when a money market fund widely used by Ameriprise customers “broke the buck.” “It became the first money market fund in investing history to let its net asset value drop below a dollar—and this had just never happened before,” continues Campbell, who adds that the fund served more than 300,000 Ameriprise customers who had routinely deposited their excess cash into it with the intent of using the proceeds to pay a variety of expenses, from mortgages to college tuitions. Not more than 10 days after the fund “broke the buck,” Ameriprise’s management team committed $400 million from its own balance sheet to support those customers impacted by the fund’s sudden collapse. Besides underlining the prioritization of customer care, Campbell notes, the experience also shaped his perspectives on treasury and finance. “It helped me to think about how to look forward,’ remarks Campbell, who continues to laud Ameriprise’s response, “and I’m saying ‘look forward’ with regard not just to what’s happening in a business but also to trying to understand where the market is headed. It’s all about reading the signs so that you can step back and make sure that you’re making the right decisions from a risk or liquidity standpoint to be able to both run your business and support your customers in the right way.” Says Campbell: “It’s the response that sticks with me. It was how the executive team quickly pivoted and said, ‘We need to take care of the customer, period. Full stop.’” –Jack Sweeney

CFO Michael Cox says that it was near the end of 2022 when the IRIS Software Group began to realize that the guiding philosophy that had motivated and incentivized the UK-based software company to complete 30 acquisitions within 6 years needed an upgrade.   Cox tells us that the IRIS management team was discussing the business cases for yet more acquisitions when the group began to banter about the same deal-making “multiples” that had successfully guided the company prior to the pandemic. “I was sitting there thinking, ‘Hang on a minute! These multiples would have us potentially spending as much on these businesses as we did pre-COVID—but in fact the cost of debt has doubled,’” recalls Cox, who adds that while IRIS management was certainly aware of the various factors (inflation, a sudden rotation of UK prime ministers, Russia’s war on Ukraine) that had contributed to the UK’s tepid business climate, there was not yet consensus around how to incorporate them and the resulting increased cost of debt into the firm’s business-case decision-making. In the past, Cox tells us, a typical business-case meeting might have involved a discussion around whether IRIS could continue to invest in an acquired company in order to allow it to achieve new growth—which would make it a worthwhile target. However, it had become clear that such deliberations now needed to consider speed to value as a key contributor to future M&A success. According to Cox, “We needed to be thinking about how quickly we could generate the value that we wanted to create from these acquisitions.” While revenue synergies and cross-selling opportunities between IRIS and potential acquisition targets would remain key selling points for any executive advancing the business case for a particular deal, Cox would ask the room to study the prospective acquisition over an 18- to 24-month time span and prod executives for ideas or suggestions. “I’d ask, ‘How do we generate cross-selling more quickly or invest in this company in a way that makes the business more successful more quickly?,’” remarks Cox, who notes that one trait that might distinguish his post-COVID vs. pre-COVID finance leadership is a willingness to push back.     Says Cox: “Sometimes you’ve got to be that unpopular voice in the room and that sort of glass-half-empty person because it’s important to understand the overall impact of the cost of capital on the value of IRIS as a business.” –Jack Sweeney

When David Parsons tells us that he remains concerned about the whereabouts of his 20-something-year-old self, we realize that our talk with Zuto’s CFO is going to be different from most of those that we undertake with today’s finance leaders. According to him, “Thirty-nine-year-old Dave is looking at mid-20s Dave and asking, ‘What are you thinking?!‘” Some further probing on our part reveals that “mid-20s Dave” was roaming the English countryside on weekends as part of a wedding band, as well as a member of other assembles—including a popular Michael Jackson tribute act.    “I just went down this rabbit hole where I was working weekends as a musician and doing studio work in the evenings,” explains Parsons, who adds that his weekend music tours would often book-end 70-hour workweeks in corporate finance. “I don’t mind working the hours, if I get to do what I love doing,” continues Parsons, who began serving in a succession of FP&A roles once he was safely beyond his 20s. “I have not necessarily built my career by trying to fill niches and gaps on my c.v., which is, by the way, a good way of going about things—but it’s just not for me,” remarks Parsons, who notes that he began to find his work increasingly satisfying as he moved into a number of commercial finance roles, which eventually led him to accept a position with UK-based automobile finance and loan company Zuto. “Basically, we begin by placing a customer with a lender and a preapproval, which means that we can tell them with a very high degree of accuracy whether the lender is going to accept them,” reports Parsons, who points out that Zuto deploys a sizable team of car-buying experts who can offer customers one-on-one service for vehicle history checks, free vehicle valuation checks, and the like. Parsons recalls that at the time that the CFO role opened up at Zuto roughly 5 years ago, he was overseeing FP&A. Nonetheless, although the company was evaluating other CFO candidates, he knew that in the end he was a good fit—and not necessarily because of his familiarity with the business. Says Parsons: “It really comes down to being a cultural fit, and for me, I found that this business is doing something that I believe in.” –Jack Sweeney

When OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, recently announced that it would be opening its first office outside the U.S., few who were roaming the tech corridors of Silicon Valley likely were surprised that the generative AI company chose London for its new outpost. As a backdrop to the decision, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been energetically pitching the UK as the intellectual and geographical “home” of AI, at the same time that UK executive recruiters have been busy compiling evidence to convince tech prospects that the UK is on the verge of becoming the next Silicon Valley. Such claims are bold moves indeed, but ones for which a resume such as that of American Michael Bannon might serve the recruiting community as “Exhibit A.”   A quick glance at Bannon’s bio reveals a familiar professional trajectory, from his 11 years as an investor with TPG Global of San Francisco to the operations side, where to date he has occupied the CFO office at three different tech firms. Other noted Bay Area laurels have included an MBA from Stanford and board seat with Meals on Wheels, San Francisco (2013 to 2017). Bannon’s resume is one that any aspiring Silicon Valley CFO might hope to someday replicate, although any peruser of it would also note that his professional journey has also been a geographic one.    “My assumption was that I would end up in the Bay Area, but one of the conversations that I had was with a London-based company—and you know how one conversation can quickly lead to two or three,” explains Bannon, who after 6 years in the UK recently opened his third CFO chapter with SaaS software developer Typeform. Still, based in London, Bannon points out that as the UK’s tech community has expanded, so too has the “weight class” of tech companies that he now prefers as a finance leader. “I love this size of company because I think that there really is an opportunity for each of us here as an individual to have an impact,” he notes, going on to give little to no mention of his geographically nomadic professional path. “I love building teams and building organizations—and so far, the companies of which I’ve been a part have grown significantly over the periods of time when I have been with them.” Says Bannon: “As an American who was based out in the Bay Area for close to 15 years, to now get to see the tech scene over here in Europe is a pretty special thing—it’s where I feel that I can be additive, given my previous experience.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Jeff Noto is asked to reflect back on his 35 years with Verizon, he tells us that his earliest years with the company were spent scoring quick returns on investments that Verizon had made inside its fledgling wireless business. “I always have to chuckle when I think back to how certain people thought that wireless would not be a product for very long,” comments Noto, who notes that being able to demonstrate speedy returns on investments became critical to securing future investments and for building the business case that wireless would someday soon be a viable alternative to “wire line” services.   “Now, look at things from where we sit today, when everything has been reversed and wireless now provides the main means for communication—that is, at least from the perspective of from the handset to the tower,” observes Noto, who would climb the ranks at Verizon as an FP&A executive to eventually serve in steady succession of business unit CFO roles. Asked why—after 35 years with other duties—2023 became the right time to step into a CFO role, Noto replies: “It was just a funny intersection where all things came together after the world had turned during my very long career with Verizon.” For Noto, it was time to look beyond the “handset to tower” space and all of the other familiar communications pathways. “From there, it becomes all about fiber-optics—and that’s what we do at Zayo,’ continues Noto, drawing our attention to his recent CFO appointment at the fiber-optics and network infrastructure company. Says Noto: “I don’t know that there could have been a company other than Zayo that I would have left Verizon for—this is a great opportunity.” No doubt this is a blush-worthy compliment, yet—coming from someone with 35 years at a single company—many of us are inclined to take Noto at his word. –Jack Sweeney

Among global management consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group—long recognized as one of the world’s top three “strategy houses” (along with McKinsey and Bain)—has remained an attractive early career chapter for many executives who wish to accelerate their learning by consulting to senior corporate leaders.    Such was the path taken by Sapna Kapur, who in 2007—after 4 years with Kurt Salmon and then 4 with BCG—exited management consulting in search of a corporate operations role that would allow her to apply the expertise that she had gleaned from years of serving a variety of corporate clients. At the time, Kapur could not have known that she was about to make what will more than likely be her professional life’s biggest investment of career years with a single company—nor could she have realized that upon completion of this 12-year stint, she would in short order become a CFO. Kapur’s sizable investment of career years with a single company is not unlike similar sojourns made many of the finance leaders who have shared their career journeys with us. However, what intrigues us is that she established this track record and fed her budding CFO ambitions while an employee of Google from 2007 to 2019, a span of time during which the company grew from $20 billion to $182 billion. “I joined Google when it was just starting to take a bit of a breather in order to better think about the ways in which it could grow to the next level and explore questions like, ‘Should we go for growth by 2X or by 5X?,’” recalls Kapur, who notes that the original Google operations team that she joined was made up of executives with consulting roots just like her own. “We were needed to really drive some of these types of growth explorations to better inform the leadership team at Google,” explains Kapur, who within 3 years of joining the company had begun to serve in a succession of finance roles.    Listeners will undoubtedly find Kapur’s insights into Google’s use of small teams of keen interest, as well as the collaborative nature that she regularly transmits—an attribute that she seems to take for granted.   While time limitations may not have allowed us to track the roots of Kapur’s “collaborative skillset,” we suspect that professional peers might tell us that not unlike Lady Gaga, she was “Born This Way.” –Jack Sweeney

The meeting that Chuck Fisher brings to our attention began not unlike hundreds, if not thousands, of other meetings that he has sat in on during his 25-year business career. However, it was at one particular gathering that he witnessed the thinking that would trigger one of the last decade’s greatest strategic bets. Back in 2013, Fisher had only recently joined the business development team at Charter Communications when he found himself in a meeting that included Charter’s then-CEO, Tom Rutledge. The meeting had begun, like many others, with Rutledge highlighting a number of Charter’s recent “wins”—before his message became far more nuanced.  Fisher recalls Rutledge saying, “The thing that we need to understand as a company is that we can be the best operators in the business—which I think that we are—but as long as we’re subscale, we’re always going to be playing the game by someone else’s rules and we will never have a seat at the table to define the direction of the industry.” It was later in that day—or perhaps a day or two later—when the Charter M&A team began to contemplate the acquisition of Time Warner Cable, a company roughly four times its size. “It was audacious to think of Charter as the acquirer, inasmuch as every logical design as far as how industries evolve goes would have had Time Warner acquiring us,” explains Fisher, who adds that the Time Warner deal ultimately took 3 years for Charter to complete. Along the way, Fisher reports, there were plenty of headline-grabbing twists and turns, but the organization stayed focused. “We believed that we were the better operators and had a better strategy,” remarks Fisher, who turns our attention back to the early meeting with Rutledge, when the CEO made Fisher and others realize that Charter’s operations edge wouldn’t matter unless the company did something bold to “move the needle.” “Our one big question became, ‘How do we fix things?,’” continues Fisher, who observes that Rutledge’s insights brought clarity to the transformative role that a deal the size of the one involving Time Warner Cable could play in the company’s future. Says Fisher: “Those comments became the guiding principles for us as an organization.” - Jack Sweeney

When Alex Triplett is asked to explain where and how he began acquiring his operations knowledge, he tells us that his ops focus began to sharpen as more and more roles demanded greater “specificity” of him. Back in 2006, Triplett had just completed a stint as an investment banker with Citigroup when he was hired by private equity firm TA Associates as an associate inside the firm’s enterprise software and fintech realms. “Fintech forced me to get closer to the product itself because I couldn’t be credible otherwise,” recalls Triplett, who notes that very often the company founders across from whom he sat at meetings had other options when it came to sourcing investors, so the ability to demonstrate some depth when it came to product knowledge became essential.   “I got used to it being about product, product, product,” continues Triplett, who tells us that even today, his TA years bring to mind volumes of product literature and a steady stream of software demonstrations. Still, Triplett reports that the specificity that he was able to nurture when it came to actual product knowledge was of little aid to him when discussions turned to the different operational challenges that certain founders were confronting. He attributes this void to what might be deemed the familiar investor–operator gap. “They were great investors, but they didn’t always know how to give specific advice to a company that was trying to understand whether to pivot right or pivot left,” remarks Triplett, who says that it was his growing appetite for operations knowledge that ultimately led him to leave TA and join the corporate development team at financial services software company Ion. In the years that followed, Triplett was at times tasked with being general manager of various newly acquired businesses—a succession of assignments that eventually would empower him with the specificity required to emerge as an operations troubleshooter.   “It’s great to be able to analyze the shape of things from 10,000 feet and glean insights using pattern recognition,” Triplett observes, “but do you actually know how a business works?” –Jack Sweeney 

We often like to ask our CFO guests if they remember the first time that they presented to a board of directors. For many, this happened earlier than you might expect—but few of our interviewees have exposed the benefits of “early access” for us better than Rex Jackson. “I grew up in boardrooms,” comments Jackson, who recalls being invited to his first board meeting when he was about 28. Jackson had spent 3 years at a Los Angeles law firm before signing on as a corporate attorney for a local real estate management company whose board had a budding appetite for M&A.   “For any deal that they wanted to do, I became the ‘Get It Done Guy,’” explains Jackson, who notes that his moniker in the boardroom soon began to apply to more than just M&A. “When an opportunity to land on a clear track northward within an organization presents itself, you just jump all over it,” remarks Jackson, whose early career endeavors swung open the door to a succession of general counsel roles at a variety of companies. Along the way, his “get it done” mantra helped to add some noticeable addenda to his legal career track. Jackson explains: “One time, I ended up as a salesperson; another time, I had to head up marketing. I have run R&D, I have run operations, I have run corporate development.”   It perhaps should come as no surprise, then, that when an interim CFO position opened up at publicly-traded Synopsis, Jackson—then the firm’s general counsel—shot up his hand. While he would occupy this particular role for no more than a year, within 13 months of concluding this interim tour of duty he was stepping into a CFO position at yet another publicly-traded company. Just as at Synopsis, Jackson’s next chapter began with a CFO exit. “Within 6 weeks of my arrival as a new general counsel, the company shot their CFO,” reports Jackson, who subsequently was asked by the company’s board to move into the CFO role. This time, Jackson would occupy the office for roughly 3-1/2 years. “It was at this point that I became visible on recruiter radar screens,” comments Jackson, who has to date served as CFO at four other companies, including ChargePoint, where he has been CFO for the past 5 years. Says Jackson: “I’ve had good support from CEOs and board members, and if you can get this kind of access and observe the business from a high level, then finance—since it’s horizontal within the business—will serve you well.” –Jack Sweeney

As John Rex tells it, when he first arrived inside the finance function at Microsoft Corp. in 2007, one executive greeted him with “Hey, welcome to Microsoft—if you’re still here a year from now, let’s reconnect.” A senior finance hire with experience in manufacturing and consumer products at such companies as Novartis (3 years) and Kodak (14), Rex was to find the message behind the conditional invitation particularly prescient only 12 months later, when he “very nearly got the boot.”     Seated across from his boss, Rex was “read the riot act” for having absorbed what the boss deemed to be only “superficial knowledge” of the developer’s plus-size menu of products and services.    “I knew that he was right, and I realized that what had gotten me ‘here’ wasn’t going to be enough to take me ‘there’—and that basically I had to go back to college,” explains Rex, who adds that during the months that followed, he spent nights and weekends learning everything that he could about the nuances of the “go-to-market” model  and the licensing approaches that governed the company’s flow of revenues.   Still, Rex tells us, he understood that in order to succeed as a finance leader at Microsoft, he needed to dramatically overhaul the management approaches and operating style that had served him well for the first 20 years of career. He continues: “I was accustomed to having information flowing toward me as a key decision-maker, whereas at Microsoft, interestingly, there was a much more egalitarian type of culture. All of a sudden, I couldn’t depend on information flowing to me. Instead, I had to become a very proactive consumer of information.” To increase the flow and absorption of information, Rex spent more time every day in reaching out to others in sales and product development, while at the same time allowing himself more “alone time” for consuming new information. In fact, Rex found that “alone time” was an important tenet of the Microsoft culture that underscored its founder’s wish to have the company achieve the feel of a university, where every employee had dorm room—aka office—to which to return.   Today, Rex views the hypothetical 12-month tryout period that the Microsoft executive attached to his arrival welcome as being not malicious but simply honest, given that the retention rate of Microsoft senior hires at the time was less than 40 percent. Says Rex: “In the end, I became not just a much more effective leader but also a more credible one because I understood the business much better than I had before.” –Jack Sweeney  CFOTL: As a former CFO and now ongoing C-suite leadership coach today, how do you feel that CFO leadership has changed over the years? Rex: Well, I’m going to take the liberty of extrapolating what I’m observing about leadership and applying it to CFOs because I have a very hard time in separating CFOs from other senior leaders. There are some things that they all very much have in common, but let’s look at things from the perspective of the CFO. Over time, particularly in American business, we reward people for knowing their stuff. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this. You need to know your stuff. I myself really needed to bone up and know my stuff at Microsoft. Doing so is just vital. The evolution that I see happening in the business world—and this fully applies to CFOs—is that the best leaders are developing this combination of subject matter expertise and deep curiosity. This allows them to show up with what I call “humble confidence.” They are very, very confident in their subject matter expertise, as they should be and as they need to be, because this is required of them. But they are also extraordinarily curious about the vast universe of things that they don’t know. Maybe this is the marketplace; maybe it’s opportunities. They just have insatiable curiosity. As a result, in virtually every instance they show up not as arrogant—even though they know so much—but as humbly confident and curious. So, whereas the CFO of years gone by would often show up as the know-it-all with a tell-people-what-to-do, tell-people-what-not-to-do kind of attitude, I would say that today’s CFO is hypercurious about what’s possible for their enterprise, for their market, for their customers, for their organization, and for their people. They’re bringing curiosity to every conversation. This leads them to take an approach that is much less interrogatory than it used to be. When I was growing up in the corporate world, it seemed to me that the job of senior leaders was to interrogate everybody else. Every time I went to a strategy review or quarterly performance review, it felt like a dental visit. The best leaders today have a different approach. They’re just wildly curious about everything and bring this mind-set of curiosity to every conversation. This has a multiplying effect because it encourages people to think beyond their normal boundaries—including those involved with rank and privilege and propriety. In other words, people used to think, “Oh, I can’t say this because the CFO is in the room” or “I can’t say this because it’s inappropriate for me because I’m too junior” or whatever. The effective CFO today is blowing past this to cultivate a group mind-set of “Let’s talk—let’s explore together.” I’m a huge advocate of this approach that they’re cultivating, which is called “mutual learning.” This doesn’t mean that they abdicate their responsibilities or don’t appropriately wield their authority. They have to continue to do these things, but they don’t do them in an arrogant, know-it-all kind of way. The result is that they just generate so much more out of the people whom they lead.

Mike DePrisco is the new CEO of the IMA, taking over from Jeff Thompson who led the organization for nearly 15 years. The IMA recently celebrated its 100th anniversary and aims to support and optimize the accounting profession while helping individuals achieve their career aspirations. Mike DePrisco has a background in higher education and previously worked at the Project Management Institute before joining the IMA. The IMA has over 140,000 members globally and focuses on providing competency, knowledge, and skills to drive business value in the finance and accounting field. AI is expected to have a significant impact on the accounting department, and the IMA aims to help its members navigate and leverage new technologies to create positive outcomes for organizations and society.

Rick Rosenthal had been working as an investment analyst at Bear Stearns for some 3 years when the bank became a casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis. He remembers sitting in front of his Bloomberg terminal in March 2008 and watching a news conference at which a Wall Street expert was assuring viewers that Bear Stearns was a solid company—just as the bank’s stock began to plummet.   In a deal reached a few days later, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay a mere $2 a share to buy all of Bear. “While our fund had been performing well, JPMorgan had its own, so the question became, ‘What is going to happen to our fund?,’” recalls Rosenthal, who became part of a team of Bear veterans who ultimately were spun out by JPMorgan to manage the fund independently. Reports Rosenthal: “Relative to traditional asset management funds, we actually performed pretty well, but I did come to understand much more clearly how integrated the financial system is into the greater economy.” Rosenthal remained inside the investment banking realm until 2013, when he was named vice president of finance at CLEAR, the biometrics technology start-up that had introduced a menu of offerings to boost security measures at airports and stadiums. At CLEAR, Rosenthal was finally able to satisfy an “operations itch” and acquire the operational skills that he now views as being critical to stepping into a CFO position. To help underscore the career-building value of being able to cite experience in multiple operational and functional tasks, Rosenthal tells us about a productivity metric that he helped to develop while at CLEAR. Historically, a total sales figure had been tabulated each day, along with a total sales per employee number. However, visibility into the sales function remained limited, and it was felt that management had too few levers to drive new sales. “Since I oversaw the payroll function, I had visibility into the number of hours that different employees worked each day and could actually see the sales that each made,” explains Rosenthal, whose next step was to engage the operations team responsible for employee scheduling. “The idea now was to assign the top performers to times when the lanes at the airport were the busiest,” comments Rosenthal, who adds that the experience of having advanced a new metric revealed to him not only the power of the operator’s view but also the risks of continuing to allow one data point to cloud over new opportunities. Says Rosenthal: “Here was an important segment of employees that we had just not focused on before because they hadn’t been generating a high enough overall volume of sales to merit attention.” –Jack Sweeney  CFOTL: Tell us about Clara Analytics … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today? Rosenthal: Clara Analytics is an AI-based software platform for claims organizations inside the commercial casualty industry. So, what do I mean by this? Think about an adjuster who’s working at a carrier or maybe even for a self-insured company, as many firms today manage these risks in-house without using an outside carrier. An adjuster may be managing 100-plus claims at any given time. There’s a lot of information on these that’s coming in on a daily basis, and it’s hard for any individual to read and comprehend all of it on sort of a real-time basis. What ends up happening is that they’ll look at each claim periodically. Every 30 days, or even less often, they’ll review what’s transpired since they last looked. What our tools do is to monitor all of the relevant information daily, so that we can alert adjusters as to which of their 100 claims require their immediate attention on any given day. This allows the adjuster to be more strategic in managing the claims and optimizing outcomes. What drew me to CLARA Analytics was that it was an opportunity. It’s a series B company. The CEO, Heather Wilson, has a tremendous background. She was the former chief data officer at companies like Citi, AIG, and Kaiser. She’s on the board of Equifax. I met her, and we just clicked from Day One. This was a really interesting opportunity on top of that because she was relatively new to the company. We had this opportunity, essentially, to rebuild from scratch some of our team, some of our products, and our go-to-market strategy. We could really think through how to invest capital in a way that was going to get CLARA growing significantly. We’ve made these investments and now, excitingly, have seen revenue grow tremendously. 

Back in 2011, the buzz surrounding the launch of Redbox’s Blu-ray disc rental business was getting increasingly dour. For Taryn Aronson, who had been hired to help to execute the firm’s digital content strategy, the performance woes of physical discs were not anything to lose sleep over. However, the negative notions surrounding Blu-ray’s lackluster performance drew Aronson’s curiosity. According to the buzz, the root cause of Blu-ray’s performance blues at Redbox was that Blu-ray was “a low-margin business.” “This just didn’t make sense to me because as a rental business, the driver of your profit is inventory turns,” explains Aronson, who notes that data showing robust turns of Blu-ray discs by Redbox competitors had exposed that demand was not the issue.      Meanwhile, a senior content leader at Redbox had recently broadened Aronson’s role, allowing her to troubleshoot for both digital and physical content. Having started her career as a financial analyst at Blackstone Group, Aronson first jumped into the media world at NBCUniversal, where she had become involved with the launch of streaming service Hulu. She would subsequently join Redbox’s strategy team after having completed an MBA degree. In the ensuing months at Redbox, Aronson dug into the numbers and began to educate others on the true economics of Blu-ray versus SD and the practices that optimized the buying and allocation of Blu-ray discs at Redbox. Reports Aronson: “I got people on board, and we were able to drive a ton of incremental profit for Redbox.” Aronson’s key takeaway from the Blu-ray experience was the importance of understanding the role of finance and leveraging data to make better decisions across the business. As finance leaders, Aronson tells us, it’s crucial for us to work in partnership with colleagues and to make smart trade-offs to increase value for the company. –Jack Sweeney

Sruthi Lanka is clearly not the only CFO who began her professional career at blue chip investment house Goldman Sachs. However, she may be one of the only CFOs—if not the only one—who can trace her career roots to Goldman’s technology engineering team. Back in 2009, as the economic downturn dispatched a daily dose of bad news, Lanka was tasked with separating Goldman’s nervous bankers from their long-tenured messaging device of choice:  the BlackBerry.   “Most banks would not even entertain the idea of switching because the BlackBerry was so locked down and considered to be ironclad,” explains Lanka, who notes that while Apple’s iPhone had become a popular alternative to the BlackBerry inside a number of different industries, bankers were known for clutching their BlackBerrys—and Goldman was no exception. According to her, “We found that most Goldman employees were already living on the iPhone, but meanwhile they would still carry this clunky BlackBerry.” After 3 years with Goldman Sachs, Lanka found herself being led into another realm by the same curiosity that had once caused her to become an engineer and subsequently drawn her to all things tech. A typical self-question of the time was “How did bankers make the decisions that they made about about whether to invest or not invest?” “This was all lost on me as an engineer,” recalls Lanka, who would return to school for an MBA and subsequently open her next career chapter as an investment banker. With Royal Bank of Canada, Lanka advised clients during pivotal moments of their company’s trajectory. She found investment banking to be empowering, as she was able to work with seasoned CEOs and CFOs, but at the same time it was frustrating for her. Lanka tells us that it was then when she realized that she wanted to build a company rather than just advise others about theirs. This experience led her to MoneyLion, where as head of strategic finance she leveraged both her finance acumen and tech engineering skills to build a data team to help to realize the early-stage start-up’s data-driven vision—a combination of skills and collaborative approaches that she would once more rely upon after stepping into the CFO office at Public.com in 2020.      Says Lanka: “It’s not about having all of the answers but about knowing the right questions to ask.” –Jack Sweeney 

Even today, Dayton Kellenberger marvels at his good fortune in having landed inside the corporate finance department of The Coleman Company, Inc.. Of course, like a lot of career success stories, this tale had timing as a large contributor, especially inasmuch as and a little more than 10 years ago, Coleman was experiencing declining gross margins across its business. To Kellenberger, a recently hired business analyst, Coleman’s shrinking gross margins seemed to present not only a problem-solving challenge but also an opportunity to help to rewire a renowned brand’s customer best practices.    “When you’re part of a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, you basically have one shot at the beginning of the year to do an annual line review with a customer,’” explains Kellenberger, who adds that at the time, the process might have involved having a “seller” from, for example, Cabela’s freely thumbing through different Coleman catalogs while casually signaling to a Coleman representative, “Okay, we’d like to sell this product.”   “The process change that we made was to get finance involved from the very beginning and have us run the line reviews so that we would create one catalog of feature products,” recalls Kellenberger, who notes that the new catalog proved particularly invaluable for what it displayed internally.   Comments Kellenberger: “Because we could see what a product’s margin was from the previous year and compare it to the current one, we could flag low-margin products, consider replacement products with higher margins, and sometimes even sunset certain SKUs.” Kellenberger believes that the resulting price volume analysis exposed the previous risks of making business decisions based on analysis that had historically seldom penetrated beyond the customer or product category level. “What we learned at Coleman was that a single SKU at a single customer could be responsible for dragging an entire product category down,” remarks Kellenberger, who reports that the analysis also exposed the alarming fact that Coleman had at times unintentionally been replacing high-margin products with lower-margin newer ones. Looking back, Kellenberger observes that Coleman’s margin decline turnaround might have had a different outcome had the manufacturer not rejected certain popular theories. At the time, Kellenberger remembers, one management team member attributed the decline to “rising prices in China,” while another suggested that the downturn was due to “manufacturing snags in the U.S.” Says Kellenberger: “This all began with a debate that was rooted not in fact but in emotion.” –Jack Sweeney

While April 2020 may forever bring to mind corporate corridors newly silenced by COVID 19’s arrival in the United States, CarParts.com CFO Ryan Lockwood will likely always remember it as the month when opportunity knocked. Having spent the previous 10 years in investment management, Lockwood, a portfolio manager for a Southern California investment house, was looking to move to more of an operational role when he got a call from David Meniane and Lev Peker of the management team at U.S. Auto Parts, the car parts retailer that was about to rename itself CarParts.com. “They said, ‘Why don’t you come out to our offices, and we’ll talk?,’ which I was a little nervous about because COVID had arrived only maybe 4 weeks earlier,” remembers Lockwood, who notes that in the past he had offered the business leaders friendly advice as a “capital markets buy-side professional.” “They told me, ‘Look, it will just be the three of us in 25,000 square feet of office space—just come by and talk,’” explains Lockwood, who adds that the two men were in the midst of executing an ambitious turnaround plan for the business. Ultimately, they offered Lockwood the position of senior vice president of finance. Lockwood accepted, and in the months that followed, the business found new traction along its turnaround journey as the auto industry’s struggling supply chains helped to spike car prices for both new and used cars and CarParts.com found itself serving a swelling population of online customers. For Lockwood—who would be named CFO in Spring 2022—the focus became data insights and profitability for every customer transaction in order to ensure that the company’s upward trajectory would continue. Says Lockwood: “We needed a lot more data insights about our customers, and fulfilling this need has pretty much informed our every decision.” –Jack Sweeney

It’s perhaps appropriate that Scott Healy’s finance career began at an airport. With recently displayed boarding pass in hand, Healy thought that he was ready for takeoff—only to have his new boss board with a mystery box under one arm. “He was carrying a package that I thought was some sort of welcome gift for me because from the outside you could see some cookies and things to eat,” recalls Healy, who upon closer inspection discovered that while the package did indeed contain a few treats, it also held 15 prospectuses.    “He expected me to read and analyze each of them during our 6-hour flight from San Francisco to Boston,” continues Healy, who uses the story to illustrate the first of multiple lessons that he believes became invaluable to his career. “First, I learned how to critically process large amounts of information, regardless of whether it was communicated verbally or in writing,” reports Healy, who tells us that in the years ahead, the processing pace never let up as his ability to consume information became further improved by the the many prospectuses that he himself would come to author. Another lesson that became critical to Healy’s finance career was learning how to pitch clients.       “Pitching is a bit like speed dating—generally, you have 5 minutes to capture someone’s interest, and if you don’t, you will not get the transaction done,” comments Healy, who credits his ever-maturing pitching acumen with winning over one client in particular. “I had this very detailed pitch planned, but when we sat down, the client said to me, ‘There’s absolutely no chance that you’re ever going to do one of my projects,’” remembers Healy, who adds that for the next 30 minutes, the client listed all of the specific terms that he would expect in a purchase agreement. “I listened, I commented, and slowly I got him to agree to talk further,” remarks Healy, who notes that he countered each specific term being required by the client with a “mini pitch” designed to address each item. In the end, the client rewarded Healy with the project, a feat that speaks highly of Healy’s ability not only to pitch, but also to negotiate—which the CFO admits might well be his greatest skillset. Says Healy: “I’ve negotiated in 12 different countries and on four different continents. One time, I even negotiated for 76 hours straight.” –Jack Sweeney

While chief accountant for the SEC’s investment management division, Alison Staloch reports, she found herself being greeted by a degree of inclusive enthusiasm that she had seldom encountered before. “People would say, ‘Great, the accountants are here!,’” recalls Staloch, who tells us that accountants at divisional meetings were sometimes sparse in comparison to the number of agency attorneys seated at the table. “Coming from a place where everyone was an accountant, this was new to me,” continues Staloch, who tells us that the commission’s high regard for her expertise and the accounting discipline in general helped to make her 5-1/2-year tenure there a satisfying career chapter. Having joined the organization as part of the SEC Fellows Program, Staloch found that her experience there seemed to grant her a healthy dose of professional activation—something that she admits that her early career had not always provided in large supply.   “I wavered a lot early in my career—I took the MCAT but didn’t go to medical school, and I took the LSAT but didn’t go to law school,” remarks Staloch, who as a seasoned KPMG auditor found herself similarly vexed with regard to possible next opportunities behind the doors at that firm. The SEC Fellows Program, however, was different. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow!—this is just a great way to become ingrained with an understanding of how regulations impact the accounting standards that companies operate under,’” remarks Staloch, who eventually exited the SEC in Spring 2021 to step into the CFO role at Fundrise, a software company that gives investors access to commercial and residential real estate deals by pooling their assets through an investment platform. Self-dubbed as the largest “direct-to-consumer alternative asset manager,” Fundrise has future investor-related ambitions that no doubt made Staloch’s resume—rich with regulatory smarts and investment management intuition—an attractive match. Says Staloch: “At the time, I still had thoughts about going back to public accounting. I do have a deep respect for that profession, but this came up somewhat serendipitously after I met Fundrise’s CEO through my network. He was very visionary and inspiring as he explained Fundrise’s mission, and it became very appealing to me.” –Jack Sweeney

Gray-haired late-night fans may remember when David Letterman sought to ingratiate himself with his network’s new owner, General Electric Corp., by hand-delivering a bowl of fruit to GE’s executive brass. Nearly 20 years later, Simone Nardi became a benefactor of GE’s media aspirations when he traded a senior manager position on GE’s audit team for a unit CFO role inside GE’s plus-size media holdings enterprise, NBCUniversal.   “While a member of GE’s audit team, I had had the opportunity to work with the head of GE’s audit staff, so when she was named CFO of NBCUniversal, she called me when she had an opening there," recalls Nardi, while referring to GE colleague Lynn Calpeter, who stepped into the CFO role at NBCUniversal in 2003 and then later returned to GE in 2011 upon the sale of the company to Comcast. That very same year, Nardi was able to take advantage of a new CFO opportunity that surfaced inside NBCUniversal Networks International's TV Production business, which allowed the unit CFO to open his first post-GE career chapter without having to change jobs.    In the years that followed, Nardi tells us, he stepped into CFO roles at a number of different companies, one of which (fuboTV) he helped to take public.   Still, few chapters have been as formative for the finance leader as his years at GE, which seemed to achieve a familiar rhythm over time. Says Nardi: “The approach involved different businesses, different projects, and different teams globally. We’d connect locally, map out the project, deliver it, and go on to the next one.” –Jack Sweeney

By the time Russell Lester landed inside Intuit’s department of analysis in 2009, the unremarkable career path on which he had first set out nearly 10 years earlier had become brimming with possibilities. Back in the early 2000s, Lester tells us, he was hired by the company Harland Clarke (now Vericast) as an analyst specializing in customer information and insights. “This was not traditional finance, and I was sort of tiptoeing around what we would broadly call ‘analytics’ today,” remembers Lester, who notes that his adeptness with data analysis eventually resulted in his assignment to a role responsible for pioneering the company’s performance management discipline, which subsequently helped to open the door to Hyland’s financial planning and analysis function. At the time when a recruiter for Intuit called, Lester was responsible for overseeing Hyland’s FP&A discipline. It seemed that one of Intuit’s divisional presidents was seeking to hire a senior finance executive with a distinguished data insight and analysis resume. “I had the FP&A background, and at the same time it was clear that I had been involved with things that touch the customer as well as the go-to-market team,” recalls Lester, whose career at Intuit is notable in part for his inclusion on the due diligence team involved in the headline-grabbing sale of Intuit’s financial services data insight division to private equity firm Thoma Bravo for more than $1 billion. No longer an anomaly, Lester’s customer-centric, data insight resume was now capable of opening doors to both senior finance and operational roles. In 2017, Lester accepted a VP of marketing operations position with Keap, a CRM applications vendor that immediately tasked him with establishing a single source of truth for data across the organization. It wasn’t long before Lester’s world was once again intersecting with the finance function, a development that eventually led to broader planning and analysis responsibilities across both operations and finance. A couple of years later, Keap found itself in search of a new finance leader—a development that Lester was monitoring somewhat passively until a mentor challenged him to throw his hat in the ring.   “He told me that he thought that I was already ‘doing the work’ and that I should have a conversation with board—so I did,” explains Lester, who would be named CFO of Keap in early 2020. Reflecting on the career path behind him, Lester can’t help but draw our attention to the quarries of customer information that he once mined daily. Says Lester: “We all perhaps have heard the advice ‘Connect yourself to numbers, and you will always have a job.’ Well, someone once told me: ‘Connect yourself to the customer, and you will never go hungry.’” –Jack Sweeney 

For business leaders these days, a thoughtful response to customer queries concerning AI is indispensable. As CEO Planful Grant Halloran demonstrated this week at Planful's Perform23 customer conference. CEO Halloran emphasizes the need for caution and thoughtfulness when it comes to AI, noting that while it presents an exciting opportunity, there is still a lot of uncertainty and potential legal and security implications that need to be addressed. He also discusses the speed of change that comes with AI, which he believes will ultimately create more opportunities for better lifestyles, but will require adaptation from society.  

Last October, when it was announced that Bobby Leibrock would become the next CFO of IBM subsidiary Red Hat, finance team members no doubt understood that the open-source developer was coronating not just any IBM veteran but a strategic finance executive who for years had been entrenched along the front lines of IBM’s software acquisition activities. Leibrock’s M&A resume began around 2006, when IBM acquired content management software developer FileNet for $1.6 billion.    “They asked me to be what was known as a ‘product pricer,’ a role that involved figuring out how to merge FileNet’s portfolio into ours from a pricing standpoint,” explains Leibrock, who notes that along the way he would frequently find himself seated across the table from the acquired company’s management while he stared down at a list of pricing-related questions. Fast-forward to IBM’s acquisition of security intelligence software developer Q1 Labs in 2011 and Leibrock’s appointment as CFO of the new security software unit that IBM established to house its newly acquired security offerings. “IBM would buy some 12 to 15 software companies a year, and while the security software sector wasn’t the biggest involved, it was strategic in that it connected IBM’s identity security with its data security portfolio,” recalls Leibrock, who adds that his 19 years at IBM remained largely inside the software lane and seldom if ever crossed over into the tech company’s hardware or professional services businesses.   Thus Leibrock’s call to leadership wasn’t immediate, and his career appetite seems to have been driven perhaps not so much by titles as by challenges.  Still, as he advanced upward within IBM, the CFO path began to come more into focus. Reports Leibrock: “I wasn’t always planning to be a CFO, but from having had the opportunity to sit across from CFOs, I sort of learned what I wanted to be as a leader through observing both the good and the bad.”  –Jack Sweeney

Back in 2010, when the flow of hiring by investment banks had been reduced to a meager trickle of new faces in the wake of the economic downturn, Aneal Vallurupalli walked through the doors of San Francisco’s Union Square Advisors.     For Vallurupalli—a recent graduate of a Bay Area college not necessarily known as a feeder school for investment banks—the job offer from Union Square seemed to validate the notion that banking was meant to be his career lane. Still, Vallurupalli tells us that from his early banking days forward, he always viewed investment banking as a place to learn but not necessarily his ultimate career destination: “Investment banking, to me, was kind of like a physician’s residency—it put the foundation in place.”   At the same time, the firm’s unmitigated drive to serve its clients provided him with many “learning moments,” including one client assignment that remains particularly salient. According to Vallurupalli, a private equity client with an appetite for leveraged buyouts asked Union Square to provide a rundown on 30 different companies and brief its investment committee on the results when it met 4 days later.      “Over those 4 days, we literally did not go home—I slept under my desk for a total of 2 hours and worked straight through in order to try to meet this deadline,” recalls Vallurupalli, who after 2-1/2 years with Union Square joined Guidewire Software to start up the developer’s post-IPO corporate development team.  Along the way, Vallurupalli became increasingly interested in the day-to-day operations of the company and began to seek out opportunities beyond corporate development in order to ease his growing operations itch. Says Vallurupalli: “I’ve never thought about titles, to be honest. I always asked myself: ‘Where could I go next? What would be interesting? How do I take my prior experience to the next opportunity and allow it to be leveraged?'” –Jack Sweeney

Back in 2006, when Paul Sheriff had only recently been named group financial director for a midsize banking business based in the United Kingdom, his team noticed that the profit margins of a certain banking product were experiencing a steady decline. What’s more, the customers being drawn to the product were deemed to be at “higher risk” than the bank’s other customers.   While Sheriff tells us that he helped to put an end to the product’s life, he also wants us to know that the numbers behind the problematic product appeared to be hidden in the bank’s overall financial statements. “The numbers from the backward-looking book of customers were dwarfing those of new customers such that everything looked okay,” explains Sheriff, who notes that an effort to study the bank’s new customer data separately was what suddenly flagged the troubling trend. Sheriff relates that once the numbers made clear that the product was not sustainable for the business in the long run, canceling the product ultimately prevented the bank from suffering significant losses when the financial crisis arrived 18 months later. “The real takeaway for me was to always delve into the details behind the data,” he observes. “The overall position may look good, but there will likely be nuggets that look not so good and signal something else.” When asked about how he was able to put the brakes on the product line, Sheriff emphasizes the importance of taking people on the journey and building consensus. He advises not to make snap decisions and to allow time for reflection and consensus-building. Sheriff first began acquiring consensus-building skills early in his career when he managed different teams. He tarted with a small team of three people and then gradually progressed to managing a team of 300. He emphasizes that the tools and techniques that he developed while managing bigger teams have helped him in his current role as CFO of NewDay. –Jack Sweeney 

By the time the general manager of Intel’s data center chipset business parted ways with the company, Julie Swinney had already advanced into one of their coveted business unit CFO positions. To Swinney—who had already served in a series of senior finance roles—the GM’s departure seemed to leave a startling void in a business that served as a key enabler for Intel’s server business at large. The unexpected opening prompted Swinney to raise her hand and issue what perhaps was a bold proposal to be coming from an executive who had thus far resided within Intel’s career ropes—the functional restraints that gingerly guide the chip maker’s finance career builders.   To jump beyond finance, Swinney tells us, with little hesitation she put forth her solution to the challenge at hand: “We absolutely need a GM. We don’t have one, and I want to step in and run this business.”  It perhaps goes without saying that Intel management accepted Swinney’s bid, allowing her to establish a career point for comparison with the finance roles that she had previously played. “You don’t always appreciate the gravity of responsibility that a GM experiences when their territory spans from sales and supply chain management to people and culture,” remarks Swinney, who in turn promoted one of her finance team members into the business unit CFO role that she had been required to vacate. For Swinney, the GM position became just the latest twist in a career that had not always featured traditional moves. In the past, for example, while many of her finance peers had set their sights on Intel’s larger business units, Swinney had opted for a CFO role in Intel’s Software-as-a-Service start-up group. “I was told by several of my peers that it was not the obvious choice for me,” she recalls, “but that experience turned out to be foundational to building my Software-as-a-Service knowledge.” Similarly, Swinney tells us that her career chapter as a GM added an indelible lesson to her CFO leadership skillset that she regularly seeks to teach to her finance team members and reports: “Ultimately, what that experience cemented for me was the enterprise mind-set: Firm over function. It was important that I step into a different role because that is what the company needed of me at that point in time.” –Jack Sweeney

Among the keepsakes that Craig Conti collected during the more than two decades of his finance career, the item to which he refers simply as “the list” remains one of his most prized career souvenirs. Having graduated from General Electric’s Financial Management program in 2001, the 20-something Conti had only recently been assigned to GE’s corporate audit staff when he was dispatched overseas for a 5-year tour of duty. It was during the first 12 months of Conti’s years abroad that he received a job review from a manager who asked him to create a list of the skills and experiences that he expected to accrue during his years abroad. Recalls Conti: “The manager was literally my own age, but he was very forward-looking.” For the next 5 years, Conti’s geography was in regular rotation from Brazil to Mexico to Eastern Europe, and, as his location changed, he would add to his list of experiences. “All of the skills that I had originally put down were definitely realized, but the experience was a lot richer than that and the list was whole lot longer when I came back,” continues Conti, who notes that over time the list of items evolved from being mainly one of hard skills to becoming a chronicle of business insights that would ultimately reshape his view of business.   “I learned how to operate and think globally, and I discovered there were other ways to solve problems,” remarks Conti, who tells us that he once augmented his problem-solving acumen by observing how a broken blade was replaced on a factory floor near Florence, Italy. “The fact is that you don’t have a prayer of understanding the complex level of accounting behind something like that without going out and physically seeing what’s taking place,” Conti comments. Still, it was perhaps the developing world that left the most lasting impression on Conti, who believes that American employers who have yet to move overseas should not underestimate the quality of job candidates currently available in the developing world. Says Conti: “If you’re going international, remember that talent resides in the places that you’re going to—and what matters most may not necessarily be the talent back home.” –Jack Sweeney

When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American expats being deployed by digital disrupter SMB printer Vistaprint of Boston, Mass. For the next 5 years, Quinn would be involved in a string of business acquisitions that would grow the digital printer’s European revenues from nothing to more than $500 million annually. Based in Barcelona, Quinn spent roughly 3 weeks of every month traveling to other parts of Europe to evaluate the operations of different businesses as he and other executives sought to determine whether there was a solid business case for acquiring a company. “I had the luxury of seeing into firms at both the executive and middle management levels, so I was able to acquire an understanding of how the executive team was operating and how the decisions that they would make would trickle down within the operation,” explains Quinn, who adds that as deal activity grew, Vistaprint ended up deploying a corporate development team from Paris to complete some of the initial due diligence.   As the number of acquisition candidates grew, Quinn was tasked with taking a deeper dive into a target company’s operations, so he would often spend a number of days with company’s leadership team in order to better assess whether there could be a cultural fit. “’Can this be one plus one equals three?’ would usually be the question that you were trying to answer,” continues Quinn, who points out that the answer to this hypothetical query was also dependent on whether his team believed that the acquisition candidate would succeed post-merger under a flat management model. “We believed that flatter was better and that this was really an efficient way to grow,” comments Quinn, who notes that along the way he acquired a deeper understanding of manufacturing logistics as well as the pre- and post-sale dynamics of go-to-market strategies for both B2B and B2C companies. However, his central role would always center on supplying the answer to the question of whether there was a strong business case for advancing a potential deal. “When they brought something to the table through the pipeline, I would vet the business case first from our ability to execute it and then from a cultural perspective,” recalls Quinn, who stresses the significance of understanding and respecting cultural norms as well as local competitors. Says Quinn: “If you’re going to go international, you must go all in and be prepared to make the investments to win in local markets because you’ll be facing local competition within their own primary market.” –Jack Sweeney

Planning Aces Guest Host Brett Knowles, an expert in FP&A and planning realm, suggests that GPT can be used as an extra member at the planning table, providing a catalyst for exploring ideas and expanding horizons. By generating scenarios and validating strategies against them, planners can identify environmental and situational factors that need to be true for a strategy to work. But the true power of GPT lies in its ability to test a plan through the eyes of different stakeholders, such as investors, regulators, competitors, and employees, before presenting it to the executive committee. This allows planners to pretest their plan against a vast knowledge base, beyond the limited experience of the leadership team.

Back in 2008, when Jim Cox was controller for investment management software company Advent Software, he was invited by that firm's founder and CEO, Stephanie DiMarco, to accompany her to an investor meeting. “I just sat there smiling and hoped that nobody would ask me a question,” comments Cox, recalling one of a number of experiences that he credits with helping him to step beyond his accounting career roots. The meeting’s biggest take-away, Cox tells us, was about repetition. He explains: “Guess what? All 20 investors asked six of the same questions and two questions that were unique to them.” Looking back, Cox believes that DiMarco was providing him with an opportunity to not only develop a rapport with investors but also polish his communication skills. “When Stephanie brought me along, I think she was like, ‘Let’s try this out,'" continues Cox, who stepped into Advent’s CFO office in 2009, only 3 years after joining the company.    Cox had been recruited to Advent by a VP of finance who had formerly been a client of Cox’s when he was an accountant at Pricewaterhouse.    “Be good to your clients,” advises Cox, who credits yet another client executive with encouraging PwC to relocate him to New Zealand for a 2-year stint. Asked about his early career’s lengthy tenures at PwC (10 years) and Advent (9), Cox reports that he doesn’t think that he missed out by not changing jobs more frequently. “You can stay at the same company, but it’s about doing different things,” he comments. Today, having served in multiple CFO roles, Cox likes to measure his stint as Advent's CFO differently since its was publicly held: “I like to say that I was a public company CFO for 22 quarters—because when you’re a public CFO, you live one quarter at a time.” –Jack Sweeney

Paolo Poma is uncertain how many times he met with bankers and investors during the first 6 months of 2009. The steady string of phone calls and conference rooms that once demanded the management of Ducati Motors Holding’s rapt attention, Poma tells us, have now blurred into a single, heart-pumping conversation. “I had to go in front of them and calculate for how long we were going be able to service the debt and comply with covenants without breaking any rules—despite the plummeting markets,” explains Poma, who had joined Ducati 2 years earlier as finance director.   An Italian motorcycle manufacturer, the firm had been acquired by a private equity investor in 2008 as part of a leveraged buyout on the eve of the banking sector’s 2008 financial crisis. Reports Poma: “The debt had been negotiated before Lehman’s collapse and now had to be serviced during this very challenging time.” On one side of the table, Ducati’s investors were expressing their eagerness to keep things moving forward, while on the other, their bankers were continuing to urge caution.   “At first, the banks were worried about getting their money back, but then it became kind of a strange situation in which they saw Ducati’s KPIs improving despite the circumstances, so they became no longer in such a hurry to get their money back,” recalls Poma, who was named deputy CFO later in 2009 upon the resignation of Ducati’s CFO, who was Poma’s then-boss. Poma would serve two years in the deputy capacity before being named Ducati CFO in 2011. In 2015, when Volkswagen’s Audi division announced that it was buying Ducati, Poma was asked to serve as CFO of Volkswagen Group Italia, an indication that he had made a positive impression on Ducati’s new owner.   For Poma, no matter what the next career chapter may be, the lessons from 2009 will always linger. He comments: “Many times, I thought, ‘Why not quit?!’—but after looking back, I would now tell myself, ‘Stay where you are! You are in a place where you are really going to grow a lot.’” –Jack Sweeney

After Galit Yaakobovitz relocated from Israel to the United States back in the mid-2000s, there was little question that the move had given her career a boost. Still, it was the next relocation—the one that would move her and her husband from New Jersey to California—that ultimately allowed her to place both feet on a finance career path. Back in 2006, Yaakobovitz was a technology implementation consultant living in Israel when she was hired by M-Systems to oversee the implementation of an ERP system for its finance function around the world. However, within 12 months, M-Systems was sold to its flash memory rival SanDisk—which left Yaakobovitz to wonder whether she would have a future at the newly merged firm. In short order, the management of SanDisk eased her concerns by offering her a spot on the global implementation team for the company’s finance organization, an appointment that required her to relocate to SanDisk’s New Jersey offices. “At the time, different geographies had their own requirements, so it was very challenging to design a system that would serve everyone globally,” recalls Yaakobovitz, who within 2 years was recruited by SanDisk’s chief accounting officer to spearhead a new revenue recognition systems project at the firm’s Milpitas, California, headquarters.  Upon completion of the systems project, Yaakobovitz received an invitation to join the finance team, which meant severing ties with her technology implementation roots. What’s more, she was moved to the FP&A team rather than the accounting department, where she had spent most of her systems implementation days. “This was a huge leap for me as far as understanding the business through data analysis and other aspects went,” observes Yaakobovitz, who—after 7 years with SanDisk—next sought to slow things down for a year or two as her young family grew by joining an M&A consultancy promising more manageable hours. Nevertheless, when a recruiter called her roughly a year later and briefed the FP&A executive not about an IT implementation role but about a senior finance position at an early-stage biotech company, Yaakobovitz was all ears. –Jack Sweeney 

One key takeaway from Gainsight CFO Alka Tandan’s career journey is the importance of being open to new opportunities and pivoting when necessary. Tandan started in investment banking, transitioned to media, and then vectored again to the SaaS industry. Looking back on the first move of her career, Tandan says that she “came to a decision” and quickly became focused on the best way to execute it. “Investment banking gave me incredible exposure to a range of business models and industries, but after 5 years, I realized that I really wanted to be on a company’s journey, so business school became the tool that I used to transition to industry,” Tandan reports. To better highlight her industry career-building years, Tandan discusses with us the 4.5 years that she spent with IGN Entertainment, an Internet media company that at the time was operating as a division of News Corp. “I came in as they were separating IGN’s finance organization from News Corp., which required us to build the finance function from the ground up,” recalls Tandan, who adds that in the years that followed, IGN’s finance team became involved in six different M&A transactions. Other career chapters that Tandan highlights for us include her experience as interim CFO (2021–2022) for Gainsight, the SaaS software developer that pioneered the customer experience realm known as “customer success.” Tandan tells us that her year as interim CFO allowed her to “test out the role” before assuming the position. There’s little doubt that fortunate timing contributed to what became Tandan’s ultimate door-opener for the CFO office. Having first joined Gainsight in May 2019 as vice president of finance, Tandan had already logged 18 months with Gainsight when Vista Equity Partners acquired the firm for $1.5 billion in November 2020. Tandan would assume her interim CFO role only 3 months later. Overall, CFO Tandan’s story is a reminder that career paths are rarely linear and that being adaptable and open to new experiences can lead to unexpected opportunities. Asked how Gainsight’s finance team has worked to better educate the organization when it comes to achieving more profitable growth in the current economic environment, Tandan responds: “Luckily, since we were already with Vista, we were on the right path, so I wouldn’t say that there has been any huge shift for us in terms of educating the organization.” –Jack Sweeney

In this Planning Aces episode, host Jack Sweeney and guest host Ben Murray discuss the collaborative organizational effort behind generating business intelligence (BI) and the different places BI resources may reside within a business, with reference to an episode featuring Gary Zyla, CFO of AssetMark. The hosts also discuss the role of finance in enabling sales, the challenges faced by sales teams, and the importance of financial discipline and visibility in a company’s financials, regardless of market conditions. The episode features insights from other finance leaders, including Teodora Gouneva, CFO of Next Insurance, and Wailun Chan, CFO of Grafana Labs.

Robert Mitchell had been sizing up new venture opportunities for PayPal for roughly 3 years when the door to an operations role swung open. Impressed by his financial modeling know-how, Mitchell tells us, PayPal’s credit bosses “handpicked” him to create a framework for launching and monitoring new credit offerings. For Mitchell, there was no turning back. “They just told me that I was a smart guy and that I could figure things out,” recalls Mitchell, who adds that the fact that the new position was in Brussels didn’t even give him pause. From the start, Mitchell viewed the position as a critical career rung that would allow him to climb above his financial modeling stints. “I was the guy who could whiteboard an idea or financial model, present it, size it, and do anything that you wanted to it,” continues Mitchell, who observes that prior to the Brussels post he had mostly been an “individual contributor” and not someone who empowered teams. “The role really taught me how to think through processes end-to-end and how to launch a program while working with and leading different operational teams,” explains Mitchell, who credits his previous experience with having helped to put in motion a critical career pivot.   “When I came back, I was able to serve in a controllership role that would have typically gone to someone with more of a traditional auditing background,” comments Mitchell, who notes that he had “raised his hand” and begun speaking with PayPal’s chief accounting officer about potential positions before arriving back in the States. Moreover, Mitchell tells us that it was roughly at about this time that he began to think about different experience gaps on his CFO resume and the types of roles that could help him to fill them. Says Mitchell: “I had some work ahead of me, but the path was now visible.” –Jack Sweeney

Finance leader Betsy Ward wants you to know that she doesn’t have an itchy trigger finger—but she does have an inner trigger and knows when it’s been set off. There’s no doubt that few professional colleagues would ever think to associate the time-tested gunslinger trope with the exponentially mild-mannered Ward, who has led insurance giant MassMutual through a string of strategic transactions since her arrival in its CFO office in 2016. Still, as Ward seeks to help us to better understand the unique mix of skills that distinguishes her from her CFO peers, her words alert us to a confidence that comes from experience not found on a more traditional corporate finance resume.   “I have a trigger that lets me know when I need to look into something and ask myself ‘Do we keep that? Do I need to manage it? Do I need to sell?,’” explains Ward, who spent 10 years in asset management before joining MassMutual in 2007 as chief risk officer. “I’ve always looked at outcomes—baseline outcomes, which in finance we typically call ‘the plan’—but I’ve always considered scenarios, too,” comments Ward, whose list of recent transactions includes the acquisition of Great American Life Insurance Company (now MassMutual Ascend) and the combination of OppenheimerFunds with Invesco in 2019. Ward’s team uses a variety of metrics to bring different scenarios into sharper focus.     “We asked ourselves what it would take to make our retirement business not only perform well but also be more scalable, and here’s where our productivity metrics really came into play,” recalls Ward, highlighting MassMutual’s headline-grabbing decision to sell its retirement business to Empower in 2020. According to MassMutual’s CFO, finance provides her organization not so much with advice as with a “thesis” for guiding business decision-making.    Says Ward: “I think that what my background brings to the financial side is this scenario type of analysis, as well as the notion of having a thesis for businesses, for assets, and for products.” –Jack Sweeney

When Heathrow CFO Javier Echave tells us that one of his greatest career lessons was learned from being passed over for the airport’s CFO position, we wonder whether we misunderstood him.   He continues: “It was then that I learned in the most painful way that securing my own succession to the CFO office was dependent on me making myself redundant.” It was a little more than 8 years ago, when a sudden CFO departure, prompted Heathrow's CEO and executive board to appoint one of Echave’s colleagues as “Interim CFO.” For Echave, who had held a succession of senior finance and operations roles, the appointment was an undeniable slight.    “I took it badly,” recalls Echave, who adds that for some time he had perceived himself to be “number two” within Heathrow’s senior finance executive ranks.    According to Echave, after having been passed over, he received some critical advice from the chairman of the airport’s executive board. “He said to me, ‘No one questions your potential and no one questions your strengths, but if you don’t face an interview while believing that you can make a position yours, there’s no chance that you ever will,’” remembers Echave, who notes that he then began to think hard about whether others might see him as having a lack of confidence. Still, given the extant circumstances, the chairman’s insight was not likely to benefit Echave—or so Echave believed, until the interim CFO exited the position within the first 300 days, leaving a second interim CFO opening that Echave then subsequently filled.   Fortunately for Echave, the opportunity allowed him to once and for all address the chairman’s comments. “I determined that my confidence had this Achilles heel, which was that people were questioning it and wondering whether I had become too senior too early,” comments Echave, who reports that ultimately his wife helped him to understand how revealing his passion for the job would better display his self-assurance. “She told me, ’You cannot beg for this—you have to be humble, but you also have to show that you are ambitious as well,’” remarks Echave, who emphasizes the power of ambition. He explains: “This allowed me to bring out my confidence and express why I really wanted the job—and within 6 months, I had it.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Brianna Gerber tells us that during earnings season at Mattel, Inc., she was once known as the investor relations person most likely to be “knocking on doors,” we can’t help but want to learn more about her IR tour of duty for the toy giant.   “I’d be calling on the marketing team and the commercial team, talking to treasury and tax, and asking them all ‘What’s really going on?’ because I would need to understand the numbers before I could explain them,” recalls Gerber, who occupied Mattel’s corridors for nearly five years, after having spent 10 years as an equity research executive. There’s little doubt here that Gerber is sharing a fond memory that exposes the somewhat immediate satisfaction that she experienced upon landing inside a corporate entity. The glass wall through which she had once peered as an equity analyst had vanished, and she was now able to engage one-on-one with the senior leaders best able to explain the complexities of the business. It’s a recollection that also reveals the door-opening presence that IR executives enjoy. Still, Gerber wanted something more, and while the IR career track at Mattel no doubt would offer her accelerated advancement, she instead decided to make a lateral move to Mattel’s FP&A team. “Ultimately, this was about me having the confidence in myself to say, ‘I understand the numbers and I understand why they tell a story, so I can now translate what I learned from this 30,000-foot view and use it to allow me to at the same time go even deeper,” remarks Gerber, who continued her career climb inside Mattel’s FP&A function for a number of years before being recruited by Kevin Farr, Mattel’s long-tenured CFO, who had exited the toy maker in 2017 to serve as CFO of ChromaDex, a pioneering biotech firm. At ChromaDex, with the two worlds of investor relations and FP&A under her purview, Gerber became a direct report to Mattel’s veteran CFO—a coveted opportunity for mentoring if ever there was one.   “I think that what brought Kevin here and what brought me here was in part the potential to build something,” comments Gerber, who would step into the CFO office at ChromaDex in August of 2022. Looking back on her career pivots from equity research to IR to FP&A, Gerber highlights her personal goal of seeking challenge. She adds: “I think that we are constantly reinventing ourselves, and this is what keeps our careers interesting.” –Jack Sweeney 

As our finance leader guests well know, we seldom hesitate to ask where they spent their career-building years. Moreover, if we learn that a CFO spent more than 5 years with any one company, we’re apt to ask, “Why? What kept you there?”  On the other hand—and somewhat oddly—finance career investments spanning a decade or more are likely to lead us to leapfrog more perfunctory queries in order to let the grilling begin.    Such was the case with CFO Keith Taylor of Equinix, the $7.2 billion data infrastructure giant with 248 data centers in 27 countries. For Taylor, who is logging his 24th year with the firm, the investment of career decades inside a single company led us to imagine a string of experiences somewhat uniform from one chapter to the next. However, Taylor quickly informs us that his investment of years inside a single company has afforded him a breadth of experiences that few job-hopping finance executives may have ever surpassed. It’s fair to say that when Taylor was named Equinix CFO in 2005, the business model responsible for the company’s following 79 consecutive quarters of growth was still in its infancy.   However, for Equinix’s newly minted CFO, it seemed hard to imagine that the breadth of experiences that lay ahead could match those already behind him. Back in 1999, as Equinix’s founders began to eye the public markets, they hired Taylor to add some heft to their fledgling finance team. The company would hire a CFO and go public in August of 2000 just as the dotcom bubble began to burst. “We then went through a near-death experience when we had only one payroll left and didn’t think that we were going to make it,” recalls Taylor, who remembers a string of long calls with investors over the ensuing 24 months.   Says Taylor: “There was a determination not to give up that allowed us to survive, and by January 1, 2003, we were like a new company, with new shareholders and our problems mostly solved.” –Jack Sweeney

Teodora Gouneva was enjoying one of the more satisfying chapters of a 25-year finance career when she began hearing voices again. She tells us that although for most of her work trajectory she had been able to ignore them, on this occasion the contentment that she had so carefully guarded began to give way. The year was 2013, and the role offered to Gouneva was to serve as CFO of PayPal’s Braintree Venmo operations, the enterprise resulting from PayPal’s recent acquisition of Braintree. “For me, it wasn’t an immediate or obvious ‘yes,’” recalls Gouneva, who already occupied a senior finance role overseeing a big slice of the company’s business after having adroitly climbed PayPal's finance career ladder for the previous 9 years. “I loved my current job, and there were still things on my road map that I wanted to improve and fix,” continues Gouneva, who notes that it was at this point that the voices once more surfaced—this time, not to be ignored. “Prior to that job offer, I would very often have people tell me ‘You should take more risks!,’ but I don’t think that I had ever really considered doing so before,” says Gouneva, who credits her divisional CFO tour of duty with adding some extra operational heft to her resume in light of Braintree having acquired Venmo only a year earlier. Comments Gouneva: “These were two completely different businesses in one, and we made a strategic decision to run those businesses separately.”   Still, in the months and years that followed, the organizations sought to achieve a better strategic alignment, a feat largely reliant on changing the behaviors of the different sales teams. “We had to paint a picture for them of what the ultimate goal was and what was important and why,” remarks Gouneva, who credits changes in PayPal’s sales compensation programs with helping to bring the new picture into focus. While Gouneva leaves little doubt that she’s happy that she ultimately listened to “the voices,” she tells us there’s no escaping the fact that risks will always be risks.    She asks: “Do I leave the certainty that comes from knowing exactly what the role is, or do I embrace something new that is not very clear and could ultimately be good or bad?” –Jack Sweeney

With regard to finance leaders who are counted among the ranks of today’s SaaS CFOs, it goes without saying that 20 years ago, most were somewhere other than at SaaS companies. In fact, many of them have no doubt arrived inside the SaaS realm only within the past 10 years or so as part of the software industry’s great migration from the model of perpetually selling software to the SaaS subscription model. However, for CFO Bas Brukx, the SaaS world has been home for more than 20 years, a fact that allows him to take a seat alongside other CFOs who can boast of pioneer roots inside SaaS-dom. “We had the benefit of not knowing what we didn’t know,” recalls Brukx, who notes that back in 2002, such a widely used metric as Customer Acquisition Cost was only then just being defined. At the time, Brukx was head of FP&A for Vocus, a SaaS software company specializing in solutions for the public relations and communication industries. “We did a lot of education with analysts and investors,” points out Brukx, who adds that Vocus went public in 2005. He would remain with the company for another 7 years before being appointed CFO of Clarabridge, a small software company aspiring to move to the SaaS subscription model.   According to Brukx, he didn’t hesitate to swiftly leave the perpetual model in Clarabridge’s rearview mirror. “We discontinued that perpetual business largely on my recommendation, so I was betting a lot on my reputation—but I felt comfortable about it,” comments Brukx, who says that the decisive move allowed him to position himself as a strategic finance leader at the very start of his CFO tenure with the firm. Subsequently, only 9 months after he joined it, the newly retooled SaaS company raised an $80 million equity investment led by Summit Partners and General Catalyst Partners. Reports Brukx: “That investment and some of their investor expertise gave us the backing that we needed to make the journey from $20 million in revenue to well over $100 million—at which point we were sold.” –Jack Sweeney

As we have been interviewing CFOs from different industries, many finance leaders have told us that they had bracketed the CFO office as their preferred career destination beginning from Day One of their professional lives. Still others have reported that it was only due to the intervention of a determined mentor that they were able to muster the resolve to aim ever higher and ultimately arrive in the C-suite. As it turns out, neither of these profiles depicts the experience of Don Bassell, CFO of ARKO Corp., a Fortune 500 company that is one of the largest operators of convenience stores and wholesalers of fuel in the United States. For Bassell, the CFO office would become “the destination” only after he received a particular job offer when he was in his early 40s. “Something didn’t feel right,” he recalls, reflecting back on the opportunity to fill a senior controller role. Bassell remembers being seated across the table from the CFO, who was trying to sell him by saying, “Don’t you understand? You are going to be preparing all of the materials that will be presented inside the boardroom.” “I said to him, ‘That’s the problem—I want to be inside the boardroom!,’” continues Bassell, “and that’s when everything became crystal clear to me.” However, while Bassell tells us that he was confident that his breadth of experience had left him well suited and qualified for top management, he still was not convinced that the CFO office was the best ultimate destination for him. “I didn’t think that I wanted to be a CFO,” remarks Bassell, who credits his eventual change of heart to a human resources consultant who pointedly cross-examined his hesitation to pursue the role. “She took me through this whole process of listing the different roles that I had had and things that I had done during my career, and she then put me through a series of questions,” explains Bassell, who adds that both he and the consultant ended up almost simultaneously saying the same words: “Okay, it looks like the CFO office it is.”     To better reveal the scope of Bassell’s experiences, the consultant had helped him to reformulate his executive resume by using a listing of the different functional roles that he had filled rather than the traditional chronological list—a change that helped even Bassell to better digest the fact that he now had a CFO resume. Says Bassell: “It was a crossroads for me—she really helped me to assess what it was that I wanted to do.” –Jack Sweeney

It was the type of CFO position that Gary Zyla probably would not have been able to find outside of Genworth Financial, a financial services company that he had first joined in 2004. Not that his resume didn’t already have some solid CFO prerequisites, but the leadership challenge that Zyla was about to take on was less about capital management and more about establishing the business functions required to run a business day by day. “Genworth said, ‘Look, this is a very broad role—we’re going to take a leap of faith with you,’” recalls Zyla, whose appointment as CFO of Genworth’s newly formed California-based subsidiary came 7 years after he had first joined the company.   Still, what happened next was arguably the most pivotal moment of Zyla’s career, as in 2013—2 years after he had relocated to California to better fulfill his CFO duties—Genworth announced plans to sell his division to a private equity firm. “Once it was sold, I was the CFO of this 350-person privately held business,” continues Zyla, who subsequently began reporting to the company’s private equity owner. “The new owners were very clear to me about what they wanted the business to be,” comments Zyla, who reports that the owners would ultimately earn four-and-a-half times their original investment before selling the business known as AssetMark to Huatai Securities Co. Ltd. in 2016. Besides the two private equity ownership transactions (2013, 2016), Zyla’s CFO career has also spanned an IPO (2019) and six different acquisitions within the past 7 years—which is not bad at all for a finance leader who has yet to look outside his company for opportunities. - Jack Sweeney

Looking back on their career-building years, few finance leaders ever forget the first time that they presented to a board of directors. For many, the stares of the individual directors around the table remain locked in time, forever evergreen. For Jim Young, the gazes that stay ever-present are some that were cast not from across a boardroom but instead by a room populated by hundreds of employees attending an offsite management gathering. “My job was to communicate some of the important trends—with a little bit of perspective on the investment community—and to highlight different aspects of what was going on with our business,” explains Young, who adds that his primary intent was to bring the company’s customer value proposition into sharper focus and better expose how it translated into customer retention. What happened next, Young tells us, left a lasting impression.   “There were a lot of questions, and I could see this high engagement as I scanned the audience,” remarks Young, who differentiates this experience from his more frequent discussions with the company’s investment community.   “The audience’s interest was not because I had brilliant insight or was presenting a great analysis of how we could create value in the business,” comments Young, who reports that following the gathering he completed a postmortem on the talk in order to better understand what was responsible for the gathering’s rapt attention.   “We had this very specific metric that in the past had gotten a few nods and maybe even been paid some lip service, and now at this session it suddenly became the focus of a discussion that revealed it to be something that was really quite valuable,” recalls Young, who today credits his talk with simply having “connected the dots.” “The average employee could now understand and translate the metric to his or her business area and to their salespeople and all the rest,” continues Young, who observes that the talk also helped to raise the profile of his finance team by enabling it to better engage with business managers intrigued by what Young had shared. “I make company leaders better at what they do by helping them to explain where we’re driving value and by making these connections visible all the way through to very tangible things,” notes Young, as he issues what might well be his CFO mission statement.      Reflecting back on the talk, he adds: “To this day, I use it as a lesson as far as how I should do my job goes—if I’m not connecting dots, I’m not doing my job.” –Jack Sweeney 

Featuring Special Guest Co Host Ben Murray As more businesses track customer product usage ever more closely, finance leaders are busy fine tuning the collaborative approaches that allow their organizations to identify and pursue expansion opportunities.   Ben and Jack discuss the collaborative organizational teams that are putting their companies on the path to greater net dollar retention as they seek to glean more customer insights and better expose customer intent. This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Jonathan Carr of Armis, CFO Kevin Rubin of Alteryx,  and CFO Patrick McClymont of Hagerty.   About Ben Murray Over the course of his finance career Ben Murray has occupied the CFO office at a number of different companies. In addition to having a multichapter CFO career, he is today known as “The SaaS CFO,” a brand he established while creating and hosting the popular SaaS CFO podcast. What’s more, the TheSaaSCFO.com is today a source of Ben’s blogs, research, courses and templates based on his more than 25 years running finance teams . He is frequently hired by SaaS companies: from small, private technology firms to global multi-billion dollar public companies.  Find out more about Ben @thesaascfo.com

Eliran Glazer’s finance career journey began in the late 1990s at the Tel Aviv office of KPMG, where as a 20-something he spent 3 years auditing a portfolio of fast-growing software companies.    As the year 2000 approached, Glazer was suddenly being recruited by an Israeli-American CFO who was seeking to fill a controller position—and the gray-haired CFO left little doubt that the role that he had in mind could potentially offer much more.   Glazer tells us the that CFO’s pitch was expressed this way: “Look, I’m pretty certain that you know accounting well, but I can help you to develop a business view.” When a formal job offer arrived from the publicly traded BackWeb Technologies, Glazer didn’t hesitate to accept—and it wasn’t long before he saw evidence of what the CFO had promised. Comments Glazer: “He began taking me to meetings with internal and external stakeholders by simply saying, ‘Come along and join me.’”     In short order, Glazer received an invitation from the CFO to visit the company’s U.S. offices, where he was asked to sit it on a variety of finance and operational meetings.   Still, Glazer was no doubt alarmed when 12 months into his controllership role he received word that his CFO mentor was planning to move on, having accepted a CFO position at a telecom company known as Schema. “He took me with him,” explains Glazer, who upon his arrival at Schema received a promotion to finance director. Had the CFO’s involvement with Glazer’s career ended with this promotion, he still would have well merited the moniker of “generous mentor.” However, Schema’s CFO went one better. Three years after appointing Glazer finance director, the CFO exited the company and afforded Glazer the opportunity to step into an interim CFO position. “They threw me deep into the water,” remarks Glazer, who notes that among the responsibilities that his new interim role brought to him was regular communications with Schema board members. Nearly 20 years later, several additional CFO chapters in both the U.S. and Israel now separate seasoned CFO Glazer from his days of benefiting from mentorship at BackWeb and Schema. Still younger than his former mentor was when he took Glazer under his wing, Glazer is now increasingly thoughtful about the mentor mind-set, which he says comes only from experience and gray hairs.   Bringing his mentor back into view one last time, Glazer tells us: “He was in his late 50s and really at that phase of life and career where he just didn’t feel threatened by anyone.” –Jack Sweeney

No matter how many chapters Wailun Chan’s finance career ultimately spans, the decade that he spent at LinkedIn will always stand out. It perhaps goes without saying that as a finance career investment, a 10-year resume stint is increasingly rare today, and it’s not uncommon for a “decade investor” looking back on his or her lengthy tenure to launch one or two “If onlys,” as in “If only I had left 3 years sooner.”         Such is not the case for Wailun Chan, though, whose LinkedIn career spanned from 2010 to 2020 and overlapped a period during which the social media company’s workforce grew from 400 to 16,000 employees as its annual revenues grew from roughly $100 million (pre-IPO) to nearly $10 billion. Chan’s investment of career years at LinkedIn arguably represents a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right outcome, which eventually resulted in a CFO job offer that led the seasoned FP&A leader to exit the social media company. Still, what makes Chan’s LinkedIn career chapter worthy of note to finance career builders is not necessarily its length or ultimate outcome but instead how he was unquestionably up to the challenges ahead even as he arrived at the firm. In fact, the finance resume of LinkedIn’s new FP&A hire was already a dozen years long and included stints at GE Capital and Kraft Foods as well as a recently added business degree. Consequently, there’s little reason to doubt that the LinkedIn recruiters who first eyeballed Chan knew instantly that they found their future FP&A leader. First of all, Chan tells us, he was tasked with helping the company to address a lopsided membership model that featured LinkedIn members outside of the U.S. accounting for 60 percent of the overall membership numbers while paying only about 30 percent of the worldwide membership fees. To support the effort, Chan was deployed as the company’s first sales finance executive, a position that allowed him from the very start of his LinkedIn career to serve as a primary connection between the company’s FP&A and business operations teams. “We looked at the data together and came up with a playbook outlining that if certain membership thresholds were hit, the inside sales team would get a signal to be led in, to be later followed by the enterprise sales team as other levels were reached,” comments Chan, who credits the “playbook” with influencing the decision-making that led the company to open 20-plus local offices within the next 2 years.    Reports Chan: “This playbook became a primary driver of the speed at which we were able to scale, and this scale enabled the hypergrowth that LinkedIn experienced between 2010 and 2012.” –Jack Sweeney

Back in 2022, having decided to leave the entertainment business only 3 years after closing on its acquisition of Time Warner, AT&T announced plans to relinquish its ownership of the giant media company and merge it with Discovery, Inc., to form a new, publicly traded entity called Warner Bros. Discovery. Just like many of his peers, Michael Kopelman has found that the business headlines of the past have everything and nothing to do with the ups and downs of his finance leadership career. Seven years earlier, he had been residing at the top of Time Warner’s investor relations function, collaborating daily with its senior leaders to carefully execute the company’s earnings communication process. Kopelman tells us that things were pretty much business as usual until there came a knock on the door from an interested buyer. “At that moment, the plan to stand alone was a better one that would result in a better outcome than pursuing a sale, as it was felt that there might be other acquirers down the line,” recalls Kopelman, who adds that Time Warner held an Investors’ Day event to more extensively brief its shareholders on the firmness of its plans to remain standalone. “We really had to convince investors that what was being offered just wasn’t worth it—and that we could do better down the line,” explains Kopelman, who notes that his efforts to advance the standalone mantra ended up putting him in regular contact with different leaders across the company—including HBO’s leadership, which subsequently offered him a strategic planning leadership role. “It ended up being a great opportunity for me, as I finally got to step away from Wall Street and into an operational role,” comments Kopelman. Still, he was only a few months into his new position when AT&T announced plans to acquire Time Warner, which cut short his operational tenure with the media company. “Well, as they say,” muses Kopelman, “‘The best laid plans … .’” No doubt AT&T management couldn’t say it any better. –Jack Sweeney

During the early years of his finance career, Dan Fletcher was accustomed to being the executive from somewhere else. When he first joined the asset management team at Allstate Investments, he was “the auditor from Price Waterhouse,” and when he landed in an interim management role as a private equity advisor, he was a former investor now turned operator. Fletcher’s early career journey stands out not just for its navigation of the financial triad of auditor–investor–operator but also for the speed at which he was able to leap from one to the next. “I did not look like everyone else,” recalls Fletcher, who doesn’t try to cloak the burdens of his first pivot. He continues: “These are two totally different disciplines. Whereas from an auditor’s perspective you’re viewing the business from the outside in and mainly trying to validate financial statements, from the investor’s perspective you’re mainly concerned with returns.” Meanwhile, Fletcher makes it clear that his ability to transition was dependent on regular outreach along the way. “Having people place a bet on me required the careful fostering of a lot of relationships beforehand,” comments Fletcher, who tells us that his switch to the operations side required both individual initiative as well as passing muster with a rigorous future employer.     “In addition to completing a lot of prep research on my own, I underwent a lot of vetting—I think I interviewed with probably 20 different people,” remembers Fletcher. Reflecting on his research, Fletcher adds: “Thanks to the Internet, there was no shortage of material out there with regard to how to thrive in different roles—from both the hard skills and soft skills points of view.” Still, one career pivot that Fletcher put in motion had more to do with narrowing his focus than widening it: Nearly a decade into his career, he decided to interview exclusively with private equity technology firms—thus ending his days as an industry agnostic. Says Fletcher: “I just slowly fell in love with tech. I started to understand how technology was really where more innovation—and therefore more value creation—was happening relative to what was going on in older industries.” –Jack Sweeney   

One of the unspoken truths about interim CFO roles is that they sometimes don’t lead to an actual CFO role—a fact that has turned more than a few seasoned finance executives into chronic nail-biters.   For Jared Poff, who ultimately cleared all hurdles as an interim chief to land inside the CFO office at Designer Brands (formerly DSW), the job title ended up leaving a lasting impression.  “I sat in the interim role for nearly 6 months, and they were absolutely the most grueling 6 months of my career—outside of COVID, maybe,” recalls Poff, who was recruited to Designer Brands back in 2015 with the expectation that he was going to be groomed by the company’s then-CFO to take over her role within the next few years. For Poff, a former Cardinal Health finance director and more recently treasurer at retailer Big Lots, the plan was to join Designer Brands as treasurer and take a year or two to beef up his accounting and controllership experience before entering the C-suite. The fact that he was swapping a treasurer role at Big Lots for a treasurer role at an organization which at the time was only half the size of Big Lots didn’t seem to matter, as Poff viewed the Designer Brands opportunity as one that offered a viable on-ramp to the CFO office. However, Poff tells us that within months of joining the company, Designer Brands’ board put in motion a CEO change at roughly the same time that its then-CFO got recruited to fill another CFO opportunity. “I was named “interim” because the board was not 100 percent comfortable that a first-time CFO was a good match for a first-time CEO,” remarks Poff, who remembers wondering whether his career calculus may have been faulty. “I was treasurer, I was controller, and I was CFO, and because I didn’t know whether I’d be keeping the CFO position, I couldn’t hire for the other two roles,” reports Poff, who came across a list of 70 possible CFO candidates that was circulating among board members.    “It was as if I were interviewing for the position every day, but I did get the nod,” comments Poff, who recalls his early days at Designer Brands as a period of accelerated learning. Says Poff: “I would do it again in a heartbeat—when it’s trial by fire, you just learn everything.” –Jack Sweeney

John McCauley is the first finance leader to tell us that his path to the CFO office began in a pool. Back in high school, McCauley relates, he was a rebellious student with less than impressive grades when a stubborn and no-excuses-allowed water polo coach knocked him from his wayward track. According to McCauley, the coach’s philosophy was rooted not so much in winning or losing but in whether the team had done everything in its power to succeed. Recalls McCauley: “This meant 4:30 a.m. practices before school began and 3-hour practices after class, 300 days a year—and if you were sick, you were allowed to skip practice, but you still had to sit on the pool deck and watch.”    These experiences wed McCauley to a lifetime mantra that has forever filled his tank with the power of preparation. McCauley’s next pivotal career moment arrived a decade deep into his finance career, when he joined one-time start-up ServiceNow in 2011—the same year that saw the dynamic tech duo of Frank Slootman and Michael Scarpelli take up residence as CEO and CFO, respectively, in the ServiceNow C-suite. “I found my people,” comments McCauley, who notes that the two business leaders ultimately provided him and others with a “new framework” within which to advance and complete their work. “It’s all about not simply just raising a problem when you see it, but going ahead and fixing it,” explains McCauley, who adds that fixing problems had always been a natural inclination for him, despite the fact that a string of earlier experiences at different companies hadn’t always supported this approach.        In light of his high regard for ServiceNow’s veteran leadership team, it’s perhaps no surprise that when asked for a book selection, McCauley recommends Amp It Up, Slootman’s 2022 text that argues that the best way for leaders to improve company performance is to raise expectations. Slootman and a certain high school coach have something in common. Says McCauley: “At the last four Olympics, there’s been someone from my high school on our team.” –Jack Sweeney

Looking back, CFO Ravi Narula tells us that he wishes that he had become a “servant leader” sooner, as he references the familiar leadership tag signaling a mind-set focused on serving others. “If you asked me 15 years ago, ‘Do you have a servant leader mind-set?,’ unfortunately, I would have said ‘No,’” comments Narula, who credits a graduate executive program at Stanford University for helping to raise his acumen when it comes to the role that servant leaders can play in successful businesses. “I began thinking more broadly as a CFO and seeing servant leadership and company culture as being foundational to the success of firms, as well as to my own future success as a CFO,” remarks Narula, who—in addition to servant leadership—identifies the customer-probing Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a primary contributor to the culture of his current company, FinancialForce. Asked if FinancialForce’s NPS rating is the most widely known measure across the company’s workforce, Narula tells us that he believes that 80 to 90 percent of the company’s roughly 1,000 employees likely know the company’s current scores, whether by geography, industry, or customer segment.   To support his claim, Narula reports: “At our townhall meeting this morning, 20 of the 60 minutes were devoted to the Net Promoter Score.” Still, like many tech companies, FinancialForce has a work environment that has evolved in recent years to accommodate more remote workers through a hybrid model that has at times put management practices as well as servant leadership goals to the test. According to Narula, it’s now up to leaders to extend their reach in order to connect more often to capture the insight required to help an employee succeed.

The Goldman Sachs “anti-raid” team was between conference calls with an embattled client company when word came that a senior member of the target company’s management team had unexpectedly died. Looking back, Tom Fennimore says that the next few months of his early career years at Goldman then became a transition point—or period of accelerated learning. “It was a very sad situation—they were in the process of being raided,” explains Fennimore, who lists the anti-raid transaction as one of two times when Goldman ultimately offered Fennimore an opportunity to “step up.” The second example came after the resignation of a managing director responsible for the bank’s automotive sector. “I got a battlefield promotion when they said, ‘Hey, we want you to do this, and—depending how you do—we may not replace you,” recalls Fennimore, who notes that while he savored the opportunity and enjoyed success in the role, certain parts of it had little to do with his skillset. “I have a little bit of a baby face,” points out Fennimore, who also comments that members of management teams within the automotive sector were known to value seniority and often had lengthy tenures of multiple decades themselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, Fennimore remembers one bit of related post–board meeting feedback with a little bite: “’Hey, look, you did a great job,’ they told me,” he reports. “‘The board loved you, but they did have one comment: This guy’s too young. They would feel a little more comfortable with somebody with a little more gray hair in the room.’” As for the embattled client company that had unexpectedly lost a key member of management, Fennimore’s youthful appearance turned out to not be enough to deter an invitation for him to fill the company’s sudden management void by relocating to Toronto for a number of months. “The person who passed away was in the middle of the transaction, so it reflected in a good way on me that the client had enough faith in me to have me go up there to live and help them to get things done,” explains Fennimore, who more than 20 years later is not yet sporting any gray hair. In conclusion, he adds: “It’s great to be given a lot of responsibility at a young age, but there will be some unique challenges. You try not to take things personally and to just move on.” –Jack Sweeney

It’s no secret, professionals from various departments must work together to correctly calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer acquisition cost (CAC) or Lead-to-customer ratios. This episode we explore how collaboration and communication is always essential to ensure these calculations and others take into account all relevant factors. This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Thomas Fennimore of Luminar Technologies, CFO Jared Poff of Designer Brands, and CFO John McCauley of Calendly. About our Guest Host: Soufyan Hamid FP&A troubleshooter Soufyan Hamid helps finance teams primarily in two ways: First, he works as an FP&A project leader or team member on mid to long term assignments Second, he helps finance professionals take their presentation skills to the next level Visit Soufyan's website or connect with Soufyan via his LinkedIn page

Back in 1993, Don Alvarez was an auditor with Deloitte’s San Francisco office when specialty retailer and coveted client company West Marine went public. For Alvarez, the day began with WM’s management explicating the novel steps behind pricing its offering, which was followed by the requisite trip to a Bay Area printer. The long day turned into a long night, so there was little hesitation on Alvarez’s part when West Marine’s CFO offered him a lift back to the accounting house’s office.  Still, the night would turn out to have even more to offer the young auditor. Alvarez remembers that as they were arriving in downtown San Francisco at about 2:00 a.m., WM’s CFO suddenly pulled his car over to the curb and turned to him.    Recalls Alvarez: “He looked at me and said, ‘I am now the CFO of a public company and I have no talent in my organization with public company experience—will you come and work for me?’”  Looking back, Alvarez reports that he did not hesitate to issue a “yes” right on the spot, which was a welcome reply that put in motion a formal job offer that allowed him to land inside the retailer’s controller office in the following January. Of course, the retail landscape was about to be altered as Amazon (established in 1994) and other shopping destinations began to appear online.   “I heard Amazon coming, loud and clear,” notes Alvarez, who would exit WM in 2007 to step into the CFO office at a dotcom retailer known as FatBrain.com. “We were selling technical reference books on the Internet, whereas Amazon was selling all books,” remarks Alvarez, who adds that he was only 32 when he became FatBrain.com’s 30th employee hire. “We were told that we would be taking the company public in 18 months, and instead we took it public in about nine,” comments Alvarez, who still marvels at the notion of an economy where capital seemed to be available around every corner. Says Alvarez: “I remember being chastised by a venture capitalist because I was too prudent with money—he gave me a lecture on how these were unprecedented times and all that we needed to do is spend, spend, spend.” –Jack Sweeney

Not unlike many of his CFO peers, Jeremy Klaperman spent the early years of his finance career in trying to rectify the damage brought on by the irrational market behaviors of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike most, though, he found that his repair duties frequently involved visits to a remote Japanese fishing village. “A lot of the work in investment banking during that 2001 to 2003 time frame involved picking up the pieces of all of these different failed businesses,” recalls Klaperman, who shortly after joining Goldman Sachs as an analyst in 2001 was bequeathed a lengthy “to do” list related to the 2002 bankruptcy of telecom giant Global Crossing. As Internet traffic projections in the late 1990s had continued to spike, Global Crossing’s undersea cable business had helped to boost the firm’s value to $47 billion by 1999. Still, the business had never had a profitable year, and as headwinds from the dotcom bust bore down, staggering losses and an accounting scandal followed.  For Klaperman, the “cleanup” began wherever the undersea cable ended.   “I found myself trying to sell this subsea cable station built in the middle of a remote Japanese fishing village,” reports Klaperman, who was tasked with completing the due diligence behind Goldman Sachs’s efforts to sell portions of the undersea cable itself or giant substations or both. “It then became apparent to me how bad business decisions can be made when you overextrapolate the current environment or don’t appreciate the cycle,” observes Klaperman, who adds that his days of working with the fishing village in mind enabled him to better appreciate the stiff price of “overextrapolation” as well as the nuances of the local economy. Remarks Klaperman:  "If you like uni or sushi that village was the sea urchin capital of Japan.” 

Our resident thought leader Brett Knowles explains how artificial intelligence is already being used to predict employee turnover, job satisfaction, and other key metrics, allowing managers to take proactive steps to improve employee engagement and retention. Brett & Jack discuss how AI-powered performance management systems are already tracking employee performance and are providing feedback and guidance to help employees improve. This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Tom Fennimore of Luminar Technologies, CFO Steven Mitchell of Redgate Software  and CFO Jared Poff of Designer brands.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the late 1990s came to mind for Anup Singh when we recently asked him to share with us a finance career lesson or insight from his past. It seems that our CFO guests have become ever more reflective on the period of years preceding the dotcom implosion as they seek to help their companies navigate the murky economics of the post-COVID age. “This was a time when many firms ignored the core fundamentals of a successful business model,” recalls Singh, who at the time headed up FP&A for Excite@Home, an new entity formed following the $6.7 billion acquisition of Internet portal Excite by @Home networks. Not unlike its acquisitive parent company, Excite@Home had an appetite for growth.   “We spent $1 billion to buy a company called Blue Mountain Arts, which had zero dollars in revenue, but the idea was to buy “eyeballs”—and the fundamentals just got away from us,” continues Singh, who in part was responsible for supplying analysts and investors external guidance as the environment for dotcom’s grew ever more  turbulent. “We were a casualty of the era,” notes Singh, who would become tasked with helping Excite@Home’s bankers, lawyers, and accountants to initiate a financial restructuring of company. Apart from succumbing to the dotcom era’s irrational business mind-set, Singh observes, Excite@Home also paid a price for a complex ownership structure that undermined its ability to achieve an alignment between its board and the company’s strategy. Having witnessed up close this strategic alignment failure, Singh made sure that going forward in his career, he was keenly focused on management directives that allowed executive teams to achieve strategic alignment. Such agreement, Singh relates, needs to center on simple statements such as “Here are the three bets that we’re going to place,” “Here are the products that we’re going to build,” and “Here are the markets that we’re going after.” This is a prescription upon which Singh has perhaps recently come to rely on more than once, as in his role as Illumio CFO he has sought to keep the software company’s ambitious international expansion plans in check and in step with the uncertainty of the current economic environment.   According to Singh, Illumio is now opting for “depth over breadth” and “doubling down” inside its largest overseas markets, rather than focusing on growing the overall number of countries within which it resides.     Says Singh: “We’re really trying to sharpen our focus and say, ‘Here are three markets on which we’re going to bet in the coming year.” –Jack Sweeney 

Steve Mitchell had not been working for Irish telecom giant Eircom for even half a year before he decided that it was time to explore other opportunities. For the previous 4 months, the seasoned operations executive had been commuting weekly to Dublin, Ireland, from his home in the United Kingdom as he sought to nurture Eircom’s waning mobile customer relationships.   However, Eircom’s CFO upended Mitchell’s plans by offering him the position of corporate finance director. “I went over there for a few months and ended up staying for 4-1/2 years,” recalls Mitchell, who still seems surprised by the CFO’s job offer. “I hadn’t even worked in finance during the previous 8 years.” Over the next 18 months, Mitchell’s responsibilities would expand to include investor relations, treasury, M&A, and running Eircom’s cap ex committee. Besides regularly delivering investor presentations, at one point Mitchell found himself before the European Commission, defending Eircom’s competitive position relative to recent telecom market consolidation. “Since those first couple of years with Eircom, nothing has really phased me,” remarks Mitchell, whose appointment came as Eircom was making the business case with its board and investors to lock in a first-mover advantage when it came to rolling out a 4G network across Ireland.   Given the breadth of Mitchell’s functional responsibilities, it soon became clear that he was also expected to rally the internal finance team to bring forth the financial insights required to move the business case forward.       “The finance people working on the fiber rollout business case could have either sat and fiddled with spreadsheets for months or else put the bit between their teeth and realized that they were about to drive the biggest decision that the business was going to make all year,” comments Mitchell, who adds that while his years at Eircom revealed to him the complexity of leadership decision-making, they also exposed how finance looms large. Says Mitchell: “A couple of really good pieces of analysis from the finance team ended up driving management and board decisions with regard to where that cap ex would go and whether we were ready to make the move.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Keith Stauffer’s youngest son learned in grade school that his family would be moving to Singapore, he likely breathed a sigh of relief.   After all, his older brothers had already lived in Spain and the United Kingdom, and it would have been only natural for the youngest Stauffer to feel that he had some catching up to do. “Although a lot of people hesitate on opportunities abroad because their kids are a certain age or are going into a certain grade, we have always taken sort of the opposite view,” comments dad Keith, whose finance resume is distinctive as much for its wealth of geographies as for its marquee brands.     A quick glance down his resume reveals both: Singapore (Hershey); Spain, the United Kingdom (Dell); San Juan, Puerto Rico (Procter & Gamble). Stauffer reports that it was back in the early to mid-1990s, when he was a treasury analyst at P&G, that his hand shot up for the first time. “I was at the tail end of my first assignment out of college, and I had my eyes set at an opportunity in Puerto Rico,” recalls Stauffer, whose stint there would allow him to boost his Spanish language skills as well as add the title of Plant Finance Manager to his resume. As the late 1990s arrived, Stauffer received a call from a former P&G colleague who had recently joined Dell who convinced him that the computer maker’s future growth path was rich with career opportunities both at home and abroad. Stauffer would join Dell at its headquarters in Austin, Texas where he began as a finance manager inside the manufacturer’s enterprise customer organization before being named controller of the company’s fast-growing K–12 business. Still, his offshore itch resurfaced. “I was 3 to 4 years into my career at Dell when I heard that they were seeking a finance leader to run Spain and Portugal and shot up my hand,” comments Stauffer, who in short order became CFO of Dell’s Spain and Portugal operations. Looking back, he marks his years abroad with as many family milestones as career ones. Says Stauffer: ”My oldest son, who is now 21, was 1 year old when we moved to Spain, and my second son was later born in the UK.” –Jack Sweeney 

August might be Patrick McClymont’s preferred month when it comes to entering the CFO office.  “September is great, but you may want to show up a little before in order to get your feet wet,” comments McClymont, who last September became CFO of Hagerty, a once–stand-alone insurance agency for classic automobiles that has now morphed into an automotive enthusiast brand that in addition to insurance products also serves up to its car-minded customers a menu of “membership” programs and experiences. It should perhaps serve as no surprise that McClymont’s timing preference has everything to do with the industry’s annual planning process and the opportunity that it affords newly appointed CFOs to convert the fall rite into a learning process Observes McClymont: “You must ask not only ‘How do I learn from this?’ but also ‘What are my intuitions?’ and ‘What do we need to change?’” To better highlight the rewards of CFO timing, McClymont tells us about an earlier CFO chapter with entertainment technology company IMAX. Having joined this firm in August of 2016, McClymont found that the fall planning process enabled him with the insight necessary to more confidently signal a possible lane change during in his CFO stint with the company. In early 2017, only 5 months after stepping into the CFO role, McClymont began to see some negative trends within the company’s operational data, prompting him to raise his concerns with IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond. “Richard had this tremendous intuition about the business, so he kind of saw where I was coming from and said, ‘Okay, let’s closely monitor our performance on the next three movie titles that are coming out, and if we find that we’re not on track, then let’s have a real conversation,’” recalls McClymont, who adds that this approach provided him with an opportunity to set up an “early warning system.”   Besides the benefits that a CFO can garner from “learning while planning,” McClymont’s experience highlights the critical CFO–CEO relationship-building that transpired during the early days of his IMAX career. While he does not tell us whether a “real conversation” ever actually took place, McClymont does let us know that the conversation that CEO Gelfond had in mind would have involved IMAX’s stakeholders at large. Comments McClymont: “He said, ‘Go get ready for that real conversation now—we need to start working on what to do if we end up in a spot where we need to pivot.'” –Jack Sweeney 

Things were going downhill for David Quinn when he met his future wife—or such might be the obvious punchline to punctuate Quinn’s disclosure that he met his wife on a ski vacation. Still, Quinn lets us know that the timing of his match being made was in sync with the escalating financial crisis of the late 2000s—a grim environment that quickly fogged over the career trajectories of many banking executives.   Quinn, who was then head of FP&A for Citigroup’s UK retail banking operations, found that the timing of the growing crisis was to exact a stiff price. Along with five other “handpicked” Citigroup executives, he had recently completed an executive MBA program specially designed by Citigroup to springboard the bank’s next generation of leaders into upper management roles. However, regardless of the degree status of its targets, Citigroup’s leadership development effort suddenly lost its spring. “For me, the promised leadership role turned out to be CFO of Norway, which was not a big business for Citigroup at the time and at best would have been a sidestep,” comments Quinn, who opted instead to leave Citigroup and subsequently move to the United States with his new American fiancée. Quinn doesn’t appear to have ever second-guessed his paucity of aspiration to be CFO of Norway. In September of 2009, he accepted a position with Bank of the West, where within only a few months he was appointed head of FP&A.   Despite his successful employment transition, Quinn still seems mindful of the economic uncertainty that gripped the late 2000s. In fact, he recalls staring down on San Francisco Bay from Bank of the West’s boardroom one day while the bank’s CFO, sitting across from him, tried to “sell him” on joining the bank. Says Quinn: “My feeling at the time was that I just needed a job.” –Jack Sweeney

Back in the mid-1990s, before email became widely used across corporate America, the executives of Frito-Lay’s northern California region suddenly found their mailboxes full. “We were getting all of these letters from people asking, ‘What did you do? What’s going on in northern California?,’” explains Tom Fitzgerald, who at the time was finance director for the region, a geography known to be a sales laggard among Pepsico’s 24 business units, within which Frito-Lay itself was a particularly heavy bottom dweller. Thus, as Fitzgerald relates, there was no shortage of intrigue concerning a sudden and steady sales climb inside Frito-Lay’s northern California business. Looking back, he observes that the explanation of the phenomenon was not necessarily pleasing to neighboring regions, which were known to be on a constant lookout for cunning new sales promotions or incentives. “Northern California, oddly enough, was the only unionized market for Frito-Lay in the country. Meanwhile, we had a direct store delivery business, which meant that we went to every store at least once a week—and often every day—to merchandise and sell the inventory,” explains Fitzgerald, who notes that the “direct sales” approach afforded the region larger numbers of employees than other locales, which in turn allowed Frito-Lay to at times operate inside the region more like a “military organization.” Like those of many of his peers, Fitzgerald’s Pepsi career routinely opened new chapters as the packaged goods company rotated its finance executives into new regions and business units. Fitzgerald’s arrival in the northern California region brought a new set of eyes to Frito-Lay’s local challenges and paired the finance executive with a divisional leader who was prepared to listen. “I told the leader that too often the business had one answer one day and a different answer the following week. I said, ‘Let’s just pick three, and then we’re going to lock in and stay there,’” comments Fitzgerald, who credits a newfound focus and the regional leader’s willingness to collaborate with having propelled the snack maker to the top of the region’s 24 business units within 3 months. As for the details behind Fitzgerald’s “three answer” prescription, the finance leader reports: “Two were top line–driven, operational metrics that we could measure. The other was related to how our team worked and coached the frontline salespeople.” For Fitzgerald, the remedy was less about strategy and more about focus. “It’s not necessarily about how good your strategy is,” he says. “Frankly, there may have been three better ideas along the way, but because they changed the strategy and moved to the next thing too quickly, they couldn’t get all of their people aligned to execute it well.” Adds the finance leader: “I became a big believer in the notion that if you have an ‘A’ strategy but a ‘C’ execution, you’re going to miss your numbers every time.” –Jack Sweeney

When consultant Steve Player died last month at the age of 64, the business function that he had tormented, ridiculed, and war-hammered for more than two decades stood quivering in the shadows. Still breathing, the beast of a business process known as budgetary control had withstood its most notorious assailant’s heaviest blows—in itself a resounding tribute to those industry high priests who had given the process life in the first half of the 20th century. However, many agree that it’s only a matter of time before budgetary control succumbs to its many injuries and a proper warrant is issued certifying the death of a business function that may have served all of industry better had it lived only half as long. It’s just such an acknowledgment that makes Steve Player and others of his ilk appear to be as worthy of our acclaim as those who helped to institutionalize this business function in the first place. Perhaps it’s no surprise that both groups have been made up mainly of management consultants, a clan that I know only too well. Or so I thought, until I met Steve. NOW LISTEN - Jack Sweeney

The following is a Holiday Replay of a popular 2022 episode. Last October, shortly after being named CFO of machine learning start-up MOLOCO, Brandon Maultasch decided to forgo yet another welcome coffee to instead engage with a wide flock of MOLOCO employees on the virtues of discounted cash analysis. “The last thing you want a new people leader talking to the entire company about!,” confesses Maultasch, before launching a stirring defense of the fall discussion that he refers to as a “teach-in.”   “We have 65 data scientists and machine learning engineers at the company. If they can build the things that they build, they are smart enough to understand finance, which isn’t all that complicated,” remarks Maultasch, whose approach is notable as much for what it does focus on as for what it doesn’t. By exploring a framework for discounted cash analysis, Maultasch rejected the more traditional point of engagement for incoming CFOs: the company’s future IPO. “The IPO is an important milestone, but it’s not the destination,” notes Maultasch. “The destination is building a generationally important company that adds value in the long run. I wanted to make people understand that the durability of cash flows is what drives long-term value creation.” Once armed with a deeper understanding of discounted cash flows, Maultasch says, employees at large can bring forth more of the insights, processes, and technical solutions that are needed to move the levers of value creation. “I want to line align our conversations around durability and long-term margins. These are the levers that move our revenue, move our profitability, and move our position in the value chain,” he adds. According to Maultasch, an added benefit from “teach-in” discussions is that they sometimes expose what the finance team has gotten wrong. “Some of the things that we thought were inputs turn out to be outputs,” he observes, “so it’s this process of discussion, argument, and learning that aligns everyone toward building a great company.” –Jack Sweeney 

The following is a bonus replay of one of 2022's popular episodes. When Herald Chen was growing up in a town not far from Pittsburg, he dreamed of someday running the small town’s steel mill. Years later when he was graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, the steel mill no longer occupied Chen’s maturing career aspirations. “My two job offers were to either go make soap for Procter & Gamble at a manufacturing plant in Baltimore or go to Wall Street,“ remembers Chen, who adds that the offers for the seemingly different jobs came as a result of having graduated from UPenn’s Management and Technology program—a curriculum that offered a dual degree in engineering and finance. Chen chose Wall Street and in 1995 landed at KKR, the private equity firm that had feasted on leveraged buyouts in 1970s and 1980s. Recalls Chen: “I had a front row seat for meeting many CEOs and CFOs and invested behind a couple dozen of them, so I learned a lot about what the good, the bad, and the ugly look like in these companies.”   Twenty-seven years later, KKR can arguably be seen to have been the mother ship of Chen’s finance career, a place that over time he would leave and then return to as the investment house provided him with the wherewithal to open new professional chapters—the longest being from 2007 to 2019, when he headed KKR’s Technology, Media, and Telecom practice. Along the way, Chen demonstrated a rapport with C-suite members and company boards that distinguished him from other investors, a trait that led to a growing number of invitations to sit on different company boards. “I had figured out that I wanted to be building businesses, but I also knew that I wasn’t the smartest or brightest or most charismatic person in the room, so maybe the best way for me wasn’t actually sitting in the CEO seat but instead was investing and sitting on boards and helping CEOs,” comments Chen, who has held a number of board seats, as well as served as board chair for such companies as Internet Brands/WebMD, Optiv, Epicor, BMC Software, and Mitchell International.  With a boardroom track record that few of his CFO peers can match, Chen attributes his success in part to being a good listener.  “I would invest behind CEOs and CFOs whom others just didn’t understand—they just didn’t comprehend what these people were trying to do—because I would find that I could create a lot of value with them just by taking a little extra time to hear them through,” remarks Chen. When asked to offer advice for CFOs seeking to lower the temperature of certain boardroom discussions, Chen shares a story involving notable KKR financier Henry Kravis: “When I was at KKR, I made a mistake in some of the numbers one time. It was late in the transaction, at the point where on Wall Street you’d expect to get yelled at and there would be this big blowup—but I remember Henry Kravis just getting very calm and saying, ‘Hey, we’ll get through this and come out the other side.’” –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss what might be a popular response to employees "quiet quitting" or what among managers has been dubbed "quiet firing" - the withdrawal of coaching, support and career development to an employee, which results in pushing the employee out of an organization. This episode’s featured Workplace Champions share their different perspectives on how to manage their organization’s talent as a collective unit. Brett believes that human capital pain points are challenging finance leaders to carefully reconsider how to best manage employees and forfeit dated models that may have treated employees as just another asset that can depreciate overtime. This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Brian Gladden of Zelis, CFO Razzak Zallow of Floqast, CFO Kevin Rubin of Alteryx  and CFO James Moylan of Ciena.

Back in the year 2000, as Arthur Andersen saw a stream of young accountants exit the firm to join dotcom start-ups, Kevin Rubin’s workload continued to escalate as the public accounting firm felt the pinch of a constricting workforce. Nevertheless, Rubin’s career ambitions remained in lockstep with the public accounting house. In fact, even today he believes that he may have stuck with Andersen had the accounting house not collapsed in the aftermath of the Enron scandal. Andersen’s fate, the implosion of the dotcom bubble, and the September 11 terror attacks each in its own way contributed to the future trajectory of Rubin’s career—a convergence of events and circumstances that Rubin still finds difficult to untangle. “Somehow, the circumstances opened up an incredible opportunity for me,” recalls Rubin, when we ask about MRV Communications, a client company of his that ultimately appointed him vice president of finance before 3 years later naming him CFO. Meanwhile, months prior to Rubin’s arrival at MRV, the company had announced that its CFO, Edmund Glazer, had been on the Boston-to–Los Angeles flight that had crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11. “It was more coincidental than anything else,” remarks Rubin, who refers to the late Glazer as a friend and the CFO who succeeded Glazer as one of his great mentors. Still, the repercussions of the early 2000s were not yet behind Rubin. Shortly after his arrival, MRV’s market cap—once more than $6 billion—fell to roughly $60 million in a plunge that would together task Rubin and his new CFO mentor with finding a way forward. Says Rubin: “We had to make some pretty dramatic changes pretty quickly to be able to re-orientate the business. In the end, we emerged as an operating company with three distinct business units.” –Jack Sweeney

It was nearly 18 years ago that Icertis CFO Rajat Bahri stepped into the CFO office for the first time.   Thus began a stretch of time that Bahri, not unlike many of his CFO peers, has populated with various distinguished CFO career chapters ranging from 3 to 5 to 8 years in duration.    Still, for Bahri, "18 years" means more than this, as it also represents the amount of time he invested prior to receiving a CFO appointment, making it a worthy touchstone with regard to which we can seek out some thoughtful CFO reflection. Icertis’s CFO doesn’t disappoint us. It seems that back in 2004, after Bahri had turned the corner on 17 years with Kraft Foods, Inc., he found himself handicapping his CFO prospects for the top job. Certainly, such aspirations were in no way foolhardy on the part of Bahri, who had already served as CFO of Kraft’s high-growth frozen pizza category as well as CFO of Kraft Canada, where he got to double down on his operations experience. However, Bahri explains, time began to weigh on him: “I could have stayed at Kraft for another 8 to 10 years and gotten the top job, but my thinking was that if I stayed and didn't get it, I could have become stale and it would have been tough to make job changes.” Of course, this is a quandary that many long-tenured finance executives face annually, not to mention that especially challenges the sense of responsibility of those executives who take pride in being loyal corporate soldiers.   Still, Bahri reports that his decision to exit Kraft was not only a hedge to mitigate the risk of his skill base growing stale but also a step that allowed him to check two new boxes. “In addition to allowing me to enter a different industry, joining Trimble put me with a publicly traded company,” remarks Bahri, referring to the technology firm that he joined following Kraft and where he would serve as CFO for the next 8½ years. Says Bahri: “It was a great win-win. Trimble got a guy who was strong operator, and I got my wish to learn IR and how to manage the Street and investors.” –Jack Sweeney 

If you had told Brian Gladden in 2006 that he would shortly be working for a Saudi crown prince, the 14-year GE finance veteran may have replied using a shorthand equivalent to “when pigs fly.” As a GE finance executive, Gladden had served in a string of senior roles, including a number in which he reported directly to GE CEO Jeff Immelt. Nevertheless, when GE announced in 2007 that it had signed a definitive agreement to sell GE Plastics to Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) in a deal valued at $11.6 billion in cash, flying pigs no doubt appeared before Gladden’s eyes. “Brian and his world-class team now have the right resources to truly transform this industry globally,” reads a comment from a GE press release announcing the deal that subsequently relocated Gladden for 12-month stint in Saudi Arabia, where his new boss—a crown prince—was waiting. “I had to stay for a year to lead the business through the integration, and this was a challenging time for me culturally,” recalls Gladden, who would step into a CFO role at Dell upon his return to the U.S. “This was my first public company CFO job—and Dell was a $60 billion-a-year firm—so it was huge stretch for me,” remarks Gladden, who would log nearly 6 years as Dell’s finance chief.      “Every relationship is different—Michael Dell was fantastic with customers and with the company’s vision as far as where technology was going,” comments Gladden. “As finance leader, you discover where to fill in and partner with the leader based on their strengths.” So, what do Jeff Immelt, Michael Dell, and a Saudi crown prince have in common? The answer is Brian Gladden. –Jack Sweeney

Back in 2009, as businesses navigated the repercussions of Wall Street’s collapse, Razzak Jallow found himself standing at a departure gate with a boarding pass that read simply “SaaS.” To be clear, Jallow had just nabbed a spot on Adobe Inc.’s Creative Suite finance team, and the journey on which he and his colleagues were about to embark was the software company’s migration from a perpetual, boxed software model to one based on SaaS subscriptions. While Adobe was not alone, and the path to SaaS was crowded with many software firms, few were faced with exiting a legacy model that operated at the scale and robustness of Adobe’s, in which 27 products were clustered under the banner of the developer’s “master collection.” “This meant that 27 R&D teams had to ship their product on the same exact day,” recalls Jallow, whose comment seems to expose both the madness as well as the unmatched rigor behind Adobe’s legacy model.    Still, cracks were visible inside the perpetual world. “We were selling fewer units every single quarter, and meanwhile we were spending more and more on go-to-market initiatives to try to get customers to upgrade,” continues Jallow, who notes that the migration to a subscription business model got into high gear only once Adobe management uniformly agreed that “it was time to do what was right for the customer.” According to Jallow, the customer-centric message began to gain momentum inside the Creative Suite business unit where he had been spending his days modeling revenue predictions to better serve the investment community. Still, a finance leadership challenge remained. At the time, Jallow remembers, Adobe’s then-CFO, Mark Garrett, stated: “Our current investors may not like it because they trade us on quarterly revenues and EBITDA  – but I’m going to go find us new investors.” Garrett’s resolve to find new investors rather than muddy Adobe’s customer-focus message further buttressed the company’s stance. Says Jallow: “Observing a CFO who saw beyond his own world and understood the products and customers and how the different teams worked together was just really impactful for me. Moments like that just don’t come around very often.” –Jack Sweeney    

When Checkout.com CFO Céline Dufétel tells us that her career decision-making has been driven not so much by titles or status but by an inner push to acquire the next level of skills or types of skills, we can’t help but note a mysterious coincidence. It seems that a former McKinsey & Company partner had just shared the exact same thought with us almost word for word. Moreover, so, too, had a former CFO of T. Rowe Price. Of course, there’s a sound explanation for this concurrence, and—much like with the solution to an Agatha Christie mystery—the answer is perhaps best read out loud: “The former McKinseyite, the former T. Rowe CFO, and Checkout.com’s CFO are the same person.” For Dufétel, the path to the CFO office at Checkout.com began at McKinsey, where 10 years ago she was the leader of the consulting firm’s North American Asset Management practice. Two years earlier, Dufétel had been named a McKinsey partner, a prestigious milestone for an up-and-comer who would ultimately spend 10 years at the firm. “Being a consultant, not only did you have to come in with a good strategy answer for your client, but also you had to convince them that it was the right answer for them,” comments Dufétel, who credits the strategy house with strengthening her “influencing skills.” Dufétel left the strategy house in 2014 to serve as global head of marketing for investment management firm Neuberger Berman—a 3-year stint that ultimately allowed her to switch tracks. “Leaving McKinsey to take on a much more operational role was very informative, and it was helpful for making certain that I was in tune operationally and would be able to execute well,” remarks Dufétel, who exited Neuberger after an executive search consultant had gauged her interest in a CFO position with asset management T. Rowe Price.   At T. Rowe, Dufétel also acquired COO responsibilities before ending a 4-year CFO tenure there in order to be named CFO and COO of Checkout.com. And so it goes inside the time-bending career of Céline Dufétel, whose resume no doubt stress-tested the selection criteria for more than one “40 Under 40” list. (she appeared on Fortune’s back in 2020). –Jack Sweeney         

Jim Moylan is perhaps our first CFO guest to list the leasing of oil rigs as one of the experiences that best prepared him for a CFO role. Of course, he makes it clear that the experience is worthy of mention not so much because of what he was selling but because he was selling at all. “The best way to learn what a company does and understand its value proposition is to be a salesperson, and I have told this to people everywhere that I’ve been,” comments Moylan, whose stint as a salesman helped to kick off a 22-year career climb inside the ever-evolving world of energy company Sonat, Inc. Sonat would provide Moylan with an expansive and varied career narrative. Having become known inside the company for his FP&A savvy, Moylan had a tenure that spanned a variety of leadership roles and included overseeing corporate strategy during a period of time when the company executed four acquisitions and two divestitures. He would also serve as president of one of the company’s largest subsidiaries. Today, while Sonat resembles a sturdy bookend at one end of Moylan’s career, Ciena—the networking systems company where he has now logged 15 years as CFO—could likely serve as the other. At Ciena, supply chain challenges have remained top-of-mind in 2022. “The priority for the company and for me personally is to address our supply chain problem, fix it, and repair our image in the minds of our customers—because not only have we disrupted our business, but also we’ve disrupted their businesses,” remarks Moylan, who notes that Ciena’s product offerings depend on the regular replenishment of parts inventories comprising some 10,000 SKUs. As with many finance leadership resumes, long tenures as well as the transactional nature of the finance field are what punctuate Moylan’s career. Turn back the clock to 1999, and Sonat was being acquired by El Paso Energy, a move that led Moylan to step into a CFO role at SCI Systems, the first of a succession of four CFO appointments for him within a mere 8 years. Reports Moylan: “If it didn’t work for me, it didn’t work for me—and if I learned that quickly, l would leave.” –Jack Sweeney

To grow efficiently businesses must have legibility across the organization, explains Airtable CFO Ambereen Toubassy, who tells us legibility can only be achieved by having everyone throughout the business using the same metrics. Along the way, Toubassy says finance leaders must ensure their organization’s data capture is being conducted correctly and consistently.   It may sound easy, but as this episode’s three Planning Aces reveal achieving legibility is a growing business presents daily challenges to those residing inside the  FP&A realm.   With Guest Host Glenn Hopper This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Anat Ashkenazi of Eli Lilly, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, and CFO Evan Goldstein of Seismic. GUEST HOST: Glenn Hopper, CFO, Sandline Global, Author of Deep Finance A former Navy journalist, filmmaker, and business founder, Glenn Hopper has spent the past two decades helping startups transition to going concerns, operate at scale, and prepare for funding and/or acquisition. He is passionate about transforming the role of chief financial officer from historical reporter to forward-looking strategist. He has served as a finance leader in a variety of industries including telecommunications, retail, internet, and legal technology. He has a master’s degree in finance with a graduate certificate in business analytics from Harvard University, and a master’s degree in business administration from Regis University. Glenn is married with three children, two goldendoodles, and a neurotic cat. Glenn is also a member of American Mensa and volunteers his time for the Analytics Foundation, helping nonprofits to digitally transform their organizations. In his free time, Glenn is an avid runner and cyclist.

Shana Veale had been working in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, office of Arthur Andersen for only about 8 months when the 88-year-old stalwart accounting house collapsed.   Being a recent college graduate at the time, Veale tells us, she really didn’t grasp all of what the news headlines attempted to convey as the turn of events surrounding the Enron scandal unfolded.     “We began having these weekly calls internally to discuss the circumstances, but then the cuts came in May and I no longer had a job,” recalls Veale, who as a newbie accountant had little to lose when compared to those colleagues with households to support and decades of equity about to vanish. Still, having been an eyewitness to the collapse of a firm that had once populated corporate parks and urban centers across the country, Veale found that her first career chapter would administer a lesson that many finance and accounting professionals often learn much later in their careers. “When in business, you should always expect the unexpected” was the takeaway from Veale’s early days—which she says has come in handy at PharmChem, Inc., where roughly 18 months ago she found herself on the sidelines of a proxy fight between company management and new and old board members. For Veale, who had served as PharmChem’s controller for the previous 3 years, “the unexpected” this time around resulted in doors being swung open rather than shut, as the victorious and newly configured board asked her to serve as CFO. “I got lucky because I had had 3 months with the former CFO as the management teams transitioned, so I was able to gather information on the things that I just had not done before, ” remark’s Veale, who lists preparing for an upcoming audit among her top of mind, 12-month CFO priorities. Looking back Veale observes: “I have had a lot of interesting things happen in my career, but I have found very few people who can say: ‘Oh, yes, I’ve been through that as well.’” –Jack Sweeney

After Chip Zint jumped two levels in NCR Corp.’s retail division finance hierarchy, he couldn’t help but savor the moment while reflecting on the fact that his career years thus far—including nights and weekends studying for an MBA—had all been put to good use. Still, while altitude matters when it comes to career leaps, where you land in an organization—and when—sometimes matters more. In Zint’s case, his arrival as sales finance head for NCR’s retail division coincided with the completion of one of the largest acquisitions ever undertaken by that group. “The moment I raised my hand, I was jumping into the fire,” recalls Zint, who reports that NCR faced multiple challenges when it came to assimilating the newly acquired business, not least of which were the newly merged organization’s revenue expectations.   Says Zint: “It was about grinding it out every single day and going to bed at 2:00 a.m., only to wake up and be 50 emails behind.”   As the problematic transaction took its toll on the division’s finance leadership, Zint says, one day he found himself working alongside NCR’s CFO, who had temporarily stepped in to serve as CFO of the company’s retail division.  Then came a directive for Zint to run the next “order cadence” call, a weekly conference call of NCR’s top leaders that was regularly attended by the CEO. The call was designed to have leaders from across the company update top management about the closing of orders from the week prior and the week pending. As it turned out, on this particular week, the CEO was determined to get to the bottom of what was troubling retail.     “I sat there for over an hour answering his questions with regard to what was going wrong with certain accounts and what was being done to offset some of the negative developments,” comments Zint, who notes that years later the same CEO would recall the exchange and how he had made Zint “deliver the bad news and stand behind it.” Having successfully helped the retail team to navigate the ups and downs of the merger’s integration challenges, Zint began seeking finance roles that would complement his FP&A experience, such as stints with the treasury and investor relations functions.   Ultimately, Zint’s 13-year career at NCR would include a turn as head of corporate FP&A for the company as well as a career chapter as a divisional CFO. Not unlike many senior executives, Zint tells us, he found that the arrival of the pandemic led him to begin reevaluating his professional aspirations. “I was looking for a smaller public company where I could come in as #2 to the CFO and have a successor opportunity—but not entitlement,” remarks Zint, who adds that he first used an executive recruiter to help him to map out such a position in painstaking detail. Zint remembers the recruiter’s exact words: “He said, ‘Chip, do not answer the phone unless it’s someone bringing a role to you exactly like the one you seek.’” –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss the workforce rantings of Elon Musk and the new Twitter owner's November 16th deadline for employees to decide whether to leave or stay. Is Musk's leadership style solely responsible for the turmoil at Twitter or are there other contributing factors? This episode's featured Workplace Champions expose how leaders seek to optimize work environments to empower people to do their best work. While Jack views the talent mind set of each of the three featured finance leaders as the upshot of extensive leadership experience, Brett points out there may be a method behind the Musk "madness." This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Anat Ashkenazi of Eli Lilly, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, and CFO Evan Goldstein of Seismic.

When Jonathan Carr first walked through the doors of the Stryker Inc. plant in Arroyo, Puerto Rico, the boyish newbie accountant no doubt turned the heads of a few managers.   Having finished college only about 18 months earlier, Carr was now the accounting and finance “lead” for a major software implementation under way at the medical device manufacturer’s Puerto Rican plant. To succeed in his new role, Carr would need to have local managers as well as senior IT executives walk him through the manufacturing plant’s transaction processes so that he could understand how the software’s promise of automation could be leveraged to streamline the plant’s accounting close cycle. Looking back, Carr can see that it was his inexperience at the time that made the assignment so enriching to his early career. “You have to find things that you have absolutely no idea how to do because it’s those things that will help you to grow exponentially,” remarks Carr, who credits his boss at the time, a Stryker divisional controller, for instilling a risk-taking career mindset. Recalls Carr: “One of his biggest pieces of advice to me was to find opportunities that would either get me promoted or get me fired.” After more than 5 years at Stryker, Carr began to think about finance career opportunities inside high tech, a sector widely populated by growth companies that could help him to move beyond manufacturing’s hyperfocus on cost accounting. The SaaS software company Survey Monkey soon captured Carr’s attention.   “At the time, Survey Monkey’s FP&A team wasn’t built out and the company was still at less than $100 million in revenue, so here was this opportunity to start thinking about how to take an organization that was growing organically and add strategic levers to it,” comments Carr, who would serve as head of FP&A not only at Survey Monkey but also at yet one other tech firm before stepping into the CFO office at Armis in 2020. Asked about the “deep end of the pool”—or the Stryker plant that he had entered with only 18 months of experience—Carr tell us: “These are the types of opportunities that as a leader I think are so important to now provide to my own team.” –Jack Sweeney

Few finance leaders have better revealed to us the career-transforming powers of IPOs than CFO Tony Tiscornia. Turn back the clock to 2015, and Tiscornia is the accounting-minded VP of finance for spend management software company Coupa. “I was really a controller—a business controller, but still a controller,” explains Tiscornia, who notes that his world began to change following the appointment of Todd Ford as CFO. Read More   Ford, a finance leader with a rich IPO resume, would join Coupa as CFO in June of 2015 and quickly begin to assemble an IPO-ready team. “When Todd first came to Coupa, he asked me what I wanted to do with my career, and I told him, ‘I want to be a CFO,’” recalls Tiscornia, who adds that Ford quickly tagged him for an investor relations role. Over the next 16 months, Tiscornia says, he learned all of what was required to achieve the milestones that led up to the company’s October 2016 IPO. During its first day of trading, Coupa’s shares would reach a high of more than $41, to more than double the $18 initial public offering price. “I think that a lot of people who go from pre-IPO to a big bang IPO like we did here at Coupa often focus on that day, but what sticks out to me was what began to happen on the next day,” comments Tiscornia, who observes that the post-IPO period at Coupa became an “eye-opener” for him with regard to understanding the resources that were then required to operate Coupa as a public company. “The bankers, consultants, and accountants had all gone away, and we were now expected to report on a quarterly basis—it wasn’t just practice any longer,” remarks Tiscornia, who quickly found that his investor relations tour of duty had now positioned him along the front lines of the ongoing discussions with industry analysts and shareholders. “That role really became my bridge from controllership to CFO-type work,” comments Tiscornia, who first joined Coupa in 2012, when the company had fewer than 100 employees. Last year, Tiscornia was named CFO when his CFO mentor, Todd Ford, exited the office to be named Coupa president and CFO emeritus. –Jack Sweeney

In March 2020, when Eli Lilly announced that it would begin providing drive-through COVID testing services to the state of Indiana’s healthcare workers, more than a few hospital administrators likely scratched their heads. After all, the giant pharma company was not in the business of providing healthcare services, any more than it was a medical device manufacturer.   Still, drive-through testing turned out to be just the most recent offshoot of an effort under way inside a specialized facility at Lilly Research Laboratories. As months turned to years, as much as 40 to 50 percent of all samples being tested within Indiana were to end up being processed by the Lilly facility.    “A CFO may look at this and rightly ask, ‘What are the costs that are going to be required to establish this? What are the sets of risks associated with deciding to move forward with something like this?,’” observes Anat Ashkenazi, who at the time served as head of strategy and transformation for the pharma behemoth as well as CFO of Lilly’s R&D arm. For Ashkenazi, who would be named CFO of Lilly within 12 months of COVID’s arrival in North America, the pandemic would become the ultimate testing ground and not just for the virus. “I remember walking into this office on the day that we announced that I was taking on the CFO role, and there were only three or four other people working on the whole floor—the building was empty,” remarks Ashkenazi, who had joined the company 20 years earlier with an MBA in hand from Tel Aviv University.   Ashkenazi’s appointment had been hastened due to the abrupt resignation of her CFO predecessor, who Lilly management had concluded had exhibited poor judgment when it came to a personal relationship in the work environment—a management drama that would unfold as the pandemic bore down. Asked to recall some of the challenges that she faced during the first 30 days of her CFO tenure, Ashkenazi comments, “I would say that trying to build connections quickly with the management team with whom you’ll be working was important and very difficult to do when you’re virtual. That was one of the things that I had to figure out: ‘How do I get this done?’” Like all of us, Ashkenazi, a mother of three (between the ages of 11 and 17), faced challenges during the pandemic that tested the boundaries between work life and home life. Still, she seems intent on letting us know that her greatest lesson or takeaway from the pandemic has to do with Lilly's resolve to step up and become one of its community’s primary testers. Says Ashkenazi: “We can talk about ESG, but I don’t think that you can run a firm successfully over many years without having a clear line of sight into your role in the community and acting on it.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Brett Powell is asked what distinguishes his day-to-day role as a finance leader inside the world of academia from that of his CFO peers residing within industry, Powell without hesitation says, “Complexity.” Aware that such a one-word answer would likely summon only more questions, Powell continues: “Essentially, when you think about it, we’re running a city … we house people, we feed people, we provide them with utilities. Everything that’s required to run your hometown needs to be replicated on a university campus.” Still, Powell points out that one of the fundamental differences has to do with an organizational mind-set when it comes to cost allocation and subsidization.  “Corporations will look at each of their product lines and try to understand the profitability of the product, and if one is losing money, then they just end that product line and move on to something else—but we don’t think about academic programs in the same way,” comments Powell, who adds that during a previous CFO tour of duty he had created a resource allocation model for a “resource-restrained” university, only to quickly discover how cross-subsidization activities between the different departments and programs added new layers of complexity. “Just putting the data in front of people was not enough—they needed to really understand the perspective and the strategic direction that we were trying to follow,” remarks Powell, who notes that he would often find himself helping different department heads to understand why getting less of a subsidy wasn’t always a negative for their department.   Says Powell: “If a university’s business school is generating so much profit that it can subsidize other programs by a certain amount, then we need to think about how this subsidy might be able to grow if the business school were to invest more—and to understand how all of the other programs might ultimately be able to gain from the business school’s success if we started to make such decisions differently.” –Jack Sweeney

Evan Goldstein tells us that it was at the end of another long day—after a week of long days—as he was walking to the parking lot adjacent to Genentech’s offices that he received a “gut punch.” Becoming more self-aware of others is something that many finance leaders have told us that they have needed to lean into during their career, but few have shared with us the pivot to self-reflection as vividly as Goldstein, whose multi-decade finance career boasts an unusual dual-chamber architecture centered on 10 years at Genentech and another 11 at Salesforce. “I refer to myself as a serial monogamist when it comes to my professional career and the longevity that I’ve experienced at both of these companies,” explains Goldstein, who credits his extended stay at both firms to the power of three: the people, the mission, and the innovation. Still, Goldberg wants us to know about the long day that ended in Genentech’s parking lot. For young finance career builders, arriving at the end-of-day parking lot can be somewhat likened to a runner breaking the finish-line tape, not to be awarded a medal, though, but to be met with the refreshingly cool evening air that routinely rewards a long day’s work. It was in just such environs that Goldstein chose to thank a younger Genentech colleague for their hard work on an important and ultimately successful “deliverable.” “After having just been promoted to the manager level, I had taken over short-term planning in the corporate organization and had hired this person—whose role I had had in the past,” reports Goldstein, who earlier in the week had presented the “deliverable” to Genentech’s leadership team. “Here we had had this really successful outcome, and this employee was just doing phenomenally well,” comments Goldstein, who found himself alongside his young report as they made their way to the parking lot together. “Thank you for all of your hard work,” Goldstein remembers saying—to which the employee then replied: “Yeah, well, I don’t think I want to do this.” Such a response was like a punch to the gut, Goldstein recalls, and one that not even the fresh evening air could ease.     The employee explained further: “Evan, you’re telling me what to do, and you’re not letting me figure it out.” Looking back, Goldstein realizes that he was shortchanging the opportunities that he provided to others by failing to allow them to grow and develop along the way as they “added their own flavor to the process.” Says Goldstein: “This was one of my turning points from a managerial leadership perspective—when I started to realize that it’s not just about what you deliver but also how you deliver it.” –Jack Sweeney

We can’t help but cringe when a finance leader tells us that they don’t want to be known as “the CFO of ‘No’”—that shopworn characterization of CFOs who seem to enjoy giving thumbs down verdicts.    So, we were pleased when CFO Jim Morgan of CallRail steered clear of the trite trope when he recently joined us as a return guest. Nonetheless, we were still curious as to what has replaced the iconic “thumbs down” when it comes to finance leaders projecting their diligence onto the monitoring of risk and governance practices. “I probably have it a little bit easier than most CFOs because one of our five culture statements is Mind the business—which is music to a CFO’s ears,” comments Morgan, who adds that the simple phrase is best voiced in a question. “’Are we minding the business?’ is what I ask our team every day,” reports Morgan, as if prescribing for the CallRail corporate culture a regimen of essential vitamins and minerals. Notes Morgan: “It’s naturally easy for me to be the culture carrier of this because I am able to leverage that business mentality as we focus on being a business partner to all of our different departments.”   Also, the question’s emphasis on the “we” helps to amplify a business’s shared mission and achieve “buy in” when it comes to some prickly decisions.   “It’s a nice sort of framework for using to sort of step back with folks and say, ‘Are we minding the business?’—as opposed to, say, just stating ‘I don’t think that’s a wise spend of dollars’ or ‘That doesn’t really follow our talent mandate,’” remarks Morgan, who again emphasizes that within CallRail, Mind the business is not just a popular phrase but also one that the company has codified. Says Morgan: “Mind the business is how we ultimately achieve trade-offs and prioritizations across the business—it’s what we call a culture statement.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Ambereen Toubassy decided that it was time to start up her own hedge fund, it's likely that no one cast doubt on the experienced investor’s grand plan. That is, no one except Toubassy herself.   After 7years as an investment banker with Goldman Sachs and a dozen running hedge funds, Toubassy says, she told herself, “Okay, this is a moment, I have a track record, I should start my own hedge fund.” Thus with some freshly drafted marketing collateral in hand, she initiated the early round of discussions that would allow her to begin raising capital.   “When I started doing this, I realized my that heart wasn’t in it—I told myself, ‘Okay, if your heart isn’t in this, you have no business asking other people to entrust you with their capital,’” recalls Toubassy, who notes that her outreach had put her in touch with a span of finance professionals from her Goldman Sachs years, including a number who had exited the investing world to take on a variety of operating roles—including CFO positions. “What clicked for me and why I made the shift to operations was how much time CFOs spent in talking about the people with whom they were working,” reports Toubassy, who points out that while the guiding principle of her career had always been to “always be learning,” her discussions with CFOs made clear that there was more to learn. Remarks Toubassy: “I'd always sort of had this inkling that when I was managing a portfolio and tickers, I didn't get as much of that people mentorship experience as I would have liked to have had.” Today, after having served in multiple CFO roles, Toubassy keeps people top-of-mind when offering advice to new finance leaders. For one thing, she advises, “Spend time gathering context and developing relationships with your peers and the business leaders for all of the other functions.” Moreover, Toubassy exposes the people factor in CFO success from the perspective of output and input metrics. “The financials are output metrics, and a CFO cannot influence them or change them because they're exactly that," remarks Toubassy. "To effect change, you need to understand and influence the inputs that go into the business.” Perhaps not surprisingly, though, Toubassy quickly circles back to her relationship-building advice: “You need to spend time with the head of each of the business functions. You need to have a relationship with each of these people. You need to be able to sort of put yourself in their shoes and say, ‘How would that person effect change?’ And, over time, the output metrics that finance cares about will change.” Meanwhile, Toubassy finds little or no irony in the title “chief finance officer.” “We have this tendency to jump straight into the financials or outputs because that’s who we are," she says. "And, we are the chief financial officer.” –Jack Sweeney

When Darren Cooper was named CFO of Reveal Group of Melbourne, Australia, in 2019, there was no friendly board member or executive recruiter seeking kudos for having completed a successful a CFO search. Instead, Cooper says, his twist of fate was due to a personal relationship that he had established with Reveal management after his prior company, Adcorp Holdings, had hired Reveal to provide it with services inside the intelligent automation realm. Originally from South Africa, Cooper had been counted among the finance rank-and-file of a Johannesburg staffing company only 5 years earlier. Turn back the clock to those times, and you would find Cooper spearheading a number of the staffing company’s strategic IT projects when Adcorp entered talks to acquire the company. The resulting deal swung open a number of new doors for Cooper, who became a key player in the restructuring of the staffing company’s South African operations. Adcorp, in turn, promoted Cooper into a group financial manager role before asking him to relocate to Australia to serve as the region’s finance leader. It wasn’t long before Cooper’s purview spanned all of Adcorp’s Asia-Pacific operations, a charge that eventually led to him developing relationships with a variety of technology services providers—one of which was Reveal Group. –Jack Sweeney

Gillian Sheeran’s was perhaps 17 years into an illustrious finance career and on her second CFO tour of duty when she finally met the limits of her CFO superpowers. These powers had first guided her into a CFO role at the tender age of 32, where during her tenure she would help to turn a 200-employee IT consulting firm into a global business with 850 workers and eight offices in six countries. Next, she added a turnaround chapter to her CFO resume when she helped to design and implement new processes allowing a company to return to profitability within only 9 months.   It was such stirring feats and results-oriented outcomes that led a mentor impressed by her resume to comment, “You’re going to have to take half of this stuff out because nobody is going to believe that you did all of this in such a short period of time.” To help us better understand the career mind-set that once guided her thinking, Sheeran issues a mock impression of herself: “I work incredibly hard because that’s what I do—I work smart, and I work hard, and I go in and achieve, and I never fail.” To which she adds: “I thought I was invincible because I used to be able to sleep.” She explains: “Monday to Friday, I might have slept 4 hours—or some nights, even worked straight through—but I could always sleep on the weekend. But now, with kids, I could no longer sleep on weekends.” Of course, we know that more than sleep—or the lack of it—is responsible for altering Sheeran’s career mind-set. It was during her turnaround CFO chapter that Sheeran, then the mother of a 2-year-old and a 9-month-old—encountered experiences that she had never run into before. Sheeran recalls: “I ran into a wall—and I never run into walls.” There were days, Sheeran tells us, when she found herself unable to answer emails. This is a frank admission that Sheeran uses to expose what now appears to be a turning point in her career. “The experience made me redefine who I was and how I was going to do my job going forward—and unfortunately I had to learn by failing,” explains Sheeran, who would step down as CFO and vacate the professional world for a period of 2 years, during which the pandemic arrived. Along the way, as Sheeran’s oldest child reached school age, she and her husband agreed that her home front status need not be a long-term plan. Reports Sheeran “I may be a great CFO, but I’m not great when I’m home with the kids all day.” Last January, as she began evaluating opportunities for returning to the C-suite, Sheeran listed market potential, fast growth, and smart people as the most requisite characteristics of a business that she would like to join. In addition, she wanted a workforce culture and set of values that she could “get behind,” before adding yet one more business characteristic to her wish list: “flexibility.” Comments Sheeran: “I really wondered whether I was pushing the boat too far.” In July 2022, Sheeran was named CFO of Pricefx, a fast-growing pricing software company that she credits with having checked every box on her list. Indeed, flexibility soon turned out to be a very important box when the date of Sheeran’s daughter’s first day of school in late August ended up being scheduled to coincide with a Pricefx strategy meeting—which quickly landed elsewhere on the calendar.    Remarks Sheeran: “We believe in family, and it’s not just lip service.” –Jack Sweeney 

If, as the old maxim suggests, “life” is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans, Adil Syed’s other plans most likely did not include Snap Inc—or at least they didn’t when he first headed east to attend business school. Having spent the previous 3 years at Redpoint Ventures helping to raise capital for such tech gladiators as Stripe and Zendesk and 5 more at Goldman Sachs as a financial analyst, Syed was ready to have a typical business school experience in which he’d spend his days going to class and nights attending gatherings with classmates. Sure enough, this was how Year 1 of Syed’s business school experience unfolded. It was during his second year, that he stepped into a role that would arguably become the most consequential of his finance career. “I was the first summer intern at Snapchat, which at the time had only about 100 or so engineers and appeared to me to be such unique place that eventually I decided to join them full-time,” recalls Syed, who notes that the opportunity to work for the Venice, California-based company was worth all of the complications that it brought. “My second year of business school consisted of me working full-time in Venice while flying back and forth to complete my classes and graduate as best I could,” reports Syed, whose professional life suddenly faced a challenge unlike any that it had yet encountered. “We had a billion dollars of venture funding in the bank,” he remembers, “and the app was growing like we had never seen before. Yet there was no real business model. There was no financial rigor. There was no forecast to tell us how to sell and monetize the app.” Over the next several years, Syed would serve in a series of finance, strategy, and operations roles at the company. Less than 2 years after his arrival at the company, Snap went public and increased its market value by nearly $9 billion on its first day of trading. More than 200 million shares—the entire size of the offering—changed hands over the course of the day making the Snap IPO a big day on the tech industry’s calendar of Wall Street milestones. The historic IPO would fall roughly midway into Syed’s Snap career chapter and provide set of experiences that Syed says offered as many finance leadership lessons after the IPO as he had learned before. “This was a start-up that went from 100 employees in 2015 to 3,000-plus by 2019—It challenged my perspective on how to grow and scale systems, processes, and people,” he explains. “Ultimately, performance has to be coached, managed, and mentored, and there has to be a partnership,” observes Syed, who believes that while he originally performed poorly as a finance partner, along the way he learned how partnership depends on finance becoming part of the “operating fabric” of the business. Concludes Syed: “I learned that the hard way. I probably failed more than I succeeded at first, but then hopefully I finally got it right.” –Jack Sweeney

It was after Ross Muken had been gainfully roaming the corridors of equity research for more than a dozen years that the acquisition of his firm administered a dose of operations insight that began to feed his aspirations to become a CFO.   At the time, Muken was a top research analyst for ISI Group, an independent, research-driven trading firm that had begun to attract the attention of a number of the investment banking world’s largest banks—including Evercore, which in August 2014 acquired ISI and its 28 research analysts covering 345 companies in 10 major industry sectors. “It was through this process that I saw what needs to happen when you integrate two businesses and need to drive cost synergies and margin expansion,” recalls Muken, who that point was helping to spearhead the firm’s healthcare and life sciences realm, an area of research that was enjoying some added luster due to a recent boom in biotech.   Along the way, Muken says, it became apparent that the 20-plus-percent operating margins that management was targeting for the newly merged entity would be a bigger challenge than expected. “It couldn’t just be the cost side of the equation—what was going to get us there was new revenue streams,” remarks Muken, who reports that the firm began evaluating possibilities in a number of untapped “adjacent markets” before formulating a strategic investment inside the equity capital markets business.   “We had committed to the Street that we’d meet these margin targets, so putting in additional costs didn’t feel great, but our view was to be tactical and take some cost out but then reinvest those dollars to achieve higher margins,” comments Muken, who doesn’t hesitate to share the outcome.     “This paid back tenfold, and we were able to build a very large revenue base with better margins in this new business, which allowed us to get to our margin targets without shrinking headcount,” says Muken, who today credits the tactical move with more than margin expansion. He explains: “We had to take a strategy that made sense on paper and then have it make sense to shareholders from a numbers standpoint—and it was because of this experience that I decided to move to the operations side of things.” –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss how hiring challenges have led certain organizations to be more tolerant of poor employee behaviors – a development that could be putting growing numbers of businesses at risk. Meanwhile, Brett points out that new hires continue to fetch bigger salaries creating an imbalance with existing employee salaries. Also, performance is not driven by talent alone. Brett says product issues are sometimes thought to be talent issues leading management to put in motion a string of misguided remedies. This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Asil Syed of Rippling, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, CFO Bryan Morris of Demandbase.

Inside the world of trade associations, the135-year-old American Coatings Association’s has never wavered in its dedication to advancing the needs of professionals inside the paints and coatings industry. However, ACA members—like those of many associations these days—are becoming increasingly demanding when it comes to the value that they receive in exchange for their dues. “In the old days, belonging to an industry association was a badge of prestige, and it was something that people felt that they just had to do if they were part of an industry,” comments Ilana Esterrich, who was named ACA’s CFO in 2019 after having served as chief administrative officer for a Washington think tank and spent the previous decade among the financial planning rank-and-file of Thomson Reuters and General Mills Corp. Upon her arrival, Esterrich was told that to better address the escalating demands of ACA’s membership, she needed to clean house—beginning with the accounting department, which seemed to be a province populated by known underperformers.   “I came in thinking that this was going to be a turnaround situation, and it was—but not in the way that I think management thought that it was going to be,” reports Esterrich, who after assessing the “skills and wills” of her accounting team members rendered a verdict of “not guilty” on all counts. It turned out that instead of being based on malfeasance, the accounting department’s laggard reputation was rooted in dated systems and processes—a set of circumstances that she and her team have since taken steps to correct. Meanwhile, Esterrich discovered that a number of the association’s traditional sales practices involving media needed to be updated in order to be able to provide the sales team with better guidance when it came to determining if and when a customer could receive a discount. No unlike most associations, ACA has long published a membership magazine, which Esterrich was told operated profitably. “However, when we took a ‘fully loaded’ look at the costs of the magazine, we were upside down in the red,” recalls Esterrich, who sought to distance ACA from associations that choose to view the price tag of their member magazines as a necessary evil. Says Esterrich: “Finance needed to show where the magazine brought value and where it did not—and at what cost.” –Jack Sweeney

Among the recruitment milestones that populate Bryan Morris’s CFO resume, few can match the 6-month talent acquisition binge that he launched during the first quarter of 2015. “In terms of key hires, I never hired faster than I did then,” comments Morris, as he begins to lay out the circumstances that led to his need to speedily attract and hire talent. At the time, Morris was the newly appointed CFO of Xamarin, a creator of software tools used for mobile apps development.   This firm, then led by cofounder and CEO Nat Freidman, had doubled its revenue annually for the previous few years yet had theretofore focused its talent recruitment efforts mainly on nabbing software engineers and intrepid salespeople. “When it came to people, sales, marketing, and R&D were way out ahead of G&A, so I knew that my first few months would be dedicated to recruiting,” recalls Morris, who notes that until his arrival, the developer had outsourced its accounting function while relying on fractional CFO services to patch any management voids. “I made five key hires—head of HR, head of technical recruiting, controller, head of FP&A, and our first corporate counsel—all within the first 6 months,” remarks Morris, who believes that hiring can at times benefit from its own momentum. He explains: “Sometimes, when you’re in a great situation and your company is growing, the press is great and the buzz is good—and what happens is that one great hire begets another. So, I kind of had this pinwheel going.” Still, what happened next made Morris’s energetic hiring spree all the more consequential. During the second half of 2015, as Xamarin was preparing for another capital raise, Microsoft—one of the developer’s strategic partners—acknowledged that not only would it be willing to serve as a reference on behalf of Xamarin for the venture investor community but also it might be interested in partnering with Xamarin to pursue something more strategic.   Subsequently, 12 months into Morris’s CFO tenure at Xamarin, company management signed a letter of intent (LOI) to sell the business to Microsoft. Looking back, Morris doesn’t hesitate to expose some of the drama that preceded Microsoft’s signed LOI. “Here were my team and I—with only some 3 to 6 months of working together—and suddenly we were up against one of the most capable technology buyers in the world,” remembers Morris, who today believes that the timing of Xamarin’s key hires and the timing of the deal were not unrelated events. “I couldn’t have done it by myself,” observes Morris, who points out that there were a number of 20-hour days during the period leading up to the finalization of the deal. Morris notes that the merger provided mostly great outcomes for both investors and Xamarin employees—not excluding CEO Nat Friedman, who until late 2021 served as CEO of GitHub, which Microsoft had acquired in 2018. Looking back on the CEO who hired him and the subsequent “pinwheel effect” that within 6 months transformed Xamarin’s lines of functional management, Morris highlights a shared mission: “Luckily, Nat was completely on board—he knew what I was inheriting, so he gave me the green light to go ahead and hire.” –Jack Sweeney

When JJ Pace tells us that he was hired in 2002 to build and eventually lead a finance team that would create and implement monthly budgets for a four-location building materials company located within Charlotte, North Carolina’s greater metro area, the sense of accomplishment that he exudes never falters even when he eventually confides: “In the end, I was the last employee there.” It turns out that Pace’s 5-year stint as a controller (2002–2007) for Build It With Brick of Greater Charlotte was transformational not necessarily for the company but certainly for Pace, who first joined the company as an operations-minded executive but soon found himself knee deep in Excel spreadsheets and month-end reporting tasks. “My job was to basically build the finance team from scratch for what was at the time an expanding business,” explains Pace, who grew into a finance leader as he contributed to the management insight that made Build It With Brick a successful company—until it wasn’t. “Unfortunately, there was nothing that we could do. We were undercapitalized to ride out the downturn, and the decision was made to close the company,” comments Pace, who despite the bitter outcome refused to exit Charlotte’s building materials and construction corridor and over the next few years found work as a controller for several small to midsize Charlotte firms. Along the way, Pace would also return to school locally and receive an MBA with a concentration in finance from Queens University of Charlotte. It was with an MBA in hand and nearly a decade of controllership experience behind him that in 2013 Pace accepted a CFO role with Service Pros Installation Group, a flooring installation company that today has 68 locations across the 16 states. “It’s been a fun ride: Over the past 9 years, our compound annual growth rate has been 52.9 percent,” remarks Pace, whose finance team today serves Service Pros as well as two other operating companies—each with its own controller and a combined workforce of more than 500 employees. –Jack Sweeney

When Mike Taylor mentions the customer experience during our talk, his intent—unlike that of many of his CFOs peers—is not to boast of some vast reservoir of data from which customer insights are routinely being gleaned. Instead, he brings this up to let us know that there are some things that finance still struggles to see and measure. This is a startling admission from a finance leader who has already drawn our attention to his sharp lines of sight into the CFO role with the comment “Making certain that I am grounded in data is what has helped me to be a better CFO.” Still, Taylor seems to distance himself from this bit of data wisdom for the moment in order to make a broader point about the customer experience and financial analysis. Having served in several CFO roles over the past two decades, Taylor has a rich career portfolio from which to extract CFO lessons. Nevertheless, he quickly turns our attention to his nearly decade-long tenure at electric car manufacturer Tesla, where he held a number of senior finance positions, including vice president of finance and treasurer.   It was during the early years of Tesla’s groundbreaking Model S, Taylor recalls, that a financial analyst shared with him some analysis that revealed how a door handle modification could result in a per-car cost saving of hundreds of dollars. “In the car industry, you’re looking to save quarters and dollars all through the bill of materials, so when you’re talking hundreds of dollars, this is just a fantastic moment,” reports Taylor, who credits the analyst with providing the required analytical firepower to prompt Tesla’s finance team to advocate for the adoption of “identical handles” for the Model S instead of the original ones, which had been designed individually with unique geometric shapes that were flush with each door. Taylor continues: “The idea got shot down, and we scratched our heads. So, I went and talked with some of the designers. They asked, ‘Mike, what’s the first tangible experience that you have with a car?,’ and I replied, ‘Well, you know, I see it and I walk up to it, and then I touch the door handle.’” Thus, Taylor adds, this exchange served up a lesson in product design and how it is often the unseen levers of customer impact that ultimately drive sales. “Your spreadsheets can tell you a whole lot about any business situation but focus first on what the customer impact of your product is,” observes Taylor, who also credits customer impact with having been the key determining factor in his original decision to join the car manufacturer. At the time, Taylor notes, Tesla had sold only a few hundred cars, sight unseen, at more than $100,000 per vehicle. “As part of my due diligence, I spent hours and hours on blogs and inside customer online forums,” he remembers. “I ended up thinking, ‘If this product has this type of customer passion, how can I not take this leap?’” –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack discuss the data tsunami that many organizations are now facing and what steps finance executives can take to replace their historical, backward-looking, "batch mode" thinking with more proactive approaches that will allow finance teams to achieve more predictive outcomes. This episode's distinguished Planning Aces reveal the leadership mindsets and approaches now driving the shift away from batch mode. Featuring FP&A insights and commentary from CFO Claire Bramley of Teradata,  CFO Sandra Rowland of Xylem, CFO Anna King of Mesh Payments and CFO Pat Dillon of Flock Freight.

Rob Young remembers that back in 2001, when he joined the incoming class of newbie accountants at KPMG’s Short Hills, New Jersey, office, there was a 5- to 6-year age difference between his KPMG classmates and himself. “It was a situation where a 23-year-old was telling me what to do, but at the same time, they had more experience than I then did,” comments Young, whose arrival inside the public accounting realm stands as a professional milestone rarely found on the resume of our CFO guests.    Turn back the clock, and Young, a high school graduate, is proudly receiving an apprenticeship qualification to work as a construction journeyman. Over the next 4 years, he would join a union and oversee a variety projects, while at the same time learning to manage people and the expectations of others. Having started a family and enjoyed some early career success, Young found that a growing sense of purpose led him to enroll in night school for a 2-year college program—where he made an impression on an accounting professor. “Nobody sat in the front row, so I sat there—I’m raising my hand and answering questions, and that intrigued him,” explains Young, who credits the professor with being the most consequential mentor of his finance career. For starters, the educator helped Young to apply his maturing business acumen to writing business plans for the Small Business Administration—a stint that eventually paid well enough to enable him to forfeit his construction pay. When Young eventually completed his 2-year degree, Rutgers University offered him a full scholarship to earn a bachelor’s degree, provided that he attend full-time. “I could have taken another 6 years to go part-time and pay the way myself or gone full-time and just gotten it done,” comments Young, who subsequently accepted the scholarship, graduated from Rutgers, passed the CPA exam, and joined KPMG. As it turned out during his early days at KPMG, the father of two and newly minted CPA once more found himself experiencing a sense of purpose, this time amidst his newfound generation gap. Reports Young: “It was somewhat humbling—but it taught me to manage up.” –Jack Sweeney

Several years ago, when CFO Anna King first began to champion the benefits of real-time data, she recalls a sudden clamor around new customer activity afforded her the consensus-building moment for which she’d been waiting. At the time, King worked for Transactis, a payment processing company that she had first joined in 2011 as a controller. A year later, after having helped to raise the company’s Series C financing, she found herself being appointed CFO. “I was completely shocked—but I was grateful for the board’s confidence in me,” recollects King, who would occupy the CFO office until 2019, when Transactis was acquired by Mastercard. Along the way, King got to work alongside seasoned entrepreneurial CEO Joe Proto, who counted Transactis as his third start-up and had a “playbook” when it came to scaling a business. While King’s C-level appointment gave her new stature within the company, the move to leverage real-time data cross-functionally within the firm demanded something more. “Change management is typically very difficult,” comments King, who observes that frequently during her tenure she came to rely on the power of consensus-building. “I had to get the CTO on board because we needed some ‘dev’ resources—which are always hard to obtain—and I needed to convince our CRO that he would be better able to communicate his needs to management,” remarks King, who notes that the initial stages of the effort involved integrating data from the company’s operations, accounting systems, and sales pipeline. Says King: “We were able to see in real time how much revenue we had made on a given day or month-to- date, and by seeing the pipeline data, we were able to forecast what the rest of the month would look like.”   Still, the value of the data was not immediately apparent to each of the functional groups, and King would sometimes have to demonstrate how to put the data to work. Such was the case with the Transactis sales team, which had been amplifying a request for additional resources in response to reports of new customer activity. However, management had been somewhat reluctant to give approval, given that the reports remained more or less only anecdotal.  “We were able to show via new dashboards that there was new customer activity, which allowed them to get them the resources that they needed,” points out King, who adds that one functional area’s experience with real-time data soon led to its spread to other areas. Concludes King” “Change management is really about how you communicate and tell the story and build the consensus.” –Jack Sweeney

When Andrew Gehrlein is asked about experiences that prepared him for a finance leadership role, one week from his 25-year career climb quickly comes to mind.   Back in 2008, Gehrlein was a controller with ERICO International Corp., a manufacturer of specialized electrical components engineered to better foster a building’s safety. “Construction companies used us to ensure the safety and integrity of their buildings, and, as a result, we commanded premium margins in the manufacturing industry,” reports Gehrlein, who recalls that as the economic downturn began to grab headlines, he found himself sequestered in a conference room for at least a week with his CFO, poring over ERICO’s different budgets. “The overall lesson for me was that when you have the data and understand the business, you can then apply it to whatever situation may face you,” remarks Gehrlein, who notes that during the sequestered week, the company’s FP&A was deployed to execute and analyze alternative scenarios. “We ended up not having any layoffs within the business,” remembers Gehrlein, who adds that the experience also left him somewhat in awe of the depth of knowledge of the business that both the CFO and the CEO had brought to the analysis. While Gehrlein credits numbers and data with providing much of the strategic insight that he has gleaned during the course of his career, he underlines one particular piece of advice that his then-CEO personally delivered.   “He pulled me aside and said, ‘Andy, words matter!,’” comments Gehrlein, who says that the CEO told him that it was very important to be very specific when it came not only to choosing words but also to how the words were spoken.  According to Gerhlein, this leadership lesson applied to gatherings big and small in attendance as well as in importance. Says Gerhlein: “He would plot out exactly what message he wanted to deliver to the board and how to say it—and he would just always counsel us to in effect do the same thing.” –Jack Sweeney

We are nearly at the end of our talk with CFO Tracy Curley when she mentions her two adult children. “I’m really blessed that they knew how important my career was to me when I was raising them,” remarks Curley, who recalls that during their younger years, it was not unusual for the children to find their mother in bed late at night answering emails on her laptop. Suddenly, the questions populating the margins of our handwritten notes no longer seem to nag at us. Why did she work for KPMG as long as she did (6 years)? Why did she move to Honolulu? Why did she not arrive in the CFO office sooner? Certainly, Curley is not the only finance leader and parent who has confessed to us a woeful email habit. However, she may be the first to allow us to witness the habit through the eyes of children.  With one stray comment, the career path that we’ve been discussing for 40 minutes comes more sharply into view. Like many of the women finance leaders with whom we’ve spoken, Curley has taken longer to reach the CFO office than our average CFO guest (21 years), and indeed her path has clearly been punctuated by more than her own professional priorities. During the early years of her career, Curley was married to a military officer—a match that she says placed her in a life where “the spouse followed along.”  At once, her stints with KPMG in Kansas City, Honolulu, and Boston make better sense to us. Still, it’s worth mentioning that marriage was not Curley’s only experience with the military. It turns out that she was among the third class of women admitted to the U.S. Military Academy and attended West Point from 1979 to 1981.  When she left West Point without graduating, she was not alone. The high attrition rate for West Point’s female cadets among its early classes—particularly their 3rd year—was alarmingly high. Besides the rigors of a military educational program, women cadets often faced the wrath of certain male cadets who wanted to see the women fail. “They now have more than 100 women who have graduated from Ranger School—to me, this is just phenomenal,” says Curley, referencing The Airborne and Ranger training program at Fort Benning, Georgia, known to be one of the most grueling courses in the Army.  As is the case with most women finance leaders, it’s not always what appears on their CFO resume that’s most important, but what doesn’t. Comments Curley: “My son decided to become a CPA and is now a partner at KPMG, and my daughter is now an elementary art teacher.” –Jack Sweeney

Turn back the clock to the mid-1990s, and Aaron Hartwig is standing behind the front desk of a Las Vegas hotel, checking in guests and welcoming them to the always spirited city. “I always loved hospitality—I love the idea of having people come to your property to enjoy themselves,” reports Hartwig, who first landed in “guest services” as a recent college graduate with a degree in hotel administration. Still, at the time, he remained uncertain with regard to within which functional area in hospitality he should try to build his career. Then came word that MGM Grand Hotel & Casino was looking to hire a number of accountants—or, rather, a number of accounting interns. Hartwig signed on, envisioning that the program could lead to something more permanent with MGM’s accounting department—a notion that soon became a reality. “I did accounts receivable at $8.65 an hour, and from there I worked for a number of different people—some of whom became my mentors—which allowed me to learn and move forward in my career,” explains Hartwig, who notes that years later, one of his mentors recruited him to fill a controller role for a casino about to file for bankruptcy.   “To make a long story short, I trusted him and it became a tremendous learning experience for me,” remarks Hartwig, who adds that the casino’s turnaround involved having two audits by the Nevada Gaming Control Board within a single year.  “Typically, you have one gaming audit from the board every 2 to 3 years, but these were back-to-back and it was like we had to cram 3 years of work into one,” comments Hartwig, who found that his controllership tour of duty helped to validate his credentials for future CFO roles at some of Nevada’s flourishing small to midsize casinos. Says Hartwig: “I like the people aspect of hospitality, but the casino business is so fast-paced and dynamic that it makes the days that I spend here all the more special.” –Jack Sweeney

When Kate Bueker first left the world of investment banking for a corporate finance role, she was ready to savor the fabled congruity that a business finance career often offers. “I felt that what would be more interesting and motivating to me would be more consistent,” recalls Bueker, who shortly after joining Akamai Technologies in 2007 became the first business finance executive to become “embedded” with the technology company’s network team. “At the time, Akamai’s cost of goods sold—which was mostly their network costs—was growing faster than revenue, so the CFO at the time asked me if I could like figure out what was going on, or ‘what was driving this,’” explains Bueker, who reports that she and her team quickly zeroed-in on the company’s spiraling co-location costs, the fees being paid to operate the physical facilities that housed the company’s network servers. “We worked together on an operational change that would basically rebuild the existing co-location facilities and free up capacity from within the space that we were already paying for—and it ended up that we did not add another dollar of co-location fees for the 2 years following this change,” comments Bueker, whose nine different future business partnering activities at Akamai ended up involving both the product engineering and go-to-market sides of the business. “What makes these different parts of the organization successful is a bit different—and the personalities and perspectives are a bit different—so the holistic view was something that became increasingly valuable to me,” remarks Bueker, who today assumes a similar vantage point when reflecting back on the personalities and perspectives that once populated her investment banking days. “As with many roles, over time mine transitioned to one that determined more by relationship management and sales,” observes Bueker, who notes that she came to realize that while she excelled at financial analysis and the negotiation aspects of being an investment banker, she was not always “a comfortable salesperson.” Says Bueker: “I think that the irony of the whole thing is that as you get more senior in your career, your success is more about partnering across the business and influencing people outside of your core area, which—when you step back and think about it—is really sales after all.” –Jack Sweeney 

Brett & Jack discuss why organizations must have a value proposition for their employees.  This episode each of our featured Workplace Champions gives us different perspectives on what they've done to help attract human capital to their organizations. Again, the question management teams need to be asking:  What's the value proposition that will help us attract the best talent? This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Claire Bramley of Teradata, CFO Rajesh Gupta of OakNorth Bank, and CFO Mark George of Norfolk Southern.

Unlike many CFOs who tell us that their finance career paths did not intersect with the investor relations (IR) function until shortly before their arrival in the CFO office, Chuck Triano relates that his actually began inside the IR function. In fact, most of the experiences that he credits with shaping his finance leadership portfolio were gleaned during a multi-chapter IR leadership career. Still, Triano’s expansive IR resume is not unusual among life sciences CFOs, who say that high-calorie IR/communication skills have long distinguished the sector’s finance leadership.    For Triano, whose resume includes a 13-year IR leadership tour with Pfizer and 8 years with Forest Laboratories, the IR path provided an uncompromising view of CFO leadership—one that other members of the finance rank-and-file are unlikely to experience. According to Triano, it’s not unusual for IR executives to find themselves seated alongside their CFOs and at times actively assisting the finance leader as he or she seeks to achieve a discerning and influential narrative about the business. Along the way, Triano recalls, his powers of narrative storytelling were put to the test nowhere more than at Pfizer, where at one point he became responsible for “putting down on paper” the company’s 6- to 7-year plan. Providing investors with an extended view into the future can be a delicate task, but inside the world of pharmaceuticals—where drug patent expirations loom large—providing an over-the-horizon look for investors can be especially hazardous, admits Triano. Still, Triano realized that there was no turning back.   “We had to make the long-term picture clearer, so we needed to talk about these things and get out in front of them,” reports Triano, who notes that the experience became liberating for the business in a way. Looking back at the task of helping to create Pfizer’s long-term outlook, Triano says: “I began by thinking, ‘How do we weave a story out of this?,’” –Jack Sweeney

When Samsung acquired Stamford, Connecticut-based Harman International for $8 billion in cash in 2017, it was not the first time that the South Korean company’s appetite for convergence IP had intersected with the career path of Harman CFO Sandra Rowland. A little more than 7 years earlier, Samsung executives had sat across the table from Rowland when she was head of corporate FP&A for Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York. At the time, Kodak was busily negotiating IP licensing deals with several smartphone manufacturers, including Samsung, that were eager to leverage what Kodak had amassed—an inventory of more than 1,000 digital-imaging patents. “Kodak was the inventor of the digital camera, and there was a real opportunity there to leverage the intellectual property and create a key funding source,” reports Rowland, who left Kodak in 2012 after a Harman board member recommended her for a top IR role. She would enter Harman’s CFO office 2 years later. “There’s a high correlation between investor relations and company strategy, and at Harman the role involved the execution of M&A transactions as well as the corporate strategy,” comments Rowland, who adds that IR remained her primary focus for the first six months, after which point she took on a variety of corporate development activities. Not unlike the case during her years at Kodak, the winds of technology convergence were steadily blowing at Harman, a publicly held company specializing in designing and integrating in-vehicle technologies. Observes Rowland: “Whether it is automotive technologies or consumer technologies, there is a lot of convergence—and people want the same experience in their cars today that they have with smartphones at home.” Of course, Samsung’s $8 billion in cash afforded the electronics giant something more than Harman’s IP and technologies—it also acquired long-term relationships with most of the world’s largest automakers. “As part of the transaction, the Samsung’s team asked our key leaders to stay because they were new to the automotive space,” states Rowland, who as part of her agreement with Samsung remained as CFO of a newly formed Harman independent subsidiary for a period of 3 years.   It was less than 30 days beyond the expiration of her Samsung agreement that Rowland was named CFO of water technology company Xylem—thus opening a new CFO chapter for her with plenty of converging technologies to explore. Asked about parting from Samsung, Rowland admits, “I did want to go back and become a public company CFO once again.” –Jack Sweeney

The expression “accelerated learning” has been used by a number of our recent CFO guests to distinguish periods within their careers when circumstances demanded a hastened pace of knowledge gain. For Jamie Britton, this period of time began when an economist at SunTrust Bank pulled him into a conference room and offered him a position on a newly formulated team being tasked with supporting the bank’s senior management in the midst of the economic downturn. “All eyes were on capital adequacy due to the massive losses that banks were having to recognize, and I had to come up to speed very quickly to learn how to calculate regulatory capital for the bank,” explains Britton, who was first hired by SunTrust in 2006 to help develop to a scenario analysis process for the bank’s operations. The new role, which Britton eagerly accepted, involved the creation of tools and metrics capable of serving senior management as it sought to maneuver away from the economic calamity. Recalls Britton: “We were charged with coming up with something that was fast, reliable, and reflective of all of the types of decisions that the board and senior management were having to make almost on an hour-by-hour basis.” Having added some luster to his risk credentials, Britton eventually joined Texas Capital Bank, where doors swung open to the finance executive as he introduced stress-testing processes to a number of functional areas. “When we did a good job in one area, we were then asked to partner with another area,” says Britton. “It was just a great way to learn the different parts of finance as well as the organization.” –Jack Sweeney

From the very start of our talk with CFO Claire Bramley, she let us know that she has long been part of the bigger conversation represented by the everyday back-and-forth discourse that punctuates decision-making inside a business. “I’m always saying that If you can’t explain it to the business, if you can’t explain it to a customer, it doesn’t matter how great your insight or idea is—if they don’t get it and you can’t communicate it, then it’s wasted,” explains Bramley, whose June 2021 appointment as CFO of Teradata had been preceded by a 15-year multi-continental climb up Hewlett-Packard’s finance career ladder—an impressive stint that ended with Bramley serving as the tech giant’s global controller. Turn back the clock on her HP years, and we see Bramley being recruited as a technical accountant in the UK before shortly thereafter being dispatched to the FP&A trenches of HP’s EMEA headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.        “It was intense learning for me at the time, but it was really helpful because it immediately made me realize that you have to understand the business to add value,” comments Bramley, who let us know that it was during her early days in Geneva when she first started joining HP’s bigger discussion, where she quickly began to amplify the concerns and challenges facing HP’s EMEA’s country management. “I was pushing corporate, and I was pushing the worldwide team and, to be honest, I think that they were like, ‘This is really becoming quite annoying—who is this person?,'” recalls Bramley, who received a number of promotions before being transferred to the U.S. to oversee HP’s worldwide FP&A team from its Palo Alto, California, headquarters. “Suddenly, I was on the other side of the fence looking back from the corporate perspective, and I realized how there’s not just one way of looking at things,” says Bramley, who lets us know that her contribution to the bigger discussion broadened as she climbed into upper management. Before advancing into HP’s global controller role, Bramley would once more be stationed in Geneva, this time serving as EMEA’s head of finance—a role that required her to be regularly engaged with EMEA’s sales leaders. It was here, Bramley tells us, amidst the everyday back-and-forth with some of HP’s top sales professionals, where she really began to glean an insight that every finance executive should keep in mind as they join the broader discussion. She explains: “There were explanations as to why something wasn’t what we expected it to be, and I remember taking these at face value and not digging down to the next level of detail. About a month later, I came to realize the error of my ways, and the strategic lesson for me was to let the data tell the story.” –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack discuss how FP&A is becoming a world beyond finance - where data expertise and insights are becoming as widely sought after as traditional accounting skills. Meanwhile, Steve urges finance professionals to take an enlightened view of robotic process automation (RPA).  Rather than replace the work of humans, the adoption of RPA offers finance professionals the opportunity to pursue new roles and opportunities ideal for developing future leaders, explains Steve. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Glenn Hopper of Sandline Global, CFO Adam Swiecicki of Brex, CFO Peter Walker of Sterling and CFO David Bedell of Lendio.

When Debbie Schleicher tells us that a football game between the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets and Clemson Tigers became her door-opener to the CFO office, we can’t help but want to listen. Back in 2014, she and her family were invited by a former client and serial CEO to one of the most anticipated games of the season. “Unfortunately, Georgia Tech beat Clemson 28 to 6,” remembers Schleicher, whose husband is a proud Clemson alum.    As the game unfolded, Schleicher recalls, her one-time client asked her if she would consider joining his start-up company as finance leader. “I was really surprised, and I remember taking a really long pause before saying anything,” comments Schleicher, who can still hear the question “Am I ready to be a CFO?” echoing through her head. “He looked at me, and said: ‘Is there anything about this role that you don’t think you can do?,’” explains Schleicher, who says that she immediately replied, “No.” To add more substance to her reply, Schleicher says, she subsequently began sharing some of the experiences from her past to add some luster to her CFO candidacy. Reports Schleicher: “The reason that I thought I was ready was that I knew that I had the technical ability. I had a track record of building teams and I had built service lines from the ground up, so I was confident that I could build a company.”    Looking back, Schleicher notes that besides the Clemson loss and the CFO job offer on the infamous “game day,” the outing can also be credited with putting in motion one other unexpected development: It seems that Georgia Tech gained a second win when some time later Schleicher’s  collegebound son opted to become a Yellow Jacket.  –Jack Sweeney 

When Flock Freight CFO Pat Dillon thinks back to his investment banking days at Morgan Stanley and considers the variety of CFOs from whom he once sat across, the banking veteran is struck by how at times the CFOs seem to have had little in common with one another. “What I saw was that their roles could be very different from one to the next,” explains Dillon, who notes that he came to view the CFO position as not one but many roles along a continuum across which that finance leaders migrate as their companies mature. “It wasn’t like a split, where this person was an accounting CFO and that person was a strategic CFO, but really more about the mix of responsibilities and where the CFO was allocating their time,” recalls Dillon, who observes that it was during conversations with CFOs that he would seek to make the finance leaders aware of where along the continuum they would need to begin allocating more of their time. Reports Dillon: “It’s no longer just about a good technology or about acquiring market share. You have to have predictable results. You have to understand that the role of the CFO and of the finance team is going to change and the requirements are only going to go up.“ Asked whether as a banker he had ever had to coax a finance leader to make finance team staff changes or beef up the company’s FP&A team, Dillon remarks: “I think that you have to tread lightly when it comes to making a particular staff recommendation. As an advisor, we have exposure to senior members of the finance team—but not enough to make a judgment regarding operations day to day.” Still, Dillon says, “You make very clear what kind of output and results the finance team is now going to have to produce as the company is evolving. Whereas it used to be just kind of providing information, you now have to hit your results.” Undoubtedly, every banking relationship has its own unique challenges, and certain finance leaders are better listeners than others. Comments Dillon: “The best relationships that I had as an investment banker were where I could talk about that evolution and say, “Hey, I can’t tell you how to run your organization, but I can help to preview where you’re going to start confronting a higher set of requirements and where you could experience pain points with investors if you don’t make certain changes.’” –Jack Sweeney

Bona Allen was never a country doctor—but he recollects feeling like one at one point in his finance career. Or, rather, being paid like one.      By the early 2000s, Allen had served in multiple CFO/controller roles, a series of consecutive appointments that from time to time had led different Georgia business owners to seek out his financial advice.      These discussions—which frequently focused on raising debt—opened his eyes to opportunities in the realm of financial consulting. “Often, I’d be engaged to raise debt for specific deals—a couple of clients were in the renewable energy sector, and then there were other deals involving big equipment,” recalls Allen, who notes that it was not uncommon to have his consulting fees structured as a “success fee” or a fee contingent on the success of the deal. Still, the owner was always expected to pay a small fee up front to cover some expenses, explains Allen, whose portfolio of clients would geographically grow beyond the greater Atlanta metro region to frequently send him to the state’s outer reaches to meet clients. It was from one such client visit in northeast Georgia that Allen returned home with a couple of cartons of fresh eggs. “My wife was like, ‘So now you’re getting paid in eggs?,’” remembers Allen, who recounts the story when asked to identify experiences that have influenced his mind-set as a finance leader.  He observes that the experience of being face-to-face outside of a traditional business environment with people tackling debt and other business challenges left a lasting impression. Says Allen: “The lesson that I learned there was stay humble because it’s the chicken farmers and the manufacturers and the people who often don’t work in a high rise who keep this country going.”   It’s mind-set that certainly any country doctor would understand. –Jack Sweeney

When Rajesh Gupta tells us that he likes change and fixing things that are broken, we can’t help but wonder how a finance career that has encompassed more than 20 years with General Electric has come to satisfy that appetite. Certainly, we reason, this number of years with a single company is more likely to accent the resume of a change-averse executive than that of someone who actively pursues it. However, as we quickly learn, Gupta’s GE years were spent across three continents, and 15 of them involved ever-acquisitive GE Capital. “Because GE Capital grew from a lot of different acquisitions, each of its new companies would in effect have its own culture—and rather than try to force their own culture on it, GE would instead introduce its leadership training and financial management approaches,” explains Gupta, whose career with GE began in India after he was first hired by a GE joint venture that was shortly thereafter acquired by GE Capital. “I was asked to join a leadership training program, which basically opened the door to opportunities through which I could take on different roles inside GE,” reports Gupta, whose vocational track quickly found traction inside GE’s M&A and commercial business partnering activities. From restructuring acquisitions to dealing with credit card operations, Gupta tells us, his appetite for change found a wealth of avenues to pursue. “I was heading down a path that I felt would someday allow me to become a general manager of a GE business unit—but then 2008 happened,” comments Gupta, who notes that the economic downturn of the late 2000s became something of a wakeup call. “When I looked at my CV, I saw that I had had a career that was difficult to explain to people and that I needed to make a choice rather than continue to straddle the general manager and finance worlds, so I decided to go down the finance track,” recalls Gupta, who in short order was named CFO of a bank owned by GE Capital in the Czech Republic. “I took hold of the position with both hands,” remembers Gupta, who years later doesn’t attempt to conceal the grave uncertainties of the time. Nonetheless, from that day forward—whether inside or outside of GE—Gupta has always had the CFO title preceding his name. Adds Gupta: “What became clear to me was that the outside world typically thinks about future roles based on the last role that you occupied.” –Jack Sweeney 

Looking back to the mid-1980s, Larry Angelilli knows now that he was at the time witnessing something that others would not see for decades. Before Jack Welch declared war on “green eyeshade” auditors or Indra Nooyi endowed Pepsico with a strategic finance function or conference promoters added the edgy words “The Changing Role of the CFO” to their event agendas, Angelilli was sitting courtside, observing the game-changing moves of Chrysler Corp. CFO Steve Miller. Angelilli—a banker then in his late 20s—had joined Chrysler Financial Corp. shortly after CFO Miller had arranged for loans from hundreds of banks under a government-insured loan program that would permit Chrysler to avoid bankruptcy—a feat that helped Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca to later achieve icon status. “At the time, Miller wanted to populate the finance team with bankers and people who knew credit risk and understood what could go wrong in the type of cyclical business that Chrysler was in,” explains Angelilli, who credits Miller with having had a survival instinct that enabled Chrysler to navigate the ups and downs of America’s auto manufacturing sector in the 1980s. Recalls Angelilli: “When Chrysler began to have trouble again, Miller became that pivotal person who had a strategy. It had everything to do with managing the balance sheet, generating liquidity, and picking winners and losers.”      In short, Angelilli describes Miller as “probably the best CFO in the United States” at that time. “I was a junior guy, working in M&A and asset-backed securities, but he showed us what was possible for the CFO role,” comments Angelilli, who notes that Miller was “totally plugged in to strategy and connected to the CEO.” Still, Angelilli says, Miller’s calm demeanor was what perhaps made him an exceptional CFO. “We’d be going through this epic change as a company and everyone would be nervous, and here was this incredibly calm person with a steady hand,” remarks Angelilli, who further compliments Miller as being “friendly and warm.” Says Angelilli: “If business were a democracy and you could vote for your CFO, Miller would have gotten 100 percent of the vote.” –Jack Sweeney

When Peter Walker looks back on his career, he never hesitates to highlight “the big asks,” or those times when he asked a boss to “take a chance” on him. One such instance occurred when he asked his CEO to sponsor his studies as he pursued an executive MBA on nights and weekends at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “He said ‘Yes,’ and the degree really flipped my brain from being that of an accountant to that of a big picture finance partner,” comments Walker, who was working for Assurant, a provider of risk management products and services. Still, an even bigger “ask” followed—one that engendered a response that even today seems to surprise Walker. “It was only a couple of months later that I found myself on a plane to Atlanta, about to step into the CFO role at a $2 billion business unit,” explains Walker, who recalls that this divisional CFO role opened up shortly after he completed his MBA—which allowed him to make the pitch, “Hey, you made this investment in me—the company needs a good ROI off this, so why not put me in that CFO role?” Today, Walker doesn’t hesitate to characterize his leap upward at the company as a case of “right place, right time.” However, he points out that the promotion came 9 years into a 17-year tenure with Assurant—a hefty investment of career years that spanned such milestones as the company’s 2004 IPO, multiple acquisitions, and expansion overseas. Other promotions followed and in 2014 Walker was named Assurant's CFO, followed by a stint as chief strategy officer. “As I sat in the chief strategy officer role, I really missed finance, as I view the CFO role today as the trifecta of finance, strategy, and leadership,” remarks Walker, who notes that during his strategy chief stint he had become increasingly interested in the deal-making mechanics of the private equity realm, an area to which his career thus far had offered only limited exposure.    Comments Walker: “I had had a lot of M&A experience within a public organization, but I wanted a turn at being the CFO leading the sale of a PE-owned organization so that I could gain another set of experiences—which, as it has turned out, have proven critical to reaching where I sit today.”    Walker was recruited to lead the successful sale of Jackson Hewitt from H.I.G. Bayside Capital to Corsair Capital and in 2017 was named CFO of Jackson Hewitt, a firm in Corsair’s portfolio. “I specifically went after a private equity opportunity and was looking for something where the sponsor was going to want to sell in the next year or two,” explains Walker, who would remain as CFO of Jackson Hewitt for another year (post-transaction) before stepping into the CFO office at Sterling in 2019.   Looking back, no matter how many CFO tours of duty or transaction milestones he achieves, Walker seems resolute in believing that none of them could have been achieved if not for “the big asks.” –Jack Sweeney

Michael Sumruld recalls that after investing 10 of his finance career–building years in oil field services giant Baker Hughes, he found a deep fog settling on the career path before him. Unlike the case with BH engineers—who could always be confident of being able to place a foot on the next rung of an ever-present career ladder—the climb upward for finance executives was becoming less and less visible. Or at least such was the case for any of BH’s finance rank-and-file who aspired to advance beyond the ranks of middle management. Rather than land a more senior finance position at another company, Sumruld set out to leverage some of what his 10-year BH investment had afforded him.   “In a decade’s time, I had developed relationships with different senior leaders, so I spent time with them and interviewed them to try to get a sense of what it would take to become CFO of Baker Hughes,” comments Sumruld, who adds that a research document highlighting his discussions with senior leaders later would later land on the desk of BH’s vice president of human resources. Part of what the document highlighted was the different experiences and knowledge sets that finance executives can gain when they are rotated into different positions. Says Sumruld: “We were able to put this in play—not formally, but informally—with a number of executives who were in my situation and had also become siloed as they had gone down a particular career path.” Along the way, Sumruld remembers, a number of his finance peers became mystified by career jumps that didn’t always align with their rank or tenure within the organization. “They’d say, ‘Mike, why are you exiting a finance VP role to become a director of IR?,’” recalls Sumuld, who notes that he views the director of IR role as a worthy prerequisite for any future CFO. Ultimately, Sumruld’s career with BH would end up spanning two decades, with his last 3 years spent as company treasurer—a position that the CFO granted after Sumruld expressed great interest in the role.   “He gave me a shot,” remarks Sumruld, who observes that the CFO was confident that if needed, his team had the bandwidth to support BH’s newbie treasurer.    “It’s uncomfortable to take on new roles,” reports Sumruld. “It’s not easy, but I think that this is what we need to do if we want to become leaders.” –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss how the economy's is sending the hiring environment mixed signals and how the inefficiencies of the recruitment function continue to be a drag on industry aspirations for building a more productive workforce. This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Adam Swiecicki of Brex, CFO Manish Sarin of Sprinklr, CFO Jason Keen of Mills Nebraska, and CFO Komal Misra of Starry

As the 32-year-old CFO of Brex, Adam Swiecicki has a professional narrative unpopulated by the tales of economic and business hijinks that many of our CFO guests share. Instead, Swiecicki’s forward-looking delivery seems intent on making a clean break from the CFOs of the past, whose career lessons frequently have involved the same one or two finance constituencies.   “I just realized that there is a broad ecosystem of people whom Brex touches,” he observes, “and it’s really important that we keep all of them in mind.”    To Swiecicki, the phrase “stakeholder capitalism” has become much more than a buzzword du jour and indeed a guiding principle for the kickoff of his CFO career. Having entered the CFO office from stints with investment banks and hedge funds, he realized quickly that he needed to make a “big change” when it came to his management mindset.    “I had heard about stakeholder capitalism, but I hadn’t really given it much thought until I stepped into the CFO role,” comments Swiecicki, who shortly after assuming the role of finance chief found himself engaging with not only investors and board members but also customers and employees.   “Historically, there has always been a view that shareholders and stakeholders are not aligned, but what I have come to realize is that they are very aligned when it comes to maximizing value for them both together,” reports Swiecicki. Meanwhile, having spent more than a few hours over the past 9 months with company customers, Swiecicki seems intent on removing any doubt that such an alignment exists, particularly when it comes to serving Brex’s customers. “The question that we like to think about is ‘What is the value that we’re creating for our customer?’—and this is really not so much a finance metric as it is a goal that the whole company can rally around,” remarks Swiecicki, who notes that executives from product management, engineering, and operations can now share the common goal of finding new value for the customer. Once this value has been created, the ball is back in finance’s court, where the finance team must determine a pricing model hopefully appropriate to achieving an even better alignment of common goals. Says Swiecicki: “From a pricing perspective, we want to extract some of this value for ourselves but ultimately deliver a lot of ROI for the companies that are buying our software products.” –Jack Sweeney

Just where and how Glenn Hopper came to acquire his finance skillset exposes an organizational dysfunction to which no small number of finance leaders have likely contributed. As a product manager for a small telecommunications firm, Hopper was asked by the vice president of marketing to begin giving presentations at a recurring management meeting regarding the allocation of marketing dollars and their impact on his specific product’s P&L.    “I was basically doing shadow FP&A for the marketing team,” explains Hopper, who adds that his presentations caught the eye of the company’s chief operating officer, who subsequently “poached” Hopper and tasked him with producing a similar financial analysis for the company’s operations at large. “The COO was tired of having to battle the CFO for the resources that he needed,” remarks Hopper, who went on to lead a department of 32 employees that was principally tasked with managing a $150 million annual operations budget, including $130 million of SG&A and $20 million of capital.  Looking back, Hopper recalls that “the company’s environment was very siloed—the finance team was very protective of their data, so the operations team was unable to plan because they did not have access to it.” According to Hopper, finance’s proprietary approach with the company data quickly began to magnify its cross-functional planning challenges as the company acquired and merged with a string of other firms. “What I learned from having to scrap and battle for the budgetary dollars outside of finance and at the same time still liaison with finance people was the importance of the finance department not just being in this ivory tower but seeking to understand the challenges of other departments,” he notes. Along the way, Hopper became visible throughout the organization to functional heads and C-suite executives, as well as to company investors, one of whom helped Hopper to open his first CFO career chapter when he recruited him to become finance chief for one of his new angel-round companies.  –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack discuss how pricing strategy has increasingly become top of mind for finance leaders as businesses become more responsive to customer behaviors, and Steve reflects on the virtues of time travel and how by asking finance leaders to reflect on their past experiences we enjoy a front row seat to view those experiences as they happen. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Mike Milotich of Marqeta, CFO Jeff Shepherd of Advance Auto Parts and CFO Mark George of Norfolk Southern.

Looking back at the early years of his finance career, David Bedell recalls being frustrated when a business unit leader remained leery about the merits of a potential deal. “I had done all of the analysis and was convinced that it would make a lot of money for the company, but I just couldn’t figure out how to convince him,” explains Bedell, who spent the balance of his early career years at software developer Intuit, where he advanced from running the gauntlet of FP&A projects to serving in multiple CFO business unit roles. “Finally, I bet my entire bonus for the year on it—I told the leader that if the deal failed, he could keep it, but if it was a win, I would appreciate my bonus being doubled,” explains Bedell, who notes that his confidence in his own analysis of the deal compelled him to break what he refers to as the “glass wall.” Says Bedell: “If we in finance limit ourselves to only making recommendations and choose to keep that wall between us, it’s just not personal enough.” For Bedell, his hefty investment in 13 Intuit career years appears to have been well spent, as the company achieved a number of strategic milestones, including the acquisition of Mint.com and the sale of Quicken. “I was just there at the right time with my hand raised, always being eager—and for people early in their career, it’s about being there at the right time,” comments Bedell.    As for the business leader whom Bedell once risked his bonus to win over, the end appears to have justified the means. “He just laughed at me and said, ’If you’re that confident, we’re going to do it,’” remarks Bedell, who adds that while his bonus bet may have been a bit “childish,” it got the job done. “Sometimes it’s not personal enough for finance,” he observes. “You have to push that emotion or excitement forward to the point where you’re part of the business and your soul is on the line—that’s what makes a great finance person.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Kabir Ahmed Shakir first arrived inside the CFO office at Tata Communications, the former Microsoft India CFO quickly determined that there was one person above all others who held sway over the company’s maturing transformation plans. “The person who is actually giving pricing to our customers needs to know how much cash we make on Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3,” explains Shakir, whose 2-year CFO tenure has spanned a period in which the company’s free cash flow has grown twentyfold.    “We had to bring our ‘cash thinking’ down to the deal profitability level,” reports Shakir, whose choice of words at first makes it sound as though his finance team had become tasked with running an errand. However, Shakir quickly clarifies the magnitude of what he was looking to achieve: “I wanted there to be an undying focus on cash. It’s not the most profitable companies that survive—it’s the liquid ones.” While this is certainly an organizational mind-set that many CFOs eventually reach, not that many do so within a span of time comparable to that of Shakir’s short ascent. For those who succeed in implementing the emphasis, as he appears to have done, leadership style is often the key contributing factor. Shakir, who spent 23 years climbing the finance career ladder at packaged goods giant Unilever, cites the scathing results of a 360-degree review that he once received as an aspiring future leader as the experience that most helped to shape his leadership skills: “It was the worst feedback of my life. Some of my friends even reported that I was a real pain to work with. They said, ‘When we come to you, you always have to show us how much smarter you are than all of the rest of us.’” In truth, a chastened Shakir tell us, he was indeed “nosy” by nature and would at times second-guess the work of others. Even faced with such cutting feedback, though, and as “extremely difficult” Shakir found it to change, nevertheless, change did come. “I have let go. And I now spend my time thinking, not doing, because that is what I’m paid to do,” observes Shakir, who says that Tata’s undying focus on cash took root with the help of many rather than just one. Adds Shakir: “When I first walked into Tata Communications, I told my team that I knew nothing of telecommunications. I said, ‘Help me learn.’” –Jack Sweeney

It was the type of assignment that Mike Milotich had been awaiting for most of his career. An innovative product team at American Express had just launched a promising new offering, and Milotich had been assigned to the group to help “optimize its day-to-day decision making”. “I arrived when it had been live for only maybe 4 to 6 weeks, and all of the traditional metrics indicated that it was a runaway success,” explains Milotich, who adds that the early consensus among team members and even the company at large was, “Wow! It looks like we may really have something here” As it turned out, the assignment provided Milotich with a singular perch from which to study the high-flying opportunity. “My job was to determine what was driving this success and what we were seeing with regard to the behaviors of customers that could be fueling this,” comments Milotich, who notes that such insight could have potentially uncorked a new secret sauce for the company as a whole.   However, there would be no recipe for significant new revenue.   Observes Milotich: “As we started to dig deeper, we began to understand that we had a problem.” The nagging question that began to haunt the product team was whether its new product was cannibalizing sales from existing customers.   “We set up a weekly meeting with the leader who ran the business, at which for an hour each week I would come in with analysis and say, 'Here’s what’s happening,'” recalls Milotich, who points out that at the time, the indications of cannibalization remained somewhat murky because behaviors of early adopters sometimes vary from those of broader customer segments.   As time moved forward, the leader and the greater team began to accept the idea that the product was flawed and changes were required. “Then the discussion shifted to ‘How do we maintain many of the new innovative attributes of the product but make certain that it’s both almost as attractive to the customer and at the same time not something that’s going to damage us financially?,’” reports Milotich, who in the weeks ahead would begin working closely with the team’s marketing and sales executives to help them to reposition the product to mitigate the risk of cannibalization. Says Milotich: “In something like a 6- to 9-month time period, we went from a kind of a euphoria to ‘Uh-oh!’ to then designing a solution that could hold on to the best parts of the product.” –Jack Sweeney

Last winter, when China ordered tens of millions of people back into a pandemic lockdown, executives inside the $170 billion automotive aftermarket parts industry took a deep breath. Jeff Shepherd, CFO of aftermarket giant Advance Auto Parts, says that the possibility of another China shutdown had just not been part of Advance’s procurement calculus. Still, parts “in stock” at Advance stores during 2022 have dropped only a few percentage points from their usual inventory level in the “mid-90th” percentile, according to Shepherd, who credits the anticipation of yet another China-related event as further evidence of Advance’s astute procurement practices.   “The last time China hosted the Olympics, they shut the power down and they shut the factories down. So, during the Games, you can’t get product out and it’s not being manufactured,” explains Shepherd, who notes that Advance’s procurement team anticipated a China shutdown in February due to the Beijing Olympic Games.  “We started doing a lot of buying late last year and very early this year,” comments Shepherd, who reports that not unlike those of its competitors, Advance’s 2021 supply chain troubleshooting efforts were related mostly to bottlenecks at U.S. ports and a confounding shortage of truck drivers.   “We’re not out of the woods now—I will tell you that it’s not perfect,” remarks Shepherd, regarding the existing supply chain challenges inside the U.S. However, if Advance’s “in stock” levels stay in line, the company may have a read on future developments in China. Says Shepherd: “I can’t take credit for knowing those things, but we were indeed able to get out in front of the China shutdown, and our ‘in stock’ percentages are now nearly back to their pre-pandemic levels.” –Jack Sweeney

It was nightly business conversations at his parents’ dinner table that first led Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah to consider alternatives to business when it came to building a career. “As most small business owners do, my parents worked all the time—and as with most small businesses, things could at times be financially challenging,” explains Mahendra-Rajah, who vividly recalls business rent increases, outstanding receivables, and the dynamics behind supply and demand that pervaded his parents’ dinner conversations. Nevertheless, it was this same scrutiny of supply-and-demand dynamics that Mahendra-Rajah credits with helping him to “come full circle” and ultimately led him to business school. At the time, Mahendra-Rajah was working full-time as a senior process engineer for chemical giant FMC Corp., a career-building stint that afforded him the real-world insights required to enrich a master’s thesis that he needed in order to complete a chemical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins. “It was my first job out of college, and the plant manager’s M.O. was to always beat me up and demand more cost reductions and better process yields,” recalls Mahendra-Rajah, who notes that his immersion into the business side of manufacturing quickly escalated when FMC received a large order for a synthetic that the company no longer manufactured. “I was given the task of refurbishing an old factory and getting it up and running in a matter of weeks,” remembers Mahendra-Rajah, who adds that the production of the once-discontinued synthetic led the plant manager’s mind-set to suddenly pivot. “He was pushing me to spend as fast as I could. I was told not to negotiate with suppliers, and if I needed overtime for the maintenance workers, to ‘go for it’—schedule was paramount, cost was secondary,” explains the career finance leader, who credits the experience with helping him to open a door that he had once shut. Says Mahendra-Rajah: “It kind of brought me back to the table with Mom and Dad and made me realize how so much of our world is really driven by supply and demand and how finance is the oil in the gears." –Jack Sweeney

Even after serving in multiple CFO roles and spending 10 years on Wall Street, Manish Sarin still marvels at the plus-size experience that he acquired in the mid-1990s when he worked for Price Waterhouse as a financial advisor in its Nairobi office in Kenya, East Africa. At the time, Sarin recalls, an abundance of available funding from the World Bank and IMF was enticing growing numbers of state-owned business in the region to privatize their operations as a prelude to jump-starting their capital market strategies. “These were businesses like steel mills, aluminum plants, car dealerships, and commercial banks—for me, it was just an amazing introduction to how businesses work, what makes them successful or not successful, and how to actually evaluate businesses from a capitalistic perspective,” explains Sarin, who reports that he was the most junior member of the East African privatization practice, a team of 10 people within PW’s 100-employee Nairobi office. Says Sarin: “Our clients were really the World Bank and IMF—we would go and work at state-owned businesses at their request and then prepare and present our analysis to both the World Bank and the national government.”     Twenty years later, as Sarin prepared to open his first CFO chapter, some of those presentations undoubtedly came to mind as he began to formulate his own vision for the role and the broader business contexts that Wall Street now expects 21st-century finance leaders to deliver. Along the way, Sarin tells us, he has learned that a broader perspective is being demanded not only by outside stakeholders. “A few years ago, a head of sales told me, ‘You have great ideas, Manish, but you need to provide greater context and better explain why you are doing the things that you are doing,’” remarks Sarin, who says that he took the advice to heart and has found that adding more context has accelerated his relationship-building with different parts of the organization. “If a CFO approaches the role from the perspective of occupying a finance swim lane, I think that this is a very narrow view of the role—it has to be much broader, and you have to be thinking, ‘the entire company and what is happening in every department are part of my concern,’” explains Sarin.  - Jack Sweeney

When Mark George first joined Otis Elevator’s accounting team back in the late 1980s, he found fixed asset accounting to be different from what he expected. Says George: ”We had to run around the company and put barcodes on any new piece of furniture that the company had purchased.” What’s more, George tells us, he roamed the corridors as a deputy in the accounts payable department, “punching A/P vouchers” and acquiring any necessary signatures. “I was always thinking, ‘How do I get away from doing this?,’” comments George, who notes that as a 20-something-year-old he sometimes felt like a “fish out of water” at Otis, which back then—as it is now—was part of the larger conglomerate patchwork that is United Technologies Corp. “I understood accounting to a certain degree, but I was definitely not an accountant,” recalls George. Less than enamored with the Otis accounting career ladder and potentially facing years of manual work, George began to speak up as he roamed the office and suggest changes to certain policies and processes that could eliminate the work that he personally disliked. He also began championing the adoption of new technologies that could automate manual tasks, despite the fact that such automation would more than likely put at risk his own position “with puncher in hand.” “If at some point if they fired me, I was young enough and naïve enough to think that I would just go and get another job, as if that would be just that easy,” explains George, who adds that over time, his suggestions found wider support—and as more tasks became automated, he found himself in greater demand, not less.      “I would solve a problem, and they would give me more problems to solve,” remembers George, who observes that he began to view his early years at Otis in a new light after returning to the United States from a stint as CFO of Otis’s South Asia operations. “I had moved around the company quite a bit by then, and I considered why I had already reached a certain level while others who had joined Otis at the same time had languished,” notes George, who credits his aversion to manual work with having opened the door to more opportunities in process improvement, beginning with a job in Otis’s treasury department and then leading to stints in financial planning and corporate development. “Eventually, due to some M&A work and my treasury background, I got some exposure to some international M&A roles overseas, and our regional headquarters then asked me to take a permanent role,” says George, whose stint as Otis’s South Asia’s finance chief became the first of several CFO tenures within UT—including a term as CFO of Otis itself. –Jack Sweeney

Looking back on her career as a corporate finance executive, Angela Pierce says that the call of leadership arrived at a moment of unvarnished frustration. Sixteen years ago, when the management of Level 3 Communications was expressing a keen interest in acquiring Pierce’s then-company, Broadwing Corporation, it was not the first time that Pierce found herself sitting across from Level 3 corporate development executives.    In fact, as Broadwing’s vice president of finance, Pierce had been involved in two earlier engagements when Level 3 executives had expressed similar sentiments—only to have nothing come out of the exercises in M&A due diligence. For Pierce, the third engagement necessitated a more direct approach—one that signaled to Level 3 that Broadwing management was confident that further negotiation was not necessary. “At some point, you have acquired the required competence from your past experiences, so I said to the executive, ‘Look, I don’t want to do this again, so here’s the deal,’” recalls Pierce, who adds that she shortly received a term sheet for a $1.4 billion deal that would be signed only a few days later. While Pierce says that she was just expressing a sentiment shared by Broadwing’s wider management, her grasp of the deal’s fundamentals and confidence in her own ability to deliver the message abruptly quelled any angst concerning her future leadership roles.    “At that moment,” she observes, “I realized that I wanted to be the one to make the call.” –Jack Sweeney 

Among the career milestones that CFOs prefer to highlight for us during our discussions, there’s little question that examples of driving business growth are an ongoing favorite. However, for Jason Keen, who built his finance career inside midsize construction firms, management’s growth goals have always needed to be mindful of a company’s organizational culture. Inside the construction realm, where multigenerational, family-owned businesses survive and thrive, growth goals are often tempered by enduring organizational cultures that are apt to cast a cautious eye upon those who choose to champion change. As just such a champion, Jason Keen has had few milestones for driving growth that have resembled the double-digit feats commonly recounted to us by CFOs from other sectors. Instead, Keen tells us of the unique challenges that finance leaders sometimes face within multigenerational firms.   “Part of what I do is to get a foundation in place—which is what I have done three times now—and then structure the company to be ready for growth,” he reports. “This means putting the right type of team in place and preparing them for this smart growth so that both the top line and the bottom line grow together.” It’s an approach that most recently led Keen to step into the CFO office at Mills & Nebraska, a family-owned business specializing in the manufacture and installation of doors.   Says Keen: “We want to be ready for growth in a smart way.” –Jack Sweeney 

Steve and Jack discuss how growing concerns about a possible economic recession are helping fuel CFO aspirations for creating a more agile finance function, and Steve reflects on how different career experiences and backgrounds influence how CFOs lead and make business decisions. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO David Barnes of Trimble, CFO Komal Misra of Starry, Inc. and CFO Jason Keen of Mills Nebraska.

Generally, when legendary CEO Roger Enrico wasn’t happy, just about every PepsiCo executive from junior grades on up knew about it. So it was that when David Barnes was told he would be presenting to Enrico on a subject known to inflame the CEO’s ire, he knew that his presentation—one way or the other—would be career-defining. “Enrico was known to be very impatient with those who would present a bunch of facts but offer no insights,” remembers Barnes, whose tryst with destiny surfaced via the guidance of none other than Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s future CEO, who Barnes tells us was his “great mentor and sponsor” during his Pepsi years. “Pepsi had hired a big consulting firm and they had dumped a lot of data on us, but they couldn’t find any insights, so Indra asked me to work with the consultants and actually get the insights out of the data,” continues Barnes, who had been hired in the mid-1990s to be part of a strategy group within PepsiCo that had been tasked with integrating strategy and finance across the company. As it turned out, Barnes’s presentation succeeded in delivering a number of new insights related to the profitability (or lack thereof) of PepsiCo’s restaurant business in China. “We had a small, money-losing business in China at a time when the Asian economies at large were experiencing deep recessions, so the questions being asked were ‘Do we give up?’ and ‘Do we double down?,’” recalls Barnes, who would soon open a new career chapter in China—an indication that perhaps his presentation had gone well.  “They wanted a known quantity in China—someone with the company’s corporate interests at heart—so I became responsible for finance as well as our development activities around new stores for KFC and Pizza Hut,” explains Barnes, who would subsequently use data to better expose an opportunity for new stores inside China’s smaller tertiary markets rather than in big cities. “We figured out that there was a better way to do capital resource allocation just for these markets,” comments Barnes, who recalls the business leader who ultimately made the call when it came to opening new stores as saying: “Let’s get at it!” –Jack Sweeney 

Among the many strategic changes that finance leader Danielle Murcray has helped to put in motion during her multi-chapter CFO career, perhaps none better reveals her mantle as a strategic leader than the move by cybersecurity firm AttackIQ to adopt a 100 percent–remote U.S. workforce.   With the arrival of the pandemic, Murcray—like many of her CFO peers—became laser-focused on the company’s finance liquidity and operational efficiencies. At the same time, though, she felt compelled to communicate the health and well-being of the company more broadly. “I really sought to promote stability across the organization and looked to instill trust with employees and investors,” comments Murcray, who credits the same aspects of her leadership outreach with helping AttackIQ to leverage the advantages of a remote workforce. “I spend quite a bit of my time making certain that we are overcommunicating and collaborating in different ways so that people feel that we are together even though we are not physically together anymore,” explains Murcray, who moved to Montana from California back in late 2020 after the company announced that its U.S. operations would be moving to a remote model. It subsequently closed its Santa Clara headquarters and San Diego offices. “From the results of our own surveys, we realized that most employees did not want to go back to the office anymore, so we could see that being 100 percent–remote would be a huge competitive advantage,” reports Murcray, who adds that since the decision, more than a dozen AttackIQ employees have relocated out of the state of California. Says Murcray: “I think that leading through the pandemic is now become something of a defining moment in my career. –Jack Sweeney

When Komal Misra, a software engineer turned asset manager, decided that it was time once again to make a career change, she found herself staring at a computer screen filled with stocks from various portfolios that were being traded based not on business fundamentals but larger macro-driven trends. “It got me to thinking: Here I had invested so much time in understanding these businesses and why they were good or great investments, but none of it mattered in that place in time when things were just selling up,” recalls Komal, who adds that she began thinking about her career as if it were a company stock that over time would be propelled or impeded due to macro-driven trends. According to Misra, “I started with a top-down approach to consider what my options were within business—in just the same way that I would’ve analyzed any stock investment. This led me to the conclusion that in the long run, if I wanted another 10- or 15-year career, I really should be thinking about transitioning to something that had a lot more staying power than what I was doing at that time. “ For Misra, who had spent the previous 15 years as a tech sector portfolio manager, the move to corporate finance was not triggered by ambitions to someday be a CFO. Instead, she tells us, she knew that management teams were seeking to add senior finance executives who could help to propel traditional finance teams into the realm of strategic finance. Misra would join technology services company Cognizant as a vice president of finance and eventually oversee the company’s corporate development.   “Cognizant is where I learned the inner workings of a large, mega-cap company from a finance team point of view,” comments Misra, who a few years later would enter the CFO office at Internet service provider Starry, Inc. Looking back, Misra says that it was not so much the CFO role as the opportunities that the role has afforded her that led her into the C-suite.     Says Misra: “I was very willing to take on risks in life and see where things led me and not be afraid to fail, because from my point of view, whether I became a CFO or not didn’t matter—what mattered was that I was doing something interesting.” –Jack Sweeney 

A dozen years ago, if you had told Ryan Gwillim that within the next decade he would be named CFO of the Brunswick Corporation, he may have laughed. At the time, he was an associate with law firm Baker & McKenzie who was spending his days traveling the globe to advise legal clients as an M&A transaction guru. However, over the next decade, Gwillim and Brunswick would together find a common groove as each embarked on a journey of transformation. For Brunswick—a 155-year-old conglomerate—the evolutionary arc would trigger a flurry of historic M&A activity that included the sale of its marquee bowling center business (2014) while at the same time advancing its steady stroke into marine products. For Gwillim, the transformation chapter would put an end to his vagabond existence while landing the seasoned M&A attorney inside Brunswick’s corporate counsel office in 2012. It would be little more than 5 years later, after a steady progression of internal M&A projects, that Gwillim would be asked by Brunswick’s CFO to step into the role of vice president of investor relations.   “From September 2017 to about the summer of 2019 was one of the most volatile times in Brunswick’s history, and here I was, along with the management team, becoming the face of storytelling for the investment community,” explains Gwillim, who characterizes the period as one when Brunswick once-and-for-all “closed the books on its conglomerate viewpoint.” Determined to focus investor attention on the company’s promising future in marine technology products, Brunswick accelerated efforts to jettison businesses procured during its conglomerate years, such as a struggling fitness operation that had been undermining investor confidence in the company. Along the way, Gwillim would become a primary driver of the Brunswick transformation as he helped to manage investor expectations as well as the financial levers that would allow the company to find its footing while opening its post-conglomerate chapter.    As it turned out, the beginning of Brunswick’s post-conglomerate life coincided with the completion of the seasoned-M&A-attorney-turned-IR-executive’s own transformation chapter. Appointed as Brunswick’s vice president of finance and treasurer in 2019, Gwillim would be named Brunswick CFO only a year later.   “We are completely different from what we were 10 or 15 years ago,” reports Gwillim, sharing a thought that one could argue applies to the CFO as well as to the company. –Jack Sweeney

Among the many acquisitions with which Marc Levine became involved during his 25 years at Hewlett-Packard Co., it may surprise few of his former colleagues that he counts HP’s purchase of Compaq Computer as one of the tech giant’s most unusual marriages.     However, Levine doesn’t single out HP’s purchase of Compaq due to the lively behind-the-scenes drama that accompanied it after Walter Hewlett, son of one of the HP founders, loudly voiced his opposition to the deal or the two books that a subsequent proxy battle helped to fatten. Instead, Levine tells us that from his perspective, the unusual aspect of the Compaq acquisition had more to do with the integration of certain pieces of the business. “On my particular team, I was the only person from HP, which was unlike in any of the other HP integrations I had previously been involved with, where there had always been more HP people,” explains Levine, who recalls spending many a night in Houston, Texas, hotel rooms beside Compaq’s headquarters. Looking back, Levine suspects that the lack of HP representation on his team had to do with his group’s focus on the integration of Compaq’s sales team and field organization. Having in the past worked closely with the HP sales team (including a stint as a sales leader in HP’s Southeast Asia operations), Levine was perhaps better prepared than many of his HP peers to join the integration effort. Says Levine: “I think that past experience brought me a little more credibility when I walked into the room, and I could understand better some of the things that the Compaq people were dealing with.” Still, while HP was widely known as an engineering organization rich with technical talent, Compaq was known for having a dynamic sales organization—a standout attribute that may have led the acquiring company to give Compaq greater influence than in other deals when it came to integrating sales talent.   Adds Levine: “It was the biggest and probably the first acquisition that I became involved with at HP. There was a lot of controversy at the time as to whether it was the right move for HP, but the integration was really about making certain that we could bring together the best of both companies.”  –Jack Sweeney

It was not long after Chris Greiner became CFO of IBM’s fast-growing Analytics Division that the gravitational pull that IBM had maintained on Greiner’s finance career-building began to give way. While his new divisional CFO title more than validated his 7-year career investment with the company, Greiner—like many divisional finance chiefs—discovered the next rung of the company’s finance career ladder becoming increasingly obscured from view.   Meanwhile, his divisional CFO role afforded him a wider view into IBM’s business development as he sat across the table from different owners of middle-market companies.    “What I saw was companies that were 200 to 400 employees in size, with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, that were being successful at disrupting markets, and I knew then that I wanted to be on the other side of the table one day,” recalls Greiner, who notes that the experience of dealing with business leaders intent on disrupting the market led him to his revise his career-building agenda. Says Greiner: “I knew that for me to get the experiences I wanted to get, I needed to take a leap.” One of those experiences, Greiner reports, had to do with talent development in midsize firms versus that at large enterprise companies like IBM. “At IBM, you can’t empty the tank when it comes to talent because there is always another person looking to step in to fill a role when someone leaves,” observes Greiner, who points out that talent development in midsize companies is not always as robust. “That muscle for developing talent within an organization needs to be worked on,” comments Greiner, who found that his menu of responsibilities inside midsize firms also became more fluid.   Adds Greiner: “Another eye-opener for me—post-IBM —was how I needed to invest a disproportionate amount of time on the organization itself.” –Jack Sweeney

When Al Farrell tells us that finance leaders must never lose sight of the value of a business asset, as well as acquire a strong understanding of how to optimize the returns on it, we sense his frustration. This is not because he’s relating a situation in which management failed both to properly value an asset (which, Farrell tells us, was worth nearly $650 million) and to optimize the asset’s returns (which ended up being increased by 12 percent). Instead, Farrell’s angst was due to the fact that management’s asset utilization improvement feat was achieved on the eve of COVID-19’s arrival in the U.S., and the asset that was so adroitly leveraged to pump up returns was none other than a fleet of rental cars some 35,000 vehicles strong. Certainly, few industries were hit harder by COVID’s arrival than car rentals, and as car rental businesses go, few suffered a more direct hit than Advantage Rent A Car, where Farrell occupied the CFO office from 2016 to early 2022.   “The car rental business is like the airlines because it requires a great deal of capital investment—but unlike with the airlines, you don’t have a firm reservation and people generally don’t prepay,” explains Farrell, who notes that in early 2020, after the U.S. announced a travel ban in response to COVID, Advantage’s reservation snag was in full view.   “That’s when 96 percent of our reservations went up in smoke,” recalls Farrell, who reports that prior to the travel ban, Advantage’s growing utilization rates had begun to increase the prospects for selling the company. Says Farrell: “Unfortunately, we didn’t come out with the outcome that we wanted, but had COVID not hit, I think that we would have had the very successful sale of a business that was significantly more productive and lucrative than it was when we started out.” –Jack Sweeney 

Back in April of 2020, as the consequences of COVID’s arrival in the U.S. sent financial markets reeling, Paychex CFO Efrain Rivera had the temptation “to say nothing.” As the company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts quickly approached, Rivera explains, a number of executive team members had gathered in conference to debate the idea of halting any future guidance in light of things being just so uncertain. “The problem was that we did have data!,” explains Rivera, referring to Paychex’s unique lines of sight into the payroll practices of thousands of middle-market businesses. The subsequent earnings call was unusual for its length (2 hours) as well as the general nature of the discussion, recalls Rivera.    “Half of the analyst questions were really about the general economy and what we were seeing because they knew that we had unique insights into employees,” remarks Rivera, who notes that the prior debate ended with those lobbying for “more guidance” scoring the win. Rivera adds that the prevailing point of view became, “We need to say what we know, and we need to say, ‘This is the limit of what we know.’” Weeks later, when Paychex found it necessary to revise some of the guidance that it had provided on the Spring 2020 call, there was no double-guessing of the earlier debate’s outcome. Says Rivera: “To this day, we still get credit for having said what we said and shared what we shared at a moment when people were very concerned about saying anything.” –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack talk about the volatile business environment and what it means for business planning professionals. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Will Johnson of Iterable, CFO Adam Ante of Paycor, CFO Ryan Van Hatten of Prophix and CFO Steve Vintz of Tenable.

When Mike Catelani seeks to identify the objectives and career milestones that have helped to advance him into the ranks of Bay Area biotech CFOs, he mentions that although he had a deep interest in biology during his high school years, upon entering college he decided to swap out a biology curriculum for an accounting one. More than a decade later, Catelani decided to make a career “lane change” to accept a CFO role for a manufacturer of instruments and tools used in drug discovery. While the company, whose stock was traded on the ASX (Australian Securities Exchange), was not directly involved in drug discovery, Catelani believed that the CFO stint would put him one step closer to opportunities inside the biotech realm. Still, he can’t help but marvel at the randomness of the circumstances that ultimately opened the biotech door. “It was complete dumb luck: A recruiter was looking for a CFO who had Australian Securities Exchange experience for a biotech firm in the Bay Area, and—not surprisingly—mine was like the only name that popped up,” explains Catelani, who was named CFO of Benitec, an Australian public company that at the time specialized in drug development for hepatitis C and HIV. Seventeen years and multiple biotech chapters later, Catelani looks back on his original door of entry as “a bit of a turnaround.” “It had roughly 6 weeks of cash when I came on board and at the time was involved in a number of patent infringement lawsuits,” reports Catelani, who lists cash management as every biotech CFO’s mission-critical skillset tool. –Jack Sweeney

Perhaps few CFO career paths better reveal the advantages a founder-led firm may offer career-minded executives than that of Prophix CFO Ryan Van Hatten. Back in 2016—when the firm’s previous CFO exited the company—Prophix’s founder and CEO, the late Paul Barber, asked Van Hatten, an 11-year company veteran, to step into the CFO office until a CFO hire could be made. Recalls Van Hatten: “I knew all of the people on the finance team, and they knew me, and we respected each other, so it was like, ‘Calm the troops, assess where we’re at, and while this may take a few months, you can then go home to operations.’”     However, Van Hatten never did return to operations, and his ascension into the CFO role was finally set after Barber sold the software company to Canadian private equity firm HG Capital in early 2021.   Comments Van Hatten: “I was suddenly thrust into a different world. It was very different from having Paul and a bunch of friendly managers asking the questions.” Still, few CFOs likely would have been better prepared to answer sticky operational questions than Van Hatten, who had spent the balance of his 16-plus years at the software company zigzagging across the organization as Barber and COO Alok Ajmera (now CEO) summoned him to take on new and different roles.      Reports Van Hatten: “I had been around the company a long time. I knew the people, and if I had fallen flat on my face, they would have been there to help me and pick me up.” Asked what advantages a founder-led firm might offer to aspiring CFOs and what exactly sets apart the company that Paul Barber founded, Van Hatten says that this comes down to learning and relationships: “It’s having the openness to learn from each other.” –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss how growing numbers of businesses are facing an employee retention crisis as they battle escalating workforce attrition and struggle to fill job vacancies. As the crisis grows in certain industries, more finance leaders are sounding the alarm on escalating business risk and dedicating more time to solving the current talent equation. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Efrain Rivera of Paychex, CFO Anisha Sood of First Choice Health, CFO Will Johnson of Iterable, and CFO Adriana Carpenter of Emburse.

Had the opportunity to work in the treasury department at American Express arrived 6 months earlier, there’s a chance that John Herman may never have landed in a CFO office. “Treasury was an area that I was fascinated by,” remembers Herman, who—after having spent a decade at American Express—was given a “package” in 2009 when the financial crisis mercilessly bore down on the card services giant. However, in April of 2010, Herman punted the Amex treasury opportunity in order to accept an FP&A position at Yodle, an online marketing company that was generating roughly $50 million in annual revenue. “I decided that I wanted to work in an organization where I could make an impact, and I felt that it was time to take a risk in my career,” recalls Herman, who would report directly to Yodle’s CFO and for the next several months be “a department of one.” “There was this opportunity to build out my team and take on new roles and learn really quickly,” recounts Herman. Along the way, Yodle would make multiple acquisitions and grow to more than $200 million in annual sales before being acquired by Web.com in early 2016. Herman had steadily advanced upward and eventually into the CFO office, where he ultimately led the due diligence and oversaw the sale process for the Web.com sale. “It ultimately came down to the fact that it was the right time to sell,” comments Herman, who within 6 months of the Yodle sale closing garnered his second CFO appointment at early-stage SaaS developer Movable Ink. Six years later, Movable Ink has surpassed the $100 million mark in annual recurring revenue and was recently valued at $1.3 billion—joining a select class of marketing technology brands. Asked whether he had ever contemplated becoming a CFO during the first half of his career, Herman replies, “I definitely didn’t grow up saying, ‘Someday, I want to be a CFO’—it’s really been a journeyman’s trip to where I have now arrived.”  –Jack Sweeney 

  When Adam Ante first arrived at Paycor in 2017, the seasoned finance executive was tasked with prodding Paycor management to begin monitoring daily performance metrics. “At first, it was about building the relationship with the executive team so that they understood how important it was to understand how the company was performing on a daily basis,” explains Ante, who equates his task with shortening the distance between management and the company’s data. “At the time, we were just piling a set of numbers and metrics into Excel spreadsheets daily and distributing them,” continues Ante, who upon his arrival was given the title of vice president of analytics. “We didn’t know where all of the data was, and we didn’t know always what it meant,” reports Ante, who notes that sometimes one manager might be sharing certain data that contradicted numbers being disseminated by another. For Paycor, the solution was to adopt a new data management framework, a process that began with first clarifying what the company wanted to know about its performance and then identifying which metrics would best reveal this information. According to Ante, “You begin by asking, ‘What should this metric really show?’ And then you say, ‘Okay, now, where does this data come from? How do we access this data?’’” Back in 2017, Ante recalls, most of Paycor’s data resided within a single SQL server. “At every turn, this meant that somebody had to go in and figure out how to write SQL queries and pull the needed data together,” remembers Ante, who adds that the company subsequently upgraded its data infrastructure.   “The most important thing is the ability to bring the data together into a place where people can access it and measure it and put the right level of governance around it,” comments Ante, who observes that as more managers have gained confidence in the data and grown to better understand the information being provided, they’ve also grown accustomed to monitoring the metrics daily. Says Ante: “It can take a long time—it’s a cultural shift.” –Jack Sweeney 

It was in the late 1990s when public accountant, savvy networker and future CFO April Downing decided that it was time to leave Dallas. “I had cultivated my network there really early—there was a group of friends from PwC whom I regularly attended a book club with, and later we would all go on to different tech firms,” remembers Downing. However, unlike those of some of her tech-minded PwC colleagues, Downing’s future plans did not include Dallas or Silicon Valley.    “It used to be that I had to say Austin, Texas—but everyone knows where Austin is now,” comments Downing, who accepted an assistant controller role at Motive Communications, an Austin tech firm—only to lose it upon her return from maternity leave. “I thought that my life was going to be as an accountant, but they said: ‘You can be the finance person,’” recalls Downing, who credits the early job pivot with opening the door to a succession of senior finance roles that included the position of acting CFO. In many ways, Downing’s Motive chapter exposes the historic connection between Austin’s high tech pioneers and its wide-body tech hub future, for it was at Motive that Downing first crossed paths with notable Austin investor and former Dell CFO Tom Meredith, who for a time served as chairman of Motive’s audit committee. It was also at Motive where she first connected with Kip McClanahan, whose firm Silverton Partners is credited with having helped to lead the next wave of Austin technology investment. Years later, McClanahan would help to recruit Downing to fill the CFO role at WP Engine.   Comments Downing: “One of things that I’ve been trying to do lately is to foster connections with some of the people who are new to Austin in order to share our heritage that says, ‘We’re all here to do better together!’” –Jack Sweeney 

Back in early 2014, the management of Paydiant, a 4-year-old mobile payments start-up, believed that it was still several years away from engaging with acquisition-minded bankers. Nevertheless, when PayPal came calling, the Paydiant team decided that they were worth a listen.        “Even though it was still an early stage for us to be in to be thinking about exiting the business, it was just a super interesting opportunity,” remembers Melinda Smith, whose CFO resume today lists the 2015 sale of Paydiant to PayPal as her third early-stage exit. “If you had asked me when we first got acquired whether I was likely to stay inside a big, publicly traded firm like PayPal for long, I would have said ‘No,’” continues Smith, whose postmerger career with PayPal lasted more than 5 years and opened doors for Smith in surprising ways. “What we determined was that our team, with all of its early-stage experience, could be really helpful in-house,” remarks Smith, who notes that at the time PayPal had only recently begun operating as a public company. It was felt that “noise from the Street” could become a distraction for PayPal’s smaller businesses like Paydiant, she adds, as well as for their mobile payment unit Venmo, which had joined the family in 2013 as part of PayPal’s acquisition of Braintree. “We ended combining the teams, and I got the opportunity to be CFO of Venmo,” comments Smith, who would serve as Venmo’s finance chief for the next 3 years. –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack discuss how successful financial planning teams are always looking to "get in deeper" and bring new insights to the surface. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Adriana Carpenter of Emburse, CFO Kent Kelley of Unanet and CFO Brandon Maultasch of Moloco.

Having grown accustomed to charting the careers of our finance leader guests from their early professional days up through their entry into the CFO office, we did not change course for Elaine Sun, an accomplished investment banker turned finance leader who last month stepped into her third successive finance chief position at Mammoth Biosciences of Brisbane, California.   For Sun, the third time is undoubtedly the charm, for it would be difficult to imagine a more compelling start-up for a CFO of any pedigree to have joined than Mammoth, the celebrated unicorn cofounded by Jennifer Doudna, the University of California professor who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering work on CRISPR-Cas9, a method of editing DNA. No matter what the tenor of Mammoth’s future achievements may be, the intersection of Sun’s professional life with Doudna’s will likely come to dominate Sun’s professional narrative as the finance leader summons her past finance experience to build and scale a financial function capable of helping Mammoth to fully realize the commercial application of Doudna’s work. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, when Sun floats a recommendation for The Code Breaker, the book written by Walter Isaacson that charts the path to Doudna’s scientific breakthrough. Still, her reference reminds us that another exciting chapter is currently being written—the one where science and finance meet. –Jack Sweeney       Elaine Sun: Mammoth Biosciences is based in the Bay Area—Brisbane, California. We were cofounded by Jennifer Doudna, Nobel laureate for her fundamental work in CRISPR gene editing. The other cofounders were Trevor Martin, Janice Chen, and Lucas Harrington. It is a very exciting company. I could not be more thrilled to be partnering with them and coming on board as COO and CFO of the company. Anyone who’s followed the biotech industry knows that there have been these different technologies that have enabled new therapies. CRISPR gene editing is this next frontier. As someone who’s been in the life sciences industry for a long time and seen technology wax and wane, I think that this is very exciting in enabling therapeutics as well as, potentially, curative therapies. On the diagnostic side, our vision is to leverage this CRISPR enzyme to be able to develop next-generation diagnostics with the accuracy of molecular diagnostics but in the palm of your hand at the point of care or even ultimately in the home. This is an area that has captured the imagination of investors, and there’s been a lot of interest in this space. The early folks that have been advancing the field in CRISPR have been focused on CRISPR-Cas9. These tools or systems have certain applications that are ex vivo, or outside of the body. We believe that our ultra-small CRISPR systems could better enable in vivo therapies. We’re also leveraging them for our diagnostic applications. There is the potential to leverage CRISPR technology even in areas outside of diagnostics and therapeutics. The company has talked about potential locations for industrial or biomanufacturing or ag biotech applications. One of the things that got me so excited about Mammoth was this commitment to advancing the field, to continuing to discover new CRISPR systems beyond CRISPR-Cas9. The intellectual property position that we have is extremely strong, and we have this multidimensionality to our business model, potentially with diagnostics, therapeutics, and more. 

Back in 2001, as the dotcom bubble imploded and the U.S. economy took a downward spiral, Anisha Sood, a recently hired consultant for Accenture, felt fortunate. “There were rounds of layoffs happening and Accenture was trying to manage it well, but I got lucky because I was in healthcare,” explains Sood, who reports that other practice areas such as technology and media were not so fortunate. Seven years later, just as Sood had finished logging her first 48 hours as an investment banker with Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers collapsed—but once more, Sood felt fortunate. “Here again, I could credit healthcare as being the stabilizing factor, although there were no deals happening, no IPOs or M&A, for about 12 months after I started,” recalls Sood, who in the years that followed would lead a variety of health sector transactions for the bank before moving back to hometown Seattle to begin a multichapter career as a venture investor in healthcare.   “When I left Seattle in the ’90s, it was kind of a small town known for its alternative rock, and now I returned to find this bustling world of startups and spinoffs and large players that had made a reinvestment in healthcare and seeded this entrepreneurial biocommunity,” observes Sood, whose venture investing career chapter—unlike those that preceded it—appears to have opened unaccompanied by the peril of economic collapse. There were other differences as well, for it was during Sood’s venture investing days that she first began to acquire the escalating desire to build things that over time fueled her ambitions to become a CFO. Along the way, Sood says, she came to realize that most often it was finance that was first to expose whether or not a company was going to be successful. As she likes to put it: “Finance is the canary in the coal mine.” According to Sood, the welfare of the bond between venture investors, boards, and entrepreneurial founders often depends on a single deliverable that is usually framed by more or less the same query: “Can you provide us with a unit economic model that shows us how profitable or sustainable your clients will be over time as you start to grow?” It was just such a deliverable that later tripped up the management team of one of Sood’s portfolio companies. “We realized over time that the company was not tracking toward its numbers—the incremental margin, the incremental sustainability, just wasn’t materializing, and it became clear that there was a flaw in the strategy and underlying business model for the company,” remembers Sood, who adds that the company was ultimately sold for far less than what had previously been projected by venture investors. For Sood, the experience reveals why finance must always be the canary—and sound off with tough questions that are sometimes difficult to ask. Says Sood: “How much do we need to pay attention to these numbers? When must we start to call it? If we let things play out, it may lead to an exit that no one wants to see.” –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss why a 4-year degree isn’t quite the job requirement it used to be and how finance leaders are reworking their company’s talent equation. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Brandon Maultasch of Moloco, CFO Steve Vintz of Tenable and CFO Kent Kelley of Unanet.    

Will Johnson can still hear the question that momentarily muted a management dinner and prodded the gathering’s executive diners to thoughtfully dispatch an answer.    “’If you weren’t in your current role, which one—held by a peer at this table—would you assume?,’” recalls Johnson, echoing the inquisitor’s words. “There were some really surprising answers,” he continues, noting that the head of sales expressed a desire to lead HR. Still, no answer was perhaps more surprising to Johnson than his own.   “I actually did cite the CFO role,” comments Johnson, who even now—after having subsequently held three consecutive CFO positions—seems to be a bit surprised at his willingness to supply such an answer that evening. At the time, Johnson was a senior corporate development executive—albeit with future CFO aspirations but until that night they had been left unspoken, at least in gatherings. Johnson reports that there was a period in his career when he found it difficult to admit to himself and others that the CFO role was becoming accessible to him. “Shame on me! I still had in my head an antiquated notion of what it took to become a CFO,” remarks Johnson, who credits a CFO mentor who entered the office from the more traditional CPA route with having dissuaded him of the notion that he too needed to be a CPA. “The role’s orientation itself had really shifted to where you were spending as much time looking out the windshield as you were in the rearview mirror,” observes Johnson, who mentions that he’s speaking specifically of venture-backed and high-growth firms.    If Johnson left the dinner with any doubts about having voiced his answer that evening, they likely vanished 6 months later when the company’s CEO, accompanied by a board member, approached him to be the company’s next CFO.  –Jack Sweeney

As we seek to highlight the milestones that mark the path to the CFO office, one of our favorite queries is to ask finance leaders to recall from their career-building years the first time they presented to their company’s board.     For Adriana Carpenter, memories of that board gathering will forever call to mind ASC 606, the mazelike revenue standard that only a few years ago upended the placid temperament of many an accounting organization.    “Make no mistake—this was really my first time, and I was delivering bad news,” recalls Adriana, who perhaps not unlike many of her CFO peers received her first “invitation” to address the board regarding a sticky issue, rather than to highlight the anatomy of a strategic win. “A majority of our revenue came from on-premises software subscriptions, and 606 dramatically changed the timing of revenue for these types of subscriptions,” continues Carpenter, who for 8 years served as chief accounting officer for Ping Identity, a developer of identity security software. For Ping, the timing issue meant that the company would be required to take a big cash hit on the eve of realizing its goal of selling shares to the public. “606 distorted our revenue and EBITDA numbers, which really forced us to figure out how to explain to investors what was really happening in the business,” comments Carpenter, who entered the boardroom that day with a portfolio of accounting experience that any board worth its salt would have savored. Carpenter had arrived at Ping 5 years earlier, just as the company had begun the tricky journey from being a perpetual revenue model to evolving into the subscription revenue mode. “Within that first year at Ping, I led the complete overhaul of our quote to cash process, which included everything from revamping how we were selling our software to helping to implement additional software modules to enable the business to scale,” remarks Carpenter, whose tenure as Ping’s CAO involved navigating not only the differences between revenue models but also the differences between owners as Ping went from VC to private equity ownership.    Then came 606’s timing issue and Carpenter’s invitation from the board. While milestones along the path to the CFO office frequently vary as far as time and place go, Carpenter’s arrival inside the CFO office at Emburse within 3 years of having received Ping’s boardroom invitation makes us think that perhaps timing is indeed everything. –Jack Sweeney

Reflecting on a finance career that has spanned nine different countries and three decades, Chris Roling says that he may have received his most valuable career lesson at a plant in Pennsylvania’s Amish Country. As a newly minted MBA, Roling was hired by Armstrong Industries in the late 1980s to augment the finance executive ranks of its growing European operations. However, prior to dispatching its new hires abroad, the giant building materials manufacturer based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, made certain that its executives got a generous helping of local operations. “It was reverse culture shock,” comments Roling, who served as controller of an Armstrong plant in Marietta, Pennsylvania, for 24 months before garnering a European assignment.   Growing up, Roling—the son of a navy doctor—had had an aptitude for learning foreign languages, a talent that had led him to set his sights on a career in international business. Now, the Marietta plant was all that stood in the way of the young executive being able to realize his ambitions. “I thought that this was beneath me—I thought that I was a hot-shot MBA,” explains Roling, who says that the role involved leading a team of about eight accountants ranging in age from 18 to 58. “I was Immediately humbled. They taught me how to do the job, how to manage, and they taught me how to be a leader,” recalls Roling, who credits this experience with providing him with “many dividends” after his career took him overseas. Still, Roling says, his greatest lessons at the Marietta plant came from a “crusty, old” plant manager, who insisted that Roling regularly visit the plant floor.            “It got to the point where I would see the plant manager coming in my direction and I would escape out the office’s back door in order to get down to the plant floor,” reports Roling.   “What he reinforced was that the product was the heart of everything—and how that product was made and the issues that related to quality and productivity were things that I had never learned in grad school,” remarks Roling, who says that he later realized that the plant manager had also provided him with an important lesson related to finance and business partnership. Years later, while working abroad, Rolling says, it was his turn to be persistent as he sought out business partners in different parts of the organization who could provide “dedicated, knowledgeable, on-the-spot insight” and, on occasion, perhaps, an invitation to visit the plant floor. –Jack Sweeney

We have spent many hours in discussion with finance leaders about the intersection of finance and sales as we try to better understand the professional collaboration required to achieve successful outcomes in these domains. Still, few of our talks have pushed us to ponder the human elements and relationships that point to such success more than that with finance leader Kent Kelley. From the very start of our discussion, we quickly typecast Kelley and brashly concluded that here was a mild-mannered voice of reason that had sat across the table from some of the software industry’s most energetic sales titans. To be clear: Kelley—a 15-year Oracle veteran whose finance career had spanned operations, sales, and marketing—had never been a bookkeeper, and his consistent willingness to assume career risks along the way set him apart even more from his more traditional finance peers. It was just such a risk attached to a challenging new role that finally led Kelley to move outside of Oracle’s wide-body finance function altogether to join the management team of one of Oracle’s standalone business units dedicated to industry applications. “I moved out of my office overlooking the Oracle pond to a smaller office in San Francisco—I’m sure that some of my friends in finance thought that I was crazy, but I was stepping out of my comfort zone and really challenging myself,” explains Kelley, whose move to the business unit also led to a fateful collaboration with an executive by the name of John Andrus. Andrus, a passionate and seasoned sales leader who had been given global responsibility for the business unit, made it clear that his plans involved broadening Kelley’s responsibilities. “This was someone who had enough faith in me to say, ‘Hey, this organization is growing, and I need to focus on growing the rest of the world, so I need you to be my guy in North America,” comments Kelley. This would not be the last time that Andrus included Kelley in his future plans. A number of years into his new role, Andrus was recruited to be CEO of a company known as PowerPlan, and he asked Kelley to join the firm as CFO. After a “thorough” interviewing process with the company’s board, Kelley was named CFO in 2011.   “We doubled the size of the company within our initial tenure,” says Kelley, whose CFO career took a dramatic turn when Andrus was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and then shortly thereafter passed away. “I was suddenly leading the company,” recalls Kelley, who was named interim CEO of PowerPlan in late 2014. “Having to interact with the other executives at a level on which I had never interacted before led me to understand their respective challenges in a way that I had never experienced.” Kelley would continue as interim CEO until the sale of the company to private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2015, at which time he reassumed his CFO position. Reflecting on his dynamic collaborator, Kelley remarks: “John was an experienced leader and a great mentor as well as friend to me.” While Kelley does not recall for us the first time that he sat down across a table from John Andrus, we can assume that the dynamics of the gathering would have been much the same as those at any other meeting between Oracle finance and sales professionals, representing a confluence of both mild-mannered and passionate voices resounding together in pursuit of a successful outcome. –Jack Sweeney 

Back in 2014, when Sarah Blanchard became committed to landing her first CFO position, she kept a key criterion in mind: Her future company had to be mission-driven. “I ended up in digital health before anyone really knew what digital health was,” explains Blanchard, who received her first CFO appointment from Omada Health, an early-stage health tech firm whose flagship product at the time was a diabetes prevention offering.   “When you talk about a mission that can have a huge impact on the world and a huge impact on humanity and our economy, this was something that I felt lucky to be a part of,” comments Blanchard, who admits to having had limited experience prior to Omada when it came to raising capital and being face-to-face with investors. “I had two choices: I could raise money from life sciences investors or I could raise money from tech investors, and they both tend to be creatures of habit—they like to see patterns,” observes Blanchard, who still seems to savor the dual challenge of opening the minds of two distinct groups of investors. Notes Blanchard: “I would spend lots of my time in trying to help life sciences investors understand how and why we could scale a healthcare company so quickly and at the same time help technology investors understand why ARR was not a metric for us, even though we were selling into enterprises.” Meanwhile, Blanchard’s tenure at Omada endowed her with a degree of extra vigilance when it comes to company pricing models.    “Omada had an outcomes-based pricing model—which was really novel at the time—meaning that we didn’t really make any revenue if we weren’t driving outcomes,” explains Blanchard, who adds that the model was flawed due in part to the firm’s assumption that the number of lessons completed by participants was a worthy “milestone” and indicator of positive outcomes. “We were focusing on driving people to complete lessons, but lesson completion, while it’s correlated with weight loss, it is not weight loss, and it is not a reduction in the risk of getting diabetes, which is what we were all about,” recalls Blanchard, whose efforts to repair the model ultimately involved tasking the company’s data scientists with a mission to better expose the connection between participant weight loss and outcomes. Says Blanchard: “After we switched over to a percent-weight-loss-per-month model, we began getting paid for real outcomes.” –Jack Sweeney

Among the many SaaS CFOs with whom we have spoken, few have listed their finance leader priorities for us as simply and concisely as did Jonathan Sides, CFO of Fleetio, a Birmingham, Alabama, software company that helps companies to track and manage their fleet operations. “My personal defect is always wanting to take on more—without realizing that I should actually be giving away my LEGOs and finding people who can do things better and faster than I can,” explains Sides, who labels his first CFO priority as “Always be hiring.” According to Sides, between 60% and 80% of Fleetio’s workforce lived in the Birmingham area prior to the pandemic—but now the percentage of local employees has dropped to less than 50% as the company has actively recruited more remote workers. Next, he advises CFOs to work closely with the company’s investors to help them to understand the challenges that a company may be facing.   “The only way that they can help you is if they have the unvarnished truth,” comments Sides, who notes that investors will typically have three responses: “They’ll say, ‘Don’t worry, this is normal’ or ‘Don’t worry, we know how to fix this’ or ‘Good luck, we know that you know how to fix this.’”      The third and last priority that Sides lists is “Achieving work/life balance”—an area, Fleetio’s CFO tells us, with which he has long struggled and that in the past has led him to take some inspired action.   Back in 2014, prior to joining Fleetio and having just completed a 14-year tour of duty as CFO of another Birmingham SaaS firm, Sides scheduled a “gap year” for which he and his wife bought “one-way air tickets” to kick off 12 months of travel during which they lived in 12 different countries. Still, all roads eventually led back to Birmingham and, of course, the SaaS model. –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss how finance leaders of high growth firm’s are becoming increasingly focused on the ebb and flow of their firm’s talent pipelines. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Gina Mastantuono of ServiceNow, CFO Josh Siegel of CyberArk and CFO Sarah Spoja of Tipalti.

Emily Villatte’s finance career first got rolling along dusty country roads in the Australian bush. With a dual-track master’s degree in engineering and finance, she had been hired by British multinational JLT Group to provide risk management and insurance services to a cluster of accounts residing in Australia’s outback. Along the way, Villatte says, she was frequently greeted by the question, “What the heck brings you here?”  It’s a greeting that Villatte is just as apt to hear today as she was back then. However, this time the road has taken Villatte into the world of podcasting, where today she is the CFO of Acast, a Swedish-founded company that provides hosting services for both podcast creators and advertisers. “Experience is what you get when you do something that you haven’t done before,” reports Villatte, who within 2 years of her arrival in Acast’s CFO office took the company public on the NASDAQ Stockholm exchange. According to Villatte, the finance team was more than ready. “We had taken the prep work as far as we could, so when the board made the decision to do an IPO, we had about 14 to 16 weeks to execute,” recalls Villatte, who characterizes Acast’s IPO as a milestone not only for the company but also for podcasting as a medium. “My job was to make certain that we had the options all set for an IPO and would be ready if the board decided to go down that road,” comments Villatte, who no doubt viewed that route forward as not very different from others that she been down before. –Jack Sweeney

Looking back on his first CFO role, Steve Vintz recalls waking up one morning and thinking that he might not have a job.   The night before, Vintz had told his company’s CEO that he was having second thoughts about a deck of slides highlighting the virtues of a proposed acquisition. “It just hit me: This is a deal we can’t do—this is not our deal,” recalls Vintz, recollecting the moment of insight that he experienced and the subsequent butterflies set free. The company’s board was expecting to meet later in the week, and the “board deck” was the anticipated precursor to a presentation that Vintz and his CEO were preparing to give about a promising acquisition target. Vintz continues: “Good news travels fast and bad news travels faster, but I caught this a little late in the process. I wish I had felt this way earlier on, but it was a reality. CFOs must have conviction, and conviction is all about doing the right thing.” The courage of Vintz’s convictions were quickly put to the test when he told his CEO about his reservations concerning the deal—an acquisition that had already received strong support and enthusiasm from the firm’s management team.    “The conversation did not go well. The next day, I called our CMO and asked if I should even come back into the office,” comments Vintz, who adds that the CMO encouraged him to return and speak further with the CEO, who appeared to have begun to digest some of what he had heard the night before. Days later, when the company’s board members gathered, the CFO was once more in the hot seat. Says Vintz: “The board wanted to understand why we were having second thoughts, and as we talked, it became clear to the CEO and management team why that was not the time to do this deal.” In the end, the company’s board ultimately praised the management team for bringing forth its concerns, and a few of its members even repeated the business maxim about how sometimes the best deals are the ones that you don’t do. Reflecting on his moment of insight, Vintz observes: “I could have very easily sent out the board deck and told myself, ‘I don’t want to look bad, and maybe it will be okay’—but as CFO, you have to listen to your inner self.” –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack discuss how finance professionals must give more thought to how they communicate “the news” inside their organizations in order to avoid being cast by other functional teams as “the bearer of bad news.” Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Russ Porter, CFO, IMA, CFO Nipun Soni of BillionToOne and CFO Gina Mastanuono of ServiceNow.

Hilary Maxson’s path to the CFO office of French multinational and energy automation behemoth Schneider Electric began at a kitchen table in upstate New York. Or at least that’s what comes to mind for us when she tells us about her “purpose-driven” parents, including a father who is a professor of agronomy at Cornell University. “We didn’t live internationally, but my parents are very tied to what can be achieved internationally and I think that this is how I got that mind-set,” reports Maxson, as we search for answers that might better expose how within a span of 12 years she pursued and realized gainful career experiences in places as far-flung as Douala, Cameroon (3 years), the Philippines (3), Hong Kong (2), and Paris (4). Says Maxson: “I really believe that doing good business is the key to changing the world, and by ‘good’ business I mean that you can still make profits, still do right by your employees, and still do right by your country—this is how we can bring about change.”   Turn back the clock to 2003, and even as Maxson was exiting a 4-year banking career in New York City to get an MBA from Cornell— a familiar gateway for ambitious bankers—she was already looking past Wall Street. Comments Maxson: “One of the reasons I wanted to change was that I also wanted to build things—not just in the U.S., but internationally.”     Sometimes building things necessitated some banking diplomacy. For instance, while living in Cameroon as CFO (Africa) for electric power giant AES Corporation, Maxson became charged with leading negotiations to help AES restructure €300 million in debt between AES, eight multilateral lenders, and the Cameroon government. She would eventually join Schneider Electric in Hong Kong before transferring to SE’s Paris headquarters, where she assumed the role of group CFO in May of 2020.   Maxson’s CFO tenure now falls during a transformational chapter for Schneider, as the company has made no secret of its plans to double down on its commitment to sustainability initiatives and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles. “ESG is not just something companies do—it is a real value driver in terms of both mitigating risk and reporting actuals, so you really want to embed your ESG thinking into your financial planning,” explains Maxson, who—despite her years abroad—appears to not have ventured very far from the kitchen table. –Jack Sweeney

When Vanessa Kanu is asked to provide some professional advice to her younger self she responds quickly and without hesitation: “Be more patient.” It’s advice Kanu says she summons even today as she passes the 18th month mark of her CFO tour of duty with technology services company Telus International. “I’m perpetually impatient and I drive myself bananas,” says Kanu, who stepped into her first CFO role at Mitel Networks Corporation, after a steady 15-year climb inside the company she first joined as a financial reporting manager.    “As the company grew, it gave me an opportunity to learn and stretch myself through various roles. Whether it was external reporting, complex technical accounting, FP&A, or M&A and other planning functions, all these things combined kept me with the organization,” says Kanu, whose career climb at Mitel spanned a period during which the company grew from $400 million to $1.3 billion. “I had a great mentor at Mitel, who was the previous CFO Steve Spooner,” comments Kanu, who would join Mitel’s reporting team shortly after Spooner was appointed CFO and would ultimately succeed him as Mitel’s finance chief. Along the way, Mitel management would execute an IPO and multiple strategic acquisitions before transitioning back to a private company.   “My thinking was as long as I'm learning and growing, there was no need to leave and that’s what culminated in a 16-year (career) tenure at that organization,” says Kanu, whose CFO appointment by Telus in 2020 upended her 18-month CFO tenure at Mitel – a chapter shortened perhaps by the same appetite for learning and stretching she has always relied on to propel herself forward. - Jack Sweeney

Last October, shortly after being named CFO of machine learning start-up MOLOCO, Brandon Maultasch decided to forgo yet another welcome coffee to instead engage with a wide flock of MOLOCO employees on the virtues of discounted cash analysis. “The last thing you want a new people leader talking to the entire company about!,” confesses Maultasch, before launching a stirring defense of the fall discussion that he refers to as a “teach-in.”   “We have 65 data scientists and machine learning engineers at the company. If they can build the things that they build, they are smart enough to understand finance, which isn’t all that complicated,” remarks Maultasch, whose approach is notable as much for what it does focus on as for what it doesn’t. By exploring a framework for discounted cash analysis, Maultasch rejected the more traditional point of engagement for incoming CFOs: the company’s future IPO. “The IPO is an important milestone, but it’s not the destination,” notes Maultasch. “The destination is building a generationally important company that adds value in the long run. I wanted to make people understand that the durability of cash flows is what drives long-term value creation.” Once armed with a deeper understanding of discounted cash flows, Maultasch says, employees at large can bring forth more of the insights, processes, and technical solutions that are needed to move the levers of value creation. “I want to line align our conversations around durability and long-term margins. These are the levers that move our revenue, move our profitability, and move our position in the value chain,” he adds. According to Maultasch, an added benefit from “teach-in” discussions is that they sometimes expose what the finance team has gotten wrong. “Some of the things that we thought were inputs turn out to be outputs,” he observes, “so it’s this process of discussion, argument, and learning that aligns everyone toward building a great company.” –Jack Sweeney 

It was 2018, and shortly after payables start-up Tipalti had raised its Series C funding round, Sara Spoja recalls, she sat down with Tipalti CEO and cofounder Chen Amit. Having spent the previous 8 years as a senior operating executive for private equity firm KKR Capstone, Spoja was known for asking C-suite management tough questions, and she was no less probing when it came time to reviewing Tipalti’s Series C model. “I tore that thing apart and asked questions about every assumption,” comments Spoja, who recollects a 4-hour-long meeting with Amit, who encouraged her to grill him on every aspect of the business. During the meeting, Spoja no doubt turned over as many rocks as any of Tipalti’s Series C investors had, but Amit wasn’t looking for an investment from KKR. Indeed, he wanted an investment from Spoja—but not in dollars. Tipalti had achieved the requisite number of start-up milestones that normally precipitate the hiring of a chief financial officer, and it turned out that Spoja had quickly advanced as the tech firm’s leading candidate. “I had hit a patch at KKR where I wasn’t as excited as I might have been about what my next role was going to be,” remembers Spoja, whose seat on KKR’s operating executive talent bench had in the past propelled her into a rotating variety of portfolio company operational roles—each with an expiration date. “I decided that it was time to go and take my first real job at a company,” reports Spoja, who would join Tipalti as CFO in August of 2018. –Jack Sweeney

To those well familiar with the career milestones that typically mark the path to the CFO office, Lou Arcudi’s resume at first may appear to be upside down. Or at least it could be said that the same operational projects and roles that frequently populate the tops of the resumes of aspiring CFOs are instead found at the bottom of Arcudi’s. To put it another way: Arcudi acquired his operations experience early. Arcudi spent his college summers working at a General Motors chemical plant in Framingham, Mass., where he was encouraged to apply to a training program offered by the General Motors Institute of Technology (now Kettering University). The school accepted Arcudi’s application, and after 6 months of training, the young recruit was offered a position at one GM’s many plants.      “It was kind of like the military, where you usually get to choose your posting and specialty, so I picked the Framingham plant and manufacturing accounting and inventory control as my discipline,” recalls Arcudi, whose GM experience soon helped to advance him into a divisional controllership role at chemical company Millipore. At the time, Arcudi was responsible for consolidating the financials for two chemical plants within the United States and two others in Japan and Ireland. “The role helped me to understand what really happens out in the field—it wasn’t about keeping a balance sheet but about being P&L-driven, and it became foundational for my career,” observes Arcudi, as he flags the origins of an operations mind-set that would help to propel him upward and accompany him as he served in a subsequent succession of CFO roles. –Jack Sweeney

If you were to casually meet CyberArk CFO Josh Siegel for the first time at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), you might quickly assume that he has spent the balance of his career-building years in nearby Silicon Valley. Certainly, on paper his resume lists the requisite number of finance job titles and entrepreneurial milestones that you might expect the bio of an accomplished Silicon Valley CFO to itemize. Later, as you reflect on the mild-mannered “Cyber CFO” whom you briefly encountered, you make one last entry in your mental manifest: CFO Siegel was queuing up for a flight to Tel Aviv. In the end, it’s this entry that’s most telling. Or at least it’s the mental note that perhaps exposes the most about Siegel’s present as well as his past. The fact is that Siegel first began frequenting Tel Aviv departure and arrival gates back in the mid-1990s, when he felt compelled to divert his finance career-building into a more entrepreneurial lane. However, instead of zigging to Silicon Valley, Siegel purposely zagged to Israel—a move that he executed while brandishing a resume with modest accounting feats but deep treasury experience. “When I first got to Israel in the mid-1990s, they were really Old School, and the fact that I was not an accountant meant that I would never be hired as a controller,” comments Siegel, who prior to moving to Israel had held the position of director of capital markets at Sallie Mae, the erstwhile government-sponsored lending enterprise. As Siegel acquired different finance experiences and titles over time, he says, Israel-based businesses and the country’s widening entrepreneurial corridor recast their notions of finance leadership. “Today, the ideas around what makes a strategic finance executive in Israel have really changed,” reports Siegel, echoing a view widely shared among his Silicon Valley peers. Still, more than departure gates may today expose a difference in Siegel’s finance leadership upbringing. As he says, “A goal that I have shared with our CEO is answering the question of how to scale up this company with profitable growth—and that’s just not the standard modus operandi of a lot of Silicon Valley companies.” –Jack Sweeney

Back in early 2020, Gina Mastantuono had only recently stepped into the CFO role at ServiceNow when the subject of intangible assets surfaced during a company board meeting. For months, growing numbers of the company’s investors had been signaling their advocacy for the company to amplify its collective conscientiousness when it came to social and environmental concerns. Traditionally, the company had relied on its marketing and communications teams to project its corporate mind-set when it came to such issues, but a number of events during the previous 12 months had led investors and board members—as well as company CEO Bill McDermott—to conclude that a more codified approach had now become necessary. “This was a pretty significant change for both me and the organization,” explains Mastantuono, who notes that her list of priorities for her first 12 months as CFO suddenly began to shift in real time as the magnitude of adopting ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles became increasingly evident.  “It enabled me to make necessary changes not only within finance but also across the enterprise and externally,” comments Mastantuono, who relates that the impact that she could have as a leader became clear to her when the company’s vice president of treasury pitched to her the idea of ServiceNow forming a racial equity fund to help underserved communities. Recalls Mastantuono: “I was really able to drive this throughout the organization, and now we have put a $100 million fund that was fully funded into the communities that need it most.” However, what’s perhaps more revealing when it comes to Mastantuono’s finance leadership has been the addition of an outward-facing pitch that she regularly makes to ServiceNow customers—and particularly to those attracted to similar ESG-oriented opportunities. “Our products can help our customers in their ESG journeys in a way that those of many other companies just can’t. We have the ability to differentiate from a product perspective and from an ecosystem,” says Mastantuono, who seldom ignores an opening to amplify ESG’s growing influence. “It is just this incredible opportunity that has allowed us to really punch quite a bit above our weight class,” adds Mastantuono, who leaves us wondering whether she’s speaking on behalf of the company or for CFOs at large. –Jack Sweeney 

Back in 2017, Casey Woo decided it was time to graduate from early-stage companies. “What I like to tell people is that as an operator you will be characterized and judged by the age of your businesses,” remarks Woo, who from 2011 to 2017 had served in a succession of finance leadership roles at a number of early-stage “A-B-C series”–funded companies. “At that point, I had three A-B-Cs under my belt, and for me, the concern was that if I took a fourth, I’d be labeled a ‘Van Wilder,’” recalls Woo, naming the Ryan Reynolds character whose seventh year of college served as the backdrop for a National Lampoon movie. “I understood what hypergrowth and product market fit were, but I was not able to say that I had seen ‘scale,’” Woo reports, as he explains what led him to nab the position that he now credits with having opened his next CFO chapter—and enabled him to add “scale” to the list of descriptors in his professional portfolio. The role to which Woo refers was noteworthy as much for its transformative effect on Woo’s future as it was for the company itself: WeWork. “They needed a regional CFO, but this was a huge step up for me, as the size of my P&L on Day 1 was 10 times greater than that of any other business I had ever been a part of,” reports Woo, who from 2017 to 2019 oversaw finance and operations for the flexible workspace company’s U.S. western region and Canada. At the same time, Woo’s timing placed him inside the headline-grabbing WeWork saga that would ultimately lead to the ouster of the firm’s founder and CEO, Adam Neumann, and withdrawal of the company’s IPO. “We were asked by some of the biggest investors in the company to go fast, so in a weird way we were doing what we were told … and following orders,” comments Woo, whose tour of duty at WeWork gave his real estate credentials the boost needed to allow him to soon thereafter step into the CFO office at Landing, a company specializing in flexible-lease apartments. Asked what lessons he may have gleaned from his days at WeWork, Woo observes: “After Adam left, everything changed—the culture went from ‘Go, go, go!’ and ‘We’re top of the world!’ to the reverse and layoffs.” It sounds like Van Wilder may have finally graduated. –Jack Sweeney 

Brett & Jack discuss how learning and development is one of five key elements of employee engagement – and explore reasons why L&D too often gets overlooked. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Dave Bernhardt of SentinelOne, CFO Joan Hilson of Signet Jewelers and CFO Herald Chen of Applovin.

Looking back on the 28 years that he spent inside IBM’s finance function, Russ Porter notes that his career climb paralleled the evolution of FP&A inside the giant technology provider. Turn back the clock to the early to mid-1990s and, Porter tells us, many of IBM’s FP&A professionals were more or less serving as budget managers for the company’s many business units. However, in the years that followed, they began being tasked with broader, more operational duties.  “FP&A became the gearbox for the financial and operational management of each division,” explains Porter, who describes the role of IBM’s FP&A professionals as becoming more “navigational” over time. “Each week, I sat down with my general managers—we would go through all of our sales performance numbers and review which contracts were coming on and which ones were coming off,” reports Porter, recalling the routine. Along the way, Porter recalls, FP&A professionals seeking advancement within the company would need to demonstrate that they could do more than drop red flags when problems surfaced. “FP&A would very often be the centerpiece of conducting troubled contract reviews,” remarks Porter, who adds that finance professionals were expected to not only make recommendations regarding what actions might be required to remedy a struggling contract but also follow up to determine whether the prescribed actions were being taken. For Porter, who eventually oversaw FP&A for IBM’s $30 billion global technology services division, the troubleshooting experiences gleaned during contract review sessions became even more valuable as his growing leadership responsibilities no longer permitted him to sit in on them.  Says Porter: “I knew what was going on at the ground level in terms of how the team reviewed a contract, so I was able to say, ‘Here are the questions that we should now be asking in order to get the answers that we need to better manage the broader portfolio.’”  –Jack Sweeney

After spending 16 years as an equity analyst (the last nine of which at Goldman Sachs), Isaac Ro could not escape the fact that he was busy and bored. The same work that had once challenged his every faculty had become more or less an exercise in pattern recognition. “Good management teams are good, and bad ones are bad,” observes Ro, recalling the cynical mind-set that had been stalking his professional life inside the medical technology sector for nearly 2 years. Still, Ro didn’t leave. “I loved working at Goldman, and I believed that if ever I were going to leave, I wanted to be running to something and not from something,” explains Ro, who admits that he had a self-imposed “high hurdle” to jump if he were to consider future opportunities. To Ro, the classic equity analyst segue to corporate investor relations chief would be “just a different version of the same gig.” “I needed to spread my wings wider and do something sufficiently different,” he remembers, “but I needed someone to sponsor me.” Ro leaves little doubt that he had a CFO role in mind and that he had concluded that the best route for distinguishing himself from his IR-destined peers was through his existing relationships with successful management teams. One such relationship that Ro had kept in place over time was with the management of a medical technology company that he had helped to take public in 2013. “I had sort of mentioned to them over the previous several years that if an opportunity for me with them were to arise, I would appreciate a call,” reports Ro, who goes on to say that in early 2019, he received calls from a number of this firm’s management team members, who outlined how they were ready to launch yet another new medical technology company that they characterized as “similar but bigger.”   “The founders knew what I had to offer and wanted exactly that, and you really need this combination to have a chance,” comments Ro, who would step into the CFO office at newly formed Thrive, Inc., in June of 2019 and help to drive the sale of the company—less than 2 years later—to Exact Sciences for $2.15 billion. Still, despite having helped the Thrive management to achieve an impressive exit, Ro’s job satisfaction wavered.   “It just felt like I had a lot of unfinished business as a CFO,” recollects Ro, who adds that he determined that the best way to broaden his CFO resume was to move beyond start-ups.   Taking the advice of a Thrive board member, Ro says, he then purposely focused on opportunities within firms that were already generating “significant revenue” and that had aspirations to go public. It was this prescription that led Ro in early 2021 to enter the CFO office of Sema4—a company with 900-plus employees that was generating roughly $200 million in annual revenue.   “Sema4 is a very natural progression for me when it comes to keeping the learning curve steep,” notes Ro, who happily observes that he seldom gets bored these days. –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack discuss how the goal of planning teams and organizations should always be moving beyond the accepted practices or tools to something better. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Bill Zerella of ACV Auctions , CFO Scott Walker of Clarity Software & CFO Michael High of Deep Water Gulf of Mexico, Shell

When Nipun Soni tells us that he spent 5 years at Oracle Corp., during which time he helped to perform due diligence on some 40-plus M&A transactions, we can’t resist asking about the “big” deals that grabbed business headlines—such as Oracle’s 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Although Soni no doubt understands our curiosity, he can’t help but tamp down our expectations a bit after we ask: “Do you recall ‘the visit’ to Sun’s campus?” His reply? “With high-profile public company mergers, you actually don’t visit. You try to keep it under the covers. You don’t want people to know about it before it happens.” Still, our curiosity lingers around “the visit” because this is when the ice is broken and where finance is frequently represented more than any other functional group within the acquiring company.     Soni is happy to expand: “Well, as soon as the transaction was announced, we were actually at the Sun campuses. We met with Sun’s broader team, their leadership, and we tried to break the ice between the two broader finance teams just by saying: ‘Hey, welcome to our broad Oracle umbrella. We really look forward to working together and learning about this different business model.’” However, BillionToOne’s CFO makes it clear that some of the biggest lessons from his 40-plus M&A transactions at Oracle and numerous subsequent other ones that today populate his collective career portfolio often came from deals involving smaller private companies. “You don’t want to suddenly find yourself in a position where you inherit a few questionable sales transactions from an acquired company that begin tainting the overall revenue recognition of a company like Oracle,” explains Soni, who adds that the lack of infrastructure within smaller firms often makes such transactions riskier—and all the more interesting.   "What is it that we should be looking for?,” “How do we evaluate the synergies between the two companies?,” and “What are some of the beyond-the-numbers risks that must be thought through?” asks Soni, as he seeks to better expose the experience he believes helped to propel him upward in his career and ultimately into the CFO office at BillionToOne.   - Jack Sweeney

Of all the CFO career routes that our finance leader guests have shared with us, very few have have rendered a path as circuitous as the one blazed by Joan Hilson, CFO of Signet Jewelers Limited, the world’s largest specialty jewelry company. When Hilson assumed the CFO role at gem giant Signet in 2019, she was entering a business that had charted several evolutionary chapters—including an early one that she knew only too well. Back in the mid-1980s, Hilson had left public accounting to become controller of a 100-store chain of jewelry stores known as Sterling Jewelers. The regional chain would soon thereafter complete an IPO that put it on a path to grow to more than 1,000 stores, a feat that it would accomplish in part through the acquisition of several chains, including Kay Jewelers. Later, the business would be rebranded as the Signet Group. In 1992, when Hilson left the jewelry retailer to accept a vice president of finance position with Limited Brands, she had no clue that her career would eventually lead her back to the fast-growing, ambitious jeweler that had first whetted her appetite for retail. Thus, when executive and specialty jeweler were reunited in 2019, Hilson’s career journey took on the storybook quality—seldom achieved in corporate finance—that derives from the protagonist returning to close a figurative loop. For Hilson, though, the intervening years were perhaps less of a loop and more of a 27-year stint of diligent career-building that included CFO tours of duty at Limited Brands’ Victoria Secret Stores (2003–2005), American Eagle Outfitters (2005–2012), and David’s Bridal (2014–2019). Asked to supply us with her 2022 CFO priorities, Hilson responds: “To continue to grow my team and create an experience that allows them to grow personally as well as professionally.” It’s perhaps not surprising to hear such team-oriented goals as the priorities of this finance leader, who, during her 1980s career chapter with the jewelry giant, became the company’s first female vice president. –Jack Sweeney 

It was a moment of insight that Heather Dixon remembers having not once but twice during the untold number of hours she has spent in examining how divisional numbers were being “rolled up” to be reported. In the process of rolling up certain numbers, Dixon noted that parts of a division’s business would be exhibiting outstanding performance, but when the division reported its results, the parts were frequently hidden.     Observes Dixon: “These divisions were really doing a lot better than how things appeared on the page.” For Dixon, whose resume includes chief accounting officer stints at both Aetna and Walgreens, the reported numbers were frequently not the problem—instead, it was how the companies were accustomed to explaining their results. As Dixon explains it, a moment of divisional insight at each company prompted finance to mobilize a company-wide effort “to tell the story better.” Says Dixon: “We went through a recalibration internally when we said, ‘Let’s look at all of the things that we do as a company and pull them apart and figure out how to put them together in the right way.” According to Dixon, “the right way” is an approach that helps investors to better understand the company. “If the market understands what you’re doing and they understand the pieces of your company, they can give you a multiple that values each division of your company separately—and they can really expand these multiples for the segments that exhibit performance that deserves higher numbers,” she notes. What began as an examination of how one division rolled up its numbers ultimately became a wake-up call for the company’s reporting at large: “What I have twice seen in my experience is that we were able to take the multiple for the overall company up. Again, same company, same building blocks, higher multiple—all because we decided to report the information in a little bit of a different way.” –Jack Sweeney 

For many organizations, capturing real-time data is no longer a goal but now a reality. However, for those firms determined to accumulate these real-time bits and digital details, the old adage about house guests and fish seems to apply: After 3 days, the former begin to smell like the latter. This is an aroma that has become particularly unsettling to CFOs who find themselves increasingly being tasked with untangling the organizational snags that frequently stall business meetings and curtail the flow of real-time data insights to key decision-makers within the organization. To help us to better understand the efforts afoot to liberate the flow of data and remove this foul scent, we were pleased to once more catch up with Darrell Cox, CFO of Vena, who never hesitates to expose the complexity of the organizational collaboration required for Vena to empower its decision-makers with the data on which they rely to scale correctly and look beyond the next quarter. –Jack Sweeney

Asked to highlight his experience in mergers and acquisitions, Andy Watts doesn’t need to weigh and measure the many deals that he has helped to execute over his three-decade-long finance career. Instead, Watts quickly points to the 2000s, when, as CFO of a division of Thomson Reuters, he sold off businesses responsible for nearly half of his division’s $120 million in annual revenues—a respectable feat that is perhaps even more impressive in light of the four new businesses that his division acquired during this same 12-month period. “I got a really good frontline view of how to do M&As, and while I stubbed my toe on a number of them in the process, in the end we had them running like a Swiss watch and knew exactly how we were going to get the value out of them,” remembers Watts, whose 12-year career at Thomson included something of a surprise chapter that he now credits with having helped to open the door to an operations role.    “I was sitting in a business review, and I began ‘barking on’ about how we were treating our customers—so the division president turned to me and said, ‘Okay, why don’t you go fix it?,'” recalls Watts, who notes that his initial his response was to try to step on the career break.    Says Watts: “I said, ‘No, wait!’ But then she responded, ‘There is no one else who has expressed that level of passion about our customers and the experience that they deserve.’” Over the coming years, Watts would oversee the company’s customer onboarding processes and the relationship management interactions that governed Thomson’s customer experience.  Looking back at the role that afforded him the title of Global Head of Customer Administration, Thomson Reuters, Watts realizes that this experience allowed him to complete his eventual trek to the CFO office. In 2014, he would leave Thomson and step into the CFO office at Brown & Brown, where a transformative acquisition was in short order added to the menu. –Jack Sweeney 

Twenty-four hours after Brian Kinion’s first earnings call as a CFO of a publicly-traded frim, his aspirations as a finance chief quickly became deflated as Vista Equity Partners made clear its intent to buy the company, a developer of marketing automation software known as Marketo. “Mine became a very different role than what I had anticipated—almost all of the executives with whom I had worked left, but I stuck around for another 6 months to help the team take it from public to private,” remembers Kinion, who nevertheless views his Marketo career chapter as one of the most formative steps along his vocational path. To Kinion, who had joined the company several years earlier as vice president of finance, his Marketo sojourn was important because it allowed him to check the “CFO” box, thus guaranteeing him a coveted edge when it came to future CFO appointments. What’s more, Kinion says, Marketo was where the full breadth of his past experiences could finally be put to use and where he finally came to “own the financial model”—a leadership leap made possible by then-CFO Fred Ball, who Kinion says made no secret of his mission to develop others.   Ball had led the company through Marketo’s successful IPO in May 2013 and occupied its CFO office as annual revenue at the firm grew from $14 million in 2010 to $210 million 5 years later.  “He told me, ‘Come in and take my job, and even if you don’t end up taking it, I’m still I’m going to train you to be a CFO somewhere else,’” explains Kinion, who in 2017 would exit Marketo to accept a CFO position at Upwork, where once more he became the CFO of a publicly traded company after the private firm’s IPO in the following year. –Jack Sweeney

Brett and Jack discuss how the leadership narrative benefits hiring, and why department hiring budgets may someday soon be replaced. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Cassandra Hudson of EngageSmart, CFO Nitesh Sharan of Soundhound and CFO Michael High of Shell’s Deep Water Gulf of Mexico.

When Nitesh Sharan exited Hewlett-Packard after 15 years of diligent career-building, he assumed—like many seasoned finance executives have done—that his finance skill set would be applicable to just about any industry or company. However, Sharan recalls that when he stepped into a senior IR and treasury role at athletic footwear titan Nike, Inc., this assumption was sorely tested. “I had to relearn finance in a way because it was not just about the science or about your gross margins, profits, and cash—it was about the art and the science together,” observes Sharan. “At Nike, the IR function was a very strong partner with communications and the brand, which was a wholly different element of IR that I came to appreciate,” comments Sharan, who back in 2016 executed the intrepid career segue from HP, a company known for its engineering and maniacal focus on product, to Nike, a company known for its marketing and maniacal focus on brand. Still, Sharan says, the two companies shared something very much in common: iconic founders and the cultures that they had built. “At HP, we had a founder’s culture in which Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were embedded in everything. Even with the mergers and divestitures that the company has seen, HP is still the iconic founders' company of the Valley,” remarks Sharan, who adds that Nike founder Phil Knight's imprint is similarly part of the company’s culture today. “When I went to Nike, I felt one step closer because Phil Knight's footprint is still so deep there—so much of the founder's culture has been embedded,” notes Sharon, who reports that his experience in working at the two founder-led companies has influenced his thinking when it comes to businesses at large. “I really believe that the most dominant companies are founder-led—you can see it in the markets,” explains Sharan, who last year opened his latest career chapter by stepping into the CFO role at founder-led SoundHound, Inc. Concludes Sharan: “I just became attracted to the founder's culture, and, in a way, this is what catalyzed my transition to SoundHound.” –Jack Sweeney

When Herald Chen was growing up in a town not far from Pittsburg, he dreamed of someday running the small town’s steel mill. Years later when he was graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, the steel mill no longer occupied Chen’s maturing career aspirations. “My two job offers were to either go make soap for Procter & Gamble at a manufacturing plant in Baltimore or go to Wall Street,“ remembers Chen, who adds that the offers for the seemingly different jobs came as a result of having graduated from UPenn’s Management and Technology program—a curriculum that offered a dual degree in engineering and finance. Chen chose Wall Street and in 1995 landed at KKR, the private equity firm that had feasted on leveraged buyouts in 1970s and 1980s. Recalls Chen: “I had a front row seat for meeting many CEOs and CFOs and invested behind a couple dozen of them, so I learned a lot about what the good, the bad, and the ugly look like in these companies.”   Twenty-seven years later, KKR can arguably be seen to have been the mother ship of Chen’s finance career, a place that over time he would leave and then return to as the investment house provided him with the wherewithal to open new professional chapters—the longest being from 2007 to 2019, when he headed KKR’s Technology, Media, and Telecom practice. Along the way, Chen demonstrated a rapport with C-suite members and company boards that distinguished him from other investors, a trait that led to a growing number of invitations to sit on different company boards. “I had figured out that I wanted to be building businesses, but I also knew that I wasn’t the smartest or brightest or most charismatic person in the room, so maybe the best way for me wasn’t actually sitting in the CEO seat but instead was investing and sitting on boards and helping CEOs,” comments Chen, who has held a number of board seats, as well as served as board chair for such companies as Internet Brands/WebMD, Optiv, Epicor, BMC Software, and Mitchell International.  With a boardroom track record that few of his CFO peers can match, Chen attributes his success in part to being a good listener.  “I would invest behind CEOs and CFOs whom others just didn’t understand—they just didn’t comprehend what these people were trying to do—because I would find that I could create a lot of value with them just by taking a little extra time to hear them through,” remarks Chen. When asked to offer advice for CFOs seeking to lower the temperature of certain boardroom discussions, Chen shares a story involving notable KKR financier Henry Kravis: “When I was at KKR, I made a mistake in some of the numbers one time. It was late in the transaction, at the point where on Wall Street you’d expect to get yelled at and there would be this big blowup—but I remember Henry Kravis just getting very calm and saying, ‘Hey, we’ll get through this and come out the other side.’” –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack are joined by friend of Planning Aces Bryan Lapidus, who is today director of FP&A for the Association for Financial Professionals. Bryan discusses 2022 planning priorities, while offering guidance to FP&A teams tasked with helping their organization advance into the new year’s uncertain environment. This episode features commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Jason Child of Splunk and CFO Cassandra Hudson, of EngageSmart.

Back in 2012, when Michael High was heading up corporate planning across 30 countries for Shell, the energy company’s CFO made it known that it was time for Shell’s business leaders to reconsider their ritual of renegotiating annual business targets. To that end, Shell’s finance leader let it be known that the business units could skip the company’s corporate planning process in the coming year, as an affirmation of their commitment to the targets they had agreed to the year before. “I actually think that this was the right insight at the time, but it generated a ton of knock-on consequences over time,” explains High, who commends the finance leader’s willingness to take head on what’s recognized in business at large as the budgeting process’s greatest vulnerability: target renegotiation. Still, the consequences were real. “When we went to turn on the planning system in 2014, most people didn’t remember how it worked. There was a series of intricate steps—something like 146 steps and different jobs required to get the IT application to do everything that it was supposed to. And, of course, if you do it only once a year, nobody remembers all the right steps,” comments High, who notes that the circumstances also exposed how talent often factors into corporate planning. “If you think about the FP&A community and the IT community that supports FP&A, you realize that these tend to be high-turnover roles. They tend to be career-developing roles. So, you’d put people in them for maybe 2 to 3 years, typically. Well, by the time we got around to doing business planning in 2014, 80 percent of the organization that either had facilitated the planning process or controlled the IT systems had turned over,” recalls High. Today, High views as a painful lesson the subsequent late nights and weekends required to get Shell’s corporate planning process back on track—times when many members of Shell’s FP&A team paid a high price. “I was accountable for the process, so it was a leadership failure on my part,” he states.   However, High observes that something more did arise from this consequential episode. Over the next few years, High says, he began to note how a shift was under way within organizations as the regular enhancement of cloud applications began to surpass the functionality improvements of legacy ERP platforms. Meanwhile, when it came to corporate planning, he became focused on how the talent demands of certain IT systems had traditionally put the planning process at a higher risk. According to High, he was determined to “de-risk” technology in planning and eliminate IT complexity. To better evaluate some of the new cloud applications, High began attending different conferences, including the annual gathering of the Association of Financial Professionals (AFP)—where the cloud vendors always highlighted how they were zeroing-in on corporate planning’s pain points. This helped High to see how the adroitness with which certain cloud applications can access, correlate, and display company data could once and for all put an end to certain planning rituals such as the renegotiation of targets. Concludes High: “What you have the potential to do today is to really change the nature of the performance conversation and the results discussion. You can go from having a static set of numbers produced outside of the room to a discussion during which you can pull up live data and talk about it and actually seek answers to questions on the spot.” –Jack Sweeney

Bill Zerella’s path to the CFO office began at a company whose customers largely belonged to a bygone era. At the time, Simplicity Patterns was the largest pattern company in the world, and its most devout customers were sewing machine owners across the United States and Canada who enjoyed making clothes for themselves and their families.   For Zerella, a 20-something-year-old auditor, the critical career decision to join Simplicity was a no-brainer not because of the business opportunity being presented or the position being offered but because of the source of the proffer. The company had recently hired a former Fortune 500 finance leader by the name of Bill Lewis, who was looking to throttle up the company’s business model. Zerella was ready to climb on board.   “I probably learned more from him during the 5 years I was with that company than I’ve learned in the past 25 years,” comments Zerella, who today is a seasoned tech finance leader who has served in a string of CFO roles, including one with Fitbit, where in 2015 he oversaw the company’s $841 million initial public offering (IPO). Still, when asked about the consequential experiences that allowed him to advance upward, Zerella is drawn back to his years at Simplicity. “It was a low-tech company that basically just printed sewing patterns—which might not sound interesting to most—but it was incredibly lucrative and probably one of the most profitable that firms I’ve ever been part of,” reports Zerella, who started in an auditing role but quickly found himself reassigned to FP&A as CFO Lewis looked to beef up the company’s performance measurements. However, Zerella’s arrival in the FP&A planning realm coincided with Simplicity’s adoption of one of the desktop computing era’s most disruptive technologies, spreadsheet application Lotus 1-2-3. In the months ahead, Zerella’s mastery of the tool would allow the former auditor to move the Simplicity finance team beyond calculators and pencils as he led the automation of the company’s entire planning process—and received multiple promotions.    In fact, the former auditor held the position of treasurer at the time of his departure to accept his first CFO appointment—only 5 years after his arrival.   “Looking back, I probably got there too soon—I probably could have used a little more training,” recalls Zerella, whose Simplicity career was also notable for having permitted him to witness firsthand the transformational power of tech—which itself would lead to his relocation only a few years later to a locale he will now likely always call home, Silicon Valley. –Jack Sweeney 

Back in 2008, Cassandra Hudson was interviewing for a senior accounting role at a small tech firm in Boston when the CFO casually shared some “insight” into the company’s future. “The CEO really wants to take this company public, this is probably never going to happen—we’ll likely sell in the next couple of years,” Hudson recalls the CFO remarking, before he added: “Usually, finance people don’t stay in the event that a company is sold—we just leave and go on to the next one.” At the time, Hudson says, she didn’t know what to make of the CFO’s comments, especially when they accompanied a job offer. One IPO and multiple CFOs later, the Boston tech firm was sold to developer OpenText in late 2019 for $1.4 billion. “It was a much longer journey, but we did end up there,” reports Hudson, who in 2020 stepped into her first CFO role as the culmination to a remarkably linear 15-year career path at the Boston tech firm, which itself grew from less than $10 million to more than $400 million in annual revenue during Hudson’s years on board. Today, as CFO of EngageSmart, Hudson looks back at the succession of promotions and job titles and experiences that have punctuated her climb upward to senior management and the merits of making a 15-year career investment within a single company. “The path was definitely not always certain, and there were moments when you would reassess,” comments Hudson, who remembers receiving a challenging international operations assignment from a newly hired CFO—and doubting whether her experience was a good match. “My sense at the time was ‘I don’t think that I can do this, I don’t even know if I want to do this, I think I’m done here,” explains Hudson, who adds that the CFO reassured her that she had all of what was required to complete the assignment. Today, looking back at her job interview at the Boston tech firm, it’s clear that the previous CFO perhaps was misjudging the firm’s IPO prospects, dogged future growth trajectory, and ultimate sale timing. Still, he did mention that there would come a day when it would be time to “go on to the next one.” –Jack Sweeney 

Unlike many of his finance leader peers, Jean Lavigueur has little difficulty in identifying where and when his path to the CFO office began.   It was back in the early to mid-1990s, he recalls, when—after he had spent nearly 10 years with PwC—a charismatic entrepreneur client named Louis Têtu convinced him to join his supply chain start-up. Although this company was soon thereafter sold to Baan, Têtu and Lavigueur found that they had unmistakable chemistry—or at least this is what we must assume, given that 25 years later, the two Canadian entrepreneurs have built not one but two other successful companies together. The first was Taleo, a talent management company that the two men cofounded in 1999 and took public in 2007 (In 2012, Teleo was sold to Oracle for $1.9 billion). Their present firm is AI-powered ecommerce company Coveo, which recently raised $215 million when it went public on the Toronto stock exchange. Today, as a seasoned CFO, Lavigueur implores his CFO peers to widen their lenses. “With every crisis, there is an opportunity,” he observes, before recounting how nearly a decade ago, Microsoft—one of Coveo’s largest development partners—acquired his firm’s largest rival, precipitating a nail-biting challenge that led Coveo to make a strategic pivot. “We used the crisis to accelerate toward the cloud,” explains Lavigueur, who adds that the company fueled its new cloud ambitions in part by forging a stronger relationship with Microsoft rival Salesforce, whose offerings—unlike those of Microsoft—were entirely cloud-based. Advises Lavigueur: “When you see a crisis, use it to get better.” –Jack Sweeney

When it came time for Jen Herdler to get back into the workforce, she signed up for a refresher course in financial modeling through a weeklong classroom experience in lower Manhattan. There she would become reacquainted with an old friend: Excel. However, her fellow classmates were another matter. “I’ll never forget that first day when I walked into the classroom and discovered that everyone was at least 20 years younger than me—I felt so uncomfortable and out of my element,” recalls Herdler, a seasoned finance leader who had put her career on hold roughly a decade earlier to raise a family. Herdler says that her weeklong immersion among 20-somethings grew only more unsettling when the class was asked to individually tackle different modeling tasks, an exercise designed to stress-test the spreadsheet’s latest functionalities. Says Herdler: “Their speed always surpassed mine.” However, the discussions that routinely followed the Excel exercises began to expose something different to Herdler. “I realized that the communication skills that leaders need to explain their ideas were as critical as they ever had been,” comments Herdler, who notes that the discussions also made her realize how her past experiences in both business and life had enhanced her judgment and enabled an enviable advantage in making business decisions. Looking back at her classroom experience, Herdler says that her biggest takeaway perhaps had little to do with business modeling. “The technology is always changing,” she observes, “but business and leadership fundamentals do not.” –Jack Sweeney 

Like many of his finance leader peers, Pete Mariani credits a senior operational role with helping him to plant both feet on the path to CFO office. However, unlike many of his peers, Mariani found his transformational role to be in Japan. Back in 1998, he was a director of finance for Guidant, a maker of cardiovascular medical products that was looking to grow its footprint in a number of markets offshore—including Japan, where it had recently acquired one of its distributor partners.   However, unlike many of his peers, Mariani found his transformational role to be in Japan. Back in 1998, he was a director of finance for Guidant, a maker of cardiovascular medical products that was looking to grow its footprint in a number of markets offshore—including Japan, where it had recently acquired one of its distributor partners. “I gave an immediate, ‘Yes!,’” recalls Mariani, when asked whether there was any hesitation before accepting the offer that would advance him into a vice president of finance position at Guidant’s soon-to-be-established Japan subsidiary. Operational experience was one of the incentives that Guidant had promised Mariani, so before long the finance transplant had numerous functional areas within the subsidiary reporting to him, including warehousing and distribution, customer care, IT, legal, and compliance. As functional areas became established and the American company successfully aligned its culture within the international setting, growth became a natural by-product. “I think that when we began, we had about 50 employees in Japan—4 years later, there were more than 300,” reports Mariani, whose Japan career chapter would end in Year 4 when he returned to the States after having been named controller and chief accounting officer for the company. However, upon his return, more than a promotion lay in waiting. “We landed back in Indianapolis on the same day that they passed Sarbanes-Oxley,” remembers Mariani, citing the devilishly complex compliance legislation that would occupy many of his waking hours in the months and years ahead. –Jack Sweeney 

  About Episodes  Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode   The podcast featuring finance leaders driving change within their organizations.               All Episodes   728: The Courage of Your Convictions | Joe Wolk, CFO, Johnson & Johnson 728: The Courage of Your Convictions | Joe Wolk, CFO, Johnson & Johnson   Aug 22, 2021   Joe Wolk was about 5 years into his 23-year career with Johnson & Johnson when he was encouraged to take a manufacturing operations position at a newly acquired J&J company in Vacaville, California. One hot July day, Wolk recalls, he and his wife drove up to Vacaville to visit the plant, where he ended up taking a seat across from the newly acquired company’s plant manager. As one of Vacaville’s initial J&J transplants, the young finance executive sensed that his arrival was being viewed less than enthusiastically.  “Within the first 90 seconds, he says: ‘Hey, you know what? I don’t think we need you out here,’” Wolk remembers, citing those words as the plant manager’s first remarks. Thus began one of Wolk’s least favorite but—as he explains—most rewarding career experiences. “The first 4 months in that job were like going to the dentist every day,” says Wolk, who tells us that ultimately the reward from the experience was a lesson in when and how to stand your ground. The lesson began at a team meeting where Wolk tried to offer the plant’s management some practical advice with regard to how to prepare for an upcoming visit from senior J&J executives. At the time, Wolk says, the plant was working to address a number manufacturing issues as it tried to determine how best to meet customer demand. Wolk recalls the plant manager’s response to his advice: “We’d like to meet your wish list, but we don’t have time for this right now.” Instead of just accepting the manager’s feedback, Wolk reports, he arranged a private meeting with the manager, where he boldly elucidated the items occupying his “wish list.” “If they come out here next week and we can’t provide certain answers, we’re going to have a mess on our hands,” were among the words that Wolk says that he used to prod the plant manager’s thinking. In the end, the visiting J&J executives were satisfied with the plant team’s answers, and Wolk’s reputation grew in the plant manager’s eye. “From this point on, he didn’t take a meeting without including me,” concludes Wolk, who uses the story to underscore how finance executives must be ready to summon the courage of their convictions. –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack discuss how building trust may be an FP&A professional’s greatest skillset. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Puneet Pamnani of KORE Wireless, CFO Robert Alvarez of BigCommerce & CFO Dave Bernhardt of SentinelOne.

Holiday Replay: When it comes time for Harmit Singh to brief Levi Strauss & Co.’s management team regarding the latest performance results, Levi’s CFO will often share a briefing document that features a front page bearing the heading “What’s Working and What’s Not.” “It’s more difficult to understand what’s not working, and it’s the ‘What’s not’ that helps us to determine the areas on which we have to focus to take the business to the next level,” explains Singh, who notes that the “front page” is carefully rendered by Levi’s Financial Planning  & Analysis (FP&A) crew – a team of forward-looking financial professionals whose past feats of analytic derring-do have included helping the jeans maker to foresee the leap from “skinny Jeans” to the baggie look among young consumers. It’s here among Levi’s crack team of number crunchers that the “what’s not” often becomes exposed, and it’s here where a new mind-set – one that keeps consumers top-of-mind and favors stakeholders over shareholders – is already visible. And just as soldiers are known by the things that they carry, so, too, are finance professionals known by the metrics that they wield – and at Levi’s, these metrics are increasingly consumer-driven. Explains Singh: “As the pivot to the consumer mind-set happens, the metrics that have become critical are: How many new customers are we signing up? What is the repeat rate of the customer? And, What is the lifetime customer value?"

When CFO Tania Secor looks back at the early years of her finance career, she can’t help but revisit her decision to accept a position with the McGraw-Hill Companies. For a half-dozen years, Secor had been entrenched in the private equity world, advising portfolio companies on different growth strategies and helping to complete the acquisition of a string of middle-market firms. Her new role at McGraw-Hill would not only leverage her M&A experience but also situate her within the corporate finance rank-and-file, where she grew accustomed to the cadence of tasks performed by the finance function. “I had never done a forecast myself, and I had never been through a rigorous budgeting and planning process at a $10 billion company,” explains Secor, who over the next 8 years would advance into a number of different FP&A roles before being named CFO of the magazine Businessweek, a role that would lead her to become part of a future transaction. “I came back from maternity leave and was asked to work with the leadership team to sell Businessweek,” recalls Secor, who would remain CFO of the media property after it was acquired by Bloomberg LLP. “During the transition, we had to rip our GL out of McGraw-Hill and put it into Bloomberg—and this had to have been one of the most challenging times of my career,” comments Secor, who notes that as the deal neared completion, her finance team lost its controller, which injected even more stress into the transition period.   Looking back, Secor says that she wouldn’t want to relive the experience. At the same time, though, she leaves little doubt that ultimately it was the Businessweek transaction that allowed her to plant both feet on the CFO path. –Jack Sweeney  CFOTL: Tell us about R/GA … what type of company is this, what does it do, and what are its offerings today? Secor: R/GA is a digital innovation agency. We design businesses and brands for a more human future. This means that we engage strategists, technologists, creative people, and producers to develop campaigns, websites, mobile applications—any type of digital experience—for our clients, which include world-leading companies like Google, Samsung, Verizon, Nike, and 200 other firms for which we create these digital innovation experiences. We have 14 offices across the world and about 2,000 employees. We are a division of The Interpublic Group of Companies. Interpublic Group has a large portfolio of different types of agencies and PR firms. The niche into which we fall is not necessarily media buying and planning—which is “media brands”—and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with big standard campaigns for some of what you might consider to be traditional clients. Where we come in is in working with brands that are more innovative or want to complement their campaigns with some more innovative solutions. You might see an R/GA-developed TikTok campaign where the influencer on TikTok is actually engaging with you. We may have used volume capture to take an influencer and create a beautiful digital art campaign that turns into a commercial or a website design or a mobile app. Our services and capabilities run the gamut of the more innovative creative types of digital experiences.

When CFO Scott Walker has considered new career opportunities in the past, only a small subset of growth businesses have been able to meet all of his desired criteria. Very often the firms had achieved product market fit and successfully raised a number of rounds of funding, but to Walker they were just still too young. Perhaps the management was being reshuffled or the operations were too fragmented, and it would become clear to Walker that the company was not yet ready to find its “cadence.” This would be of no little import, as helping companies to find their cadence is what Scott Walker does best, or so he explains as he reflects back on the different career choices on his path to becoming an “operational CFO.”      Says Walker: “My sweet spot is stepping into a business that’s doing well but has to professionalize. It has to grow up. It has to mature. It has to add discipline and build rigor in how it gets things done. This ultimately focuses on execution through decision-making on logic and data and facts.” According to Walker, a business might be able to swiftly close its books and review its balance sheet with regularity, but very often the firm is not yet advancing “in step” as one organization. “I put a healthy tension on the business to make sure that people are showing up every month, and there is a monthly operating review at which people talk about the fundamental underlying performance of the business,” explains Walker, who believes that the regularity with which people talk about performance helps to inform how decisions are made across an organization and how things ultimately get done in a business. Last May, when Walker stepped into the CFO office of Clarity Software Solutions, Inc., he was confident that he had found an excellent match for what he does best. Still, his first 100 days were not without a few challenges. “I couldn’t find the cadence in my first couple of months, so the CEO and I sat down and I told him, ‘I need to build a cadence here,'” remarks Walker, who adds that his arrival at the software developer occurred at a unique place in time on the company’s path to maturity. Says Clarity’s CFO: “This is a very important time for me as an operational CFO—it’s when I can really help a company.” –Jack Sweeney  

Brett and Jack weigh-in on Zoom firing squads, the move to hybrid workplaces and hiring’s enormous impact on your company’s funnel. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Jim Morgan of CallRail, CFO Amol Chaubal of Waters Corporation and CFO Justin Judd of BanbooHR.

When it comes to FP&A data, WP Engine CFO David Brolsma is an open book. “We make a data visualization tool called ‘Looker’ available to all of our employees,” reports the veteran tech executive. “We’re an open book company, so all employees can see almost all of the same performance data points that I see.” At the Austin-based start-up that provides developer-centric WordPress products for companies and agencies of all sizes, Brolsma and his extended team keep their eyes on the crucial metric of market share growth, as well as on customer retention, churn, daily active users, and other software-as-a service (SaaS) measures. Brolsma helped used a Dutch auction to take Rackspace public in 2008, just before the global economic crisis hit. The fanatical customer support he learned at that cloud computing pioneer proved valuable in helping WP Engine’s customers to navigate the extreme uncertainty brought about by the global pandemic throughout 2020. “COVID was impacting a lot of our customers, especially in industries like travel and hospitality,” Brolsma confides, “so we decided to talk to them to figure out how we could best be of help.” Despite WP Engine’s own COVID-related budget cuts and spending constraints, the company eventually offered credits to distressed customers. “It’s difficult to make this kind of decision,” Brolsma adds, “but now our customer retention is off the charts—like nothing we’ve ever seen before.” –Eric Krell

How should a textbook rental company respond when it discovers that Amazon has just introduced offerings that will make the giant retailer its newest and biggest competitor?   If it’s 2013 and the company is Chegg, Inc., management found a conference room and locked itself inside not for hours but for days and weeks, according to Dave Bernhardt, who sat alongside the company’s CFO and other operations leaders as they together considered some of the grim realities of having Amazon as a competitor. “When Amazon entered the market, pricing on textbooks fell about 40%, so the profit in the business disappeared immediately,” explains Bernhardt, who first joined Chegg as a corporate controller and soon advanced into the vice president of finance role as Chegg tapped into more of Bernhardt’s FP&A acumen. “We needed to find a way to make our business ‘capital light,’ and the question became: ‘How do we get out of where we are and take our money and put it back into something that will basically give it back to us?,’” recalls Bernhardt, who notes that Chegg’s management quickly zeroed in on partners and competitors facing a similar Amazon threat. “We partnered with the logistics company Ingram, which did fulfillment for us. Later, we partnered with the publishers themselves when we moved to a consignment model. This meant that we weren’t buying any of these books and thus had that cash available to us,” remarks Bernhardt. Nevertheless, Chegg’s profits from book rentals were being put on life support. “We essentially gave to our partners whatever profits existed in the rental business. We had to tell Wall Street, “Hey, ignore this side of the business because all we’re viewing it as now is as a low-cost customer acquisition vehicle,” remembers Bernhardt, who adds that the company then began to aggressively upsell customers to Chegg services consisting of more high-margin products. “I want to say that at the time Chegg services might have been 5% to 10% of the business, and now it’s probably 95%,” reports Bernhardt, who estimates that the education company’s profit margins today run higher than 80%, on average. Reflecting on Chegg’s response, Bernhardt doesn’t hesitate to characterize fear as being an effective catalyst: “I don’t know that Chegg would be where it is today if Amazon hadn’t entered the market—or at least its transformation never would have happened as quickly or as successfully.” –Jack Sweeney

Waters Corporation CFO Amol Chaubal has cracked the code on the strategic CFO role, and he’s willing to share a snapshot of his formula for success. “A lot of companies focus on data and the insights coming out of that data,” reveals Chaubal, who amassed finance leadership experience in consumer products, pharma, and energy before joining Waters Corporation—a publicly listed analytical Laboratory instrument and software company—earlier this year. “Our focus is a few steps ahead. We say that data and insights are table stakes. You have to go one step further to take these insights and create action options for the business leaders. And you have to then use these options to come up with decision support and recommendations on what actions to pursue.” After helping to execute a tricky COVID pivot at his previous company, Chaubal now tries to apply his laserlike focus to commercial operations at Waters in order to drive recurring revenue gains and help to enhance the vitality of the company’s product portfolio. On a daily basis, he and his finance team monitor the opportunities pipeline by tracking incoming orders (by instrument category, business area, geography, customer type), order–sales conversions, supply chain and inventory health, operations productivity, and product portfolio vitality. Chaubal’s secret for optimizing his own levels involves taking a series of 5- to 7-minute breaks throughout the day to relax, refocus, and reinvigorate. He channels this vigor into expanding his relationships with business leaders throughout the organization: “I strongly feel that the most successful CFO is a social CFO. One who connects with the deepest deep corners of the organization. One who is able to pull information out, connect the dots, and come up with: What does this mean?” –Jack Sweeney 

Ten years ago, when Adobe management finally made up its mind to enter the software-as-a-service (SaaS) realm and become part of the mass migration from selling boxed software to selling its software offerings via subscription, Adobe’s migratory undertaking might well have been compared to that of the arctic tern. With by far the longest such treks known in the animal kingdom, the arctic tern has one of the most widely followed migrations on the planet—and such would be the case for Adobe, whose most dedicated observers were unquestionably its investors. “How do we tell investors that this is a great thing for them, that the metrics on which they’re most reliant actually won’t have any validity for 2 or 3 years, and that they should look at other numbers instead?,” asks Justin Judd, who at the time—as a vice president in Adobe’s corporate legal group—became involved in the massive migration as the company’s finance and legal worlds converged to better address the transformation’s communication challenges. To Judd, Adobe’s migration to SaaS was an inflection point not only for the company but also for his career, which—considering the legal complexities of the migration—would benefit from having direct involvement with Adobe’s executive team and board. What’s more, Judd found himself increasingly intertwined with the company’s finance teams and leaders. “In communicating and developing the strategy and running through this process, I learned the value that finance can have in framing hard decisions for companies and the importance of business context because Adobe invested deeply in understanding what our customers needed,” explains Judd, who—although initially summoned for his legal guidance—seems to have savored the broader communications challenge that was being addressed by Adobe’s finance teams. “’Here’s how our product offerings work. Here are the implications of decisions that we make.’ Let me bring this information back and present it in a way that can be influential and powerful in helping our decision-making to be successful,” remarks Judd, who would trade in his legal moniker in 2018 when he was named CFO of Adobe’s digital experience business—perhaps a less-than-surprise outcome in light of his previous multiyear entrenchment within the company’s finance leadership. However, unlike with the arctic tern, for Judd there would be no turning back. –Jack Sweeney 

Start early, stay late, be prepared, and don’t shy away from the street-fight environments surrounding start-up companies. These methods have helped Michael Levine to bound up an unconventional leadership ladder en route to the CFO office of Payoneer, the global B2B digital commerce company that he helped to take public in June of this year via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). According to Levine, Payoneer’s decision to go with a SPAC rather than a traditional IPO was influenced by his ability to share forecasts with prospective investors amid the pandemic’s digital commerce boom. Levine followed an untraditional path to the CFO office, from his start as an investment banker to his swift rise up through the ranks in the commercial banking, telecommunications, and healthcare software sectors. Fresh from Wharton, Levine recalls, he would wait at the end of the line queued up outside the vice chairman’s office each evening in hope of a brief audience. On occasion, he might eventually snag a precious few minutes after 8:00 p.m. to chat with the senior leader about his day and the investment bank itself. Now, a decade after joining Payoneer, Levine starts his work at [5:30] each morning with a breakfast of payments volumes, fee revenue, take rates, customer acquisition costs, and other KPIs. Thanks in part to his long days, rigorous preparation, and “beyond what?” focus on why the numbers are what they are, Payoneer has grown from 100 employees and $13 million in revenue in 2011 to approximately 2,600 employees and revenue north of $345 million today. Before each board meeting, Levine preps by asking and answering every question that the board might ask. His hard work lets him skate to where the puck is going to be, which his board appreciates: At times, they’ve asked Levine to help CFOs at their other companies to sharpen their board communications skills.

During 2018, the very year Craig Foster joined Bright Machines, the San Francisco–based company was spun out from contract manufacturing firm Flex, raised a headline-grabbing $179 million in Series A funding, and shed its original moniker, AutoLab AI. By all accounts, the manufacturing start-up, which promised to use a combination of robots and new software to perform manual labor, was open for business. However, like many start-ups, Bright Machines had yet to add some basic business functions. “We had a sense of product, but we didn’t have any infrastructure whatsoever,” comments Foster, who notes that among the company’s most immediate needs was an HR executive hire—someone capable of populating the company with experienced managers. Still, arguably more critical to future of the business were the remedies for certain flaws that had begun to become visible in the company’s maturing business model. “I had been working there only a few months before I realized that the business model was simply not going to work,” explains Foster. “Basically, we had a blueprint for how things were actually supposed to come together but only a semblance of one for what the business model was supposed to look like going forward,” continues Foster, who adds that over a period of months he worked with the CEO and the company’s board to “retool” the model to better facilitate customer recurring revenues and place less emphasis on the services aspect of the company’s offerings. “We needed not a reset of the model but just a retooling in terms of how we thought about pricing, product, and development, and we needed to retool these things in concert,” observes Foster, who notes that the new mind-set kept the distinct value that Bright Machines offers its customers in sharper focus.   Says Foster: “It was a tough bandage to rip off, but I had great support from the board and everyone else at the time.” –Jack Sweeney 

Steve and Jack discuss FP&A's 100-year march. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Kurt Shintaffer of Apptio CFO Jim Morgan of CallRail & CFO Daniel O'Shaughnessy of FormLabs.

Inder Singh started off his professional life as an engineer, only to learn that the large engineering projects that he aspired to someday lead often faced as many financial obstacles as they did engineering challenges. So, Singh says, he went back to school and earned an MBA in finance, allowing him to redirect his career down a path populated with unique and imaginative financing deals to support engineering feats as well as business transformations. One of the more innovative financing projects that Singh has helped to champion came along in the 1990s, when he was working as a business development executive for AT&T Corp. It seems that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was looking to upgrade its telecommunications infrastructure—to the tune of $4 billion. “Other companies were just offering typical bank financing. In our case, we said, ‘Let’s do an oil barter agreement,’” explains Singh, who says that the proposal involved having Saudi Arabia supply $4 billion of oil to Chevron Corp., which then would pay $4 billion in cash to AT&T, which then would build Saudi Arabia a $4 billion telecommunications network. “If you just think outside the box a little bit, bring your engineering skills, and bring some financial skills and common sense, you’ll see what makes sense for three different parties. And guess what? We actually won the deal,” comments Singh, who notes that the fact that Saudi Arabia may not have demanded such an imaginative financing solution is not important. Says Singh: “The fact that we put it on the table made us stand apart.” And so it goes for Inder Singh, whose imaginative approach to financing deals over the years has routinely set him apart from his finance leadership peers. –Jack Sweeney

Back in the mid-1990s, before email became widely used across corporate America, the executives of Frito-Lay’s northern California region suddenly found their mailboxes full. “We were getting all of these letters from people asking, ‘What did you do? What’s going on in northern California?,’” explains Tom Fitzgerald, who at the time was finance director for the region, a geography known to be a sales laggard among Pepsico’s 24 business units, within which Frito-Lay itself was a particularly heavy bottom dweller. Thus, as Fitzgerald relates, there was no shortage of intrigue concerning a sudden and steady sales climb inside Frito-Lay’s northern California business. Looking back, he observes that the explanation of the phenomenon was not necessarily pleasing to neighboring regions, which were known to be on a constant lookout for cunning new sales promotions or incentives. “Northern California, oddly enough, was the only unionized market for Frito-Lay in the country. Meanwhile, we had a direct store delivery business, which meant that we went to every store at least once a week—and often every day—to merchandise and sell the inventory,” explains Fitzgerald, who notes that the “direct sales” approach afforded the region larger numbers of employees than other locales, which in turn allowed Frito-Lay to at times operate inside the region more like a “military organization.” Like those of many of his peers, Fitzgerald’s Pepsi career routinely opened new chapters as the packaged goods company rotated its finance executives into new regions and business units. Fitzgerald’s arrival in the northern California region brought a new set of eyes to Frito-Lay’s local challenges and paired the finance executive with a divisional leader who was prepared to listen. “I told the leader that too often the business had one answer one day and a different answer the following week. I said, ‘Let’s just pick three, and then we’re going to lock in and stay there,’” comments Fitzgerald, who credits a newfound focus and the regional leader’s willingness to collaborate with having propelled the snack maker to the top of the region’s 24 business units within 3 months. As for the details behind Fitzgerald’s “three answer” prescription, the finance leader reports: “Two were top line–driven, operational metrics that we could measure. The other was related to how our team worked and coached the frontline salespeople.” For Fitzgerald, the remedy was less about strategy and more about focus. “It’s not necessarily about how good your strategy is,” he says. “Frankly, there may have been three better ideas along the way, but because they changed the strategy and moved to the next thing too quickly, they couldn’t get all of their people aligned to execute it well.” Adds the finance leader: “I became a big believer in the notion that if you have an ‘A’ strategy but a ‘C’ execution, you’re going to miss your numbers every time.” –Jack Sweeney

Jim Calabrese recalls that when he began to climb the corporate ladder early in his finance career, an executive mentor told him, “Never be afraid to make the coffee.” This curious advice caught Calabrese’s attention, so the up-and-coming executive listened carefully as the mentor added: “As an executive, you need to be able to get dirty—to roll up your sleeves. You don’t want to be the person who can’t do a mundane task because you’re in love with your title.” Today, as a CFO, Calabrese serves up his own bite-size mentoring verbiage in this way: “There’s nothing more valuable when you’re the CFO than understanding how the widgets are made—and being the person who’s willing to take on the challenging projects.” Calabrese tells us that he reached the CFO office by aggressively pursuing projects outside the traditional finance realm while also signing up for long stretches on strategic planning teams, where he guided re-engineering projects in the energy and software sectors. His strategic work—along with his operational “grinding and tinkering”—positioned the CPA/MBA hybrid to thrive as a finance leader, especially in his current role as CFO of Finalsite, a private equity–backed SaaS developer serving the education sector.

Among today’s career building finance pros who view the CFO office as their ultimate destination, Howard Wilson might be labeled an off-road commuter. Whereas most finance leaders have shared a common view as accounting and finance milestones fell away in their rearview mirror, Wilson entered the finance realm from the merge lane – where his rearview revealed a roster of operational milestones and sales experiences. Having spent most of his early career altogether removed from the accounting cubicles, Wilson's operational experiences began supplying added luster to his CFO credentials. It’s no secret that as the CFO role has broadened, our CFO guests have been eager to highlight their operations experience, but as Howard Wilson’s career perhaps reveals, operations experience is no longer just a pit stop along the motorway of CFO career journeys. –Jack Sweeney

When does a mission-driven CFO initiate a crucial turnaround of an erstwhile nonprofit that’s been losing money for years and has a legacy pension plan dragging down its balance sheet? Before he’s even been offered the job. At least that’s how you take care of business if you’re March of Dimes Senior Vice President and CFO Dave Damond. “I came in with a change management plan,” reveals the former KPMG auditor, who was a finance executive with American Red Cross before launching himself into his current role in 2018. “In fact, when I was interviewing, they showed me what the current table of organization looked like. And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s wrong – here’s what it should look like.” Damond got the job, and immediately implemented his plan, which included replacing a 30-year-old legacy ERP installation with a cloud-based system (within a year), hiring new talent (including a controller) and addressing that drag on the balance sheet as interest rates fortuitously plummeted. “We saw a lot of organizations were actually doing buyouts [of defined benefits pension plans],” Damond says while detailing the mechanics of his change plan. “It was something that we had to jump on right away, and we took that opportunity to offer buyouts to all of our people who were already retired.” The move saved the organization $20 million, adds Damond who also shares his take on cashflow analytics, fundraising KPIs, how he managed through COVID and the AI solutions that his finance group is considering investing in.

Talk to, or about, CircleCI CFO Chitra Balasubramanian and you’ll hear the word “team” early and often. The phrase describes her leadership approach and to how her finance group equips colleagues with next-level business and customer insights. Current and former colleagues will tell you how much value (and fun) she brings to any “solve team.” And Balasubramanian refers to her “insights team” when discussing her group’s FP&A activities  at CircleCI, a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that helps developers do their work faster while ensuring high-quality code. The key to delivering actionable business nights, Balasubramanian notes, includes creating clear problem statements and outcomes. When that clarity is wanting, Balasubramanian’s insight team clicks into exploratory mode. Once the financial analysts have gleaned what the business needs to make better decisions, it’s time to distill. “We don't want to simply relay a party bag full of information,” Balasubramanian asserts. “Our role is to deliver insights that are consumable and that immediately stimulate a productive dialogue among our stakeholders.” That those financial analyses could influence shareholder value marks a touchstone career moment for Balasubramanian, who previously worked at RetailNext. “Finance teams have a lot of opportunities to lean in and drive the business forward,” she adds. “By looking at customer data from a finance perspective, we can glean new insights that help other business stakeholders actually improve the end-customer experience.” A focus on delivering beyond-finance insights is fitting given that Balasubramanian is the only CFO currently on the board of trustees team at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Dan O’Shaughnessy may be the only finance leader with whom we’ve ever spoken who credits hard work and financial acumen with having helped to keep him out of business school. Or at least this seems to be what unfolded at Gymboree back in early 2015, when he accepted a job offer from the CFO of the children’s apparel retailer. Explains O’Shaughnessy: “At the time, Gymboree had been taken private and was managing a significant amount of debt. I told myself that if we could turn around the business quickly, it would be a great opportunity, and if we couldn’t, then business school was always a good option.” As it turned out, the retailer’s successful turnaround would require a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing as part of a larger process that expanded O’Shaughnessy’s role into comptrollership, tax, treasury, and even supply chain planning and store operations. Along the way, the finance executive was frequently tasked with dealing with the company’s creditors and investors. “The creditors across the table with whom I had been negotiating aggressively one day became my board members on the following day,” reports O’Shaughnessy, who notes that the experience taught him “how to have professional conflicts but maintain relationships.” Within a few quarters, the turnaround began to get some momentum, as the retailer sold off certain noncore assets and saw EBITDA grow by 50 percent. For O’Shaughnessy, a former manager with Price Waterhouse’s M&A practice, the leap to the operations side of a struggling business likely provided more relevant lessons than he might have learned from attending business school. In the end, he says, “it opened up my eyes to how much I enjoyed the operations side of business.” -Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about Formlabs, what does this company do and what are its offerings today? O’Shaughnessy: Formlabs is in the 3D printing space and has successfully disrupted the 3D printing space. To give you some perspective on the industry, it’s not new. It’s been around for 30 plus years. This company was founded 10 years ago last week, and really took off on Kickstarter. The whole model here is bringing a machine, a technology that I equate to the IBM old mainframes, hundreds of thousand of dollars, take up half of a room require an engineer to run, and put that onto the desktop. You’re now providing a technology that previously cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for under $5,000. As I like to put it, it’s so easy a finance guy can use it. It’s an out-of-the-box solution. 3D printing is a very complex technology, and the team was able to develop and manufacture an offering and a product that performed at 99% of these multi hundred thousand dollars machines at a fraction of the price. I’d say my number one, two, and three priorities are to grow and scale the Formlabs business. Everything that we do from a finance perspective is in support of growing the business, delivering more value to our customers, and then how do we do you that? It’s engaging the team and driving alignment in trust. It’s getting the simple things right so that we don’t run around every day fighting fires. Sometimes it makes us feel good and important, but there are certain things that just need to run smoothly. So do that. Driving predictability. If this, then that, and here’s the different levers we have to pull. Then it’s really putting the right people in the right place to deliver the most value and grow the most personally and professionally in support of this infrastructure that is finance that enables the growth and, again, if done well, drives the growth in the business over the next 12, 24, 36 months.

Brett and Jack discuss the move by Amazon and other companies to pay employees daily are likely to trigger new approaches in salary administration. Plus, more developments in the age of the "great resignation."  Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CEO Craig O'Neill of Versapay, CFO Michael Rosen of Digital Power Marketing, CFO Kurt Shintaffer of Apptio.

Minnesota-based Mann Lake Ltd. is a leader in the beekeeping industry, serving commercial beekeeping businesses and backyard hobbyists alike. The company specializes in quality manufacturing, innovation, customer service, and global ESG (environmental, social, governance) matters. “Bees pollinate one in every three bites of food that humans consume,” Mann Lake CFO Shana Rowlette explains. “Colony collapse is a real thing, and we’re very involved in helping our industry to address this risk.” Her company’s unique realm and rapid growth quickly nudged Rowlette beyond the traditional bounds of the staff accounting role that she filled when she joined the company. “I started with payables, receivables, and inventory but steadily took on more responsibilities that showed me how everything functioned as our company grew,” she notes. “It’s been 11 years, and I haven’t had a boring day yet.” Read More As controller, Rowlette helped to shepherd the company’s purchase by a private equity (PE) firm. She educated her PE partners in the nuances of the industry’s pollination seasonality and weather-related risks while collaborating on acquisition targets to fuel further growth. This work resulted in Mann Lake’s acquisition of Stromberg’s Chicks & Game Birds. “Our ultimate goal is to become the one-stop shop for everything related to backyard hobbies,” says Rowlette. Next year, Rowlette will play a key role in a major employee-engagement initiative in addition to helping to drive growth. “The fast pace in a rapidly growing company can be overwhelming at times,” she observes. “You have to take a deep breath each day and prioritize what’s most important to the company. I also have a really good relationship with my amazing team. I was given a great opportunity by my former CFO to rise from being a staff accountant up to being a CFO. So, I make sure that we give our staff the ability to take on more and more while learning about the entire business.”

It sounds counterintuitive, but the best big men in basketball succeed less on size than they do on finesse and footwork. NBA Hall of Famer Tim Duncan’s right-foot jab created the space that he needed to sink his patented bank shot or fire a pass to an open teammate. The same holds true for data-driven CFOs who partner with founder CEOs in technology start-ups. CallRail CFO Jim Morgan began his professional career by pivoting from Goldman Sachs to a 100-employee, venture-backed start-up in early 2000. Once there, he immediately helped to pivot the marketing-technology company’s business model in response to the looming dotcom crash. Since then, Morgan—a former center who co-captained Stanford University’s hoops team in the early ’90s—has served as CFO at a succession of venture- and private-equity backed high-growth companies. “I love working with the entrepreneurs,” Morgan notes, “and I’ve learned that the CFO has a highly unique value prop to offer by facilitating the processes and scale needed to build a company from an idea.” Besides scaling operations through detailed design and planning, Morgan’s facilitation takes the form of financial planning and analysis, M&A transactions, equity and debt fund-raising, board and investor relations, capital management, and more. He starts each day at marketing platform software developer CallRail by poring over revenue, product, and customer metrics on his morning dashboard, a tool that he continually finesses. “There’s so much data in most organizations,” Morgan adds. “A huge part of the CFO’s role is to identify which data really matter so that you can elevate two or three next-level metrics.”

Steve & Jack discuss planning’s crunch time in the 4th quarter and the operationalization of FP&A inside different business functions. Featuring FP&A Insights & Commentary from Planning Aces: Sameer Ralhan, CFO, The Chemours Company, Chris Kuehn, CFO, Trane Technologies,  Laurence Capone, CFO, Pipedrive. Akash Palkhiwala, CFO Qualcomm.

When Robert Alvarez first joined the finance team of one venture-backed start-up, he was thinking that one day he might like to be a CFO. However, upon further reflection, the young finance analyst realized that he had little idea what a CFO did. Being part of a start-up team afforded him the opportunity to have one-on-one meetings with different senior leaders, including the company’s CFO, Alvarez recalls. Of course, access to leadership has little value unless you are willing and able to undertake the responsibility of shepherding a future deliverable. For Alvarez, the task of identifying such a deliverable was best left to its intended recipient. “We were together going down the list of items that I was working on, and I stopped and asked the CFO, ‘So, what’s on your list?’” remembers Alvarez, who says that the CFO subsequently began listing one item after another. Alvarez says that he asked if he could “take a stab” at tackling one of the items and told the CFO that he would have it for him by the next day. Having identified a valuable action item and promised to deliver it promptly, Alvarez asked the CFO not to fix the item if it ultimately fell short. Instead, Alvarez says, he was eager to discover what mistakes may have been made to learn from them. “We began with that one item, which quickly became two—and soon I was working on parts of board presentations and different materials for investor relations,” comments Alvarez, who notes that the experience was contingent on a finance leader willing to give up something. Says Alvarez: “He gave me the gift of letting me do his job, which was critical because I’m not smart enough to just read how do things—I’ve always had to do the work.” –Jack Sweeney

Troy Ignelzi’s CFO career is rooted in an unlikely place. In fact, some might describe it as the least likely of all places, for the environs of his early vocational path were not those of a growing company but instead a place where businesses had stopped growing. So it was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the late 1990s when Ignelzi—part of a local economic development team—became tasked with creating jobs in the wake of Pfizer’s decision to remove a number of business operations from the region, including a large plant. “They moved all of the R&D jobs and everything business-related out of Kalamazoo and Portage, Michigan, and all they left was a very large manufacturing plant,” explains Ignelzi, who notes that the move by Pfizer began putting the area’s larger biotech sector at risk. “What happened was that this big vacuum got created, so what we said was, ‘Let’s keep these other smart guys in town,’” continues Ignelzi, who adds that preserving the region’s biotech jobs became part of a bigger project known as the “Pfizer Disaster Relief Plan.” As Ignelzi diligently worked to crack the code for job creation inside the biotech realm, he increasingly found his interests leaping well beyond the region’s economic ebb and flow. Comments Ignelzi: “What first drew me to economic development was the idea of helping companies to create jobs and making a difference. Then this passion kind of spilled over into companies in the pharmaceutical and the biotech worlds, where firms were developing life-changing medicines.” To date, Ignelzi says, he has helped to lead the financing of six approved drugs representing different therapeutic areas and has helped seven different companies to go public.  Meanwhile, it’s clearly a point of pride for Ignelzi that Kalamazoo’s once empty biotech plant is today playing a part in the greater biotech community’s COVID response. Says Ignelzi: “It’s that same manufacturing plant that is now making the pandemic therapy that we’re all hoping gets us through this right now, right down the street from where I still live, in western Michigan.” –Jack Sweeney

When Evan Fein accepted his first CFO position more than a decade ago - his focus as a finance leader was too narrow according to the CFO, who in a moment of self-reflection can’t conceal his exacerbation.  "Ashamed is not the right word, but I'm such a better CFO now than I was then,” remarks Fein, who gives his younger self some kudos for having helped to champion the company’s business model as well as extending the organization’s lines of sight into the future. Still, there’s little question Fein finds the notion of time travel appealing. “What I would now tell my younger self is that the CFO role is about the ability to partner and build relationships and grow other people. That is the special sauce that I bring to my job now,” Fein comments. Asked to better expose his former CFO mindset Fein says: “At the time, I decided if everybody stayed in their swim lanes and we each ran our trains on time, that things would come together. It’s just not that simple.” – Jack Sweeney  

Michael Rosen’s finance career began inside the loan department of middle market lender Union Bank (now MUFG Union), when—after completing an 18-month training program—the 23 -year-old was provided with a stack of business cards bearing the title “Loan Officer.” “At the time, being a loan officer meant a great many things. You would be responsible for most of your clients’ needs, as well as bringing in new business for the bank,” remembers Rosen, who today credits the program’s scope with allowing him to quickly find his footing inside the bank’s apparel sector—a realm made up largely of midsize businesses ranging in size from $15 million to $100 million. “It was a significant program that provided some broad-based training in things like financial analysis, collateral analysis, and financial accounting, as well as the legal and ethical issues that come up when running a bank,” continues Rosen, who adds that for the next 7 years he responded to the unique needs and growing pains of his midsize customers. Next, Rosen joined CIT Group, which at the time was aggressively expanding its factoring offerings. The financial services firm was known for not only taking over its clients’ accounts receivable but also signing outsourcing agreements for the customers’ credit collections and bookkeeping functions. “Once we were doing all of these things, it became a lot easier for us to make loans against the collateral because we were the custodian of all of the funds. We didn’t have to rely on companies collecting the money and then sending it—instead, it came right to us,” he recalls. The experience of serving customers at CIT Group opened Rosen’s eyes to managing risk and the critical thinking that’s often required when advising businesses “where things aren’t going well.” It was through just such a business that Rosen accidentally discovered a door of entry to corporate finance leadership. “We kept telling the owner that the business really needed to have a CFO, and the next thing I knew, I was offered the job,” explains Rosen, who accepted the position. Looking back, Rosen says that at the time he probably did not have all of the technical accounting knowledge that a CFO might be expected to command. Even so, he knew how to stabilize the business, and that’s arguably what mattered most. –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: Tell u

Brett and Jack discuss the marriage of fintech and human capital management, and the of the growing mandate for employee success.  Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Sameer Ralhan of the Chemours Company, CFO Robert Alvarez of Big Commerce, CFO Laurence Capone of Pipedrive.

When Thomas Kramer recalls his decision to leave his job with a prestigious consulting firm to start up a tech firm in the final hours of the dotcom boom, he doesn’t hesitate to underscore his decision’s questionable timing. “This was when I realized that I would be getting out of consulting at what potentially would have been the worst possible point in time. Everyone could see that the Internet boom was closing, and smart people do what smart people do: They run in the other direction,” recalls Kramer, now some 20 years later. Whether it’s quantum bits, IPOs, or even SPACs, the exciting developments surrounding IonQ are no match for CFO Kramer’s insightful personal advice and often biting self-reflection.  “Travel is something that you do when you can,” explains Kramer, who tells us that during those times when his career has dispatched him to different parts of the world, he has frequently combined work and leisure trips. At one point back in the early 2000s, when he discovered that he was not required to be in Delhi, India, for another 48 hours, the avid traveler made a pit stop in the United Arab Emirates.  “I stopped off in Dubai and then I drove to Oman,” he reports, “because, hey, when else are you going to get to go to Oman?” ­–Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about IonQ … what type of company is this? Kramer: This is one that I love to get at cocktail parties because we actually shoot lasers at individual atoms and use these as building blocks to create the computer of the future. And I’m not kidding about the lasers or the atoms—this is what we do. We literally manipulate the smallest entities in the universe to create the largest-capacity supercomputers in the world. Why is this important, because who cares about computers? You can go to Best Buy and buy another one every day. But the problem with computing is that “more slow” hasn’t been working for a while now. There are just physical limits to how many transistors you can put into a chip, and transistors are the basic building blocks of traditional computers. Transistors or bits are pretty limited in their function, though. They’ll assume the value of only zero or one, and to paraphrase Katy Perry, they’re off or they’re on. Famously, quantum bits can be both zero and one at the same time—and also any value in between. This means that they can hold much richer information and therefore be used to compute much, much more complicated problem sets. I’ll give you an example. Most UPS drivers can make about 120 deliveries per day. The potential combination of stops is expressed as a mathematical function by multiplying 120 by 119 by 118, and so on. The result far exceeds the age of Earth in nanoseconds. The practical implication of this is that if UPS or FedEx tried to calculate the optimal world for each of their more than 100,000 drivers every morning, all packages would’ve been delivered weeks ago, before the fastest supercomputer could ever give you the answer. This is where quantum computers come in. They can handle a much larger data set simultaneously than your traditional computer can. When you go public, it’s a moment of profound commitment because now you’re really stuck, now you have to make it work. And that’s what I want to see happen here. We can go public. We will be trading. But what’s important is that we can bring out the best computers in the market for decades to come. And we as a finance function can help to make this happen.

In the wake of an economic downturn, a company’s door of opportunity swings open to a finance up-and-comer. This is a familiar early career chapter for many finance leaders, and few have revealed to us the uncertainty surrounding the moment better than Apptio CFO Kurt Shintaffer “The CEO came to me and said, ‘Do you think that you have what it takes?’ I said, ‘Well, sure!,’ without really knowing what I was signing up for,” explains Shintaffer, who back in 2002 was a senior finance executive for Pacific Edge Software when the company’s then-CFO exited. Until this moment, Shintaffer’s resume arguably had resembled those of thousands of other finance career builders stationed along the different rungs of finance’s corporate ladder, and like Shintaffer, may have completed a stint in public accounting. (Shintaffer spent three years with Ernst & Young).   Still, at 28 years of age, Shintaffer was already aware that his technical knowledge was not what would make the difference in the days ahead.   “I had to rely on all of the relationships that I had built to help me find my way. I was super-open about what I didn’t know, and I tried to learn from other people. I think that when you sort of make yourself vulnerable like this, people lean in for you,” remarks Shintaffer, while recalling the mind-set that he quickly acquired to meet the challenges ahead. Meanwhile, his ability to be calm under pressure began to become evident as his appetite for multitasking grew, and he found his relationship with the business changing. Says Shintaffer: “I was able to stay just far enough ahead of all of the things that were coming at me so that I could at least create this illusion of control, and I think that even to this day there are still some times when you just have to stay one step ahead.” –Jack Sweeney

Twenty years ago, when Roy Simmons first joined General Electric Company as a rookie financial analyst, it likely would have been difficult to imagine that he would someday occupy the CFO office of GE Lighting. Of course, occupying the CFO office of “GE Lighting, a Savant company” would have required the young analyst to be endowed with not just imagination – but a crystal ball. This being said, in 2019, when a more seasoned Simmons joined the former GE business (now owned by Savant Systems, Inc.) as CFO, he had little trouble imagining a list of finance leader priorities for the coming year. Read More   “We’ve been together for the last 14 months and we together have a vision to bring that brighter life to the people,” explains Simmons, who spent a combined 18 years at GE, a span of time during which he served in a number of senior FP&A roles including one with GE Lighting. “Back in the lighting days, we realized that our customers who bought lights for their businesses were also finance professionals and operating professionals who had goals, so we asked ourselves, ‘How do we sell lights better than anyone else?’ and ‘How do we actually create a meaningful opportunity to provide value to the customer?,’” recalls Simmons, as he begins to outline the thinking behind a strategic pivot from GE’s past. Says Simmons: “Normally, a customer would say, ‘We’re just going to go buy a series of new lighting fixtures for our parking lot, and this will cost me $100,000.’ However, what if instead we went to a customer and said, ‘Rather than spend $100,000 on lights, how about a solution that means that you’re going to save $40,000 a year in energy consumption?’” According to Simmons, the GE team narrowed its lens in order to target CFOs and other operationally minded executives with a commitment to deliver the customer savings within two and a half years. “Sometimes we could get it down to less than a year. Sometimes it was a bit longer, but by doing it this way, we changed the paradigm on selling,” comments Simmons, who credits the solutions approach with helping GE to land a landmark deal valued at $180 million¾a hefty price tag for what Simmons describes as “the largest lighting deal ever closed.” Looking back on the approach Simmons says: “It really brought to life a solution for customers that has survived past those days and which has now gone on to morph into a company that’s today outside of General Electric Company in a different capacity, and it set a paradigm in an industry that had been thinking of things in a singularly focused way and changed them.” – Jack Sweeney  

It was after he had worked 3 years as an investment analyst with Bear Stearns and spent more than 2 years inside the corporate strategy bullpen of The Walt Disney Company that Craig Abrahams decided to head to business school. However, Abrahams says that unlike many of his future classmates, he had made up his mind that hedge funds, investment banks, and strategy consulting firms would not be on his preferred menu of postgraduation career opportunities. “I wanted an opportunity to work really hard and stand out but also to go somewhere a little bit different, where I wasn’t competing with 10 versions of myself,” explains Abrahams, whose earlier experiences at Bear Stearns and Disney had left the MBA student searching for a less traditional route to career success. Observes Abrahams: “I was looking for a place where I personally could have an impact.” That place became Las Vegas, where upon graduation Abrahams joined Caesars Entertainment as a director of broadcasting and new media. “This was about putting myself in a position where I would be in the right place if an opportunity came along,” comments Abrahams, who within 6 months of joining the gaming giant was tapped to help launch Caesars Interactive Entertainment. “I remember when Gary Loveman, the CEO of Caesars at the time, said to me, ‘There’s an opportunity to work on a business plan to create a new entity,’ so that opportunity fell into my lap,” remarks Abrahams, who had served in a number of corporate development roles before advancing into the new entity’s CFO office. It was as CFO of Caesars Interactive that Abrahams first became acquainted with a small Israeli company that had a megahit mobile game known as Slotomania. Caesars was smitten and in 2011 acquired the Israeli firm, Playtika. Over the next 5 years, Caesars Interactive invested more than $300 million into the business, which allowed Playtika to complete a series of acquisitions that led to the sale of the company for $4.4 billion in 2016. “This was just the first step in the evolution of Playtika,” explains Abrahams, who joined the newly private firm as CFO in 2019 and subsequently spearheaded a debt raise of $2.5 billion. The company was able to pay investors a dividend before management became focused on taking the company public, a goal that would be realized early in 2021. –Jack Sweeney

Unlike many of the up-and-comers who populate the corridors of The Chemours Company, CFO Sameer Ralhan spent the balance of his career building years with the company inside its manufacturing plants. It was there where Ralhan says that he observed everyday executives making decisions that routinely impacted the business, and it was there where his M&A activities allowed him to imagine new avenues for value creation. Says Ralhan: “The heart of this company beats at the plants.” Still, the many hours that Chemours’s future CFO spent there made him aware of a growing disconnect between finance and the plant’s decision-makers.  According to Ralhan, Chemours, not unlike many U.S. manufacturers, had undergone decades of reorganizations designed to streamline and centralize its operations. However, one consequence of this was that the bond between the plants and the Chemours finance team had become weakened. “It was really limiting the finance support at the site and undermining decision support that could really drive the right financial outcomes,” recalls Ralhan, who after stepping into the CFO role made reallocating finance resources to support plant decision-making a priority. Ralhan reports that one of a number of Chemours businesses that have benefited from the reallocation has been the chemical company’s Advanced Performance Materials (APM) business, where the finance and the operations teams came together to build new decision-making models as well as return-on-capital models for each manufacturing site. Observes Ralhan: “These models really provided the insights to drive the right decisions, and this is evident in the margin improvement that we're seeing today in the APM business.” Meanwhile, the Chemours manufacturing sites, as well as their bottom lines, are expected to benefit in the coming years from different digital tools and applications that promise to build on APM's recent margin improvement success. Comments Ralhan: “Once you achieve this, you earn the right to do more things, and that's what I'm really excited about.” -Jack Sweeney

It was a complicated transaction that Ingersoll Rand’s then-CEO Mike Lamach challenged his finance and operations people to address by “turning over every rock in the company” to nullify the possibility of unforeseen snags. Recalls Chris Kuehn, who at the time served as Ingersoll Rand’s chief accounting officer: “I remember Mike coming back and telling us that he had never been through an IPO in his career, but this transaction was likely going to be the closest he ever got to one.” Today, Kuehn is CFO of Trane Technologies, the spinoff and resulting offspring of the transaction that involved the merger of Ingersoll Rand’s industrial business, Milwaukee-based Gardner Denver. “Mike didn’t want us to accept the status quo. He wanted us to review every one of the 600 cost centers and every organizational chart and function,” continues Kuehn, who adds that the exhaustive process spanned between six and nine months. Part of engineering the spinoff’s early success, Kuehn explains, involved proactively moving processes that had been managed centrally to regional locations where they would be better suited for the management of the entity’s future operations.    Still, putting a reorganization in motion on the eve of a defining transaction is no doubt a tricky management feat, especially when the dimensions of the proposed spinoff are not yet fully visible to the company’s incumbent employees.   According to Kuehn, the approaching transaction deadlines brought an operational opportunity into view. He comments: “We said, ‘Let’s be courageous enough to change what has not been working, with a bias to moving those processes that are centrally led.’” For Kuehn, the reorganization and eventual 2019 transaction swung open the door to Trane’s CFO office, where the finance and operational opportunity remains front-and-center. “We’re still on the journey today,” he points out. “We’re not done, but this has certainly allowed me to get inside the finance function as well as our other global functions and see what is working well and what we need to change.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Pramod Iyengar returned to school after working for several years as a manufacturing engineer with United Technologies, he was ready to change careers. The young engineer headed back to the University of Michigan, where as an undergraduate he had earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering. However, this time he had a business degree in mind Post graduation with an MBA in hand, Iyengar landed at Intel Corp., where he had the opportunity to join a “very efficient and very well-structured finance team,” he explains. For his part, Iyengar says Intel gave him the opportunity to learn not only the discipline of finance, but also how to use financial data and analysis to influence and improve operations across the company. Intel also offered the opportunity to move into a variety of other areas. "Employees just had to take the initiative and take advantage of them," comments Iyengar. At Intel, Iyengar began as a finance manager with the distribution channel and soon became a senior financial analyst with the microprocessor products group. Looking back, he credits the chip maker with regularly bringing together finance professionals from across the company. Says Iyengar: "They would share best practices and strategies for using finance to improve decision-making in other areas, like accounting and sales."

Back in 2014, when Akash Palkhiwala was first approached to serve as treasurer of wireless technology company Qualcomm, the company’s future CFO was uncertain as to what the role of a treasurer might actually entail. “I’m not making this up: I did a Google search on what a treasurer does,” explains Palkhiwala, who recalls that the approaching retirement of the firm’s incumbent treasurer had led then-CFO George Davis to gauge Palkhiwala’s interest in the role. Palkhiwala had first joined Qualcomm in 2001, and during his early years with the firm had been involved in the wireless firm’s M&A activity. Eventually, he graduated from a succession of financial planning and analysis roles through which he had rendered a steady flow of strategic insights for Qualcomm management as the company climbed from 3G to 4G to 5G along the wireless continuum. “Although I’ve been here for 20 years, I feel like I have changed companies multiple times,” comments Palkhiwala, who notes that the treasurer role ultimately proved to be one of his career’s greatest learning grounds. “It was just a fantastic experience. I did a lot of different things that I had never done before and worked with a whole new set of people, got exposure to the financial markets and the banking system, and created these new relationships that today I see as foundational in being successful as a CFO,” observes Palkhiwala, who adds that while today he knows that he made the right decision, accepting the treasurer position did require a degree of courage. Says Palkhiwala: “I was recently talking to someone who was facing a tough career choice. He explained that you get maybe three windows of opportunity in the course of your career, and your success or failure over time is largely defined by your courage when windows of opportunity show up.” –Jack Sweeney 

Featuring FP&A Insights & Commentary from Planning Aces: Ian Charles, CFO, Flexe, Beth Clymer, CFO, Job Case,  Mark Shifke, CFO, Billtrust, Mike Rasic, CFO, Synapse.

Back in 2011, when Radiant Systems was acquired by NCR Corporation, a door swung open for Radiant Systems controller Geoff Brannon, who received an invitation to join NCR’s plus-size FP&A function as a finance director. The appointment had been made possible by a former Radiant boss who had stepped into a divisional CFO role shortly after the acquisition’s completion. “He took a bet on me,” recalls Brannon, who says that the former boss knew his skillset well and had witnessed firsthand “a willingness to learn.” However, up until his NCR appointment, Brannon had resided mostly in the accounting side of the house. Looking back, the one-time controller tells us that he was also known as a collaborator and problem-solver who had distinguished himself through an easy manner when it came to working with others—a trait coveted by many FP&A leaders. A few years later, when the divisional CFO was recruited elsewhere, Brannon was tapped to be the division’s new CFO. As a new leader, he has come to appreciate the management approach that NCR used when it came to forecasts. Reports Brannon: “On a weekly basis, the division president, the division CFO, and the sales leaders would gather. We’d talk about not just the forecast for the quarter but also ‘weekly commits’ and how that particular week, for example, was going to generate $15 million of new sales. The following week, when you came back to the table, you’d be asked, ‘Did you do $15 million?’—and if not, you’d be asked, ‘Well, why did you only do $12? million? Why did you miss?’” Brannon adds that his division was known for having an enviable distinction: “We were probably the smallest division from a revenue perspective but the most profitable. So, we were something of a shining star at NCR.” –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: Tell us about Oversight Systems. What does this company do, and what are its offerings today? Geoff Brannon: We’ve been around for, let’s see, 18 years. We’re not a new company, but we’re a growing organization. When I joined back in 2017, we had about 65 employees; now we’re up to 165. Our revenue certainly has continued to grow at a 30% annual CAGR. We’re a software company that serves enterprise customers, and what our software does is essentially to analyze spend. If you look at our customers, we are ingesting their spend, whether it’s in payables, P cards, T&E. We ingest that spend into our system and analyze it for duplicates, noncompliant spend, errors, fraud, waste—you name it. It’s almost like an insurance policy for cash leakage and all of the things that go along with this. When it comes to a metric that is top-of-mind, it’s ARR, annually recurring revenue. This is really what we measure ourselves on at the highest level and the number one metric that matters to us. It’s not the only thing, of course, but, you know, when we talk to our board or internally, it’s always like, Where are we on ARR? The other key metric for us is retention, so retention of customers and the recurring revenue stream are both super important to us. Over the next 12 months, the biggest thing for me and my team will actually be to implement a new ERP system. As we’ve grown over the past few years, we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve outgrown our current ERP system. We’ve already started seeing some demos by providers out there, so I think that this is something that we will probably be taking on in early 2022.

Back in the early 1990s, Laurence Capone was a Paris-based public accountant serving a distinguished list of oil and gas industry clients when she heard about an audit assignment unlike any that she had taken on before. It turned out that a manufacturer of cotton fabrics had engaged Capone’s firm to help to audit the operations of its subsidiaries located in central Africa. As a team was being assembled for the client engagement, Capone did not hesitate to express her interest and shortly found herself departing for a monthlong stay on the continent. From the start, Capone knew better than to expect an indulgent environment. In fact, the region of central Africa—including Chad, where she would be based—was still experiencing waves of casualties from the AIDS epidemic. “I was working with this local CFO, and even just getting together an accounting team was a challenge. Locally, 30% of the individuals had passed away due to AIDS or HIV,” recalls Capone, who says that early in her career she would frequently take on assignments that no one else wanted. However, the audit assignment in central Africa stands out. “The experience really marked me,” comments Capone, who adds that at this stage of her career she would also purposely pursue assignments involving different industries and different world cultures to broaden and test her business acumen. The audit assignment in central Africa included both of these, as well as another realm from which to learn. “You can imagine the social and human facets of the challenges that these companies were facing in the early ’90s,” remarks Capone, who credits the assignment with opening her eyes to the human side of the enterprise. Says Capone: “It was the people and the people story behind everything that I was able to gather and learn from. The personal side and the life experience were very important.” –Jack Sweeney

It was little more than 6 months after Matthias Tillmann first joined Trivago—and shortly after the travel booking company’s December 2016 IPO—when the company’s future CFO decided to step away from his senior IR role in order to head up Trivago’s creative production function. However, the jump to the creative side was not triggered by a sudden creative itch on Tillmann’s part. Instead, he was determined to extract new ROI insights from Trivago’s television advertising dollars, the very allocation that the online travel platform is credited with having converted into a groundbreaking strategic advantage. “I started to develop my own hypotheses but was unable to test them,” reports Tillmann, recalling his frustration when it came to extracting greater ROI from Trivago’s annual TV budget, which by 2019 had grown to more than $600 million, or roughly 70 percent of the company’s annual revenue. “In finance, you see numbers, but if you really understand the decision-making processes behind them, this changes how you identify opportunities and look at risk,” explains Tillmann, who today credits his tour of duty on the creative side with having bestowed upon him detailed knowledge about marketing decision-making. When COVID arrived, Tillmann notes, this knowledge allowed him to confidently respond to the crisis and take steps that would quickly modify the company’s brand marketing strategy, thereby saving the firm millions of dollars. Still, the lingering pandemic has continued to stress test a number of Trivago’s market assumptions.    Says Tillmann: “Pre-COVID, we had a very good idea with regard to how many people were out there and how many were willing to travel, and we knew how much to spend on TV—but this has now all changed.” In certain markets, Tillmann observes, roughly 50 percent of the traveling public may still not be willing to travel just yet. “For a mass channel like TV, this means that the channel is only half as efficient as it used to be,” comments Tillmann, who adds that the current environment has led Trivago to keep a steady eye on the size of each market and its accompanying pool of potential travelers.  “We began looking at what ratio we needed to hit in order to make our economics work on TV,” continues Tillmann, who says that the travel platform has recently turned to alternative channels such as online video when the economics for TV haven’t panned out.  Tillmann explains: “On YouTube, you can target certain audiences. For example, 25- to 30-year-olds may be more willing to travel at the moment, and that channel allows you to target certain groups much more specifically.”  As for whether the TV-driven brand is opening a new brand marketing chapter, Trivago’s CFO says, “The way we do brand marketing now is much more granular. This is the way that it has to be, as we pay more attention to how the markets develop.” ­–Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about Trivago. What sets this company apart today? Tillmann: Yes, sure. This is a topic that I love to talk about. I love travel. We started as kind of a Wikipedia for travel 16 years ago and then only focused on hotel price comparison. The core value proposition is still our hotel metasearch, which is based on a cost-per-click model. We have over 5 million properties through more than 200 booking sites on our platform. It’s a classic marketplace, where travel agencies, hotel chains, and independent hotels bid in our auction and essentially buy refers from us. This is how we make most of our revenue. I would say that we were very early in the game and one of the first focusing on hotels only. In 2008, the founders made the decision to diversify their acquisition channels by building their brand through TV advertisements at a time when most bookings were still happening offline. With this strategy, we became an essential part of the offline-to-online transition, which we could then observe for the next couple of years. Online travel was a major tailwind for us and for the whole industry. Later, we added apartments, houses, and vacation rentals to the platform, capturing the whole accommodation space. Obviously, today, there are a few more players in this space. Competition has increased, in particular since Google started to push into our domain with their own meta product, but I think that what sets Trivago apart is the ability to learn very fast and adapt quickly. For example, as a response to the COVID crisis, we developed a local travel product with the idea of offering a more inspirational product. We launched after a couple of months and have now extended the use case for unique weekend getaways. We recently rebranded the product as Trivago Weekend. Essentially, with it, you can find local things to do even if you do not wish to travel or stay somewhere overnight. If you just want to take a short trip and go somewhere, you can also find great deals there. I’m really excited about this opportunity. Nobody owns this category, and we are excited to try it. I think that we have the ability to move fast and develop great products that solve travel-related pain points. This is the core of what we do. Looking ahead—obviously now, with COVID—everything is a bit uncertain. We already are seeing change in travel behavior. A lot of people speculate on how permanent some of these changes will be and what comes next, but I think that whatever happens, it’s a dynamic space—and I’m sure that over the next 5 to 10 years, there will be many more changes. COVID won’t be the last event that maybe changes the way that we travel. It’s important to stay flexible and adapt and look at it from the user side, really. Look at user pain points because with every development, new opportunities come up and new problems need to be solved. We have a decent-size tech team working on these kinds of products, and I’m excited to be a part of all of this.

    In front of the restaurant’s dozen or more cash registers, customers were standing six or seven deep when Brice Hill raised his voice and began instructing the hungry mall shoppers to immediately exit the store. “No one listened to a single word I said,” says Hill, who opens our discussion by transporting us back to the mid-1980s, when as a teenage recent graduate of McDonald’s management training program he was given a surprise leadership test. Having made a trip to the mall for some holiday shopping, Hill had poked his head into the mall’s marquee McDonald’s only to find a few of his fellow managers nervously waiting for a return call from McDonald’s headquarters. The restaurant—at the time one of the busiest McDonald’s locations on the West Coast—had only minutes earlier received a bomb threat, and as Hill digested the blank stares triggered by his shouts to clear the store, he realized that more extreme measures were required. Leaving the customers in their queues, the young manager dodged the doubtful stares of employees as he maneuvered his way to the back of the store, where he found the location’s electricity source and without hesitation cut it off. “They had told me that 20 minutes was the countdown on the thing—we cleared the whole place with only 4 minutes to spare,” recalls Hill, who estimates that the location may have held as many as 500 customers and workers that day. Later, police would determine that there had been no bomb, but this has never led Hill to second-guess his actions. “When you’re in that type of situation, you have to be able to act and act like an owner. Even if you don’t know whether you have the right answer, you have to act. There cannot be a void of leadership,” says Hill, underscoring what might be a recurring theme for his career. Fast-forward a few decades, and Hill is a senior strategic planning executive at Intel Corp. The venue is an Arizona conference room where a group of Intel executives—including the company’s CFO—has gathered to hear Hill offer an analysis that could potentially lead Intel to begin building idle factories. This time, the doubtful stares quickly turned to dissenting voices as Hill’s strategic analysis failed to win over many of his Intel colleagues.   “When I made the recommendation that we should build an idle factory, there was like a melee in the room. All of the CFO staff was arguing, waving their hands, debating different opinions,” explains Hill, who says that in the minds of traditional finance executives, an idle building equals excess cost. To highlight his point Hill repeats the refrain of “You have to heat it, cool it, and guard it!” Still, what Hill’s analysis had begun to spotlight was the cost of missing out on growth opportunities in a business wielding 60% to 70% gross margins. Suddenly, having idle factories in place to add additional capacity when growth demanded seemed to have merit. “At the end, the CFO said, ‘Bryce, I want you to go meet with the treasury staff. They’re experts in derivatives and option modeling. I want you to go see if your math holds up,’” remembers Hill, whose analysis received “a clean bill of health” from treasury before getting a thumbs-up from Intel’s CEO, a final affirmation that led Intel to modify its growth strategy as well as its accounting. Going forward expenses associated with serving the idle factories would be listed as strategic investments rather than costs – a change that has perhaps made management think twice before turning off the lights .  –Jack Sweeney 

Brett and Jack discuss the highs and lows of executive compensation, and  why corporate culture may trump all.  Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Gregg Clevenger of LiveVox, CFO Charles Freund of  FLEETCOR and CFO Jill Klindt of Workiva.

Having previously held a succession of finance leadership roles inside Chicago’s ever vibrant financial services sector, Vicki Dudley was perhaps more surprised than anyone to find herself accepting a CFO position with Yancey Bros. Co. of Atlanta, the oldest Caterpillar dealer in the country.   Nevertheless, the job hop drew Dudley into a world of opportunity that she credits with having helped to open the door to her latest career chapter as CFO of TTX, the largest railcar provider in North America. “That particular experience did help to prepare me for my current role. Not only did we have sales for Caterpillar and Blue Bird bus, but also we had leasing plus repair facilities across the state of Georgia,” remarks Dudley, who gives credits to Yancey for tasking her with the company’s process improvement function “and tying it to my toolkit.” –Jack Sweeney

When Charles Freund was named CFO of FLEETCOR in 2020 – his arrival in the c-suite became the latest chapter of a varied and lengthy career journey that paralleled the rise of the $2.6 billion fintech.   Accepting a position in FLEETCOR’s corporate development department, Freund joined the firm in the year 2000 when it was generating roughly only $30 million in annual sales and struggling to manage its cash flows. “On two separate occasions, the corporate controller called me and said, ‘Charles, I know we normally pay you on a Friday, but we’re not going to make it this week. Can you wait until next week?,’” recalls Freund. In the years that followed, FLEETCOR found its strategic footing and Freund entered a succession of roles that would ultimately advance him into leadership positions overseeing FLEETCOR’s corporate strategy and global sales. What’s more, along the way FLEETCOR’s future CFO served as a general manager for the company’s developing markets. “I know and understand what’s behind the scenes more than others who haven’t had these kinds of experience. This is no knock on anyone—it’s just because I’ve lived it,” reports Freund, when asked whether he had missed out from not having pursued a more traditional finance career path. Asked to provide some insight into how his past experiences might influence his approach to the sales function, Freund explains: “I say ‘Look, I want your business to grow 10% next year.’ I then layer in my retention assumptions and other things to create a model that basically drives this performance, with what types of investments are required and so forth.” Still, Freund’s most pressing challenges as CFO are likely tied to the more than 80 acquisitions that FLEETCOR has completed over the past two decades. According to FLEETCOR’s finance chief, the fintech is embarking on a finance transformation designed to better integrate its operations around the world, beginning with the numbers. “Over the next 12 months, we’ll be implementing a new global chart of accounts. What this means is that we’ll be cleaning up the chart of accounts around the world so that we speak kind of the same language,” remarks Freund, who adds that it’s also time to replace the company’s patchwork quilt of different ERP systems—another legacy of FLEETCOR’s acquisitive past. –Jack Sweeney   Freund: First, FLEETCOR is a FinTech, so we’re a technology driven provider of financial services, but we’re not a bank. I want to make sure people know that. We’re really in what we call the spend management space. What we provide to businesses are tools to control what gets purchased by employees and what gets paid by the AP department, so you can control it on the front end by either allowing a purchase to happen or not. Or if someone has already made a purchase that’s outside of policy, I could control it on the backend with what gets paid or not. What we have found is that these smarter payment methods help our clients to spend less, they have greater insight and greater control over what’s happening. By spending less, they retain more profit. That’s the real value proposition of all of our products around the world. I’d say we are on a multi-year transformational journey over the next 12 months. A couple of things that we’re doing, we’re implementing a new global chart of accounts. We’ve grown a lot through acquisitions. FLEETCOR has done some 80, 90 acquisitions over our 20 year history. I’m cleaning up the chart of accounts around the world, so we all speak the same language, which should be helpful. We are going to implement that global planning tool this year. I’m also transitioning off of a legacy ERP system this year and have plans over the next three years to reduce the number of ERPs. Again, many of which we inherited through acquisitions, sourcing new tax software for next year. And then I’ve got four or five different HR systems. We have a plan to reduce that footprint over time. We’ll move down to about three next year and then see where we go from there, so a lot of system related things to standardize, simplify, and automate.

Jill Klindt recalls that back in 2008, when she joined Workiva, the software start-up was somewhat removed from the career path that she had envisioned for herself. “It wasn’t that obvious to me at first, and it wasn’t what I was looking for,” explains Klindt, who says that at the time, the Ames, Iowa, company employed six to eight people. Once on board, Klindt found that her accounting skills and willingness to problem-solve quickly made her a go-to executive along the entrepreneurial byways that ruled Workiva’s early years. “I was relied on, which felt really good, and people kept bringing me opportunities, so I never felt passed over,” explains Klindt, who notes that even when an outside CFO was recruited to lead Workiva’s 2014 IPO, she never felt displaced. “I would not have been ready for that role at that point in my career,” comments Klindt, who adds that her predecessor in the CFO office became an outstanding mentor to her, as did other members of Workiva’s C-suite. Meanwhile, a talent-focused culture that took root during Workiva’s early days has continued to thrive during the company’s post-IPO life, says Klindt, who characterizes the culture as one where employees can ask others for help. Having stepped into the CFO office earlier this year, Klindt says that talent is now a primary concern when it comes to unlocking future growth at Workiva, where employees now number nearly 2,000. Says Klindt: “We want to be a much bigger company, and in order to do this, we need to keep hiring.” –Jack Sweeney 

Joe Wolk was about 5 years into his 23-year career with Johnson & Johnson when he was encouraged to take a manufacturing operations position at a newly acquired J&J company in Vacaville, California. One hot July day, Wolk recalls, he and his wife drove up to Vacaville to visit the plant, where he ended up taking a seat across from the newly acquired company’s plant manager. As one of Vacaville’s initial J&J transplants, the young finance executive sensed that his arrival was being viewed less than enthusiastically.   Read More “Within the first 90 seconds, he says: ‘Hey, you know what? I don’t think we need you out here,’” Wolk remembers, citing those words as the plant manager’s first remarks. Thus began one of Wolk’s least favorite but—as he explains—most rewarding career experiences. “The first 4 months in that job were like going to the dentist every day,” says Wolk, who tells us that ultimately the reward from the experience was a lesson in when and how to stand your ground. The lesson began at a team meeting where Wolk tried to offer the plant’s management some practical advice with regard to how to prepare for an upcoming visit from senior J&J executives. At the time, Wolk says, the plant was working to address a number manufacturing issues as it tried to determine how best to meet customer demand. Wolk recalls the plant manager’s response to his advice: “We’d like to meet your wish list, but we don’t have time for this right now.” Instead of just accepting the manager’s feedback, Wolk reports, he arranged a private meeting with the manager, where he boldly elucidated the items occupying his “wish list.” “If they come out here next week and we can’t provide certain answers, we’re going to have a mess on our hands,” were among the words that Wolk says that he used to prod the plant manager’s thinking. In the end, the visiting J&J executives were satisfied with the plant team’s answers, and Wolk’s reputation grew in the plant manager’s eye. “From this point on, he didn’t take a meeting without including me,” concludes Wolk, who uses the story to underscore how finance executives must be ready to summon the courage of their convictions. –Jack Sweeney

When Greg Saunders tells us that “having patience” was perhaps the quality that most contributed to his first appointment as a CFO back in the early 1990s, we wonder how many additional years a more impatient Saunders (then only 32) may have needed before stepping into the CFO office. Of course, then again, a railcar leasing and repair business might not have been the first choice of many aspiring Bay Area CFOs, who as a group have for decades preferred to satisfy their C-suite ambitions via the area’s high tech companies. Read More “I remember thinking back in the early ’90s that maybe I should jump into the tech sector, but I stuck it out and I’m glad that I did,” reports Saunders, who 5 months after joining Transcisco Industries as a corporate development executive was helping the company to manage through a bankruptcy. “I was suddenly involved in everything—the attrition at the company was crazy, and I was able to take on more responsibility,” recalls Saunders, who notes that Transcisco’s rapid downturn of fortune had occurred when a much celebrated luxury passenger train project collapsed due in part to the firm’s limited capital resources. “Because of all of the attrition across the company, I was able to take on more and more roles, and guess what? I became a young CFO of a publicly traded company,” comments Saunders, before once more crediting his “patience” with helping him to nurture a mind-set that encouraged “sticking around” and finding solutions.   Along the way, Saunders says, he became tasked with fighting off a hostile takeover and ultimately negotiating a successful merger, which he credits with helping the company’s stock price to jump up to $6 per share—after trading at as low as 12 cents. Says Saunders “For me, it was just a great experience for many different reasons, including learning the rewards of sticking things out.” –Jack Sweeney

Back in the early 2000s, the use of videoconferencing to conduct job interviews remained rather rare in most parts of the world—and India was no different. What made Manish Dugar’s interview experience still rarer was the fact he had participated in 18 different video calls over a period of 3 months for a single job opportunity. Says Dugar: “Over that span of interviews, I became almost as knowledgeable about IT services as any professional in that sector.” Nonetheless, Dugar recalls, he had some reservations about Wipro Technologies, a tech services company based in Bangalore, India, that had recently begun to distinguish itself in a number of areas—including its thorough vetting of job candidates.   “It did not seem so exciting for me to leave a big name company in the north of India and relocate to the south to become part of an industry that was not as well known,” explains Dugar, who at the time was working for Coca-Cola India in Delhi. What’s more, the Bangalore of 20 or more years ago was far different from the dynamic technology hub that it is known as today. “Those who are familiar with India know that the south is much more cosmopolitan today and people can move around freely—but back in those days, the north was the north and the south was the south,” observes Dugar, who ultimately joined Wipro and quickly advanced upward into a series of financial management roles in which he observed firsthand the financial and operational levers required to scale the business to accommodate explosive growth. “From 2001 to 2008, $150 million in revenue grew to become $8 billion,” reports Dugar, who—after several promotions within the company—was named CFO of Wipro Technologies roughly 7 years after his arrival. Reflecting back on some of his early reservations about joining Wipro, Dugar says that he turned to his father, who had thus far seemed reluctant to possibly influence his son’s decisions. Remembers Dugar: “He told me, ‘If the company has done so many interviews, the position must be very important to them. It’s one thing to work for a company that has a big brand, but it’s another to work for a company that really values you.’” –Jack Sweeney 

This Episode Features FP&A Insights & Commentary from: Ross Tennenbaum, CFO Avalara Waifa Chau, CFO, Nylas Brad Kinnish, CFO, Aryaka

“Fire the auditor!” Three words that Quantum CFO Mike Dodson vowed would never cross his lips were now being spoken aloud by Quantum’s board. “Fire these guys!” was the message that Dodson received after weeks of personally rejecting the notion.   “We had been delisted, we were in the middle of a multiyear restatement, and there were lender issues,” recalls Dodson, listing the action items that needed to be addressed to regain credibility with Quantum’s investors and lenders. “In the middle of all of this, the last thing that you want to do is to fire the auditor and start over,” observes Dodson, while summoning up past experiences that seemed to counter the logic behind dismissing Quantum’s auditor. “I was sticking to my guns,” reports Dodson, who, along with Quantum’s chief accountant, doubled back in hope of getting deeper insight into the auditor’s progress or lack of it. “It just started to feel like we were taking two steps forward and three steps back—I remember thinking that we were not getting any buy-in from the auditor on what approach to use with regard to how we were going to get things done,” continues Dodson, who adds that the restatement involved tens of thousands of transactions that went back several years. “Firing the auditor was against everything that I had believed up until that point,” says Dodson, who recalls having a shared moment of insight with his chief accountant when they repeated back and forth to one another: “We are going to fire the auditor.” Concludes Dodson: “This was a defining moment for the company, and it became a lifesaver that made the difference in the entire process.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Back in 2001, after Scott Dussault had been named CFO of StorageNetworks, it’s unlikely that the 30-year-old finance leader was popping any champagne corks. The company’s management had offered him the position when its previous CFO had vacated the office to serve as CEO in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble collapse. “The ride up the roller coaster was exhilarating—the ride down was educational,” explains Dussault, who had joined the firm as a controller in 1999 and been promoted to vice president of finance within 6 months. “We hired 1,000 people in 3 years and grew the company to $150 million in revenue,” recalls Dussault adding some context to the “ride up.” In 2000, when StorageNetworks went public, its stock climbed 234 percent in its first day of trading—a frenzied indicator for a company whose customer portfolio was known to be 80 percent Internet-related application vendors and dotcom customers. The CFO office at StorageNetworks turned out to be where Dussault logged some of the most difficult days of his career as the collapse of the dotcom economy cut short the life of many of his firm’s most loyal customers. “I had a terrific vice president of investor relations and she and I suffered through a quite few meetings with analysts, but I took those learnings with me,” says Dussault, who credits the challenges that he encountered during the “ride down” or the aftermath of the collapse with leading him to build better and stronger relations with investors and analysts during future CFO career chapters. - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s is as good a place in time as any for Gregg Clevenger to use to begin explaining the mix of professional and personal circumstances that made Rochester, New York, his port of entry into the CFO office. At the time, Clevenger recalls, he was a vice president for Goldman’s Sach’s media entertainment and technology group in Singapore and observed $100 million of recently raised funding “go up in smoke.” Having been recruited to join Goldman while overseas, Clevenger returned to the U.S. as something of an unknown. “People didn’t really know me in the U.S. context,” he remembers. “So it was going to be a very tough row to hoe.” What’s more, the travel to which Clevenger was accustomed was no longer a great match for his young family. “My first two children—one born in Singapore and the other in Hong Kong—I never saw them,” comments Clevenger, who began commuting daily to Goldman’s Manhattan office from a new home in Connecticut. It was at about this time that Clevenger began accepting calls from a number of recruiters, one of whom he believes likely brought him to the attention of a publicly traded, midsize telecom located in Rochester. “That whole Rochester thing: I never would’ve thought ‘Hey, let’s move to Rochester,’ but it was kind of a personal reset as well as a career one—to live, work, and have our kids go to school in a community,” explains Clevenger. Having joined the company as head of corporate development, within 3 years he found himself entering the CFO office, where he remained for 4 more years while helping to lead the business through a major restructuring brought on by the telecom sector’s crash. Looking back on his decade as an investment banker, Clevenger says that he has few doubts about his move to the operations side of things: “I’ve now been doing this for 20 years—it’s hard for me to imagine being an investment banker for 30 years.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Lovers of tortilla chips will swear that the only true ones are made with corn (and never wheat) and that when it comes to sourcing them, the highest-yielding kernel of corn comes from West Texas. Or so explains Joe Euteneuer, who exited an auditor position with Price Waterhouse in the mid-1980s to join a snack-making entrepreneur in a quest to lower the cost of tortilla production—a coveted advantage in what was quickly becoming a highly competitive market. “I flew to West Texas and bought corn crops from those farmers so that I could get the best deal that we could and get the best return on my—on our—invested dollars,” explains Euteneuer, a seasoned finance leader who has to date occupied the CFO office at more than a half dozen companies, including hefty brands such as Mattel, Sprint, Sirius XM Radio and Comcast. Still, it’s Euteneuer’s trip to West Texas that comes to mind when he’s asked what experiences best prepared him for a finance leadership role. Reflecting on his encounters with the Texas farmers, Euteneuer observes, “It was the type of experience that you don’t typically get in an accounting department.” The company’s small size, Euteneuer says, gave him the opportunity to take on more responsibility, which quickly allowed him to step into a chief operating officer role. “It was like doing a practical MBA, inasmuch as we were building a company from scratch,” recalls Euteneuer, who adds that during his COO tenure, the company’s customer base began to spread across the western United States, which required the company to add greater capacity to its Phoenix and Minneapolis hubs. Says Euteneuer: “I learned how to get chips and salsa onto every store shelf west of the Mississippi.” - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Brett and Jack discuss the power of the mission, the CEO return-to-work agenda and covid’s delta variant backlash. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Beth Clymer of Jobcase, CFO Todd McElhatton of Zuora and CFO Scott Dussault of Workhuman

When Melissa Ballenger stepped into a deputy CFO role for TD Bank’s U.S. subsidiary back in 2011, she did so knowing that she had been recruited to be a change agent. Having recently generated business headlines from acquiring two sizable banks in the U.S., TD Bank had U.S. expansion plans that were hardly a secret. “A lot of competitor banks in the U.S. were still back on their heels at the time from credit concerns, capital considerations, and other things like that, and TD had the opportunity to take share profitably from competitors,” recalls Ballenger, whose new role at first involved interfacing with the different management groupings and teams of executives who were expected to help to drive a finance transformation designed to position’s TD Bank’s U.S. subsidiary for the coming decade.    “We had a very interesting mix of people. Some were from the parent company in Canada, others were from the legacy organizations in the U.S., and still others were executives who were available to be brought in from the industry because they had been displaced by the financial crisis,” continues Ballenger, as she draws our attention to what she credits as being a primary lever for helping to put the transformation in motion. “I was resolved to listen to all of the key finance leaders and talk to the executive committee in the U.S. and understand what their business needs were. It sounds pretty basic, but I don’t think that I could have gotten things started otherwise, because I needed to know what their business needs were. They were each kind of uniquely different, and their personalities were different as well,” reports Ballenger. What began as a listening campaign helped to lead to a broadening consensus around the adoption of a new management structure involving the appointment of business unit CFOs who would report to Ballenger but at the same time partner with leaders for each of the lines of business inside the new U.S. entity. Next came the technology platforms and communication processes. “We built analytics that were needed for timely, informed decision-making, and, being a public company, we knew that our forecasting capabilities and our communication with our parent would be critically important,” comments Ballenger, who says that while the finance transformation provided many leadership lessons along the way her biggest takeaway arrived early in the process . Says Ballenger: “Begin by listening” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

It was one of the last pieces of advice that CFO Beth Clymer left us with—an item that we snagged with one of our favorite questions: What advice do you have for new CFOs?    Her reply—“Don’t skimp on resources”—at first seemed trite, but a groundswell of words shortly followed. “Too often, CFOs will say, ‘I don’t need that extra analyst’ or ‘I don’t need an extra accounting manager.’ But don’t skimp on resources. The impact that a strong finance organization can have throughout the business is massive, and those resources will almost always pay for themselves,” explains Clymer, who perhaps sounds more like a veteran CFO or a finance leader with multiple CFO tours of duty than an executive who entered the CFO office for the first time only in 2019. However, prior to entering the C-suite at Jobcase, a jobs-oriented social media platform, Clymer had invested a decade with Bain Capital, where as an operating partner she had spent her days advising C-suite executives from the venture capital firm’s portfolio of consumer-oriented businesses.   “In my time at Bain Capital, I found that I was very often drawn to the parts of business transformation that had a lot to do with the office of the CFO,” recalls Clymer, who provides us with a lengthy list of typical challenges that frequently summoned her involvement at the firm, including finance team–building, KPI alignment, capital strategy, and business restructurings. Still other items from her past also set her apart from finance’s more traditional corporate rank-and-file, including a nearly 4-year stint as a consultant with Parthenon Group, as well as a number of Ivy League degrees. Perhaps not surprisingly, you get the feeling that it was Clymer’s experience at Bain Capital that today accents the delivery of her responses in a manner more akin to that of an objective outsider than of a CFO who has climbed the more traditional corporate ladder. It’s a delivery that makes her final piece of advice sound all the more compelling. Advises Clymer: “Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. Really focus on surrounding yourself with the quantity and quality of team members who are going to allow your team to really help to drive the business.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

The aspiration to become a CFO was always there,” says Madhu Ranganathan, executive vice president and chief financial officer of OpenText, a leader in information management based in Waterloo, Ontario. “I just didn’t know what the journey would look like.” Along the way, Ranganathan says, she learned that while technical acumen remains critical to a successful career, collaboration and a commitment to understanding business operations is what has ultimately propelled her leadership journey. Ranganathan launched her career as a public accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC and then moved to Liberty Mutual Financial Services. “I did make the decision very consciously to say, ‘I would like to explore multiple industries throughout my career,’” she notes. She also wanted to gain ownership of a business’s financial performance rather than remain in an advisory role. After a stint as vice president and corporate controller with Redback Networks, Ranganathan moved to CFO positions with Rackable Systems, and [24]7.ai. As part of her journey, Ranganathan studied the careers of other successful CFOs. Collaboration had often been at the core, she observes. While CFOs must remain independent custodians of their companies’ plans, they also need to acknowledge the business leaders’ command of their operations and work toward a solution that’s a win for the organization. “The word ‘collaboration’ has never been more important,” Ranganathan reports. Aspiring CFOs also need mentors who will acknowledge their qualifications and experience and guide them toward their goals, Ranganathan says. “Do your homework, understand the business, and read about the products and solutions,” she advises. When collaborating with other departments, be prepared, be respectful, set clear expectations, and allow others to hold you accountable, Ranganathan continues, as doing so fosters a similar response from the business side. “That’s really where collaboration happens,” she adds.   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

When asked when he knew that he wanted to become a chief financial officer, Sean Mulloy tells us that he knew from the time he first became “siloed” within an organization. At the time, Mulloy was a project manager with the financial services company Discover, where his lines of sight seldom extended beyond his immediate projects. “I knew that I wanted to have a bigger impact. I knew that I wanted to tackle operational efficiencies and execute fund-raising and capital structure, but I was stuck sitting in a silo,” explains Mulloy, who subsequently left his confines at Discover to join a consulting firm that specialized in turnarounds and structuring outcomes for distressed companies. Says Mulloy: “This was essentially serving as the interim CFO for distressed companies. I was no longer just doing FP&A—I became responsible for banking relationships, audits, operations, and HR.” No longer fenced in, Mulloy says, he acquired a taste for making an impact and a hunger that eventually would lead him to the CFO office at Level Ex, Inc. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

This Episode Features FP&A Insights & Commentary from: Chad Gold, CFO, SalesLoft Maria Manrique, CFO, O’Reilly Media Harmit Singh, CFO, Levi Strauss & Co. Andrew Kenny, CFO, Scoular

Looking back, Nathan Winters says that his appointment as CFO of GE Healthcare’s global supply chain was in every way a milestone in his career—a high-calorie leadership stint that would ultimately propel him into the CFO office at Zebra Technologies (NASDAQ: ZBRA), a publicly traded provider of digital workflow and tracking solutions. Says Winters: “It gave me the responsibility for delivering productivity, improving working capital, and thinking about how we transform the supply chain to really create value for the company.” It also charged Winters with leading a global team spanning more than 50 manufacturing sites. “I had to quickly learn how to lead differently, drive change, and deliver results,” he explains. After 17 years with GE, Winters joined Zebra in 2018  as vice president of corporate development and business operations. “This was just a great opportunity for me to leverage my operational background in a technology company but move outside my comfort zone,” comments Winters, who adds that his first few years at Zebra also opened the door to new experiences. “I was exposed to investor relations, board communications, and the debt equity markets in ways in which I had not been exposed before,” he comments. “This was really the missing piece that helped to allow me to step into the CFO role earlier this year,” says Winters, closing the loop on his GE-to-CFO journey. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Back in 2008, Chad Gold was working for Home Depot as an FP&A professional when the economic downturn upended the home building market and summoned him to the retailer’s forecasting front lines. “Finance had to be ahead of the business as far as thinking through all the different scenarios went because the housing markets were changing literally day to day,” comments Gold, who observes that the crisis revealed to him how the finance team must always be out in front “looking around corners.” After several years with the giant retailer and multiple promotions, Gold says, he began to grow frustrated as the flow of promotions slowed down despite his willingness to take on big projects in different functions. Then, one day, an issue involving one of his projects “blew up.” “My boss sat me down late at night and on a whiteboard drew some stair steps with a line that went from the bottom to the top of the 10 steps. You’re so focused on wanting to step from the bottom to the top that you’re missing out on all of these incremental learnings,” Gold recalls him saying. Gold says that he took the message to heart and uncovered new opportunities to satisfy his FP&A appetite inside Home Depot’s growing merger-and-acquisition activities. “No one was offering to go work in M&A, and I said that I’d be happy to go do it,” remarks Gold, who estimates that he applied his FP&A acumen over time to 20 different acquisitions, including some postmerger integration work in China. Says Gold: “I said, ‘Well, I’ve never been to China before, so why not?’” Today, as CFO of SalesLoft, Gold says that his Home Depot experiences revealed to him how FP&A functions are built over time and ultimately yield different tools for the organization to leverage to allow Finance to become a more valuable partner. He explains: “There are certain foundational things in FP&A that you simply have to have in order to partner—the business partnership and collaboration are just the last part.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Among the growing number of finance leaders who can be classified as cloud computing CFOs, few have arguably stayed in step with the parade of cloud opportunities longer and with more brand muscle behind them than CFO Todd McElhatton of Zuora. For the past two decades, McElhatton has been finance’s cloud point man for some of the biggest names in tech as the technology developers have shifted their offerings from on-premise to in-the-cloud solutions. Turn back the clock to 2001, and McElhatton is joining Hewlett-Packard’s finance team, where he serves as a vice president of finance while advancing into the realm of managed services for the first time. Fast-forward to 2007, and he’s joining Oracle, where he invests 7 years and oversees business operations for the developer’s pioneering cloud business. Next, he’s jumping to VMware, where he’s named CFO of the developer’s Hybrid Cloud Business before moving onward to SAP as SVP and CFO of their Cloud Business Group. Today, as CFO of Zuora, McElhatton is tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for a developer whose offerings are designed to help companies manage and grow their subscription businesses. It’s perhaps the obvious next chapter for a finance leader who built his career inside companies set on harnessing the awesome power of subscription businesses.   CFOTL: Tell us about Zuora. What does this company do, and what are its offerings? McElhatton: First of all, Zuora is a subscription management platform company. We help companies to launch and manage their subscription services. A lot of high tech companies operate on us. Companies like DocuSign and Zoom are our clients. We power all of their billing, and we do a lot of their revenue accounting for them. We help them to collect revenue from their customers. We really are helping clients as they’re transforming from a product sale to an ongoing subscription sale. This is really huge change for companies because when you think about a product sale, it’s a one-and-done, but a subscription sale is an ongoing, circular relationship that you constantly have with that customer. The customer signs up, and then you’ve got to make sure that you collect the revenue. You’ve got to make sure that you recognize the revenue correctly, make sure that you fulfill it, make sure that you renew it. Every time you do these different tasks, you might impact 15 or 16 different business processes. Using Zuora as a platform allows companies to do this really seamlessly. The other thing that we know about really good subscription companies is that they’re constantly iterating. Their customers might have some sort of change up to four times a year, so if you have a good subscription business, you’re going to have all of these changes going on. For the most part, homegrown systems and ERP and CRM systems don’t do a good job of helping companies to manage these businesses, and this is where Zuora comes in. We’re really helping to transform a lot of what’s happening in the New Economy. I recently saw that IDC projects that in the future, more than 50% of GDP will be in the form of a subscription. Zuora is absolutely out front-and-center on this and is a recognized leader in helping customers through this transformation. We want to make sure that we’re helping people as they’re engaging in the subscription economy and as they really transform. Our employees want to make sure that we’re building the best products that we can to help our clients accomplish this. We’re also really focused on making sure that our technology and platform are world-leading and that we execute our strategy in a way that makes sense. In some ways, Zuora is where ERP was in the 1990s. We’re really on the cusp of this, and it’s really changing how people operate. Think about yourself. When was the last time that you bought music? And cars … kids don’t have an interest in buying a car. It’s like, there’s Uber, there’s a subscription, or there’s a way that they can buy something as a service-on-demand—and this is really changing how things are working.   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

In March of 2009, when the economy was still in the clutches of the global financial crisis, Time Warner spun out its subsidiary Time Warner Cable into an independent company. “As we spun off, we paid a massive dividend to the parent of $18 billion, and our central thought became: ‘How do we survive? How do we survive as a newly public company with lots of debt?’” recalls Christian Lee, who at the time was a Time Warner Cable senior vice president and head of the company’s M&A strategy. Over the next several years, Lee says, he experienced a fast ride of ups and downs that provided a string of lessons when it came to speaking to debt holders and investors inside ever-changing market conditions. Fast-forward to 2014, and Lee and Time Warner Cable (TWC) CFO Artie Minson receive a hostile takeover letter from competitor Charter Communications, which made no secret of its intent to replace TWC’s board of directors with its own selections.  “We spent the next two and half years of our collective lives working through our hostile takeover defense—a merger with Comcast,” explains Lee, who adds that ultimately Charter and TWC were able to put together another deal that would secure the sale of TWC. “In the background of all of this, Artie had gotten introduced to Adam Neuman [WeWork founder], and he said to me, ‘Hey, I’m thinking of going over as COO—you should think about the CFO role,” recalls Lee, who would step into WeWork’s CFO office in 2015. “I had done a lot of deal work and capital-raising in my career, but my first year as CFO of WeWork was really about building out systems—we didn’t have an accounts receivable or accounts payable system, so I was leaning into things that I had never done before,” reports Lee. He exited that role in 2017 in order to move to Asia, where he would help to launch and manage WeWork’s Asia business, an appointment that helped in part to satisfy his long-term career goal of serving in an executive business development capacity overseas.

In the late 1990s, when Stuart Henrickson was CFO for Koch Industries’ Canadian operations, Chase Manhattan made him a job offer unlike any that he had received before. “It was a fork in the road for me. Koch had been consolidating and bringing many of its operations back to their head office in the U.S., and it happened to be at that point in time that Chase brought me the opportunity,” explains Henrickson, who reports that he was asked to spearhead a development bank for Chase in the Middle East. “So, within the course of a week, I had to make a decision regarding whether I went down to the U.S. to be part of a Koch team that was already built or instead started to do something new with a blank sheet of paper,” recalls Henrickson. After 4 years with Chase, he would join the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, where he led investment banking for nearly 5 years before accepting a CEO position with Standard Bank MENA.    In all, Henrickson’s Middle East career chapter would extend across 11 years, a span of time during which the Middle East’s appetite for financial services escalated along with the price of oil, which grew from roughly $9 a barrel at about the time of his arrival to a high of $149 per barrel, according to Henrickson. He recalls: “The Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) went from having a handful of Western-based financial institutions consisting of rep offices of between 2 and 10 people to growing overnight to eventually number some 1,500 employees. Dubai became the hub for the whole region.”    Asked for some pointers when it comes to doing business in the Middle East, Henrickson says that board members and company management need to be treated differently. He remarks: “I remember that one board member from a large local investment house told me, ‘The biggest difference between a European investment banker and an American investment banker is that the European knows full well that he needs to come back every 3 months for a year or two before he would get a deal, while the American comes over, doesn’t get a deal, and leaves in frustration—for good.’”  Still, the biggest differences in business are in the thought processes, he explains.   “Leave your logic at the door—so much of it is knowing what makes the other person tick,” says Henrickson. –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When Maria Manrique stepped into her first role as a CFO, she did so knowing that her finance leader mentor was still in the building—in fact, he was occupying the CEO office. “It would be unfair of me to not say that this was critical—being able to step into the role and have someone there who could help me to bridge the gaps,” recalls Manrique, who prior to entering the CFO office at the start-up had served as vice president of FP&A. Manrique had already occupied similar senior planning roles at multiple companies, having previously worked for Fidelity Investments, where she had lent her FP&A acumen to the financial services firm’s portfolio of venture-backed companies. Still, at the start-up, she found herself along the front lines at the company’s board meetings—an opportunity that she had seldom been afforded at Fidelity. But along with her increased visibility came responsibility, she points out. “I had been supporting venture capital–backed companies for a long time with strategic planning, but I had never had to make the hard decisions,” comments Manrique, who says that more challenging decisions concerning the company’s ultimate valuation and with which investors to partner suddenly became front-and-center. Fast-forward to 2021, and Manrique is today CFO of O’Reilly Media, a 43-year-old midsize firm where as finance leader she has sought to open doors for her finance team members by exposing each member to the broader planning process and allowing them to acquire a deeper understanding of the firm’s strategy. Notes Manrique: “I have a really hard time telling you who on my team is accounting only or controllership only or FP&A only. Everyone has a chain of activity that goes from the general ledger to our monthly operating report to our board report.” It’s an approach to talent development, Manrique says, that is helping O’Reilly to retain talent in an highly competitive market. “This is about giving people meaningful roles that impact the organization,” comments Manrique, who at O’Reilly also wears the hat of Chief People Officer.  - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Asked to recall the experience of stepping into a CFO role for the first time, Nicole Anasenes doesn’t mince words. "It’s a very lonely, scary moment,” comments Anasenes, as she considers her early days at technology company Infor—a CFO appointment that preceded more recent CFO engagements at Squarespace and now technology firm Ansys. “If only someone would have told me how lonely it feels to make certain decisions—you can bounce ideas off people, but you are the ultimate decision-maker,” continues Anasenes, who says that, looking  back, she may have been able to ease some of the decision-making concerns if she had had a broader professional network to which to turn. “I happened to have been lucky that Charles Philips, the CEO of Infor, was a financially savvy person, but since then, I’ve built a much broader network of people and a framework for how to have these type of conversations in which you don’t divulge the specifics concerning your company but get the mentoring and support that you need,” remarks Anasenes, who prior to entering the CFO office at Infor spent more 14 years at IBM Corp., where she last served as CFO of the tech giant’s middleware group. “I learned very quickly after leaving IBM that you need to be open to networks and different types of networks,” explains Anasenes, who adds that her appetite for networking has grown along with her CFO talent development responsibilities. “You are only good as the talent you attract, retain, and are able to keep engaged, so my relationship with the executive search community is quite broad,” she notes.  –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

It was nightly business conversations at his parents’ dinner table that first led Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah to consider alternatives to business when it came to building a career. “As most small business owners do, my parents worked all the time—and as with most small businesses, things could at times be financially challenging,” explains Mahendra-Rajah, who vividly recalls business rent increases, outstanding receivables, and the dynamics behind supply and demand that pervaded his parents’ dinner conversations. Nevertheless, it was this same scrutiny of supply-and-demand dynamics that Mahendra-Rajah credits with helping him to “come full circle” and ultimately led him to business school. At the time, Mahendra-Rajah was working full-time as a senior process engineer for chemical giant FMC Corp., a career-building stint that afforded him the real-world insights required to enrich a master’s thesis that he needed in order to complete a chemical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins. “It was my first job out of college, and the plant manager’s M.O. was to always beat me up and demand more cost reductions and better process yields,” recalls Mahendra-Rajah, who notes that his immersion into the business side of manufacturing quickly escalated when FMC received a large order for a synthetic that the company no longer manufactured. “I was given the task of refurbishing an old factory and getting it up and running in a matter of weeks,” remembers Mahendra-Rajah, who adds that the production of the once-discontinued synthetic led the plant manager’s mind-set to suddenly pivot. “He was pushing me to spend as fast as I could. I was told not to negotiate with suppliers, and if I needed overtime for the maintenance workers, to ‘go for it’—schedule was paramount, cost was secondary,” explains the career finance leader, who credits the experience with helping him to open a door that he had once shut. Says Mahendra-Rajah: “It kind of brought me back to the table with Mom and Dad and made me realize how so much of our world is really driven by supply and demand and how finance is the oil in the gears." –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Billtrust CFO Mark Shifke likes to label himself an “accidental CFO”—a tag that a number of our guests have appropriated from time to time when faced with explaining a past filled with less-than-traditional career experience. However, in the case of Shifke, the term arguably has little to do with career experience, for Billtrust’s CFO spent nearly a decade on Wall Street before entering the C-suite. Instead, Shifke uses the appellation to help to reveal the pivotal role that a single phone call came to play in his finance career. Back in 2000—near the beginning of Shifke’s Wall Street career and the end of the market frenzy known as the dotcom bubble—Shifke took a phone call from a CEO founder whom he had met through a personal acquaintance. Just as the CEO didn’t hesitate to ask Shifke to invest in his struggling company, Shifke didn’t dither when it came to coming up with some figurative cash. “I made a handshake agreement with him over the phone,” explains Shifke, who notes that the investment did require some visibility into the company’s sales pipeline.   “I told him, ‘If you are successful at selling into this environment and you are able to generate revenue, then on the back of that, I will raise capital’—and I did so,” recalls Shifke, who raised a "family and friends" round of funds that allowed him to become a central angel investor in the company Green Dot Corp., a fintech start-up and pioneer of prepaid debit cards.   Fast-forward 11 years, and Shifke is no longer just a Green Dot investor but a board member, when he opts out of a managing director role at JPMorgan Chase to join Green Dot in a senior corporate development role.  “It’s one thing to invest in a business and it’s another to advise a business, but it’s quite another thing to go operate it—and I had never operated one,” comments Shifke, who would enter the CFO office at Green Dot a few years later in 2015. In the end, Shifke says, the “accidental CFO” label still fits because he originally had zero aspirations to be a CFO and now-midsize fintech firm Green Dot simply became the means to scratch his operations itch.    Says Shifke: “There was an opportunity to either enhance my position as a shareholder or materially harm it—but this tended to play out to the positive.” –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Several actions proved key as Waifa Chau advanced from financial planning and analysis (FP&A) roles to chief financial officer positions. Collaborating with other functions, gaining an in-depth understanding of the overall business, and helping his colleagues understand how FP&A benefits an organization have driven his success, says Chau, currently CFO with Nylas, Inc., a provider of productivity infrastructure solutions for software.  Cross-functional collaboration helps in gaining an understanding of a company’s overall business, Chau says. While working at Gap Inc., the company behind Gap, Banana Republic, and other apparel brands, Chau focused on driving higher gross margins—key in the retail industry. Chau’s curiosity about the business also helped him propel his career forward, he says. He spent about two years in a merchandising role at Gap, during which he gained a better understanding of the intricacies of operations. Often, employees in other parts of an organization assume FP&A’s primary role is to tell them when they’re over or under budget, Chau says. He tried to show how a strong FP&A partner tries to understand their performance so the business can better prepare for the future. After about seven years at Gap, Inc., Chau moved to an FP&A role at Walmart.com. In an ecommerce organization, there were “different levers to pull,” he says. For instance, along with analyzing gross margins, he reviewed margins on grocery delivery apps. Building on his success in FP&A, Chau set a new goal: establishing a finance team from the ground up. He joined BirdEye, a marketing platform, as vice president, finance, and advanced to CFO. Among other accomplishments, he structured the accounting and FP&A functions and determined how finance would interact with other functions. At Nylas, Chau again is leveraging his experience to propel himself forward and establish the finance function, this time for a slightly younger and small company. Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Of course, every finance leader needs to understand the mechanics of accounting and know how to identify the financial implications of management’s decisions. Their preparation should also include learning from their experiences—and this includes mistakes, says Ian Charles, chief financial officer with Flexe, an on-demand warehousing solution. In particular, identifying the optimal candidate for a job is one of a leader’s most difficult and critical responsibilities, Charles notes. It’s also far from straightforward. It’s easy to believe that you’re hiring a star who will move the organization to the next level, only to discover that the individual isn’t as exceptional as he or she appeared as a candidate. In other situations—say, when it’s necessary to fill a role quickly—a candidate who appears less inspiring at the outset can turn out to add tremendous value to the organization. To improve his track record when hiring for critical positions, Charles has beefed up his interview process. He begins by interviewing several dozen individuals. From this group, he chooses two or three finalists. All go through at least several rounds of interviews, with both Charles and other members of his team. To be sure, this can mean balancing rigor with market realities. Given the tight job market at the moment, good individuals can find plenty of great opportunities, Charles adds. Also key to hiring well is adeptly balancing the interests of multiple parties, including the board, management, and employees. Focusing too heavily in one direction can lead to unintended consequences. For example, a goal of maximizing share price will impact the board, investors, management, and employees differently. Charles notes that in the early days of his career, he would lean toward maximizing share price for the board rather than focusing on employees’ needs. “I’ve learned from that mistake as well,” he says. Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Nearly 20 years later, CFO Trent York tells us that he can still hear the finance executive’s exact words. “Trent, I don’t need you tell me how not to do something—I need you to help me to figure out how to work through the issue and what needs to be addressed in order for us to be able to expand,” recalls York, placing just enough emphasis on the word “not” to expose a degree of anxiety that still lingers. At the time, York was a newbie controller for Golfsmith, an Austin, TX–based golf specialty retailer that in the 2000s was opening dozens of stores annually as golf enjoyed newfound popularity nationally amidst the Tiger Woods boom.  “We went from 20 retail stores at the time I joined to close to 80, and we actually took it public, so this was really a build-and-scale moment that was quite exciting,” explains York, who advanced into the vice president of finance role as the golf retailer began to prepare for a public offering that ultimately debuted on NASDAQ (symbol: GOLF) in June 2006. Beyond gainful employment and resume enrichment, Golfsmith provided York with a series of “build-and-scale” moments of insight that allowed him to confidently step into yet another fast-growing Austin phenom of the 2000s, HomeAway. “HomeAway was about scale. There was meaningful organic growth, and we were very acquisitive along the way, too, because the market that we were looking to bring together was fragmented,” remembers York, who would spend 13 years at the company and enter the CFO office a year after its sale to Expedia Group in 2015. Later, HomeAway was rebranded as part of VRBO. “Following the sale, we pivoted our entire business model from being subscription-based to being transaction-driven, which was really more aligned with the marketplace—and to pivot like this was not an easy thing to do,” reports York, who adds that his lesson or takeaway from “the pivot” was coming to understand how making complex tasks simple could help an organization to achieve greater agility.   Says York: “The ability to be agile or stay fluid within a changing environment—and to drive through it—comes back to keeping things simple.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

When the TreeHouse Foods financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team notice CFO Bill Kelley entering the room, chances are that a number of team members shoot a quick glance at the company’s latest revenue figures. “I’m probably more predictable than I want to be,” explains Kelley, who has made revenue management a top priority for the $4.5 billion private label food and beverage maker. The push for organic growth at TreeHouse follows a larger reorganization at the company that roughly coincided with Kelley’s arrival inside the CFO office. According to him, that reorg has since led finance to begin embedding senior finance executives inside different business lines. “There are finance people who are now hard-wired into the business units, and we have created a revenue management function that had not previously existed,” points out Kelley, who notes that the embedded finance professionals are today playing a more strategic role inside the business than ever before. “They are the copilot or the chief of staff to the business unit presidents, with whom they help to make decisions on how to allocate capital and how to grow the organization,” explains Kelley, who adds that the central finance function remains responsible for the training and development of all finance professionals. Meanwhile, Kelley says, in addition to helping to drive organic growth, finance helps the company to flex its working capital muscles.   “Our investment thesis about which we talk to investors is that we have a unique ability to generate an outsized amount of cash flow,” reports Kelley. “We are committed to driving free cash flow in excess of $300 million annually, and we want to grow our EPS 10% a year.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

When asked about a personal habit that has served him well over the years, finance leader Puneet Pamnani raises his voice slightly and seeks to mimic the delivery of his wife’s tone:  “This is what you do for a hobby? You read company annual reports?” To which Pamnani defends his favorite pastime with the retort: “I find them interesting!” Although it might seem difficult to imagine this exchange taking place on sandy beach vacations and holiday escapes, it nonetheless remains an example that Pamnani uses to illustrate his relentless curiosity for how businesses operate and perform.   According to Pamnani, this curiosity has led him to regularly attend the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the major event for many value investors and fans of Warren Buffett, among whom Pamnani proudly includes himself. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Pamnani’s reading pastime is one that Buffett has long enjoyed and encouraged others to pursue.    “I’ve been to every Warren Buffett annual shareholder meeting in the past 10 years,” says Pamnani, who quickly adds: “But not the last one, that was hard”—signaling the environment related to COVID. Of course, Buffett is renowned not just for the investment and business insights themselves that he serves up but also for how he serves them up using clear, concise language that every investor can understand—and it’s here where Pamnani’s relentless habit and professional life are perhaps about to converge as at no other previous time. “The CFO arrives at the center of the process when a company goes public,” explains Pamnani, who back in 2018 entered the CFO office at KORE Wireless, a provider of mobility and network connectivity solutions that is expected to go public later this year. Helping KORE to realize its IPOs ambitions is just latest chapter of a transaction-driven career in which at times Pamnani has worn multiple hats, including those of CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer. “As a privately equity–backed firm, KORE has been very commercially focused, but it’s now time to balance that out, and as we maintain our focus on revenue and profits, we need to be more focused on compliance in order to become one of the best publicly listed companies of our size,” observes the increasingly investor-minded Pamnani, who tells us that he keeps a volume of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders on a shelf nearby. “These are his actual letters, word for word, compiled as a book. You also can also find a summary on Amazon—but this is not a plug,” remarks Pamnani, who, perhaps like Buffett, just wants to share his methods. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When it comes time for Harmit Singh to brief Levi Strauss & Co.’s management team regarding the latest performance results, Levi’s CFO will often share a briefing document that features a front page bearing the heading “What’s Working and What’s Not.” “It’s more difficult to understand what’s not working, and it’s the ‘What’s not’ that helps us to determine the areas on which we have to focus to take the business to the next level,” explains Singh, who notes that the “front page” is carefully rendered by Levi’s Financial Planning  & Analysis (FP&A) crew – a team of forward-looking financial professionals whose past feats of analytic derring-do have included helping the jeans maker to foresee the leap from “skinny Jeans” to the baggie look among young consumers. It’s here among Levi’s crack team of number crunchers that the “what’s not” often becomes exposed, and it’s here where a new mind-set – one that keeps consumers top-of-mind and favors stakeholders over shareholders – is already visible. And just as soldiers are known by the things that they carry, so, too, are finance professionals known by the metrics that they wield – and at Levi’s, these metrics are increasingly consumer-driven. Explains Singh: “As the pivot to the consumer mind-set happens, the metrics that have become critical are: How many new customers are we signing up? What is the repeat rate of the customer? And, What is the lifetime customer value?" Read the complete article on Forbes.com Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Andrew Kenny still remembers the smell of day-old pizza that lingered in the back of the Cairo conference room as negotiations between his then company, food processing giant ADM, and a future joint venture partner entered day five. “Planting a flag in Egypt was extremely important for us because it was not just about having a presence there—it was about creating an entire supply chain and creating value for an asset base back in the U.S.,” explains Kenny, who tells us that the 5-day gathering was the culmination of 10 prior trips to Egypt and a burdensome due diligence process.  Still, at times, a positive outcome was in doubt. “We were struggling to come to economic terms on the transaction,” recalls Kenny, who says that the developments that broke the stalemate ultimately had little to do with the happenings inside the conference room. As the day-five negotiations dragged on, Kenny says, he would at times step out of the room with the Egyptian company’s CFO and co-owner to purposely redirect the discussion away from the pressure cooker of deal-making mechanics to other areas of shared interest, both personal and professional. After 10 trips to Cairo, Kenny found that there was a willingness to reach a deal based on some of the relationships that had taken root over the lengthy due diligence process. “We spent a lot of time exploring each other’s common concerns and life ambitions,” comments Kenny, who adds that stepping out of the conference room allowed the executives to change the mood and once more find common ground. “On my first flight to Cairo, I was thinking like a finance person, but by the end of the experience, my mind-set had shifted and my thinking had become more commercial and relationship-based,” remembers Kenny, whose role would eventually grow to oversee ADM’s commercial business in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

There’s little question that the pandemic has led business leaders to amp up digital initiatives across most industries. In response, CFOs have more frequently been called upon to serve up some detailed answers for investors eager to keep a grasp on all spending tied to such initiatives. However, capital spending numbers were only an appetizer for certain board members and investors who viewed their businesses’ growing digital operations as a dependable source of new and timely insights into their firms. “The severity of the risk associated with the pandemic pulled finance executives into a place where they needed to be more comfortable in sharing a degree of detail with investors that was much more foreshadowing or predictive,” says Adam Meister, CFO, Talend, a publicly held cloud data integration company that recently announced its acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. According to Meister, the search for more timely insights by investors was most acute shortly after the pandemic’s arrival in North America. “For the first time, a lot of CFOs were starting to describe things like ‘pipeline,’ which would never have typically been up for discussion,” comments Meister. Asked how Talend first responded to the demand for more predictive information, Meister says, “On our Q1 call for 2020, we described a little bit of what we were seeing from real-time sales trends. These were not hard metrics at that point but were qualitative and added color to help contextualize the guidance that we had set.”    Meanwhile, investors were not the only stakeholders demanding greater data insights. Meister observes that in the past few years, Talend had introduced a broader framework of performance measures designed to answer the growing demand for performance indicators from departments and functional areas. “We asked the question: ‘How do we instill these measures as a framework across every department, even beyond sales—a common framework that can help us to achieve common ways of thinking about economic trade-offs in our business?,’” reports Meister. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Space is not typically the realm that CFOs point to when we ask about experiences that prepared them for a finance leadership role. However, the first 10 years of Alex Amezquita’s professional life frequently involved celestial spaces. “I was an engineer and chip designer, and some of those chips are floating around space on satellites right now, as we speak,” explains Amezquita, who served in a succession of senior chip designer roles before returning to graduate school for an MBA. “As a designer, it’s all about problem-solving, or, ‘How do I get from point A to point B in a very structured way?,'” comments Amezquita, before making a thoughtful comparison between chip design and finance.   “Finance leadership is about taking unstructured information and figuring out how to make it fit into a budget or P&L or message that we can share with the public or our management team or operators,” continues Amezquita, whose post-MBA career has largely been spent inside the investment banking realm’s mergers and acquisitions wing. “These sets of problems often involve human capital and transactions and  ‘How do you arrive at a solution that works for both buyers and sellers?,’” observes Amezquita, who, shortly after joining investment banking firm Moelis & Company, acquired Herbalife Nutrition as a client back in 2012. Looking back, Amezquita says that his advisor role allowed him to become a Herbalife “business partner,” which in turn found him beginning to observe more closely the Herbalife team’s approach to strategic decision-making.     “I got to see how they managed the company in various situations and how they worked together as a team, so for me it was like being on a 5-year interview in reverse,” recalls Amezquita, who in 2017 joined Herbalife by accepting a finance position that the company dubbed “second to the CFO.”   “There were no promises made about the CFO role, but I jumped at the opportunity. I just felt that from where the company had come and where it was headed, I could learn from the CFO,” reports Amezquita, who 3 years later would step into the CFO role himself. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

When Acepodia CEO Sonny Hsiao began developing a list of candidates to fill the chief financial officer role at the biotechnology company that he had cofounded, it may have surprised some to see Jimmy Lai make the list. Certainly, this was not due to any U.S. markets void on Lai’s resume—to the contrary, he had helped to take three companies public and served as chief financial officer for multiple U.S.-listed firms. Nor was it due to a presumed lack of boardroom stature on Lai’s part, as he was at that time serving on the boards of multiple NYSE-listed companies). Instead, any surprise that Lai’s name elicited may have been due to the simple fact that he was known to have retired. Read More “I had been working in (Asia) for 17 years, and it was time to change the pace and take my wife to all of the places that I had always promised I would,” explains Lai, who notes that his retirement was upended after he received a call from Acepodia and began learning about the innovative cell therapies that the company was developing to help treat cancer at significantly less cost.   “Not being a scientist, I do have my limits in understanding the technology, but I love to learn, and I began by speaking with everyone,” recalls Lai, whose resume no doubt stuck out in part not just because of his IPO experience but also because of the fact that his 36-year career could be divided almost evenly between the United States and Asia—and Acepodia operates labs in both. Turn back the clock to the mid-1970s, and Lai is attending college on the island of Taiwan when he recalls noticing how Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal had begun to incorporate comments from chief financial officers in their reporting. “The CFO name kept popping up, which was an indication that the role of the CFO was becoming more important in the overall management structure,” says Lai, who soon relocated to the United States, where he would receive an MBA degree from the University of Texas before entering the rank-and-file of the accounting profession within the United States. For the next 18 years, he would advance into a succession of senior accounting and controller roles, one of which led him back to Taiwan and subsequently opened the door to the CFO office.  –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

It’s no secret that the herculean effort required to keep corporate board meetings on time frequently involves tracking the arrivals of certain board member attendees. Of course, the most anticipated arrival inside the boardroom is often not a board member at all, but a new business measure or yardstick commonly referred to as a metric. And just as board members often hail from faraway places, so too do metrics. Or so explains Ross Tennenbaum, a former investment banker, who in 2020 stepped into the CFO office at Avalara, a developer of tax compliance software. “I’m obsessed about what I call, for lack of a better name, the macro-to-micro continuum,” explains Tennenbaum, who notes that his new environs have opened his eyes to the life that metrics lead as they swim upstream to the boardroom. “It’s about how you connect that board-level output to the individual all the way down in the organization,” comments Tennenbaum, who believes that too often there’s a sizable disconnect between the aggregated top-level results being discussed at corporate board meetings and the customer account manager who’s been struggling to meet a customer retention quota number. Says Tennenbaum: “That individual needs to understand how he or she is connected to everything up the chain.” Among those businesses aspiring to achieve the type of deep workforce connections that Tennenbaum is now seeking, SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies are known to have an enviable advantage.  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Back in 2014—when Guy Blanchard first entered the CFO office at AeroFarms—the indoor vertical farming company had roughly 20 employees and a commercial farm prototype under construction. Seven years and four rounds of private funding later, AeroFarms has recently broken ground on its third commercial farm in Danville, Virginia, and a research farm in Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, this past March, Aerofarms demonstrated that its appetite for innovation extends beyond farming techniques when it announced a merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp., a SPAC that the company now expects to use as a vehicle to go public. “Spring Valley prefers growth-stage companies that don’t have any technology risk and can just focus on the execution part of the equation,” says Blanchard, when asked how the talks with Spring Valley had first gained traction. "They were a great match for us, and this allowed us to narrow the timeline and announce the merger in an accelerated way," explains Blanchard, who notes that the merger, once closed, will provide $357 million in gross proceeds and empower AeroFarms to execute a business plan that involves the opening of vertical farms across the country. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

When marketing campaigns get old, they’re like polyester leisure suits that seem to fit okay but look awful, explains finance chief Darrell Cox of Vena Solutions, who credits finance with helping Vena to empty its closet. Or, to put it another way, Cox credits finance with helping Vena to fail faster. “The earlier you know that you should stop investing, the more successful you will be at failing efficiently and having your experiments be effective,” comments Cox, who says that such experiments are frequently conducted in collaboration with the sales team, as finance seeks to lengthen its lines of sight into the  sales funnel. Read More “The further up you get in the funnel, in terms of being able to analyze where your sales leads are coming from and what your conversion rate is going to be, the more successful you can be when it comes to failing fast and knowing where you should be spending,” observes Cox. Still, certain finance teams are better prepared than others to ascend the funnel. According to Cox, finance teams need to understand that they are not climbing the funnel in order to make business decisions but instead to influence them.    “How do you influence and lead others without friction? You put yourself in their position and begin by assisting them,” explains Cox, who notes that the most effective finance people begin by understanding the roles of others.   Says Cox: “If you can make their job easier and make them more successful, they will start coming to you.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Featuring the Workplace Champions CFO Arleen Paladino of Crum & Forster CFO Guy Blanchard of Aerofarms CFO Mike Rasic of Synapse CFO Ross Tennenbaum of Avalara

Chances are that CFO Louie Reformina never expected to be in the rolling papers business. Having advanced down a career track populated with different private equity firms, a stint at Goldman Sachs, and a Stanford Business School degree, Reformina could have landed inside any number of industries offering him multiple C-suite doors of entry. However, not unlike the pick-and-shovel entrepreneurs who once outfitted troves of Gold Rush  prospectors, Reformina is confident that his arrival inside the CFO office at Turning Point Brands (NYSE:TPB) is well timed for an uptick in cannabis sales due to the industry’s quickly changing regulatory environment as well as public perception.    In addition to cannabis, Turning Point, a marketer and distributor of “alternative smoking accessories,” is now seeking to satisfy its appetite for growth inside a number of product categories such as cigar wraps, hemp paper and paper cones. “The majority of our profits now come from our Zig-Zag brand of rolling papers and wraps products—we have now put fixes in place to grow the business to where we can now take advantage of the tailwinds in cannabis,” says Reformina, who first joined Turning Point as vice president of business development in 2019. “There’s the changing regulatory framework, and then there’s the changing consumer framework,” observes Reformina, who quotes recent research showing that 7 out of 10 Americans favor legalizing cannabis at the federal level. “The perception 10 or 20 years ago was that cannabis was a drug,  whereas today there is a health and benefits  perception to cannabis, and this has been accelerated in part due to the pandemic,”  explains Reformina, who anticipates a domino effect in the wake of New York and Virginia joining the list of states where cannabis is already legal. “States will just not want to lose the tax revenue that cannabis will be generating,” adds Reformina. –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Not unlike other finance leaders, Nitro CFO Ana Sirbu wants you to know that she’s a “prioritizer.” Both personally and professionally, Sirbu has created a list of objectives that never strays far from her mind’s eye. Meanwhile, she undoubtedly keeps a second list—a listing of key results.   “Effective key results are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic,” wrote John Doerr, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, in his ode to OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) Measure What Matters (Penguin Random House, 2018).   Learning how items move from the first list to the second is one of our objectives in talking with Sirbu, a steely-eyed Silicon Valley CFO who’s known to bring a vice-like focus to key results. By way of introduction, she names past affiliations (Google Capital, Silver Lake Partners) to expose her path to the CFO office of fintech BlueVine, which she joined in 2016 as a vice president of finance and capital markets. “When I joined BlueVine, the company had just over 50 people, and when I left, we were at well over 400,” explains Sirbu, who says that over the same time, the fintech’s revenues grew by thirtyfold. “One of my core areas of expertise is to lead finance from all its aspects through very rapid growth, and at Nitro my goal is to replicate this trajectory,” comments Sirbu, who tells us that her own insight into scaling companies benefited from her time at Google Capital (now Capital G), where from time to time she found herself seated beside some of Google’s top growth-minded leaders as her investment team met with the management of different companies “post-investment.” “They would pair very senior Google executives with a company to speak about whatever area the company was in need of input on the most,” recalls Sirbu, who credits Google culture and its frenzied focus on OKRs with helping her to home in on growth companies as well as the unique role that CFOs now play when it comes to helping companies to scale. “OKRs drive a lot of great focus throughout the organization when it comes to achieving objectives and being deliberate in terms of where I spend my time and where my team spends their time,” comments Sirbu, who helped spearhead the OKR adoption process at BlueVine as well as Nitro. Says Sirbu: “Being deliberate is something that is very core to how I think in general. We want to make certain to get the important things right and not focus on things that are less impactful or less important.” – Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Looking back, Mike Rasic says that his entry into the world of tech start-ups got kicked off with a phone call that he almost didn’t answer. “I have a strict policy that if I see a phone number popping up on my mobile that I don’t recognize, I just don’t pick up,” explains Rasic, who goes on to say that the voice on the other end belonged to a head hunter who subsequently gave him the scoop on a CFO position. “It worked out,” reports Rasic, a former PwC partner who is currently the CFO of Synapse, a fintech start-up that can now be counted as Rasic’s fourth CFO tour of duty. Asked what advice he wishes that someone had given him upon entering the CFO office for the first time, Rasic replies “timing matters,” before explaining further: “I joined a mortgage company as CFO at the onset of the mortgage crisis.” Besides some of the more challenging lessons gleaned from the mortgage crisis, Rasic says that he exited the experience with two key takeaways that he has applied to every CFO role since. “First,” he notes, “I went into the role thinking that my world was predominantly going to be finance. Don’t think that way! And make certain that the role is expanding as much as you think is necessary.” Rasic’s second takeaway once more highlights finance’s broadening influence. “Don’t underestimate the responsibility of the role. You are going to make decisions that impact peoples’ lives for good and bad,” explains the finance leader. - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

In 2008, as the subprime mortgage crisis began turning the Street’s brash dealmakers into a squeamish clan of risk-averse bankers, Tim Murphy, an associate at Credit Suisse, decided that it was time to try some slots. Lots of them. “I took a gamble in the casino space—it was probably one of the best decisions that I have made in my career and one the best decisions that we have made as a family,” explains the finance leader, who accepted a director of finance position with Cadillac Jack, a fast-growing slot machine manufacturing company based in Georgia.   At the time, Murphy’s wife (the couple had met at business school) was working for The Coca Cola Company in Atlanta, a factor that the finance executive says helped to hedge his career bet. “I had opportunities to join investment banks in Atlanta and other large organizations, but we made a conscious decision that given the fact that she had a job at a very large and stable company, I could take a gamble with mine,” says Murphy. Also influencing Murphy’s decision was the understanding that he would be reporting directly to the CEO, a former investment banker whom Murphy characterizes as a “hard charger.” Besides helping Cadillac Jack to navigate gaming’s unique compliance highway, Murphy focused on finding ways to grow the business and make it more profitable. “In about 3 years, we got to the point where we were comfortable with the business and began looking for an exit,” recalls Murphy, who began initiating discussions with potential buyers and lending partners. Ultimately, Cadillac Jack was sold to Canadian gaming company Amaya for $167 million. “It was just great experience for me in leading up to becoming a CFO,” says Murphy, who would join Amaya as director of corporate development, where for roughly a year he scouted out new purchases and divestitures for the publicly held firm before entering the CFO office of Atlanta-based REPAY, a publicly traded payment processing company. “I joined REPAY in January 2014 just after the firm had taken in its first institutional private equity capital—prior to that, it had used really just family and friends’ capital,” continues Murphy, who over the past 7 years has helped the firm to unlock both private and public investment capital as it uncovered new avenues for growth. Among REPAY’s transaction milestones was the sale of a controlling interest in the company to Corsair Capital in 2016 and a subsequent public offering executed via a SPAC business combination. “Corsair was able to get a lot of liquidity at the closing of the business combination with the SPAC, and they have since fully exited the business at a much higher stock price than what it was when they entered,” notes Murphy, who adds that to date REPAY has leveraged its access to the public markets to help execute five acquisitions, helping the firm to expand into a number of new verticals.  –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When Rob Krolik agreed to join us for a CFO (emeritus) episode, we expected to hear about the successful business turnaround chapter that he added to his finance resume while CFO at Move.com. We also anticipated learning about his years at Yelp, where—back in 2011, as the firm’s new CFO—he was credited with helping to lead one of the year’s most successful IPOs. While Krolik was only too happy to share a few thoughts regarding both of these chapters, he also reflected on a place in time about which we never expected to hear—namely, when a speech delivered by the outgoing president of his international youth group turned out to be plagiarized and in fact a word-for-word copy of an address given by another retiring president a number of years earlier. “It was a very moving speech and I had put the guy up on a pedestal, so it taught me not to put anyone up there again,” explains Krolik, who notes that this experience from his teen years led him to enter the professional world with a self-mandate to treat people as individuals. “It actually allowed me to treat people equally at the different jobs I’ve had. Whether it was a CEO or COO or the lowest-level accountant, they were going to be treated all the same,” he continues. Still, Krolik’s egalitarian aspirations have not stifled his willingness to offer generous praise to past mentors and bosses alike, among whom is counted finance executive Robert Swan, the former CFO of eBay (and more recently Intel CEO), who is allotted perhaps the lion’s share of Krolik’s kudos. “He was able to explain things in a way that made sense to everyone in the room and not just the tech people and not just the finance and accounting people,” recalls Krolik, who joined eBay after the firm acquired Shopping.com, where Krolik had served in his first CFO role. Krolik would stay on at eBay as a vice president of finance for another 3 years before entering the CFO office at Move.com. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

In the early 1980s, when Arleen Paladino joined Crum & Forster as a 21-year-old internal audit trainee, she was frequently sent to remote office locations to complete audits of financial statements the data from which were then transferred to keypunch cards and fed into a giant mainframe at the insurance company’s Morristown, New Jersey, headquarters “While this might seem like a long time ago, we just decommissioned the mainframe last year,” says Paladino, who entered Crum & Forster’s CFO office in 2017 after serving as a senior vice president of the company’s internal audit function. Having only recently bid farewell to mainframe technology, Crum & Forster is not likely counted among the industry’s tech savvy innovators. Still, evolution is arguably what Crum & Forster does best. The insurance company will celebrate its bicentennial next year. “Understanding the systems and how the processes worked together really helped me to understand the business model,” continues Paladino, who would advance upward as she took on more management responsibilities, including helping to spearhead compliance initiatives such as SOX, which garnered the attention of company board members. Meanwhile, as evident as Paladino’s maturing leadership qualities may have been, her focus on systems and processes at times arguably may have obscured what might be her 40-plus-year career’s greatest contribution to the company. “When I started, I was the only female auditor in the department,” explains Paladino, who recalls engaging with very few woman executives during these early visits. Much later, at about midstream in her eventual career of more than four decades, Paladino found herself married, a mother of two under the age of 6—and struggling to achieve work/life balance. “I had a CFO at the time who I did not think would want me to reduce my hours, so we had a very candid conversation and I explained my situation,” remembers Paladino, who ended up securing an hours reduction in her workweek and thus illuminated a path for others to follow. Says Paladino: “Part of the draw for me has been to achieve this work/life balance and have a culture that supports it.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Within 4 months of her 2019 arrival inside BDSI’s CFO office, Terry Coelho had spearheaded a product acquisition and managed a successful equity raise—two finance milestones that would produce generous sales tailwinds for the specialty pharmaceutical firm.   BDSI would experience 100% net sales growth in 2019, followed by 40% net sales growth in 2020.  Such sales momentum recently led BDSI to issue a press release praising its “new commercial team” and at the same time announcing that Coelho’s CFO title would now include the designation “executive vice president.” For Coelho, a seasoned finance executive who spent more than a decade serving in a variety of senior positions inside Novartis and Sealed Air Corp., the call to leadership at BDSI afforded her a wide berth from which deliver results that are now arguably visible to all. Still, even this success chapter must compete for our attention when we hear about a promotion that she received from candy and pet food giant Mars Incorporated early in her career. At the time, when Coelho was in her early 30s she was asked by John Mars (currently chairman) to relocate to South America and build a plant to start up Mars’s confectionery business in Brazil. “When the plant concept was coming about, John Mars said to me, ‘You can do this job,’ and I kind of looked at him and thought to myself, ‘Why not?,’” says Coelho, who had first gotten her FP&A acumen noticed inside the corporate planning function of  Mars’s McLean, Virginia, headquarters. Years later, as she prepared to return to the U.S., the Brazilian team presented her with a photo of the former cow pasture that the Mars plant was then occupying. After a number of expansions, the factory and Brazilian business operations under Coelho’s leadership had grown to provide jobs to 200 people.     “I don’t think that most companies would have given someone with my experience—at that point in my career—that kind of an opportunity. It has really shaped whom I’ve become. I have a breadth of experience from having run an entire business, and when you build it, you know it even better,” explains Coelho, who, after returning to the U.S., would hold a number of strategic finance positions, including CFO of Mars Direct, a newly formed direct-to-consumer business unit that would establish itself as one of the company’s future growth engines.  –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Back in 2014, when FM Global wanted to entice finance executive Kevin Ingram to move back to the US from England, the UK finance director was offered a position no one at the company had ever heard of before.       “My CEO came to me and said, ‘It’s called sr. vice president of corporate services and that means nothing to anybody, but I love that because that means I can put anything I want there and no one can tell me it doesn’t belong.’" explains Ingram, who says the newly created role would grow to include business analytics, business risk consulting, capital management , risk management as well as other areas. Still, the corporate services title to the outside world was arguably somewhat vague and perhaps not what a top executive may have in mind after 25 years with the same company. Says Ingram: “I was never looking to leave. It was really just a question of when the opportunity was going to present itself and if it didn’t present itself what else would I do instead.” Two years later when Ingram stepped into FM Global’s CFO office his promotion no doubt further validated the corporate services position as well as his willingness to add an extra rung to his career climb. In the corporate scheme of things, the management of org charts sometimes requires CEOs to summon the instincts of air traffic controllers—who’ll never hesitate to institute a holding pattern in order to make certain that everyone is ready for takeoff. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Each Wednesday morning, as the CEO prodded his team for business projections and troubleshooting ideas, the midsize company’s top managers would huddle around a white board inside a glass-enclosed office. For 20-something Ken Kaufman, the management huddle was a silent spectacle—except for the occasional bouts of laughter that burst out from behind the glass. “The managers would always leave with this positive energy and always have new guidance for how the business could move forward,” explains Kaufman, who says that for him, over time the meeting became not just a source of weekly intrigue but also a career destination.   Years later, Kaufman recalls, when he was invited to join the huddle at another middle market company, the gathering generated little energy and was far less productive than what he had expected. “I finally made it into the room, and then we spent the entire time arguing over why certain numbers were wrong,” remembers Kaufman, who—now with a business degree in hand—then began to dig into the company’s financial statements. Subsequently, he was able to introduce some business modeling approaches that allowed managers to better understand the company’s pain points when it came to growth.   “I ended up sliding into the CFO role and ultimately brought the company into job costing and creating visibility that allowed managers to make decisions to build the business,” reports Kaufman, who adds that within only a few months the finance leader proceeded to ask him to take over the CFO role. –Jack Sweeney

Long before growing numbers of digital nomads freely roamed the planet, Hamza Benamar had achieved a borderless professional life inside the world of internal audit.   “I went through a phase in my career when I was not even planning the next year—I was too busy getting my work noticed and getting proposals to go somewhere else,” explains Benamar, who recalls that the question “Why not?” became the familiar response with which he greeted each new opportunity. Having grown up in multilingual Morocco, Benamar found that crossing international borders came naturally to him, which gave him an edge when SAP came looking for young professionals to serve a growing roster of clients interested in scaling their processes globally. “I knew that I was actually going to be able to learn from these marquee companies and discover how to design, implement, and run the processes of A/R, A/P, and general ledger,” remembers Benamar, who joined SAP’s Houston operation in 1999 before in short order garnering Platinum frequent flyer status with Continental Airlines.    Next, he joined biotechnology rising star Amgen, which was seeking to quickly expand its internal audit function around the world as the company opened a new chapter of global growth. “I went overseas, built up the audit team, got noticed by the CFO, and moved to Switzerland to be his right-hand controller, and things just continued to evolve from there,” comments  Benamar, who remain with Amgen for 5 years before joining  the Geneva office of SunGard. At SunGard, Benamar continued to greet new opportunities with his familiar “Why not?” attitude and soon found himself relocating first to Paris, where he would oversee the integration of a recent acquisition, and then to Hong Kong, where he was tasked with reengineering the finance function to align better with its greater Asia-Pacific operations.    After 12 years in Europe and Asia, Benamar felt another “Why not?” pulling him to return to the U.S., where last year—after stint in healthcare finance consulting—he entered the CFO office of treasury software and solutions provider Kyriba. –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Featuring the CFOs: Tom Berquist, CFO, TIBCO, Terry Coelho,CFO BioDelivery Sciences , Kevin Ingram,CFO, FM Global, Robert Linder, CFO, Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar

For Rebecca Mahadeva, the late 1990s audit of a minor league baseball team was the type of rare career assignment that never failed to intrigue both accountants and non accountants alike. At the time, Mahadeva had been serving a variety of technology audit clients as a young associate for  Coopers & Lybrand when she added to her docket a major league baseball team otherwise known as the New York Mets.  “The Mets controller at the time engaged me to do a site visit and some compliance work on the financials of a single A team up in Canada known as the St Catherine’s Stompers,” explains Mahadeva, who says her visit’s findings were used to help bolster confidence behind the purchase price the Mets owners had divvied up for the single A team. Following the close of the deal, St. Catherine’s Stompers relocated to Brooklyn, and was subsequently renamed The Brooklyn Cyclones . The newly rebranded Cyclones became the first professional baseball team to play in the borough of Brooklyn since the Dodgers left for Los Angeles in 1958. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but this engagement was really my job interview,” observes Mahadeva, who says that ess than a year later she received a Mets job offer from the same controller.  Mahadeva joined the Mets organization as an assistant controller and would spend more than a decade inside its finance function, often taking on assignments to improve operational efficiencies in different areas. “Baseball is a very hard industry to leave—people seldom do—but there were no growth opportunities for me,” comments Mahadeva, who next accepted a controller position in a professional services firm specializing in marketing communications and healthcare—a realm that has continued to bring Mahadeva new and more senior roles. Today, as CFO of marketing agency Greater Than One, Mahadeva believes that professional services present a challenge to finance leadership unlike that presented by other sectors.   Says Mahadeva: “The CFO of an agency must find the delicate balance between the output of our employees and the hours that are required to pursue new business opportunities.”  Of course, no matter what balance maybe achieved, few challenges will ever match the deal that brought baseball back to Brooklyn. – Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When Paul Ottolini is asked to share a personal trait—one that a family member might divulge to us— the seasoned finance leader tells us that he likes to cut his own lawn and that he is known for being “cheap.” Still, Ottolini makes clear to us that it’s more the satisfaction of completing a job and not the cost savings that regularly fuels his pursuit of manual tasks. “I’m smiling when I spread 10 yards of mulch,” says Ottolini, whose words perhaps provide a clue to his past as well as to a work life cadence with which one suspects that he has rarely if ever fallen out of step during his more than three decades of  career-building. The son of a chemist employed by General Motors Corp., Ottolini graduated from General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) after completing a co-op undergraduate degree that permitted students to pay for their education by alternating 3 months of classes with 3 months of work inside General Motors. Upon graduation, Ottolini joined GM, where he worked 2 years as a software engineer before heading to business school at Harvard. With an MBA in hand, Ottolini next joined Deloitte Consulting, where for 6 years he piled up frequent flyer miles as a client-facing consultant—before a surprise return to GM. “I had wanted to get off the road, and while with GM I knew that it probably was going to take 15 years to match what Deloitte had offered me in 6, I felt that coming from a GM family, I wanted to go back,” recalls Ottolini, who notes that at the time, he was introduced to the GM opportunity by a recruiter from Russell Reynolds Associates, the executive search firm whose CFO office he now occupies. And just as GM and later Russell Reynolds would make repeat appearances in Ottolini’s professional life, so too did Deloitte, to which Ottolini returned in the early 2000s to serve in a succession of finance leadership roles that ultimately allowed him to place both feet on the CFO path. - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

When Stéphane Berthier joined Uniphore of Palo Alto, CA, as CFO this past January, the move no doubt raised more than a few Silicon Valley eyebrows. For more than two decades, Berthier had served a list of prestigious Bay Area tech companies as a top audit partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers, where his impressive tenure had originally been kicked off by his relocation from France to better serve one of the firm’s most coveted Silicon Valley clients: Hewlett-Packard. During the next two decades, Berthier would become inducted into Silicon Valley’s coterie of familiar advisors and consultants known to provide sound advice to IPO-minded technology start-ups as well as software firms struggling to replace “on premise” customer revenue with new cloud-driven funds.   “I stayed 20 years and loved every aspect of client service—this was a tough decision for me, but I think that it was the right time,” says Berthier, who describes Uniphore as being uniquely positioned to pursue the fast-growing tech opportunities in conversational AI. Asked what his priorities are when it comes to the CFO role, Berthier doesn’t hesitate to tell us what he believes distinguishes great CFOs from good ones. “From the accumulated knowledge gained from my experience in dealing with CFOs, I would say that a great CFO is someone who not just can report the numbers but also knows how to influence them,” he observes. He continues: “It’s like landing a plane on time: People expect that, but what sets an airline apart is the customer experience. For CFOs, it’s insight into how to influence the numbers.” Certainly, the notion that Berthier was vacating his esteemed industry practice to become one of the very CFOs he had for so long served came as a surprise to both past and present CFO clients. For some, Berthier’s January appointment begged the question of why the CFO advisor’s aspirations had not surfaced sooner. Says Berthier: “There had been other opportunities to leave along the way, but I finally realized that I needed to be in the driver’s seat—so it just became a matter of finding the right company.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When CFO John Collins is asked how his background in data modeling and strategy is influencing the role that finance plays inside LivePerson, the artificial intelligence (AI) software firm that he first joined 2 years ago, he draws our attention to the mountains of data accumulating alongside most businesses today. “Given the volume of data that exists and that the tools to transform it into information have not evolved very much, my taking over the CFO seat and building out this team under me is putting us on a path to better achieve more data efficiency,” explains Collins, while referring to the team that he’s dubbed “DMD,” or Data Models and Decisions. “Data is essentially an input into a model. The model may be rather simple and rules-based or it may involve more sophisticated machine learning, but the models manipulate and organize that data to produce useful information,” continues Collins. Still, what sets Collins’s data aspirations apart from those of his more traditional CFO peers is not the act of transforming additional data into information, but what he refers to as the Flywheel Effect, through which the system for digesting the information over time “gets smarter” and begins to create “automations” for different transactional activities while reducing uncertainty and maximizing the returns around decision-making. “That’s the essence of the flywheel that gets generated, through the vision that we have for the CFO and the modern tool set underneath him or her,” says Collins, who characterizes the proper operation of the accounting and reporting processes as “tables stakes” inside a broadening finance function. “For me, the past should be accounted for perfectly, but where I would like to focus is on being a strategic partner and the creation of long-term value,” comments Collins, who considers the Flywheel Effect as a primary contributor to long-term value creation. Says Collins: “From my perspective, it’s pretty clear that we’re digitizing the world at an accelerated pace, which has had implications not just for traditional products and services but also for traditional jobs and corporate functions.” –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

As Christian Geyer sees it, the path to the CFO office can begin just about anywhere. For him, anywhere happened to be the accounts payable department of a DC-area construction company. Having built numerous government facilities across the region, the company hired Geyer—along with three other “payables specialists”—to manage the process of paying for the expansive list of building materials that the company was constantly acquiring to use in the construction of its buildings. “I knew that if I stayed in step with the department’s typical rhythm, I would never go anywhere,” explains Geyer, who reports that shortly after his arrival, he converted what had been a 40-hours-a-week job into a 60 to 80 hours one. “I looked at the purchase order process as well as the payment approval process, and I tried to whittle these down to figure out where the bottlenecks were in order to make us more efficient,” recalls Geyer, who quickly began eliminating snags within the process while at the same time introducing new approaches that ultimately cut the number of required man-hours per week from 160 to 10. According to Geyer, the newly streamlined A/P processes helped to save the company $300,000 annually.   Still, what did he get out of it? “This allowed me to free up my time and focus it elsewhere,” remembers Geyer, who adds that he soon became involved with the company’s accounts receivable and payroll processes, as well as its general ledger and audit support. Says Geyer: “Too often you see people sitting in a job and doing the same mundane thing day in and day out. You have to challenge yourself and don’t settle.” Next, Geyer joined a not-for-profit organization where he accepted a non-management position despite having a resumé populated with management experience. “I took a step back in title, knowing that I could go in there and change that organization,” remarks Geyer, who notes that he reduced the organization’s reporting cycle from 6 months to 1 week—a feat that drew people’s attention and promptly got him promoted. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

A little more than a decade ago, Ron Knutson remembers, when he first stepped into the CFO role at Lawson Products, he quickly realized that the productivity improvements that he was expected to help drive would demand a number of significant infrastructure and technology investments. In anticipation of the investments that would need to be made, Knutson recalls, he first completed a “competency review” for every member of the finance team, a process that was in part designed to help flag those employees deemed well suited for training tied to future investments. “We wanted to make certain that we would be training the right individuals,” comments Knutson, who notes that the review ultimately led to “extensive” staffing changes as he sought to lessen the team’s overall dependence on existing systems and use new training to whet its appetite for the adoption and implementation of new technologies, including ERP software.     “Having these individuals go through the implementation process just made them so much stronger coming out of it,” explains Knutson, who credits the new technologies with—among other things—helping the sales team to monitor and interpret customer engagement patterns.     Meanwhile, some of the biggest gains from Lawson’s technology investments may have been occurring inside their system of warehouses, or distribution centers (DCs). In addition to consolidating the number of DCs from eight to five, Knutson reports, the distributor also significantly lessened excess inventory through the adoption of a demand-forecasting tool that uses historical customer demand patterns to provide Lawson with regular inventory management insights.       Adds Knutson: “We had quite a bit of working capital tied up in inventory, but now we are able to make the right investments in our high-turning items as well as our slow-turning ones.” –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Looking back, AgroFresh CFO Graham Miao says that the decision to change careers early in his professional life was triggered more or less by resource allocation. Originally, Miao had trained as a biologist, but after having earned a doctoral degree in biology from Columbia University, he quickly found gainful employment as a scientist at a research facility run by pharmaceutical giant Roche. It was here amidst the daily pursuit of biological insights that Miao began to observe how finance and accounting professionals held sway over many of the resources needed to complete different projects. “It made you wonder, ‘What is it that accountants know about science that scientists don’t?,’” explains Miao, who after 5 years with Roche returned to Columbia to study business full-time. “At the time, my boss and colleagues thought that I was being crazy and that it was too risky,” remarks Miao, who notes that the pursuit of yet another degree required that he take out a student loan. Next, Miao joined JPMorgan, where he worked in equity research and served investment banking clients that were looking to better communicate the “equity story” to investors.   “The pace of the job was completely different from what I was used to as a scientist,” comments Miao, who adds that the discussions he found himself having as an investment banker further revealed to him the breadth of finance’s influence and boosted his confidence in having made the right decision.  –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

When Ed Goldfinger is asked to relate a moment of strategic insight that he has experienced as a finance leader, he draws our attention to his CFO tenure at Zipcar, the car-sharing upstart that targets the short-term needs of its customers by being billable by the hour as well as the minute. At Zipcar, Goldfinger would achieve the fabled CFO milestone of taking a company public. However, the biggest takeaways for him were related to the experience of growing a company widely recognized as an industry disrupter—and thus member of a cohort known as much for innovation in business modeling as for often startling deficiencies in benchmarking data. “You couldn’t point to any existing player and say that this was what we should look like over time,” explains Goldfinger, who notes that Zipcar grew from roughly $55 million to $300 million in annual sales during his term as CFO, a 6-year tenure that ended with the sale of Zipcar to Avis Budget Group in 2013. Among the more sizable obstacles that Zipcar’s finance team faced was the lopsided rental habits of its weekly customers. “There were probably 50 percent more rentals on the weekend than on weekdays,” comments Goldfinger, who reports that the spike in customer demand on weekends burdened Zipcar with growing numbers of dormant vehicles on weekdays.     He continues: “I invented a metric that we called ‘weekality,’ which was simply weekend usage over weekday usage, with the goal being to lower it.” What’s more, Goldfinger says, the company introduced incentives to make overnight rentals more appealing to weekday customers and at the same time launched a “big push” into the business rental market by using promotions specially designed to attract weekday corporate customers. Still, Goldfinger admits that few incentives were more effective than pricing when it came to striking a weekday/weekend balance: “We charged a lot more on weekends on a per-day basis because there was just no way that we could hit our revenue-per-car numbers if we didn’t achieve a better balance during the course of the week.” –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When Michael Pickrum tells us about ExecOnline, the company that he joined as CFO back in 2019, he wants us to know that the education technology firm is aligned with his goals both professionally and personally. When it comes to the professional side of things, Pickrum says, ExecOnline in certain ways is a media company. “You’re taking some IP and figuring out how to distribute and monetize it,” comments Pickrum, while boiling down the somewhat complex approach that ExecOnline uses to repackage the curricula of top business schools and universities to better serve the specific people development needs of a variety of corporate clients. Still, Pickrum’s shorthand description is intended not to spotlight the facets of ExecOnline’s business model but instead to draw our attention to its similarities with his past media industry experience—such as his 17 years with BET Networks, where he occupied the CFO office for 9 of them.   As for the personal side of things, Pickrum says that he is a “big believer” when it comes to the transformative power of education. “I went to public schools growing up—I was very fortunate to go to a great university, and it changed my life,” remarks Pickrum, who adds that ExecOnline packages the academic IP not with aspiring college students in mind but with an eye toward first-time managers as well as more senior business leaders. According to Pickrum, part of the added value that ExecOnline offers corporate clients derives from providing the IP in a more relevant and efficient way. “Most of our programs are 1 week, 3 weeks, or 6ix weeks,” explains Pickrum, who says that at times the material being covered can be applied to a specific project that the managers are undertaking within their company.   “It’s just a great marriage between the business school’s IP, professors, and resources, and our platform and ability to engage people where they are, which is at work.” –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021  uf1Uaz9iI5wYUzzsFtwd  

Back in 2015, after nearly two decades of diligent career-building across United Technologies, Paul Lundstrom fixed his career builder’s gaze upon the span of companies known as the Fortune 500. Like many seasoned finance executives who spend the balance of their careers inside large enterprise companies, Lundstrom had to confront the obvious truth that for every company, the CFO office has but one occupant. By all accounts, a Fortune 500 company was a worthy target for Lundstrom’s CFO ambitions, but here, too, the number of CFO roles quickly diminishes when you consider the industry-specific focus that spans the arc of Lundstrom’s career and those of so many others.   Finance executives often tell us that it was here within this realm of heightened ambition and shrinking opportunity that they dared to add one of the most satisfying chapters of their CFO careers, and so it was for Lundstrom. Last fall, the UT veteran landed safely inside the Fortune 500 world when he was named CFO of Flex, a $24 billion contract manufacturer. However, it was the 4 years between UT and Flex that Lundstrom now points to as constituting one of the most satisfying periods of his career. Back in 2016, Lundstrom exited UT to accept a CFO position with Aerojet Rocketdyne, a struggling aerospace company that had recently found it necessary to restate its financials. “This was a $2 billion NASDAQ company that did not have a controller,” explains Lundstrom, whose 4-year tour of duty as Aerojet’s CFO coincided with a rise in the company’s stock price from $16 to $50 per share (pre-COVID). “The goal was business transformation,” explains Lundstrom, who now characterizes his Aerojet years as a “turnaround” chapter that no doubt put yet another stripe on his CFO career path sleeve. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

This Episode Features Human Capital Insights & Commentary from: Dynshaw Italia, CFO, Soldo Brad Kinnish, CFO, Aryaka Will Bondurant, CFO, Castlight Health The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations. More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees.

According to Goodroot CFO Jim Harper, the best way to transform the current U.S. healthcare system is to replace its connective tissue. “It’s going to be a long slog and it’s got to be done one system at a time,” explains Harper, who uses the word “system” while referring to the individual points of connection that knit together healthcare’s patchwork of payers and providers. For Harper, connection points are where waste gathers within the larger system – and where companies often add unnecessary complexity in order to extract more dollars. “Because there is so much money flying through the systems there are a lot of organizations that have become involved here and they are greedy,” comments Harper, whose shares his opinion of the healthcare system as a preface to explaining the mission behind Goodroot.   Not exactly a business incubator, and not a private equity firm, Goodroot prefers to be dubbed a “community” of businesses dedicated to improving the current state of healthcare delivery.  Harper once more tells us: It's a mission that can only be achieved  "one system at a time." - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When CFO Robert Linder highlights what distinguishes the dining experience at Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar, it’s easy to imagine him as a friendly host escorting us across a lively dining area filled with spirited patrons. “I love the hospitality industry, and I didn’t always know why—but I love to host and I love the interaction and taking care of someone and helping them to discover something new,” says Linder, whose words draw our attention to the universal splendor of dining out and its bitter absence from our lives during these past many months. From the start, we knew that our discussion would become focused on the pandemic and its impact on Lazy Dog’s business, yet we couldn’t help but want to linger as Linder listed the popular menu items from the restaurant that currently serves customers at 39 locations in seven states. In the end, we left it to Lazy Dog’s CFO to transport us back to earth with the not so enviable time of arrival being March 2020. “It’s hard not to point to something in the past year, given all of what this industry has gone through,” says Linder, when asked to share a moment of strategic insight that he’s experienced during the course of his career.   Looking back, Linder recalls the first 48 hours when shelter-in-place orders were being issued in California and the full magnitude of the decisions that would need to be made began occupying the thoughts of Lazy Dog management. “We knew that our cash burn rate would be significant, and the thinking was around how we could adjust our costs as quickly as possible in order to survive,” explains Linder, who observes that survival demanded a wide and aggressive workforce reduction but Lazy Dog management remained uncertain about its response and considered whether several waves of layoffs over a period of weeks might permit the business to “buy time” and allow management to revisit the question of layoffs again in the future. “What we realized was that the outcome that would be most kind to our people was the one that would offer them a job when we came out of the other side of this thing,” comments Linder, who notes that management rejected having several waves of layoffs in favor of one large one. “This was one of the best decisions that we made because from that time forward we have only delivered good news to our people and have been able to say, ‘Hey, we’re bringing some people back” or “Hey, we’re able to restore a portion of your compensation,’” reports Linder, who adds that Lazy Dog has continued to pay health insurance for those who have been laid off. Says Linder: “For me, that 48-hour period showed why you can’t run away from a hard decision as a finance leader.”  –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Years from now, when Castlight Health CFO Will Bondurant reflects back on the varied chapters of his finance career, he may title the current one “The Turnaround”—that is, if he and Castlight CEO Maeve O’Meara are able to achieve what the firm’s previous management team had not been able to: a strategy transformation. Like his CEO, Bondurant is not an outsider: After joining the firm in 2013, he was assigned a variety of strategy and financial planning duties that led to more influential product strategy and operational roles of the type that many aspiring CFOs eagerly seek out. As Bondurant shared with us his cross-functional journey, he mentioned few titles or promotions but instead drew our attention to a variety of experiences that has led us to conclude that Castlight’s future CFO first emerged as one of the company’s foremost problem-solvers. Says Bondurant: “If everything is working, you don’t always get the opportunity to fix something. The reason that I was able to have these opportunities is that we had challenges—and from where I sit now, they certainly benefited my own personal development.” Then, in 2017, came a $135 million acquisition, a transaction that management told investors would transform Castlight but instead ended up leaving a trail of merger snags and glitches that ultimately led to the formation of a new management team. At the time, Bondurant no doubt may have appeared to certain investors and outsiders to be a dark horse candidate for the firm’s CFO role. Still, it appears likely that his Castlight colleagues viewed things differently.   Having spent many hours with Castlight customers before becoming CFO, Bondurant was familiar with certain external facing aspects of the role, but not all. “Investor relations was a new area for me—I had been external in my previous roles but principally with customers and partners and the like,” explains Bondurant, who recalls several unpleasant calls with investors after stepping into the CFO role.   “I recall asking myself in the first week, ‘Do these people just hate me? Am I just really disliked by these people?,’” comments Bondurant, who notes that he now enjoys the calls with investors and very often views them as being more productive than his engagements with customers.  –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When an inquisitive software analyst takes a seat across the table from TIBCO Software CFO Tom Berquist, the inquisitor may not know that TIBCO’s finance leader once sat on their side of the table and in certain ways still prefers it. From 1996 to 2006, Berquist added a distinguished equity research chapter to his career when he became a marquee analyst inside the software realm for a string of Wall Street investment houses—namely, Piper Jaffray, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup. Seated across the table from the likes of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Bill Gates (at the time, Microsoft’s CEO), and many others, Berquist asked probing questions and listened to the carefully crafted narratives designed to achieve “buy-in” on the company’s strategy from discerning analysts. “You would get pieces of information from each of the different companies, which gives you this incredibly powerful view of the market,” recalls Berquist, who even today seems to envy the analyst he once was. “The CEOs and CFOs would read your research and then come back and complain and try and explain why you are wrong by supplying you with even more data points—which is helpful because you can then create an even bigger mosaic,” continues Berquist, who ultimately exited software research when he was offered a CFO role at a newly minted company formed from a group of technologies spun out from CA Technologies that was then known as Computer Associates. “We had to build the finance function from scratch,” remembers Berquist, who quickly set about building processes and hiring finance professionals to lead the company’s different functional groups.   As the finance function grew up around him, Berquist says, he observed firsthand how finance acquires its “bottom up” view of the business organizationally, whereby data is first captured and then finance projects trends according to what’s already happened. “I’ve found this in every finance function that I’ve encountered since that time, so I view it as a universal truth,” states Berquist, who set out to remedy finance’s traditional “bottom up” approach by applying some “top down” macroeconomic insights. “I put in processes to run a “top down” model after actually building it myself. I compared and contrasted it to the traditional finance model and we reached common ground, allowing us to get in front of the trends,” says Berquist, who, even today after serving in multiple CFO and CEO roles, can’t help but linger on the other side of the table. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

It was a meeting that Planful CFO Shane Hansen tells us that he was not looking forward to. The SaaS developer’s FP&A team had discovered a “fairly large” forecasting error, and Hansen deemed it necessary to brief Planful CEO Grant Halloran on the matter. So, as planning teams are apt to do, Planful’s FP&A crew performed an extracurricular round of scenario planning—or what might more accurately be described as "CEO planning." Says Hansen: “We did our homework and put things together in order to be ready for whatever reaction Grant might come up with.” Halloran’s response: “Oh, that’s just a mistake. What can we do to improve?” Of course, whether the Planful CEO’s reaction was among those considered by the planning team in its anticipated responses is not the point. Instead, the tale of the forecasting snag allowed Hansen to bump our discussion concerning continuous planning into the continuous improvement lane. And make no mistake: Planful’s finance chief views these two realms as one and the same. Only a month away from his 1st anniversary as Planful’s CFO, Hansen leaves little doubt that his leadership voice and actions are making as important a contribution to the company’s culture as they are to Planful’s monthly forecasts. “This is about empowering our culture by saying ‘Let’s improve,’ as opposed to pointing out who is to blame,” explains Hansen, whose words are no doubt intended in part to influence finance leaders inside organizations that have struggled to embrace continuous planning and at the same time perhaps failed to realize the potential of planning tools such as those provided by Planful. Asked whether his own interactions with Planful’s planning team involve scheduled weekly or monthly meetings, Hansen observes that his arrival at the company more or less coincided with Planful opting to have its employees work remotely due to the pandemic.    “I have found that the consistent interactions that we’ve had while everyone has been working from home have really helped us to band together and provided a lot more unity than there would have been otherwise if not for the circumstances,” comments Hansen, who flags greater unity as yet another underpinning of successful continuous planning. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

If we were asked to boil down our discussion with CFO Gary Golden to a single word, our answer would be: “judgment.” It perhaps goes without saying that having good judgment is a prerequisite for every finance leader, and the quality frequently tops the list of reasons that CEOs give when asked to describe what sets apart one CFO candidate from another. Still, the word comes to mind not because Golden uses it—which he does multiple times—but because he routinely draws our attention to the “decision-making” central to every CFO position and the experiences that have helped to shape the judgment that he uses to make sound business decisions. Golden’s professional life began as a lawyer in a Dallas law firm, where his goal was to become a top mergers and acquisitions attorney, but along the way he jumped to American Airlines.  “One of the reasons I left private practice for American is that they had a reputation for moving lawyers onto the business side of things,” explains Golden, who says that attorneys frequently found finance to be a convenient door-of-entry at American. “Interestingly, at American, my mentors were not really attorneys, but I found mentors inside the finance organization,” remarks Golden, who says that his legal experience has served him well as he has taken on a number of different CFO roles. “When you start training as a lawyer, you have a very detailed ‘what can go wrong?’ orientation that I have found to be very helpful to me as a CFO because you’re always thinking about what can blow up and you want to have this orientation that forces you to anticipate next steps,” comments Golden. “Many times, you find yourself making judgments on things, and you decide not to do things even though you would really very much like to,” remarks Golden, who frequently uses the word “judgment” interchangeably or alongside “deciding” or “decision-making”—as in the sentence “As a CFO, your decision-making judgment is critical.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

We seldom hear a finance leader tell us that they took a pass on a promotion early in their careers, so when CFO Ozan Pamir told us that as a 25-year-old associate he had turned down a vice president position with Echelon Wealth Partners, a Canadian investment banking firm that he had been with for only 2 years, we felt obliged to ask: “Why?” “I’d like to think that I’m a relatively self-aware person, and at the time I just did not feel ready—I thought that I had a little more room to grow and things to learn,” says Pamir, who had joined the banking firm as an IV analyst and was promoted in short order to associate—at which time he began managing other analysts.   “A year later, they offered me a vice president role again, and I accepted it at that time,” continues Pamir, who believes that the extra year as a “senior associate” served him well. “It gave me more time to learn how to better manage the analysts and how to take on responsibility when it came to managing certain deals,” explains Pamir, who notes that 12 months later he was able to more confidently accept the firm’s promotion to VP, a rank that positioned him to head up the firm’s small and midcap financing deals. “Smaller deals are usually harder to complete—they are riskier and require a lot more due diligence and legwork to get done,” comments Pamir, who today views his development of a team of analysts for the firm as one of his most valuable experiences when it came to his own preparation for a CFO role. “I advocated for their compensation increases, fought for their bonuses, put in place their career trajectories, recommended them for promotions, and mentored them,” says Pamir, who in 2018 left Echelon to step into the CFO role at 180 Life Sciences, a biotech firm specializing in the treatment of inflammation. Having raised over $400 million in capital and helped to lead 30 financing transactions at Echelon, Pamir tells us that this time he felt more than ready. –Jack Sweeney    Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

It was roughly 12 months ago that Jason Eustace was named CFO of CuriosityStream, an upstart streaming media company launched in 2015 by Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks. For Eustace, CuriosityStream represents something of a flashback career chapter, arguably having more in common with the first 10 years of his finance career than the past ten. Turn back the clock 20 years, and Eustace could be found in the accounting department of the National Geographic Channel, which at the time was a newly formed joint venture between the National Geographic Society and Fox Cable Networks. “Nat Geo wanted to marry up their content with the distribution of the cable world, so it was a perfect marriage,” explains Eustace, who saw his responsibilities grow over a 6-year stint that ultimately landed him in a controller role. Controllership credentials in hand, Eustace then joined Discovery Communications, where he would serve in a variety of finance leadership roles over another period of 6 years. However, it was his experience at Nat Geo and the more entrepreneurial nature of the business that Eustace uses a point of comparison with his current stint at CuriosityStream.   “National Geographic had been around forever—they had great stories, and it was the ability to put these stories on a more widely distributed platform that really propelled Nat Geo to become a media company,” observes Eustace, whose latest CFO role puts him once more inside a media company determined to open new avenues for distributed content. Says Eustace: “I always wanted to get back into media. I really loved D.C., but there are limited CFO roles inside the metro area, so when this opportunity came up, I jumped at it.” - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

The mid-December conference call was 45 minutes old, CFO Brad Kinnish says, when he began to feel edgy. One of the company’s biggest deals of the year had yet to close, and the specifics behind its commission structure (or lack thereof) had led a number of the call’s participants to begin to flag potential snags. As time passed and commissions continued to dominate the discussion, Kinnish found he could no longer remain on the sidelines. “Hey, look, team—I think we’re spending time on the wrong thing here. I think we need to be spending time on closing this deal and getting it done. I need you to trust me that we’re going to pay a commission that’s fair to the sales leaders, fair to the sales reps, and fair to the company” are the words that Kinnish recalls saying as he charged the group to not begin waving red flags outside of the mechanics of the specific deal and to put their trust in him. “I needed to rely on the fact that I had built relationships with these people and had built trust and could get them to refocus on what needed to get done in order to win the deal and close the quarter,” recalls Kinnish, who uses his story about “the mid-December call” to help close the loop on a CFO leadership journey that began with a job rejection. Years earlier, Kinnish remembers, when he was interviewing for his first CFO role, he scored well during his management interviews only to receive a thumbs-down from the company’s board. Later, a board member confided to Kinnish that he focused too much on his accounting and analytics experience. “In my mind, what she was telling me was that finance and accounting knowledge is foundational—that the question that you needed to answer was how else you could influence and lead,” explains Kinnish, who believes that the board was looking for indications that he was ready to muster the type of leadership that he so confidently summoned forward on the mid-December call. As for the call’s outcome, Kinnish reports: “It worked. We went back and focused on the deal. Won the deal. Closed the quarter. Made our number and paid the commission on the back end.” –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review  Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM  Signup for our Newsletter

It’s a phrase that has historically never roamed far beyond the corridors of pharmaceutical companies, but now—thanks to COVID 19—the term “clinical trials” has entered the vocabulary of the public at large. Perhaps at no time in history have the “trials” that pharma companies use to generate data on the safety of a particular drug, vaccine, or treatment been as heavily scrutinized—and at no previous time has CFO Manmeet Soni of Reata Pharmaceuticals believed that the processes and approaches that govern Reata’s “trial design” have been more ripe for innovation. “Our learnings from the past 9 months are going to influence how we operate for the next 90 years,” explains Soni, who says that these learnings were put into motion last spring as COVID’s arrival shut down trials and began curtailing Reata’s data flows. “That’s when we began asking: ‘Why can’t we do trials in a way similar to how home health services are provided? Why don’t we deliver the drug to the patient’s home?’” recalls Soni, who says that serving the company as both CFO as well COO allowed him to be more hands-on when it came time to tweak Reata’s “trial design” and the daily activities performed to keep trials on track. “There will always be certain trials that will have to be completed at the lab, but the pandemic has allowed us to regularly consider how things can be done differently,” adds Soni, who believes that today’s impulse to regularly reconsider current methods and approaches is the biggest change to yesterday’s business as usual.  –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review  Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM  Signup for our Newsletter

Among the experiences that Rob Barnhart credits with having prepared him for a CFO role was an executive training program in which he participated when he served as director of FP&A for defense contractor BAE Systems. Known as LEAD, or Leadership Enhancement Accelerated Development, the program put a spotlight not on technical knowledge or management best practices but on each participant’s soft skills, Barnhart recalls. “There were literally clinical psychologists sitting in on meetings who would later reflect on your behavior and give you advice on how you could have been a more effective communicator,” says Barnhart, who also credits one of his own earlier talent development efforts with helping him to advance down the CFO path. At the time, Barnhart was heading FP&A at Fanatics, a company specializing in sports merchandising, “The question became: How can I make sure that I don’t have to level up or bring new people in and put them over people as the challenges get more daunting?,” explains Barnhart, who notes that at the time, Fanatics was evolving from a single e-commerce site to a multichannel global business. “There were people whom I brought in as analysts who today are directors and VPs in the business—this happened during my tenure, so I’m really happy about that,” remarks Barnhart. –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review  Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM  Signup for our Newsletter

Back in 2015, when Gary Swidler was a candidate for a CFO position at Match Group, the seasoned banking executive recalls being told by company management: “On paper, you are definitely not the most qualified person for the job.” The gap on Swidler’s resume was due to the fact that he had never held a CFO position—a void that frustrates many first-time CFO candidates who routinely find themselves second in line to candidates whose resumes list previous CFO appointments. Perhaps frustrated CFO candidates might find some comfort in the notion that Match, a company whose online offerings excel at achieving “matches”—albeit romantic ones—chose to discard industry’s traditional CFO matching criteria. According to Swidler, the CEO remarked: “‘You’ve never done this before, but I’ve known you for a long time and you have very good judgment. You’re a smart person with high integrity, so don’t prove me wrong.” Swidler’s comments expose the roles that intuition and instincts often play when it comes to CFO hiring. They also draw our attention to the type of partner that Match management was seeking: not a blind follower or “yes man,” but someone upon whose counsel the CEO and a board could rely. Meanwhile, as a banker, Swidler’s relationship with his future company had gone back not months but years, giving him an edge over veteran CFOs who were less familiar with Match as well as IAC, the holding company that at the time owned 100 percent of the online dating company. However, within 2 months of Swidler’s arrival in Match’s CFO office, IAC sold 15 percent of its shares to the public, allowing Match to raise a little more than $400 million and giving the company a market cap of around $3 billion. In the coming months and years, more IAC shares were expected to be sold to the public, which would allow Match Group to becoming increasingly unfettered from its largest investor. Still, IAC was evidently not yet ready to part with its 85 percent and opted to hold on to its shares until this past June, when it completed a spinoff of Match Group by selling its shares to IAC’s existing shareholders and thereby giving Match a market cap of $30 billion. “We had such a good business, and we were doing so well—IAC enjoyed owning us and didn’t want to give us up,” says Swidler, who would likely not hesitate to tell us that when it comes to large investors, breaking up is hard to do.   – Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review  Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM  Signup for our Newsletter

We have been speaking with Hoang Vuong for little more than a minute when he mentions the CFO mentor whom he credits with having influenced his early career decisions. “Hey, what do you really want to do when you grow up?” was the question that Vuong remembers being asked by the CFO, who had gotten to know Vuong personally while the young techie had served as an IT troubleshooter for his company’s ambitious SAP implementation. Fast-forward a few years, and the same CFO introduces Vuong to the management of an early-stage Internet search firm in the travel space, known as SideStep. Vuong joins the young company and subsequently focuses his troubleshooting skills on the firm’s mounting growth obstacles. “I had started reading a bunch of blogs where I began learning about this little company called Google and the interesting things that they did,” recalls Vuong, who says that he quickly began to grasp how Google offerings could help SideStep to address some of its nagging growth challenges. In fact, Vuong was so convinced that Google offerings would unlock new growth for SideStep that he ignored the doubts being flung about by his management peers, negotiated a contract with Google’s bus dev team, and presented it to SideStep’s CEO. Vuong says that the CEO responded by asking: “Are you so sure about this decision that you would risk your career on it?” At the time, Vuong says, he felt that careerwise he had little to lose—and besides, the Google offerings were pretty impressive.    “Google was just getting started, so at the time they would provide search results on the portals of other companies and do a rev share,” explains Vuong, who says that SideStep’s monthly revenues quickly ballooned from $50,000 to $1 million.    Having successfully addressed one of SideStep’s most formidable growth hurdles, Vuong saw his responsibilities at Side Step grow over time to include sales, online marketing, operations, and, of course, finance—where he served in the first of his several CFO roles. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review  Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM  Signup for our Newsletter

When innovation is a topic for discussion, Dynshaw Italia can’t resist mentioning Cobra Beer—or, to be more specific, “the big bottle.” It was Cobra, of course, that first opted to forgo the UK’s standard 500–550 ml beer bottles and introduce an ever more generously proportioned 650 ml vessel. “Cobra was all about doing things differently and better and, as a result, changing the marketplace,” explains Italia, who recalls that Cobra’s big bottle strategic insight had to do with the willingness of UK diners to share their oversize beverage with others at their table.   “Because they were sharing the bottle, it would be kept on the table. As a result, customers entering the restaurant would see all these tables having a bottle of Cobra, and it was like free advertising,” continues Italia, who served as group CFO for the popular UK beer brand from 2003 to 2010 as it continued to flummox its beer rivals by touting the brew’s premium recipe while outsourcing the actual brewing and distribution processes. “Cobra was about creating a premium brand with high gross margins that would eventually fit inside a larger brewery portfolio—one that had their own production and own distribution,” notes Italia, who credits Cobra’s culture of innovation with having routinely led him to explore creative ways to generate working capital. “I learned that every single asset on your balance sheet could create and generate cash for working capital, whether it was stock or debt—you could even get financing against your rent deposit,” remarks Italia, whose working capital resourcefulness proved to be a good match for Cobra’s entrepreneurial founders. In the end, Cobra’s appetite for growth (and escalating debt) led its founders to seek deeper pockets, so in 2011 Cobra Beer Partnership Limited was formed as a joint venture with Molson Coors—which allowed the Cobra brand to achieve a “fit” inside a larger brewery’s portfolio. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review  Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM  Signup for our Newsletter

Inside the realm of corporate finance, it’s safe to say that the year 2020 has been unlike any that have preceded it. As more employees have occupied remote workspaces, growing numbers of finance chiefs have told us that they are more carefully monitoring the financial and cultural levers that influence workforce behaviors.  

Thinking back to his days as a charter boat captain off the coast of Point Loma, San Diego, Dan Stokely marvels at the responsibilities that he shouldered as a young adult. Serving a mix of customers, Stokely would routinely welcome on board groups of small business owners, executives, and doctors before setting off to sea on 3- to 15-day jaunts. “Whether it was dealing with people experiencing some kind of medical emergency at sea, or really rough weather, or mechanical failures—you just had to be on top of your game all the time,” recalls Stokely, who says that the experience forever shaped his mind-set when it comes to taking on challenges.   Initially, Stokely had set his sights on acquiring equity in a boat, but conversations with different customers piqued his interest in business and led him to begin a college career alongside his sea captain vocation. Upon graduation, Stokely feared that the lack of an accounting internship on his oceangoing resume might lessen the odds of him landing a job with a big-name accounting house.    However, Stokely says, the partner in charge of Deloitte’s San Diego office at the time hired him after summing up the college grad’s seafaring days this way: “You had to make quick decisions, and very often with not a lot of information. And you had to live with the outcome.” Another factor that no doubt contributed to Stokely quickly finding his groove in the accounting and finance realm was that he was accustomed to having gray-haired customers turning to him for answers, a qualification that few hiring officers would likely miss. Such conditioning perhaps served him well at Sithe Energies, where he was hired as a financial analyst inside one of the firm’s divisions but within weeks found himself working alongside the company’s CFO as they mapped out an aggressive acquisition strategy involving the medical waste industry. This led to Stokely crisscrossing the county to meet and consult with the owners of different medical waste firms being targeted.    Says Stokely: “This might have scared a lot of people. But with my fishing background and having taken some risks before, I knew how to manage it.” As it turned out, the company would acquire nearly 12 new firms over a 3-year period and reformulate its division known as Recovery Corp. of America. –Jack Sweeney    Signup for our Newsletter  

Back in 2018—when Deb Ricci’s name topped the list of leading candidates to fill the CFO role at Guidehouse, a management consulting firm carve-out—three career distinctions likely set her apart from other candidates. First, Ricci was a veteran public sector executive whose finance resume included multiple chapters inside the government services sector, Guidehouse’s home turf. Second, she had worked inside private equity–backed companies—experience that few recruiters could ignore in light of Guidehouse being the offspring of private equity firm Veritas Capital. Third, she had an EBITDA mind-set—an unyielding orientation that allowed Ricci’s lines of sight to seldom stray very far from the metrics that helped to track, measure, and deliver EBITDA.  Of course, it is just such a mind-set that has likely kept Ricci’s finance leadership credentials on the radar of private equity partners. To date, she has played senior finance roles inside four private equity–backed firms. “I know what they’re looking for. Often I think like they think. And I find that the objectives that they’re looking to achieve are the same ones that I look to achieve,” explains Ricci. Since Veritas first acquired the public sector practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2018 and rebranded it as Guidehouse, the professional services firm has made headlines with its acquisition of Navigant Consulting in October of 2019, a deal that expanded Guidehouse’s workforce from 2,000 to 7,000 and planted a trove of commercial clients inside Guidehouse’s customer portfolio. What’s more, the Navigant organization brought along two-decade–old processes and practices, whereas the Guidehouse organization had still been mapping out its internal approaches and practices.   “We were receptive to adopting some established practices, while on the Navigant side I think that they were very accepting of change—so for me, this was the most successful acquisition that I’ve ever been associated with,” remarks Ricci. –Jack Sweeney     

  In front of the restaurant’s dozen or more cash registers, customers were standing six or seven deep when Brice Hill raised his voice and began instructing the hungry mall shoppers to immediately exit the store. “No one listened to a single word I said,” says Hill, who opens our discussion by transporting us back to the mid-1980s, when as a teenage recent graduate of McDonald’s management training program he was given a surprise leadership test. Having made a trip to the mall for some holiday shopping, Hill had poked his head into the mall’s marquee McDonald’s only to find a few of his fellow managers nervously waiting for a return call from McDonald’s headquarters. The restaurant—at the time one of the busiest McDonald’s locations on the West Coast—had only minutes earlier received a bomb threat, and as Hill digested the blank stares triggered by his shouts to clear the store, he realized that more extreme measures were required. Leaving the customers in their queues, the young manager dodged the doubtful stares of employees as he maneuvered his way to the back of the store, where he found the location’s electricity source and without hesitation cut it off. “They had told me that 20 minutes was the countdown on the thing—we cleared the whole place with only 4 minutes to spare,” recalls Hill, who estimates that the location may have held as many as 500 customers and workers that day. Later, police would determine that there had been no bomb, but this has never led Hill to second-guess his actions. “When you’re in that type of situation, you have to be able to act and act like an owner. Even if you don’t know whether you have the right answer, you have to act. There cannot be a void of leadership,” says Hill, underscoring what might be a recurring theme for his career. Fast-forward a few decades, and Hill is a senior strategic planning executive at Intel Corp. The venue is an Arizona conference room where a group of Intel executives—including the company’s CFO—has gathered to hear Hill offer an analysis that could potentially lead Intel to begin building idle factories. This time, the doubtful stares quickly turned to dissenting voices as Hill’s strategic analysis failed to win over many of his Intel colleagues.   “When I made the recommendation that we should build an idle factory, there was like a melee in the room. All of the CFO staff was arguing, waving their hands, debating different opinions,” explains Hill, who says that in the minds of traditional finance executives, an idle building equals excess cost. To highlight his point Hill repeats the refrain of “You have to heat it, cool it, and guard it!” Still, what Hill’s analysis had begun to spotlight was the cost of missing out on growth opportunities in a business wielding 60% to 70% gross margins. Suddenly, having idle factories in place to add additional capacity when growth demanded seemed to have merit. “At the end, the CFO said, ‘Bryce, I want you to go meet with the treasury staff. They’re experts in derivatives and option modeling. I want you to go see if your math holds up,’” remembers Hill, whose analysis received “a clean bill of health” from treasury before getting a thumbs-up from Intel’s CEO, a final affirmation that led Intel to modify its growth strategy as well as its accounting. Going forward expenses associated with serving the idle factories would be listed as strategic investments rather than costs – a change that has perhaps made management think twice before turning off the lights .  –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

When Tupperware Brands CFO Sandra Harris is asked what set her apart from the other CFO candidates who aspired to fill the finance leadership role at the iconic maker of food storage products, she doesn’t hesitate to mention that her previous leadership turn was not as a CFO, but as chief information officer for outdoor apparel and footwear manufacturer VF Corporation. It was there where Harris first climbed into the company’s leadership ranks from VF’s FP&A function, where she had become increasingly focused on the company’s quickly evolving global supply chain.   “VF was on a trajectory of going from $6 billion to $12 billion, and in order to do this, they needed to optimize their supply chain,” explains Harris, who along the way found herself overseeing VF’s procurement function—a position that made her the direct report for VF’s sourcing for all of Asia. “Asia was one of our most complex businesses—it had every kind of retail channel, and it was because of my Asia experience that I was given more financial roles in the retail segment of the business as well as VF’s shared services,” recalls Harris, who credits her retail experience with having helped her to emerge as CIO and IT leader as she helped the company to forge a digital connection with its consumers. At Tupperware, Harris has made “innovation through technology” a central theme of her 20-month CFO tenure. “Until I arrived, we were really still taking orders by hand and using fax machines,” comments Harris, who says that the company’s rapid adoption of cloud-based tools and solutions paid big dividends in 2020 when, due to the pandemic, increasing numbers of consumers went looking for food safety and storage products as the number of home-cooked meals grew. “We knew that we had to think more about the consumer and create a supply chain that could support what Amazon brought to the world, which was 2-day delivery,” adds Harris, who credits Tupperware’s technology investment with helping the company to pivot to a more digital world. –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

It was near the end of her 9 years with Intel Corp. that Yevgenia Fink received a bit of advice that today she credits with having helped her to blaze a path that would ultimately lead to the CFO office.   As Fink recalls, “Leave Intel before you forget how to open an Excel spreadsheet” was the brief but memorable comment that a respected manager opined. “I felt that I had a lot of influence at Intel, but most of my function became leading and managing people, and I still didn’t feel confident in my pure finance skill set,” says Fink, who at the time was a group controller for the chip maker’s mobile platform team. Fink’s future finance career path would involve a string of start-ups where she got to demonstrate her FP&A skills and along the way acquire broader finance responsibilities that made her a candidate for VP of finance positions and eventually the CFO office at HOVER, an application that helps users to design and estimate home improvement projects. “The experience gave me exposure to what it is like to be part of a public company on a much more intimate scale than what Intel could have ever given me,” observes Fink, who at the same time credits the giant chip maker with offering its finance professionals a wide berth of opportunities to pursue. Comments Fink: “There was a realization at Intel that to be a strong finance professional, you needed to be well-rounded across all disciplines, so it wasn’t about hoarding employees and keeping them in a finance box but really about providing people with opportunities that an organization the size of Intel can offer.” At HOVER, Fink’s attention these days is migrating from Excel spreadsheets back to people. “When I joined, I built a financial model, and now, as the company is scaling, it’s about hiring people who can improve on what was built,” explains Fink, who says that the transition from “leader and doer” to “people leader” requires a sense of timing. She adds: “If the transition feels a little premature, it’s probably the right time to do it.” –Jack Sweeney  Signup for our Newsletter

When Russell Burke tells us that his days at Sony Music Entertainment included “huge peaks” such as the release of the hit sound track for the motion picture Titanic as well as huge challenges such as the rise of digital pirates, the two developments quickly converge. Suddenly, in our mind’s eye, we see Burke’s career vessel of choice surrounded by pirates and the finance executive shouting a string of orders to a bewildered seafaring crew. Once again, the instant imaging that our conversations often render appears to be strangely prescient of the finance leader’s future career chapter. “Before that piracy, I hadn’t really understood the concept of disruption,” explains Burke, who occupied VP of finance roles at Sony Music in both New York and Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s.   At first, Burke was tasked with helping Sony to lessen piracy’s bite by leading a series of cost optimization initiatives, including setting up joint venture distribution agreements and putting in place shared services facilities. “After dealing with that for a time, I decided that I wanted to join the disruption,” comments Burke, who in 2001 was named founding CFO of PressPlay, a music streaming service formed as a joint venture of Sony Music and Universal Music. “Even though this was a joint venture formed by two massive companies, it was in many respects a true start-up—we sat down and created a business model and executed on it,” explains Burke, who adds that the company would grow to serve 800,000 digital music subscribers before it was sold in 2003 to Roxio, an early streaming service that helped to legitimize the streaming seas as it rolled up streaming assets, including those of pioneering pirate Napster. “PressPlay was really set up by the record companies to battle the Napsters of the world, and, at the same time, these companies were suing the pirates,” remarks Burke, who recalls that PressPlay opted to sell to Roxio as the firm sought to rebrand Napster as a legitimate streaming service—signaling an end to the music industry’s choppy seas. –Jack Sweeney

Twenty-five to 30 years ago, senior executives seeking CFO roles did not think like Tom Tuchscherer. Many still don’t, which is why CFO roles have increasingly come to executives like Tuchscherer, a gate crasher from the world of corporate development. Such was the case back in 2012, when Tuchscherer entered the CFO office for the first time at Talend, a fast-growing developer of data integration software. At the time, Tuchscherer was accustomed to having long strategy discussions with both Talend investors and board members and was even tasked with helping management to recruit “a professional” CFO. However, when a new CFO exited the company only 12 months after being recruited, Tuchscherer agreed to serve as an interim finance leader.   “First it was 3 months, then 6 months, then 9 months, and then a year. Eventually, the board said, ‘Hey, you seem to be doing a good job with this—why don’t you just stay?,’” explains Tuchscherer, who characterizes his arrival in the CFO office as an “accident” rather than a “willful choice.” In fact, as time passed and Talend began preparing for its IPO, Tuchscherer says his career mind-set remained untethered to the CFO role. “Had I been in a board member’s shoes, I would have thought that this was pretty dangerous,” explains Tuchscherer, who says that during some “honest discussions” with the company’s CEO and board members, he made clear his willingness to step aside and even to help recruit a CFO with IPO experience. “Essentially, the message that came back was: ‘We value the relationships that you built and your strategic knowledge of the company much more than the downside of your lack of experience as a public company CFO, and we believe that you can grow and learn those skills … but we will be keeping a close eye,’” recalls Tuchscherer, who notes that by this time he had learned to appease his sizable appetite for high-minded strategy insights—a source of sustenance for many corporate development executives—in order to better digest the company’s accounting and administrative functions. Looking back, Tuchscherer recalls that his “accidental” arrival inside the CFO office in some ways allowed him to be more clear-eyed about the role of finance leadership. Comments Tuchscherer: “It forced me to ask a lot of questions and to challenge the role and reinvent it at the same time.” –Jack Sweeney   Subscribe to our Newsletter

When Drew Vollero arrived in the CFO office of Snap (formerly Snapchat) in 2015, the executives occupying the tech world’s traditional IPO talent bench no doubt raised a few eyebrows. Having spent the previous 25 years inside the corporate corridors of Mattel, Inc., and PepsiCo, Vollero had a resume chock-full of strategic planning initiatives that any finance leader would covet. Still, he could not be counted among the familiar CFO all-stars known for their routine rotation into IPO-minded tech companies. Of course, whatever buzz Vollero’s hiring may have stirred, Snap left no room for IPO skeptics, having earlier in 2015 hired Imran Khan, head of Internet investment banking at Credit Suisse, where he had recently led the IPO for Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. “Whenever we walked into a room together—on the road show or wherever—there were seven or eight people who knew Imran,” explains Vollero, who characterizes his pairing with Khan as “a one, two punch.” “The founders knew that I had experience in building world-class teams, and they knew that I could hit the ground running,” comments Vollero, who adds that “the match really made sense” in light of the tight time frame involved in Snap’s plans to go public. During the 18 months in the lead-up to the IPO, Vollero initially committed to a 70-mile commute to Snap’s Venice, Calif., headquarters from his home of 30 years in Orange County—a daily trek that became more daunting as IPO action items began pressing down.      Says Vollero: “I got an apartment up in Los Angeles, and I was there Sunday through Friday, moving the things that we had to get done.” These days, Vollero has been working closer to home while occupying the CFO office at Allied Universal of Santa Ana, Calif.  Despite his shorter commute, Vollero says, his days are once again becoming populated with IPO action items, as the $8 billion privately held supplier of security and facilities begins eyeing the public markets.   Comments the CFO and now IPO veteran: “We’re a founder-led company, just as Snap was founder-led—these companies tend to take on the personalities of the founder, and they drive hard.”  –Jack Sweeney  Signup for our Newsletter

  "Talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it—today, I spend around 20% of my time on it." - Ross Tennenbaum, CFO, Avalara CFOTL: What are your priorities for the coming year? Tennenbaum: One is building out our finance and accounting talent to take us to a billion dollars’ worth of revenue and beyond. We’re at close to half a billion of revenue, and we’re looking to go well beyond that. You really need the talent that has experienced a larger scale, knows how to achieve it, and can take you there. So, talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it—today, I spend around 20% of my time on it. CFOTL: What does the phrase “workforce culture” mean to you? Tennenbaum: Beginning in my investment banking days, I’ve studied many companies and management teams. I’ve seen teams that were really high-functioning, really strong, great cultures. I’ve also seen management teams and executive teams that were not cohesive. There was a lot of distrust and backstabbing. Each of these scenarios could generate great numbers and be performing well, but I would only want to invest my money in the one that has that trust and has a cohesive team—and where this is really being driven forward in a cultural way. I don’t think that Wall Street really has a view of this. There is really no metric internally—and certainly not externally—that gives this view on culture. But I think that investors are increasingly trying to get this view into talent and culture. Drew Vollero, CFO, Allied Universal When Drew Vollero arrived in the CFO office of security and facilities company Allied Universal in 2018, he understood that the primary constraint to Allied’s future growth remained human capital. Like so many other meaty challenges, Vollero had helped to remedy during his finance career– Allied’s new CFO understood finance must play an active role when it came to optimizing the company’s “employee funnel”.  Then Covid 19 arrived - overnight elevating Allied’s hiring hurdle to Vollero’s top of mind status.    We recently asked Vollero to explain how the company’s hiring priorities may have been altered due to the pandemic. Vollero: I would say that we hire 3,000 people a week. We see a million resumes a year here at Allied Universal. There's 150 million or so people employed in this country. So, you're talking about a meaningful number of resumes that this company sees. Our ability to hire the right people is really important. How do you do this at scale is really our challenge. Our strategy team has adopted a couple of new tools that helped us do that through the field. We now have an artificial intelligence vehicle that we're testing that will help us identify what are the key metrics when it comes to hiring and what are the key personality traits or key answers that applicants can give us that (signal) they will fit well with our culture, as well as indicate that they might be successful employees. We're also using an automated workflow to really help us get through some of our staffing bottlenecks. Our challenge here today is we may get a resume, but we may not be able to call you for six to eight weeks. Managing that workflow better is very important to us and something that we spend a lot of time studying the employment funnel. How do we find 150,000 of the best employees? We hire based on customer needs. Customers continue to need services and some have used less during the pandemic like the retail channel, or some of the local office buildings, but a lot of customers have asked for more hours. State governments have wanted more hours. Hospitals have wanted more hours. As we manage through the pandemic we've really focused on three important pieces.  First, and foremost, we focus on our employees. We've instructed all of our employees to follow the CDC and WHO guidelines, social distancing, very important. … We've supplied over 650,000 cloth masks to employees during that time. We've also been very active with virtual events, hiring people, so lot of kind of drive-through hiring events to practice social distancing, and meet the demand for security services and we still have a significant number of open posts and we've been trying to fill those.  The customers, we've got 30,000 customers. And these 30,000 customers have 13,000 different ways that they've attacked this situation. Different customers have done it different ways and we’ve tried to be responsive to their every step.  From a financial perspective, obviously during the pandemic, we've been focused on really the liquidity of the company. On the financial side, there's a couple of things that we've been trying to do to make sure that the company can continue to do well and to frame the magnitude, our payroll here is a $100 million a week, and we have to make sure that we have the ability to continue to pay the people who are working hard through this.        

Of all of the business discussions that Chad Cohen has had over the years, few are likely as memorable as the 20-second conversation he had with Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff about midway into his 9-year career stint with the online real estate company. Cohen joined Zillow back in 2006 as corporate controller, a position that he says also had the added distinction of being the company’s first full-time finance role. Over the next 4 years, as Zillow’s back-office finance and accounting team took shape, Cohen’s responsibilities grew, allowing him to step into the role of vice president of finance. “I had been moving up the ladder, and it was right before we made the decision to go public—I remember Spencer coming into my office and saying, ‘You’re going to be CFO,’” says Cohen, who recalls Zillow’s CEO saying little more before exiting. For Cohen, the exchange signaled a 6- to 12-month transition that would enlarge his focus from being largely back-office to being both back- and front-office. “I had built an accounting and finance department, but this was a big step that required coaching from mentors and formal media training and IR experience,” says Cohen, who today views the Zillow IPO as only one of several Zillow milestones during his CFO tenure with the firm. Says Cohen: “I spent 4 years—or 16 earnings calls—as CFO, acquired about 10 companies, and raised somewhere between a half-billion and a billion dollars in capital from the public markets for Zillow Group.” Asked to recall a learning moment from his CFO years, Cohen says that he recalls waking up in a cold sweat during the 20- to 30-day period that immediately followed Zillow’s 2015 acquisition of Trulia. Having carefully crafted a 90- to 120-day postmerger integration plan, Cohen says, he realized that as the number of Trulia employee departures began to quickly escalate, “speed of integration” was going to play a plus-size role in the merger’s success. “Our retention bonuses—albeit very healthy and robust—were being offset by a very frothy employment market in San Francisco and even larger sign-on bonuses that we were having trouble competing with,” recalls Cohen. “I called my controller in a panic and said: ‘Hey, we have to do this faster because I think I see how the scenario is playing out—and it ain’t going to be pretty,’” remarks Cohen, who then instructed his team to “rip up” the 90-to 120-day plan, while accenting his new mandate for speed with the words “We’re going to do this now!” –Jack Sweeney

In 2016, when Jeff Nichols had been a senior member of Glassdoor’s FP&A team for 2 years, he and other members of the finance team were confronting the nagging truth that the firm’s path to going public wasn’t getting any shorter. The online job recruitment firm’s efforts to grow its profit margins had met only mild success, while its cash burn rate was inching upward. According to Nichols, Glassdoor’s path to going public was further complicated due to the unique characteristics of its business model. Points of comparison between Glassdoor and top recruitment rivals such as LinkedIn and Indeed offered few insights due to the firm’s unique approach, making Glassdoor’s story more challenging for management to tell. To help remove the firm’s storytelling obstacles and address its meager margin growth, Nichols says, the firm’s finance team began asking, “How do we get the business to perform over the long term in a way that would actually make for a compelling story?”   To help answer this question, Nichols reports, Glassdoor first had to widen its lens and search for points of comparison with SaaS companies, ad tech firms, and other companies beyond the traditional recruitment realm in order to identify competitive attributes that aligned with those offered by Glassdoor. At the same time, this broader comparison helped to magnify certain weaknesses in Glassdoor’s model. “What we were lacking was retention. Most SaaS companies are focused on net dollar expansion or gross dollar expansion, and we just didn’t have it,” explains Nichols, who says that another challenge that quickly came into view involved small and medium-size businesses. “The way in which we went about SMB sales was just not efficient—it was very labor- and cost-intensive,” comments Nichols, who—having played a central role in helping to broaden the company’s strategic view—was soon helping to put a restructuring in motion. Says Nichols: “We reprioritized. We made some new investments that we had not made before, but at the same time we curtailed some costs and refocused what we were actually doing.”   Ultimately, Glassdoor’s path led not to an IPO but to a sale, when in 2018 Recruit Holdings, a large Japanese human resources company, paid $1.2 billion for the company. Having been valued by investors only 2 years previously at around $860 million, Glassdoor had a story that had no doubt become more compelling. Looking back, Nichols’ cites his part in helping the company to widen its lens: “All of this was a directional change for the company. I feel that I brought something to the organization that it really needed, which was an honest, objective look at ‘here’s what’s going on in the business, and here’s how it appears to its peers.’” –Jack Sweeney 

Ross Tennenbaum remembers that back in 2018, when he was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, he had conversations with a number of senior executives from Slack Technologies, Inc. At the time, the fast-growing workplace messaging and communication platform was preparing to go public, and the company was making a special effort to educate bankers and analysts alike about the firm’s business. As his questions became more pointed, Tennenbaum says, he noticed that members of Slack’s senior management team would frequently permit other executives stationed along the conversation’s periphery to supply the answers. “At first, I thought that they served sort of a chief-of-staff type of role, but what I realized was that when the executive was pressed with a question, one of the sidekicks would always be turned to for the answer,” explains Tennenbaum, who found his conversations with Slack to be highly informative. Later, Tennenbaum learned that the sidekicks were members of Slack’s business operations team, a cluster of analysts that he describes as being “cousins” to Slack’s finance and FP&A teams. “This team was incredible: They were so dialed in to the business, and they were partnered with Slack’s executives, which allowed the latter to quickly make data-driven decisions,” says Tennenbaum, who today, as CFO of software developer Avalara, is seeking to borrow a page from Slack and populate his own business operations and FP&A functions with teams of analysts on the ready to inform and supply answers to questions. “This is about creating not just budgets but also operational plans that tie strategy and tactics to key metrics so that we can see when things are trending up or trending down and be able to more quickly take action,” adds Tennenbaum, who believes that many businesses struggle due to a disconnect between what he calls “top-level metrics” that are being widely shared and reported by the company and decision-making by “everyday operators” often situated deep inside a company. “How do we make these people feel a sense of ownership of the measure and feel more accountable when it comes to driving outcomes?” asks Tennenbaum, who notes that a disconnect can occur even after a company has made an effort to push a metric deeper into the organization. “What happens is that they don’t do a good job of updating the metrics every month, reviewing them and quickly assessing where they’re on and off track, and course-correcting,” comments Tennenbaum. At Avalara, remedying the metrics disconnect is now a top priority for finance. Says Tennenbaum: “To me, that’s the impactful part of the CFO job.” –Jack Sweeney  Subscribe to our Newsletter

In 2008, as the economic downturn threatened to upend IBM Corp.’s financial well-being, the company’s leadership was considering different candidates to lead a corporatewide restructuring when Kieran McGrath’s name surfaced. McGrath was known as a troubleshooter inside the ranks of IBMers, a seasoned finance executive whose 27 years with the company had produced a zigzag career trajectory tracing a jagged path that signaled to IBM insiders both a breadth of experience and company loyalty. “Early in my career, I got a reputation as a workhorse and a bit of a problem fixer, and while this was positive in the long haul, it did not always seem that way at the time,” explains McGrath, who says that he was 10 years into his career with IBM when “special assignments” began regularly populating the path before him. “I was constantly getting pushed out of my comfort zone because I was never able to stay in any one space too long,” says McGrath, whose IBM resume included tours of duty inside the technology realms of storage technologies, semiconductors, and global technology services. McGrath was offered the restructuring assignment, and, as usual, he accepted the invitation. “This was really tough work because you’re really forcing decisions as you try to push along a restructuring in response to economic realities,” recalls McGrath, who—while in midstream of a restructuring gig that he hoped would last only 6 months—suddenly found himself being approached by IBM’s leadership with yet another opportunity. Says McGrath: “As luck would have it, the restructuring role became temporary because the CFO of IBM software at that time decided to leave the company for another opportunity.” McGrath was shortly named finance leader for the company’s $25 billion software business, a demanding and high-profile leadership role both inside and outside the company. “Clearly, I would never have been the CFO of CA Technologies or today the CFO of Avaya if I had not taken up many of these other experiences and gone down these side roads,” explains McGrath, who would leave IBM after nearly 33 years in 2014, when he joined CA Technologies. He continues: “This is kind of how I was raised—to be a little accepting of things coming my way, because there would always be opportunity associated with them.” –Jack Sweeney  Sign up for our Newsletter

Had Martin Nolan studied engineering instead of accounting, his career path would likely never have entered the worlds of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, and Michael Jackson. Still, Irish-born Nolan is quick to point out that it was a Green Card lottery, not his accounting degree, that facilitated his relocation to New York City, where he would meet and ultimately team up with Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions, the world’s leading entertainment auction house. Before the two men met, Nolan had traveled a remarkable distance from his early days in New York, where in the early 1990s—Green Card in hand—he had landed a job working at the front desk of the New York Hilton. In the years that followed, the determined Irishman had networked his way up into a string of Wall Street jobs, where he found success as a stock broker and investment advisor at such firms as JP Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch.   “Darren was doing a Johnny Cash auction when I met him—he was a marketing guy who needed a finance guy, so I joined him,” explains Nolan, who met Julien in 2004 and the following year signed on with the auction house as CFO. By 2010 Nolan had become an equal partner in the business. “When I resigned from Merrill Lynch in 2005 and told my colleagues that I was joining Julien’s Auctions, there were looks of dismay—they would say: ‘Why auctions? It’s such a different business. It’s so risky …,’” says Nolan, who pointed out to his colleagues that the buying and selling on the floor of the stock exchange was no different than what takes place inside an auction hall. Fifteen years later, he continues to wield a healthy appetite for risk, a prerequisite for any CFO daring enough to enter the ebb-and-flow of the auction business. For Nolan, the risks are best hedged by using a mix of financial best practices and good humor. Says Nolan: “Darren wakes up in the morning and checks Google and asks: ‘Are we in the news?’ I wake up and check the bank accounts and ask: ‘Are we still in business?’” However, there’s one risk that Nolan may fear more than any other: that a finance career hatched by a lottery win could put Wall Street in its rearview and still someday be deemed as ordinary. – Jack Sweeney  

It’s a familiar sequence: A strong-minded investor musters the will to lead and steps into the CEO office determined to revitalize a struggling technology company and put it back on the growth track. For Bill Adams, this swift turn of events occurred only a year into his first industry stint as a corporate controller—a career chapter, he recalls fondly, that included a devoted CFO mentor. However, the company’s CFO and CEO had exited the firm just prior the investor’s arrival, and Adams found himself stepping into a finance leadership role. Although stressful, the circumstances swung open the door for Adams to not only oversee the finance function but also have the opportunity to play a more strategic role in the business. In short, he would now be in lockstep with the new CEO as they together championed the latter’s strategic vision that would upend the tech company’s growing focus on software revenue and double down on hardware sales. Or so the CEO believed. “The challenge that I faced was that I didn’t agree with him,” explains Adams, whose in-depth knowledge of the business made him quietly question the new CEO’s big bet on hardware. “The company was full-steam-ahead focusing on software and system development, and the hardware part had already become secondary,” adds Adams, who says that his broadened responsibilities within the company allowed him to reach out to different stakeholders and bring back “suggestions” to the CEO. “Being able to talk to customers was extremely enlightening in terms of how to steer the company in the direction that it needed to go,” comments Adams, who says that at the time the company counted Boeing and General Dynamics among its largest customers. According to Adams, the company’s strategy would continue to evolve as it lessened its hardware orientation and came to enjoy newfound success. Even today, as Adams reflects on the circumstances that first advanced him into a CFO role, his sense of apprehension and excitement lingers: “I was not yet 30 years old when I was thrust into the CFO role at a public company, not really knowing where I was going or what I was doing.” –Jack Sweeney

When Adrian Talbot tells us that he parachuted into Thames Television in the early 1990s, the image of the London skyline—once used to brand the popular British broadcasting company —quickly comes to mind. Suddenly, in our mind’s eye, just to the right of St. Paul’s dome, we spy a 20-something-year-old Talbot floating confidently downward. Along with a boatload of first-class metaphors, this is the type of instant imaging that every conversation renders—at least for those of us on the lookout for them. But Talbot’s successful first jump—not unlike those of many future finance leaders—came about with a degree of serendipity. “The lead auditor became sick—I was parachuted in for 2 years, and this gave me an early taste of media,” explains Talbot, who at the time was an auditor for BDO. Several internal auditing roles followed, including one with Hilton International that required a good deal of travel in order to complete audits in different parts of the world. “When you have chased the financial controller for the Caracas Hilton around the airport with a sheet of accruals or when the general manager of the Nairobi Hilton is yelling at you for telling him that he made a mess of a capex project, it is rather character-building,” comments Talbot, who soon jumped back into the media realm with United Business Media, where he would serve as a finance director for the company’s television broadcasting properties before entering the global communications sphere as a finance director for Burson Marsteller. Talbot reports that years later, when he was recruited to be CFO of Hotwire, a fast-growing global communications firm, he found a unique match—not because of his years inside media and communications but because of Hotwire’s global CEO, Barbara Bates. Bates had sold a communications company that she had spent 25 years building to Hotwire in 2016 and gone on to be named Hotwire’s Global CEO. “I was able to help her with my experience around the globe, and she was able to help me with her experience inside the USA,” says Talbot, who today credits Bates with helping him to safely land inside a finance leadership opportunity. - Jack Sweeney

Bendetti: I'm trying to steal that great quote from Warren Buffet, "I'm trying to be greedy while others are fearful." And I'm trying to grow. And if you're an existing organization with a big overhead, wow, you're retreating. You are worried about how you're going to continue if you're a 501C6, you're not eligible for the PPP loans. They're in a period of retrenchment, these other professional associations. I have no costs. I'm lean by design. I have a job. This is my nights and weekend gig. So everything I do is easy and lean. And so I have no costs. And so I'm trying to grow, I'm trying to be greedy while others are fearful and expand this thing. While I can't meet anywhere physically, so I can grow virtually.

Just as Michelle McComb was imagining that she would shortly be joining another Silicon Valley start-up as a finance leader, the CFO of Lucent Technologies helped to upend her plans. Back in the early 2000s, McComb’s first CFO tour of duty was coming to an end with the successful sale of her company to a larger, publicly held software firm. However, within a matter of months, the buyer was itself acquired by the giant telecommunications player, and Lucent’s CFO offered up a question to McComb: “What would it take to keep you?” The coveted query is one that career builders long to hear but don’t always answer in rational ways. “I packed my bags and moved to England, where I became CFO of one of Lucent’s major divisions,” she explains, leaving little doubt that her answer had landed well. “I received tremendous international exposure as I traveled extensively and got to deal with finance people with very diverse backgrounds,” says McComb, who worked abroad 5 years before returning to the U.S., where, over time, she has occupied the CFO office for a string of technology companies. The latest is Bluecore, a marketing technology firm that she joined in May of 2020. Of course, in light of the pandemic, it’s safe to say that Bluecore will likely be a career chapter unlike any that have preceded it, and, not unlike her CFO peers, McComb finds herself now being drawn to the mix of financial and cultural levers that influence Bluecore’s workforce. “I think that the people strategy—especially as we come through environments like COVID—is going to be extremely important to ensuring how we retain and hire the right talent, especially when it comes to remote. What does the new office environment look like?,” comments McComb, who begins voicing a series of questions: “What is our compensation philosophy today? Are we competitive? Are we a merit-based company?” It’s just such questions that in the wake of pandemic make McComb—perhaps more than some other CFOs—better prepared to land on the right answer. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: What are your priorities as a finance leader as we go forward?  McComb: I think it's super important that you have a solid foundation. So for me, I got to make sure that that foundation of my GL's accurate. I can close the books in a timely way. And make certain I have got audited financial statements. Those are super important. But as a finance leader, you're not going to get credit for them. So make them happen, get them done, and then it's important to move on to other things. And so for me, looking over the next 12 months, especially in light of COVID, I think it's paying attention to the capital strategy. So around cash management investment, what do we need to look at? ... Should we look at acquiring a company or other companies? What do we want to do with our investments in our cash strategy? So that's one side. I'm going to add to that because I think a lot of times CFOs do tend to look at capital as cash. I'm one of those CFOs who look at people as a huge asset. I also look after the people function at Bluecore and I think the people strategy, especially coming through environments like COVID, is going to be extremely important of ensuring to retain, hire the right talent, and especially of looking at remote. What is the new office environment look like? And then the last thing that I would say that I'm looking at is all around the other keyword that I mentioned to you earlier, around data. I think data is going to be absolutely essential in helping the company transform strategically. The decisions it's going to make, the avenues it's going to take supporting its customers. So it's really double clicking down on the data side of things. And the analytics because it's not just about data. What is the data telling us? What changes do we need to make? What's the story being told? And I think it's just going to become increasingly important to help get the company to the next spot in its journey.  

There’s little question that 2020 will long be remembered as a year of crisis for the casino industry. Commercial gaming revenues in the U.S. were down 79 percent during the second quarter when compared to Q2 2019, a fact that made IAC/Interactive’s August announcement that it was purchasing 12 percent of hospitality and gambling giant MGM all the more headline-grabbing. “We think we found a once-in-a-decade opportunity to find a meaningful position in an iconic brand,” explains IAC/InterActive CFO Glenn Schiffman, who says IAC’s balance sheet remains flush with cash (more than $3 billion) after the recent spinoff of online dating site Match.com. “We believe that Las Vegas will come roaring back, and this comes back to how IAC likes to invest: We like massive addressable markets with tailwinds from offline to online, and that’s what we see with gaming,” says Schiffman, who is no stranger to industries in crisis. Back in September of 2008, Schiffman was head of investment banking for Lehman Brothers’ Asia-Pacific business when the firm filed for bankruptcy due to its part in the subprime mortgage crash. Schiffman, along with other top Lehman partners, helped to manage the sale of Lehman’s Asian business to Nomura Securities. “In times of crisis, you have to separate the urgent from the important because in a crisis everything appears urgent but not everything is important,” explains Schiffman, who says that he learned just how important being able to separate the two was when the clock was ticking in the wake of the Lehman bankruptcy and his team was seeking a resolution that would best serve Lehman’s Asia workforce. (Episode 440) “We saved every single job in Asia—and that was 3,000 jobs, including my own,” comments Schiffman, who adds that the Lehman bankruptcy, among other things, revealed how during a time of crisis an individual’s character becomes more evident. “Crisis doesn’t define character, crisis reveals character,” says Schiffman, who, after joining Nomura, went on to help establish and build the bank’s North American investment banking division. –Jack Sweeney 

More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees. The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations.

Back in the late 1980s, Mike Brower’s list of audit clients included a roster of oil and gas companies as well a local university and a number of different state and local government entities. It was the type of client list that any accountant based in and around Cheyenne, Wyoming, might covet, a fact made all the more undeniable by having Taco John’s International top the list. A restaurant franchisor with over 450 restaurants nationwide, Taco John’s first began serving local Cheyenne customers in the 1960s, before expanding rapidly across the Plains and upper Midwest as it outfitted franchisees in small towns rather than big city locations. “They just popped up everywhere, and I sort of had an insider’s view,” says Brower, who joined the Taco John’s finance team in 1990 after having given notice to the Cheyenne office of McGladrey & Pullen. For the next 6 years, Brower’s responsibilities intersected with every aspect of Taco John’s accounting and reporting function, eventually landing him in the controller’s office, where he oversaw the company’s financial statements as well as those of the 30 company-owned restaurants. However, as time passed, Brower began evaluating other local opportunities and came upon an advertisement in the Sunday newspaper seeking CFO candidates. “It was a blind ad, but you have to remember that this is Wyoming and everyone in the local business community sort of knows everyone, so I called the guys up and said ‘Hey, I’d be perfect for you,’” explains Brower, who notes that the ad was placed by a fast-growing insurance company owned by two local businessmen who had in fact underwritten policies for Taco John’s. “I told them that I’d love to talk with them about the job, but they were like, ‘Well, we don’t want to lose the Taco John’s account,’ so I said, ‘Look, Barry isn’t going to take the account away just because you took his controller,’” said Brower, while mentioning his former boss who at the time was Taco John’s CFO. Brower got the job and became CFO of the insurance brokerage, which in short order began talks to acquire two Midwest insurance brokers. The insurance firm’s appetite for M&A deal-making gave Brower a new set of experiences that injected some excitement into his first CFO role that even today he looks back upon and savors. –Jack Sweeney

Back in 2015, Katie Rooney was only 7 months into her first industry CFO role at Aon when her boss asked her to exit the office. “He came into my office on November 1 and said, ‘I’m retiring, and I want you to take on my role. I’m leaving in 8 weeks,’” recalls Rooney, who says that the news triggered a mix of surprise and fear, which she recalls outwardly expressing with the words “Oh, my God!” Her boss quickly sought to ease her concerns. “He said: ‘You know what? It will be the best thing for you. If I stick around, you will never get the credit from the team,” explains Rooney, who subsequently swapped her CFO business unit responsibilities for her boss’s broader, divisional-level CFO portfolio. Looking back, Rooney confides that she expected to someday to fill her boss’s shoes, but perhaps in 2017 or 2018—and certainly not in 2015. For her, though, the timing would turn out to be most fortuitous. In early 2017, 13 months after she had officially taken on her boss’s role, Aon announced plans to sell its employee benefits outsourcing business to private equity firm Blackstone Group as part of a “carve out” strategy that eventually rebranded the stand-alone business as Alight Solutions. “We called ourselves a $2.3 billion startup,” remembers Rooney, who says that she now realizes how her boss’s decision to step aside in late 2015 ensured her inclusion in the early round of discussions that ultimately led to a deal with Blackstone and her subsequent appointment as CFO of Alight Solutions. “We kind of had this moment when we said, ‘The capital structure and some of the margin components just don’t fit with the larger business,’ so we started thinking about carving the business out,” responds Rooney, when asked to recall the moment of insight that may have helped to hatch Alight Solutions. –Jack Sweeney Rooney:  As I think about the next 12 months, we have to execute on the strategy we've now brought together. We are at this incredible place in time where our business is uniquely positioned to help solve the needs of our clients and their employees. We can help drive down the total cost of the workforce. We can try to drive and improve health outcomes. And as we think about the financial stresses created by the pandemic, thinking about overall financial wellbeing, there's so much opportunity here, and we've pulled the strategy together, and as I mentioned, I think we've built the right KPIs around it. We're now working on building out a detailed operating plan that will hold us accountable day over day around executing against this, because its about driving more value. We're taking an outcome based approach. We're leading with technology and really looking at everything, but we now have to hold ourselves accountable day over day to execute against that. And I think finance plays an incredibly important role there as we think about how we develop the operating plan to get all of our leaders, all of our businesses, aligned around what's required to drive that forward. So that's really where we're focused here over the next couple of months.

It’s not uncommon for career-building executives inside the finance realm to obtain an MBA in order to pivot their careers in a new direction. Such was the case for Sachin Patel, who after finding some early success as a systems engineer at IBM Corp. began to study the path before him more closely. “One of the things that you don’t very often get to do as an engineer is to articulate what you did by using the written word or even verbally. Just having this not be a feature of the job was something that began to be evident to me,” says Patel, who as the years passed found the laconic nature of engineering to be in direct conflict with his growing desire to play a more active role in shaping and influencing business strategy. “I looked at two areas—investment banking and strategy consulting—and began pursuing both, which probably wasn’t the best approach from a time management standpoint,” explains Patel, who says that ultimately the numbers—or, as he describes it, “the common wiring between engineering and finance”—drew him toward the world of finance. With an MBA in hand, Patel joined Citigroup and set about developing the relationships and industry insights required to succeed in the investment banking realm, until one day—roughly 4 years after his carefully executed career pivot—he received a call from a friend and business school classmate with a job opportunity. In short order, Patel was accepting a director of finance role with Vantage Oncology, a network of cancer centers and supporting physicians that was quickly expanding across the country. Over the next 4 years, Patel would build and lead Vantage’s FP&A team as he advanced from controller to the CFO office, where in 2016 he ultimately helped to sell the company to McKesson Corporation for $1.2 billion. Looking back, Patel credits his years at Vantage for providing him with consecutive opportunities to prove himself as he climbed steadily upward. Still, he makes clear that his success there was not always obvious. In fact, even before he accepted the position, he needed to confront a potential obstacle that surprisingly had little to do with strategy or Vantage’s financial footing. “An interesting wrinkle was that I reported to the business school classmate who recruited me,” explains Patel, who at first mentions his classmate to highlight the added rewards of having returned to business school but is compelled to emphasize the added complexity of such a relationship. “It was good that we had the baseline of a friendship, but sometimes this can lead to a little more ruffling,” he says, before giving kudos to his classmate as well as to Vantage’s management team for creating an environment where the two friends could both succeed. –Jack Sweeney   Patel: We developed an in-house pricing tool for each of our solutions that we offer. And so based on our experience out of what the different components of the expense were, whether it's human time from the operations team, over to cloud expense that I mentioned, anything else that all gets folded into there, I should say, and then we can set the pricing based on that. And this tool allows them to check each of their contracts, or as they're negotiating they can check those margins using that tool. Ultimately, that goes to our chief growth officer who oversees that, and then if we need to make any additional decisions around that, we meet as a group. But it's become part of the practice, and I think they were actually looking for that being that we are developing new solutions. You're not entirely sure how we should price those in the market when it's a new solution. Many times there's a lot of puts and takes there that you have to consider. And so early on it was a very much live discussion, but now it's part of the standard process, and very much something we follow. We were guarded about that margin profile. We were very particular about it. And then we realized that there's many other components to our numbers that we can manage better to free up those dollars to win more business. And what we were able to do is understand that from a valuation perspective, moving from X to 1.1 X margin may not be as important to us as having higher revenue growth. So let's orient around that. Let's take the additional dollars we have and maybe give a little here, invest a little there, and make sure that we're driving that top line growth. Because ultimately there's a finite universe of health plans and provider groups after which the sales team can go. But once you're in there, the opportunity to sell more is really where the sizzle is. And so it's important to sort of win the day, and that became something that the management team, ranging from operations and engineering over to obviously sales and marketing, everyone could coalesce.

“It’s not cheap to go public,” concedes CFO Steve Cakebread, echoing the oft-repeated refrain that founders and CFOs confront when considering the prospect of selling shares in their companies to the public. Concessions aside, it will come as little surprise to Wall Street and private investors alike that Cakebread—a seasoned finance leader who has taken public such companies as Salesforce, Pandora, and his latest firm, Yext—has come not to bury IPOs, but to praise them.  And 2020 might be the year when founders and CEOs are prepared to listen.   Certainly, few of Cakebread’s CFO admirers are likely to question the finance leader’s keen sense of timing. In fact, more than a few will likely be making room on their bedside tables for Cakebread’s soon-to-be-released The IPO Playbook: An Insider’s Perspective on Taking Your Company Public and How to Do It Right (Silicon Valley Press, 2020). “With all of the macroeconomic and pandemic issues going on, there have been as many—if not more—IPOs through August than there have ever been in the past couple of years,” says Cakebread, signaling an optimistic note for U.S.-listed publicly held companies, which have seen their numbers cut in half over the past two decades.  The coronavirus, it turns out, might in part be the antidote for Wall Street’s IPO blues. As COVID-19 spread, many companies made greater operational discipline and efficiency top-of-mind, which in turn led to the adoption of governance practices more commonly used by publicly held companies. What’s more, they began doubling down on culture, a trend that has prompted IPO-minded founders to more thoughtfully expose the connective tissue between public ownership and social responsibility. “Most founders want to create opportunity both for themselves and for the people around them, and this happens only when you go public,” explains Cakebread, who notes that the social responsibility aspects of going public were a big incentive for each of the companies that he took public, including Salesforce, where he and CEO Marc Benioff identified a number of benefits. “Marc and I talked about it a lot before we took Salesforce public. The discipline of going public makes your organizational governance better. It makes companies more socially responsible, and this was a big item for him and for me. It grows careers and spins off other technology companies,” continues Cakebread, who joined Salesforce as employee #67, when the $17 billion company was eking out a quaint $20 million annually. According to Cakebread, public firms operate with a certain rigor that privately held firms struggle to match—and VC-backed and private equity–owned firms can at times miss the big picture. Notes Cakebread: “I actually find it tougher to work with VC boards because all they care about is the numbers. They don't care about the opportunity so much.” To Cakebread, the IPO process is important because it allows CFOs to realize their role as visionary storytellers with the ability to articulate a narrative that educates others about where the business is headed and what opportunities are being pursued. “You’re always going to have one number out of whack every quarter, but if the sell-side research people understand the underlying story, they can teach the longer vision to their investors and say, ‘This is an upsy-downsy quarter, but long-term, this business is intact,’” he observes. Asked how diminished listings of U.S. public companies have likely impacted industry over time, Cakebread points to the dynamics of wealth creation. “This has meant less access for most of us, and I think that this is helping to create this disparity between people who are very wealthy and people who aren't because they can’t get access to the market,” says Cakebread. “This is a challenging topic for a lot of people, but I personally believe that access is important because wealth distribution happens when employees and other investors get to participate,” asserts Cakebread, who believes that a new generation of investors is quickly emerging. “The retail investor is realizing that there’s opportunity and getting back into the stock market, and this next generation is starting to recognize the public market as a way to create wealth,” continues Cakebread, who cautions IPO-minded CFOs not to become too besotted by numbers.  Concludes Cakebread: “What I have found in my career is that science and numbers are important, but you need a little bit of art to make a really successful bottle of wine or a really successful company.” CFOTL:   For many CFOs -  the IPO process is challenging in terms of communications. Cakebread: That's a good part of it. I mean, you have to be able to one, love your business, have a passion around it, explain it to third parties that may not have a good idea of what you're doing. The IR function is really critical. The good news is, there's a number of very capable IR firms that can help you get through that early stage of communication. Not the least of which is your investment banker that can help you write the story of the S1, and then there's others that I've worked with my whole career and even after we've been public for five or 10 years, I still use those same IR people to bounce ideas off of, to look at my problems differently and how to communicate. Yes, if you want to be shy and introverted and don't want to talk to people, this is probably not a company that you want to take public, but you learn speaking skills, which is good for all of us, I think. You learn how to approach and answer questions and explain your story. None of that is hard. It just takes a little bit of work, but shouldn't prevent you from going public because personally, it is kind of interesting. I actually find it tougher to work with VC boards because all they care about is the numbers. They don't care about the opportunity so much. What I found in my career is science and numbers is important, but there's a little bit of art that you need to make a really successful bottle of wine or a successful company. It can't all be driven by numbers and I've been around long enough. If you remember, General Motors at one time, was known as the organization that the bean counters ran the company. Well, that company went broke and they had to bring in people with a little bit more vision and a little bit more art to the car, not all numbers. I think that's a good opportunity to really help the company see itself, not only mathematically, but in a different vision, and talking to investors is a great way to hone your story in terms of how you might talk to a customer.

Jamie Samuels still recalls some of the raised eyebrows that he saw after having completed in short order both the verbal and written portions of an exam that his future employer administered to job applicants. Not unlike most of his fellow applicants, Samuels had been invited to take the exam after responding to a newspaper advertisement, but, unlike his peers, he had been the only foreign applicant—or, more important, the only foreign applicant able to complete both portions of the exam in fluent Chinese. “At that time, my written Chinese was very good because I had only recently completed my senior thesis,” explains Samuels, who first became immersed in the Mandarin-speaking world in the early 1990s when at 18 years of age he spent 12 months in China in a gap year before returning to the U.S. and entering college as a Chinese language major. “Language is a tool to go do something else, so I spent a lot of my early career in trying to figure out just what that ‘something else’ was,” remembers Samuels, whose stellar exam performance earned him a junior sales rep position with a Taiwanese medical device company. “While I was good at sales, I discovered that it wasn’t for me—it was too much of an emotional roller coaster,” observes Samuels, who would remain in Taiwan but change companies as he migrated from sales into a corporate development role.  The job switch was enlightening. Says Samuels: “It taught me that my financial toolbox was lacking. My response was to get myself into the most quant-oriented MBA program that I could.” Samuels returned stateside and nabbed a Wharton MBA before being recruited by Johnson & Johnson to fill a CFO role at a small Taiwanese operating company. “They don’t give CFO roles to fresh MBA grads for nothing. They had an operating company that was in a little bit of trouble in Taiwan, or so I figured out after starting the job,” confesses Samuels, whose career with J&J would last more than 10 years and span a variety of senior finance positions in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Next, Samuels stepped into a CFO role for a privately owned manufacturer of air compressors. Based in Taiwan, the company operated six plants in the United States and Europe. Finally, with more than 20 years abroad behind him, Samuels began considering CFO career opportunities back in the United States. “When you spend as much time as I did in the Far East, you risk getting pigeonholed,” says Samuels, who, as CFO of EXUMA Biotech, may have finally figured out what that “something else” is. Headquartered in West Palm Beach, Fla., EXUMA produces cancer-fighting therapies largely developed at research facilities in Shanghai and Shenzhen, China—a strategic advantage that Samuels seems uniquely experienced to leverage. - Jack Sweeney  Signup for our newsletter

Back in the early 2000s, Catherine Birkett found herself being pulled into confidential meetings where her company’s senior management was discussing restructuring plans with the company’s largest investor. The company—a fiber optics telecom firm known as Interoute—was not yet 6 years old, but its days appeared to be numbered as the company sought to weather the telecom industry’s historic collapse.   As Interoute’s top FP&A executive, Birkett knew from the ongoing business plan’s numbers that massive changes were urgently needed, and she as well as others were not optimistic about the restructuring options available to the company. In fact, Birkett recalls, she and many executives had to tamp down the feeling that “this was not going to end well.” From a career perspective, Birkett arguably had less at risk than the other more senior executives sitting ringside during the restructuring discussions. Not yet 30 years of age, she joined the discussions knowing perhaps that other more gainful career opportunities were available to her outside Interoute’s four walls. Nonetheless, she had been given a seat at the meetings out of recognition of not just her ability to recite numbers but also her grasp of the intellectual property that governed the numbers.  “I owned the business plan,” Birkett explains.   In the end, the company’s multiyear restructuring allowed Interoute to find a new path to growth while operating under a new management team—one that included the 32-year-old Birkett as CFO. “I was thrown into the deep end as a finance leader—I basically had to learn on the job,” recalls Birkett, who entered Interoute’s CFO office in 2003 and went on to serve in the role for the next 15 years.   “We managed to transform the company,” says Birkett. Along the way, Interoute marched in step with a new private equity firm owner and closed a string acquisitions. Ultimately, the company was sold to GTT Communications in 2018 for $2.3 billion. “Being promoted so young, I definitely made mistakes,” admits Birkett, who credits her CEO and other members of senior management for standing behind her as she ran at breakneck speed to acquire the skills necessary to manage a quickly expanding finance team. –Jack Sweeney

It's the type of business restructuring capable of striking envy in the hearts of many a company board member—and particularly those known to favor one oft-repeated bit of business wisdom: Never waste a recession. At food ingredient maker Ingredion, where the recession’s bite is directly linked to the eating habits of consumers, a 2-year-old restructuring strategy dubbed “Cost Smart” has begun to deliver on its cost savings promises. In fact, last month, the maker of sweeteners and starches announced plans to increase its Cost Smart run-rate savings target from $150M annually to $170M—a $20M uptick that led certain analysts to believe now might be the right time for the food giant to step on Cost Smart’s accelerator. Not so fast, says Ingredion CFO Jim Gray, who reports that he already likes what he’s seeing in Ingredion’s rearview mirror. The opportunity around remote work environments and online collaboration has accelerated toward us,” observes Gray, who over the past 2 years has replaced the dated architecture of Ingredion’s finance function with a new shared services model and a mandate for greater online collaboration. The restructuring involved the relocation of 107 finance and accounting employees to shared services location in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Guadalajara, Mexico. The movement of this part of Ingredion’s workforce is expected to be followed by that of a number of other functional areas within the company. “This was not about lowering head count—it is about holistically redesigning processes to have a lasting impact on cost,” says Gray, who last month—along with Ingredion CEO Jim Zallie—briefed investors and analysts on COVID-19’s impact on the business. After having experienced a significant drop in demand for different ingredients in April and May, advised Zallie, the company had seen “sequential improvements” in June and July as shelter-in-place restrictions had eased. These improvements were more than likely first detected by a member of Gray’s finance team, which had been working to better expose how the pandemic is altering the buying patterns of Ingredion customers. “With the pandemic, there has been a change in consumer behavior that’s impacting the pull of our customer products. Then you also have the effects of a recession, in which there is less personal income, so this changes how they shop in grocery stores and how often they dine out,” comments Gray, who credits the company’s widening use of technology for helping to track and monitor customer activities.

The son of two doctors, Tom Fencl recalls that while growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, to him a free market economy was more “an intellectual curiosity” than a possible career destination. “When the Berlin Wall came down, I was midway through high school—it was a very formative experience,” remembers Fencl, who says that the historic happening suddenly released “a market economy spirit.” After studying at Prague’s University of Economics, Fencl says, he was “drawn to the big financial centers” and worked in London for 2 years at Stern Stuart & Co. as a consultant before heading to the University of Michigan for an MBA. “From a university standpoint, the University of Michigan may not be the most obvious place for a European to go—but they found me more than I found them,” explains Fencl, who notes that years earlier in Prague he had met students from the University of Michigan who were involved in a study of post-communist economies. “They were virtually the first MBA students that I had ever met,” he observes. From Michigan, he went directly to New York and Wall Street, where roughly 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall Czech-born and -raised Fencl became an investment banker. “I worked as sort of a traditional investment banker, meaning that I covered everything from capital market transactions to M&As,” says Fencl, who worked for Salomon Smith Barney (later acquired by Citigroup) and Bank of America. “I left Wall Street just before the 2008 meltdown,” he reports. “That was some lucky timing. I moved back to my home country, the Czech Republic, with my newborn and my wife, and there I joined a private equity boutique,” explains Fencl, who over the next 10 years migrated from what he describes as “transaction-driven” finance roles to more traditional CFO posts. “I joined Pricefx in Prague—which was its largest office and where a lot of the banking office functions are,” says Fencl, who was named CFO of the company in 2017 and subsequently relocated with his family back to the U.S.—a market that Pricefx now views as a primary source of future growth. –Jack Sweeney Fencl: To remind your listeners, we're a SaaS company.  So that is a subset of the industry where there's one metric above all, which is ARR, annual recurring revenue, and more specifically the growth of ARR. And then you rank companies based on where they are. For the past few years, we've been somewhere around 80% year over year. So that's a pretty decent clip. Now, you ask what did I change since I arrived? I didn't have to introduce that. They were told already by the very first investors, "You need to watch your ARR growth." The thing that I had to work on doing, and it is obviously a cultural shift, is understanding that particularly when you're using other people's money, where you're not regulated by, do I have the cash or not ... Now, you have a lot of cash, but the right question is how are you deploying it? How efficiently are you using that capital? So, the metric that I had to work and make sure that the organization understand is payback, customer acquisition cost payback. So understanding how the growth ... How much did I have to spend to get that growth? And that of course is something that then leads to further analysis because you break down the metrics into its components. And that's something where you can't just buy the growth, right? You have to have a certain level of patience. Well, for us, we mentioned before that we just finished fundraising. So we have plenty of cash to give us the, what they say, runway; meaning, we don't have to worry immediately on the short-term of funding the business. But conversely, we need to deploy that capital and, what we say, that's to scale up. And as I was saying before about it's not just growth, but how efficiently it grows. So I guess the biggest priority is make sure that we deployed efficiently, that we do achieve the growth, but we do it in a way that will satisfy sort of the requirements of the return on capital. And to do that, one of the key areas of our focus today is work with data. There's obviously a lot of data in the business, but not all of it is structured perfectly. And not all of it is organized in the right way. So we're currently spending a lot of effort on making sure that we clean that up and that we, going forward, make the decisions based on data. Data-driven decision-making is a big priority internally.

Members of Siemens USA’s finance team would probably not be surprised to learn that when their CFO, Marsha Smith, is asked to reveal the experiences that prepared her for a finance leadership role, the ones that she relates most often originate from being part of a team. Such was the case in 2004, when she had been assigned to a Siemens joint venture as a commercial project manager. “I’ll never forget: It was my first week on the job, and the project manager came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Marsha, we need to ask for a change order on this one, so write a letter to the customer,’” comments Smith, who recalls thinking at the time: “I know how to use spreadsheets, I perform calculations—but I don’t know how to word this letter.”   Later, Smith says, she reached out for guidance from the technical team, followed by the legal team, before sitting down and writing a letter to the customer. Very often, the customer relationship would involve multiple partners and payment schemes, she explains. “This was the beginning of my external-facing experience,” comments Smith, who at different times during her career has found herself seated at conference tables flanked by dozens of customer executives and their attorneys. Says Smith: “I’ll never forget when at a certain meeting I asked a question and one of the managers asked: ‘And who are you?’”    From her early customer-facing experiences on forward, Smith’s business mind-set has become largely influenced by teams.    “Everybody has to work together because everybody has a piece of the puzzle and we must make sure that we’re collectively doing the right thing for the customer,” says Smith, who believes that teams can also help to bring clarity to each individual’s contribution. “You see who goes the extra mile,” she says. –Jack Sweeney SUBSCRIBE

The Berlin headquarters of software developer Contentful occupies an old brick warehouse with heavy metal doors and broad functional corridors and spaces native to its industrial past. Standing six stories high, the structure once accommodated its worker population with a miniature kitchen on every floor, a favorite employee perk perhaps first introduced by a coffee-loving tenant.    Still, not everyone at Contentful loves coffee—or at least its CFO, Markus Harder, doesn’t. “My secret is that I hate coffee—I just don’t like it,” says Harder, who shortly after his arrival at the firm put in motion a mandate to remove the small kitchens. “It was arguably one of my biggest career gambles,” says Harder, as he captures our attention and leads us to wonder why a finance leader would make a point of championing such a seemingly misguided decree. Of course, Harder’s actions are only Part I of a two-part tale. The second part involves the creation of what he dubs “a central watering hole” complete with a coffee machine worthy of Berlin’s trendiest “third-wave” coffee shops. “With all of these floors and their little coffee machines, we were never seeing each other—we never talked to each other,” explains Harder, who reports that Contentful hired a champion barista for a 2-week period to teach every employee how to properly use the new machine to render an excellent coffee. Says Harder: “Whatever you want to drink—a coffee, a latte, an espresso—you’ll find that there’s always somebody there who has been to the training or someone in line who is ready to train somebody else.” According to Harder, skeptics of the original mandate have largely been won over, but outsiders still find the coffee-making arrangement hard to imagine. “Three hundred people, just one coffee machine—how does that work?” asks Harder, echoing the thoughts of coffee drinkers beyond Contentful’s four walls. “Well, actually, it works. And it’s about the line. It’s a social experience, and one that I celebrate each morning,” remarks Harder, who says that on any given morning he’ll spend a minimum of an hour at the café. Says Harder: “We’re all in the open. I’m available. Ask me something.” –Jack Sweeney   Harder: We're in the fortunate, but also tricky situation that historically we've doubled or more than doubled revenue over basically every year of our history. And that brings challenges toward pipeline generation. Because if you want to double the revenue again, you need to have a massively bigger pipeline. So we are doing more with existing customers. Our existing customers have certain requirements that today we can't fulfill. So how do we get them to be successful in all those things they want to do? We have just relaunched our partner program.  So oftentimes Contentful gets implemented through a large partner who is either specialized in building web presences, or building workflows for the customer without touching any internal user interfaces and so forth. So you can think of the Accenture's and Capgemini's of this world, or Razorfish or ... There are certain marketing agencies that use Contentful. So you were trying to work more with partners, enable them to be more educated with how to best implement Contentful. We're investing a lot in enablement and training and coaching. So the learning materials about Contentful are out there are heavily downloaded. We have a Contentful certification. So if you are a developer, you can actually graduate with a Contentful diploma. And we try to be industry agnostic, such that our solution really works for a broad variety of customers though. Yeah. So I continue to invest in the team. I continue to invest in automation and systems. I'm actually accelerating hiring at this point and I'm getting Contentful ready for being a public company in a couple of years. That is sort of a North star. That doesn't mean that we will go public, but a North star that I'm instilling in my team because the quality of financials, the quality of insights, the quality of processes I want to see us have is that of a public company. - Jack Sweeney SUBSCRIBE

It was a little over 40 years ago when Steve Young first joined what would become Duke Energy, the giant electric power holding company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Not only has it been a long tenure, but also it is the only post-college job that I’ve ever had,” says Young, who first roamed the energy giant’s corridors as a finance assistant. In the years that followed, Young says, he became involved in various finance-related projects as different executives sought him out because he had become recognized as a hard worker. One such senior executive, who sat inside Duke’s rates and regulatory affairs realm, approached Young about a staff position in the department. “It was a smaller group and outside of finance, but from what I could see, the group intersected with the lifeblood of the company’s profitability and revenue streams and pricing,” explains Young, who accepted the position and in short order acquired the regulatory executive as a dedicated mentor. Says Young: “This person was a tough, hardnosed executive who had a reputation for being that way.” Years later, when the executive retired, Young advanced to his mentor’s position, a promotion that firmly planted him inside Duke’s executive ranks. Along the way, Young’s regulatory focus and experience afforded him a keen sense of how the changing legal landscape would alter the industry in the years ahead. “I was pulled into that process,” recalls Young, who says that back in the mid-1990s, he enjoyed a ringside seat as Duke pursued and acquired one of its early M&A targets, PanEnergy. “Mergers were rare in the utility industry back then, and certain laws had to be repealed—they were, and other mergers have since occurred,” explains Young, who in the decades that followed influenced and championed a string of transactions that would reshape Duke’s business over time. “I found it a fascinating challenge to pull the pieces apart, put the new pieces back together, and come up with a cohesive business plan that was understandable to the SEC, regulators, and shareholders,” remarks Young, who would find himself at the center of Duke’s M&A activities in the mid-2000s, a period during which Duke sold off its international and merchant businesses and merged with energy company Cinergy of Cincinnati, OH. “All of this happened within 2 years,” says Young, who advanced into a number of organizational CFO roles during that period and was named senior vice president and controller for Duke Energy in 2006. He would be named CFO and executive vice president in 2013, following the energy company’s 2012 merger with Progress Energy—yet one more transaction along Young’s career path. – Jack Sweeney SUBSCRIBE

Among the more transformative chapters of Matt Briers’s finance career was his 3-year stint monitoring and forecasting margin performance inside Google’s UK operations. “The core role was really to understand what was happening in the organization from a revenue and margin performance perspective and then help to operate the organization so that it could better drive that revenue,” explains Briers, who says that his responsibilities included an unyielding effort to expose new drivers of Google revenue “even down to keyword searches.” “My role was to provide a hotline back to product in Mountain View,” says Briers, who notes that UK customers are known to be among the most advanced users of Google’s advertising offerings, outpacing users in the U.S. and other markets by as much as 3 years. The insights gleaned by Briers and his team would become an important strategic voice for both sales and finance at Google and allowed Briers to add an impressive FP&A chapter to a career that up until Google might have advanced in any number of directions. Still, his subsequent hire as CFO of TransferWise might have surprised certain finance career builders, given that Briers’s pre-Google career had largely involved consulting roles rather than traditional accounting or audit work. Today, Briers says, his consulting background has routinely informed his finance leadership as he helps TransferWise’s finance function to sharpen its customer focus and collaborate across the organization. Still, he admits that during his early days at TransferWise, his consulting past led him at times to too frequently focus on achieving “buy-in” across the organization. Eventually, he reports, “the two founders told me, ‘Stop trying to achieve consensus—make up your mind and get on with it!’” –Jack Sweeney Briers: In all my time in consulting, we spent a lot of time working with people driving mission statements, and I can't honestly tell you that I believed in it back then. But since joining TransferWise, it's kind of this slightly religious maniacal focus on mission, which runs deep, and it's pretty amazing. So my challenge is how do I help on this mission of pushing the product forward, such that we get faster, cheaper and easier, for a wide range of customers. The things I focus on:  Are we growing? Are we getting new users? Are they putting volume through TransferWise? We know we're being used and we know we're useful if customers are engaged. ... But when I say volume, the amount of money people are sending across borders,  I worry about those metrics. The second thing I worry about, is what's happening to price, so not just revenue, but price. Price times volume gives you revenue, but price isn't going down. Many CFOs might ask what is he talking about? Why does he worry about price and revenue going down? Surely you want to drive this up? Well, actually, no, because if we're going to be successful in the future, we know that we need to get cheaper over time. Because we believe it can be done and we believe it should be done and we can solve this problem of hidden fees. That's equal to $200 billion and it gets paid to banks. So I worry about price. - Jack Sweeney SUBSCRIBE

Jacqueline Purcell’s path to the CFO office began inside an Australian law firm where as a young attorney she was advising corporate clients and their bankers on how to best address some of the legal hurdles that their M&A deal-making might confront. At the time, her routine collaboration with different banking executives gave her a point of comparison to the seemingly less energetic legal world. “They seemed to be having a little more fun and a lot more impact on the outcomes,” she recalls. “This is what sparked my interest in moving into finance,” continues Purcell, who was soon headed to Stanford University for an MBA and then to New York, where she joined Morgan Stanley’s M&A practice. “I spent just over 8 years there focusing on a full spectrum of mergers and acquisitions transactions,” comments Purcell, who says that it was during those years of M&A deal-making that she grew to respect the CFO role and the executives who filled it. “CFOs were very often the ones in the driver’s seat for the deals, and they were just particularly influential,” notes Purcell, who realized that the CFOs across from whom she sat often applied deep operating experience to their decision-making. Determined to add an “operations” stripe to her sleeve, Purcell would exit Morgan Stanley in 2017 and return to Australia, where she would step into her first CFO role at Culture Amp, a workforce management company headquartered in Melbourne. – Jack Sweeney

Back in the early 1990s, Steven Springsteel nabbed an interview for a CFO role with a high-flying tech start-up. At the time, he was controller for Apple’s worldwide manufacturing operations, but the buzz surrounding the brash start-up intrigued him, and the young but accomplished executive shortly found himself waiting to be interviewed by the firm’s CEO. According to Springsteel, his interview aspirations quickly became somewhat tempered as he sat listening to a stream of expletives originating from the CEO’s office.  Within minutes, the CEO’s door swung open and several long-faced engineers beat a hasty retreat, to be followed by a smiling and gracious Steve Jobs extending a hand to Springsteel.      “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you! Can I get you something to drink? Are you hungry?” Springsteel remembers the legendary tech innovator saying before explaining the role that he had in mind for the CFO of NeXT, Inc. Recalling the interview, Springsteel says that he felt that he had just met with “the nicest, most charismatic guy that you would ever meet in your life.” Of course, Springsteel had reason to doubt first impressions, having for a number of years worked at Apple, where stories circulating about Jobs’s darker side were plentiful. What’s more, a book titled Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing (Scribner, 1993) had only recently been published, and Springsteel had made a point of reading it prior to his interview. According to Springsteel, the text relates the experience of an Apple employee who was hired by a very gracious Jobs only to experience his darker side a short time after joining the company. Springsteel says that Jobs’s evil twin was only one of several issues that led him to look for CFO roles elsewhere. In the end, he says, “I just didn’t believe in the business model.” –Jack Sweeney   Springsteel: First, let me start off by saying that with every management role that I take there are four key operating principles that I run by, and I explain those to the team right upfront. The first operating principle is, never say no without giving options. It's very easy, particularly in G&A roles, when someone comes to you with a proposal to say, "Well, you can't do that. "Sorry, Jack. I know you want to spend that money or structure the deal that way. We just can't do that." But you're not adding value when you do that. But, if you can now have that conversation with Jack, understand what's the business result he's trying to achieve, work with him on developing options, now you're adding value. So the first principle that I sell is, never say no without giving options. The second principle that I sell is, think in terms of the business. When someone comes and says, "Well, what happened that our expenses went up last quarter?" Let's say I have an answer of "Well, we had a large accrual for compensation." Well, that doesn't tell you anything. Give the business reason behind everything. Look behind the numbers to articulate the story of what happened that answers their question. The next two are open communication. My staff, we're going 200 miles an hour, but everybody knows what the other people, the other groups within my organization, are always doing. That helps because then you can leverage. And then very often, somebody will hear something that sales is thinking about a promotion that affects maybe some other groups within my team that they didn't know about it, and so that open communication is key. Then the last thing is, no surprises. Bad news does not get better with age. Let's get it out upfront. We don't like surprises. Give me an early head's up on things, and if I have an early head's up, then I can help you. Or other people on the team can help you get past this, and all of a sudden, what was the negative we can turn into a positive. So, I start off with those four key operating principles.

It was the type of role that any recent business school graduate could envy—not because of the position’s title (Chief of Staff) or how much it paid, but because of its proximity to management decision-making. The job is one that Bennett Theimann remembers well as he looks back on the days when he served as chief of staff for the president of Gruner + Jahr’s German magazine division. “It exposed me to that sort of very-high-level strategic thinking. We launched magazines, we sold magazines, we bought magazines,” says Theimann, who very often found himself finalizing some of the documents that Gruner + Jahr management ultimately used to brief its board. “My job was to help senior management translate their investment proposals, budget requests, or whatever they needed to get done, and very often they needed money,” explains Theimann, who adds that while the position was not officially a finance one, this early experience of being a “business case builder” later helped to propel him into a number of FP&A and senior business development roles. Theimann, who would step into his first CFO role in 2005, has now occupied the CFO office for several early-stage companies, the latest being Applicaster, a SaaS developer specializing in app development and content distribution. –Jack Sweeney 

It’s a story that Matt Hagel likes to share as he networks with fellow finance executives and accounting types. Back in 2017—only days after stepping into a finance leadership role at the online prepared meals company Freshly—Hagel was reviewing the company’s chart of accounts when he asked himself: “Why is Plant, Property, and Equipment (PPE) under Operating Expenses?” As he soon learned, this stalwart accounting acronym has long led a double life and is also used by various industries (notably healthcare and food prep) as a shorthand designation for Personal Protective Equipment. Three years later, the protective gear acronym is widely known from coast to coast—just like Freshly. In fact, since its PPE entry first drew Hagel’s consternation, Freshly has opened an East Coast kitchen and distribution center, an expansion that extended the firm’s geographic reach from 28 to 48 states and propelled its sales to nearly 10 times their early 2017 volumes. “I inherited a finance and accounting team of three, and now I have a team of 30,” comments Hagel, who located many of his new finance and accounting hires at the company’s three distribution centers, the newest of which opened in Arizona this past April. “From a cost accounting perspective, we have feet on the ground, so if any issues arise, our folks can quickly step onto the plant floor and determine the correct inventory number or provide whatever other information is needed,” says Hagel, who entered 2020 keen to sharpen his team’s focus on costs after years of marshaling resources and new plant capacity to accommodate growth. Then COVID arrived. There’s little doubt that the pandemic has been an accelerant on the trend of consumers turning to online for shopping experiences like Freshly that promise safety as well as convenience. (Such was the case for online car seller Vroom, which after record sales in March and April moved quickly to go public in June.) It’s enough to make you wonder whether Freshly management may be of a similar frame of mind. Reports Hagel: "Freshly is focused on building the best company possible, one that will be ready for the public markets or remain as a successful private company."  Perhaps momentarily escaping Hagel’s lines of sight is yet another option whereby Freshly is acquired by a giant inside the packaged goods space. Certainly, Hagel doesn’t have to look far when you consider that Nestlé is one of Freshly’s largest investors. To be sure, Nestlé’s move to acquire a minority interest in Freshly back in 2017 was somewhat out of character for the food giant that is generally known to swallow its quarry whole. At that time, Nestle was the lead investor in a $77 million round of funding. Just as the pandemic has accelerated the shift to online buying, so too has it appeared to draw Freshly and its big name investor ever more close. “This has been open-office at both ends. We have had a really good dialog that has helped us both to be successful,” comments Hagel. Back in March, Freshly engaged with Nestlé’s human resources team as it formulated its COVID response, which Hagel credits with having helped Freshly to avoid the mistakes made by other food industry players. For one thing, Freshly hired a number of health professionals to begin taking employee temperatures at every shift across its different locations. “The words ‘essential services’ weren’t even a term on March 9, and there was no way of knowing whether we would be shut down,” explains Hagel, who says that in the event of a state “lockdown,” Freshly has prepared printed laminated forms for each employee to use that would confirm their employment at Freshly. As the pandemic bore down on different U.S. geographies, Freshly issued a press release announcing that Freshly and Nestle would jointly be donating $500,000 to Meals on Wheels America. “What happened back in March was that there was a period of a few weeks when we had no new customers because there was so much demand by people who were already using our service,” explains Hagel, who adds that shelter-in-place ordinances quickly turned dinner clients into lunchtime customers. “People just needed more meals, and this transition to be more of a lunch solution is something that we never would have imagined happening this quickly,” Hagel observes.   Sign Up for Our Newsletter    

Inder Singh started off his professional life as an engineer, only to learn that the large engineering projects that he aspired to someday lead often faced as many financial obstacles as they did engineering challenges. So, Singh says, he went back to school and earned an MBA in finance, allowing him to redirect his career down a path populated with unique and imaginative financing deals to support engineering feats as well as business transformations. One of the more innovative financing projects that Singh has helped to champion came along in the 1990s, when he was working as a business development executive for AT&T Corp. It seems that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was looking to upgrade its telecommunications infrastructure—to the tune of $4 billion. “Other companies were just offering typical bank financing. In our case, we said, ‘Let’s do an oil barter agreement,’” explains Singh, who says that the proposal involved having Saudi Arabia supply $4 billion of oil to Chevron Corp., which then would pay $4 billion in cash to AT&T, which then would build Saudi Arabia a $4 billion telecommunications network. “If you just think outside the box a little bit, bring your engineering skills, and bring some financial skills and common sense, you’ll see what makes sense for three different parties. And guess what? We actually won the deal,” comments Singh, who notes that the fact that Saudi Arabia may not have demanded such an imaginative financing solution is not important. Says Singh: “The fact that we put it on the table made us stand apart.” And so it goes for Inder Singh, whose imaginative approach to financing deals over the years has routinely set him apart from his finance leadership peers. –Jack Sweeney

At the start of his finance career, Mark Sargent says, he could not picture himself working for a large, big-name corporation. He says that he was drawn instead to smaller companies, which he believed would be more accepting of “creative types” or those employees more prone to self-expression. In Sargent’s case, an accounting and finance job was Plan B, or a “safety” occupation in case his aspirations to become a rock musician didn’t pan out. Interestingly, it was Sargent’s deliberate avoidance of big business that undoubtedly allowed him to quickly garner some of the experiences that finance career builders long to add to their resumes. “The very first job that I got was really a perfect fit: It was a small paper-making company, and I quickly learned that they were 9 months away from an IPO,” recalls Sargent, who was hired as a cost accountant but quickly found himself reassigned to oversee the implementation of a new accounting system intended to add some muscle to the company’s post-IPO reporting regimen. This was the type of early career experience that later helped Sargent to open the door to more senior finance and accounting roles, such as the operations controller role he took on at Spectrian, a Sunnyvale, Calif., technology company. After years of serving government and aerospace industry customers, Spectrian, in the mid-1990s, moved to supply its cellular technology offerings to commercial customers in light of the growing infrastructure opportunities driven by cellular phone usage. Not unlike in Sargent’s first career chapter, Spectrian went public within months of his arrival, increasing the demand for improved visibility into the numbers and challenging the finance team to routinely produce metrics that could help management to better set performance expectations. “I really consider it my inflection point in becoming a CFO and a leader,” explains Sargent, who adds that it was his breadth of visibility across the company and his awareness of being part of a team of highly skilled finance professionals that whetted his appetite for more and turned his finance career into Plan A. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: You first arrived at EPAM in 2017, can you tell us what was top of mind as you entered the office? What were some of your early priorities?  Peterson: I joined a company that was growing rapidly, that's got pretty solid profitability in it, a pretty capable finance organization. You kind of look under the hood, I guess, and what you're trying to do is make improvements without breaking anything. One of the things that happened is, the company had grown really quickly. And I think over a period of time sometimes you'll under invest in certain functions and I think that was probably the case with finance. I started by making some strategic hires, so strengthen the external reporting, the controllership and the tax schemes. And then from a reorganization standpoint, I've done a lot of things, but much of my career has been in FP&A, so I work with a head of FP&A who already had some ideas. When we organized the FP&A group, to not only support corporate leadership decisions, but to be able to take information, decision making down to the BU level and be more supportive of the different business units while of course continuing to support the senior leadership. Then I would say one other focus I introduced and not only with the FP&A team, but with the broader finance organization is to really focus on being more future or forward looking. I introduced a regular cadence around forecasting and processes that I guess would allow us to identify problems or bumps in the road. And the idea was it would give us enough time then to do something about it or if we didn't do anything, we couldn't do anything about it, at least we knew what was coming. That's really probably what I brought to the company in maybe my first year here.

Back in 2004, on the very day that Ormat Technologies, Inc., began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Eyal Hen began working in as an assistant controller for the geothermal energy company in Israel. The transition to being a public company opened a transformative chapter not only for Ormat but also for Hen, who—after having been with the firm for only a few short weeks—agreed to relocate to company’s new Reno, Nevada, headquarters. “It was a very small office at that time, with only seven people,” recalls Hen, who would for the next 11 years help to build out a U.S. finance team while accruing growing worldwide responsibilities for Ormat’s electricity-segment. Along the way, Hen says, a number of unforeseen developments helped to advance Ormat’s steady U.S. expansion, including the U.S. government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. “Ormat benefited from the response after it received $600 million in cash grants to build renewable energy power plants,” explains Hen, while citing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which stipulated that energy companies be offered government grants instead of tax credits. “This was an enlightening moment for me, as it demonstrated how much impact a government can have when a company is prepared,” remarks Hen, who says that Ormat went on to build renewable energy plants in rural parts of Nevada and southern California. After serving several years as a vice president of finance, Hen would leave Ormat and step into the CFO office for the first time at a life sciences company before being named finance chief for Rekor Systems. –Jack Sweeney

Filter: When we were talking at the executive staff level, it's from a mindset of accelerating around the curve. And so I think our CEO has really coined that phrase, but that's the lens that we're looking through and the question we're asking is what investments can we make now that will allow us not only to come out of this better, but accelerate around the curve. And allow us when we have changes in the macro environment to be tremendously successful.  

When Envoy CFO Sinohe Terrero is asked about his career chapter at Etsy, the online marketplace founded in 2005 and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, he begins by explaining how back in 2008 Etsy’s finance function was really just a loose grouping of tools and people. “I'll never forget that I once had to go meet the bookkeeper, and he was like in Coney Island,” explains Terrero, who says that the financial mind-set at Etsy during its early days was that data trumps accounting—or, to put it another way, that data was strategic to the business and therefore should be kept in-house, whereas accounting could be outsourced to Coney Island or wherever. “Etsy was a marketplace, so the transactions occurred in big volumes, but we didn't send invoices. We didn't really have AR. Everything is paid by credit card on the Web,” points out Terrero, who quickly became tasked with establishing more traditional processes in preparation for bringing the accounting function back in-house. “Because of the nature of Etsy’s business, the accounting function initially really didn't have to grow as much as the data function,” says Terrero, who notes that even as Etsy’s finance department evolved into a full-capacity function, the data mind-set still loomed large. Says Terrero: “Understanding the transactions of the business on the data side was the primary responsibility.” Later, Terrero recalls, it was his focus on data and the growing volume of Etsy transactions that led him to back a strategy that not everyone was convinced was a good idea. According to Terrero, there was debate inside Etsy over whether the company should be charging fees on payments received by sellers inside the marketplace. At the time, certain Etsy executives believed that the firm’s mission should simply be to enable the sellers to sell more, which would then result in more transactions. “We argued that the fees could be a revenue source and that, given the volumes we were seeing, the strategy could be game-changing for the company over the long term,” remarks Terrero, who says that he was joined by a number of influential Etsy executives on the winning side of this debate. Says Terrero: “When you look at the percentage of revenue that these fees now represent for Etsy, you see that they’re actually pretty sizable.” - Jack Sweeney  Sign Up for our Newsletter

CFOTL: Having only stepped in to the CFO office in April, what is the vision you have for the role of CFO?  Hansen: I’m really keen on having Planful be a world class FP&A organization and definitely be one of the best users of the Planful platform. I think that’s important for us as an organization to eat our own cooking so to speak. On the second initiative of covering the basics, particularly in times like these where there’s high level of uncertainty, we need to be able to iterate on company plans and department plans. We need to be able to adjust budgets and investments and offer forecasts that illuminate some of the potential paths forward. So I’m talking about basic competencies here like a direct method cashflow forecast that we really don’t want to mess up. So that’s what I meant by make sure we’re proficient in covering the basics. And then finally accelerating growth. I really want to begin with our end in mind and work backwards from there to uncover the activities that are critical for us to do over the next couple quarters. And maybe if I gave an example there, what actions would we need to consider to improve our customer life cycle or our customer experience that will ensure our customers are getting the optimal value from our platform so that we have low customer churn and a very strong platform to grow from. …I believe part of the job of being a finance leader is to elevate the financial IQ of the entire organization. And I think we’re seeing the role of the CFO in particular and the finance organization at large expand and change to meet that challenge. And I think that the old style perception of finance as a service desk is going away and transitioning more towards a strategic advisor role for the entire organization. And so the ability to have business users in marketing, and in all corners of the business have access to their budgets, to their plans, to the information they need to make their decisions and be a part of the elevation, we’ve seen that pay dividends.

When veteran CFO Ivor Macleod first contemplated joining an early-stage pharma company, the condition  known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was not appearing in nightly news headlines and was yet to be ranked as the  number one cause of death among COVID-19 patients. Nevertheless, ARDS captured his attention—or rather, Athersys did.  The Cleveland, Ohio–based company, with fewer than 100 employees, met one of Macleod’s foremost criteria in that the company was  focused on the area of medicine known as “critical care”—a space that Macleod characterizes as having  “high unmet medical needs.” “It was the science that attracted me and not necessarily the capital structure,” explains Macleod, when asked whether he may have preferred to join a privately held firm instead of a public one. As the former CFO of F. Hoffmann–La Roche, Inc., North America, and vice president of finance for Merck Research Labs, Macleod knows better than most the risks being taken and the high rate of failure when it comes to introducing new medications. “You take big swings at big diseases, and you are not always going to be successful. So you have to be prepared for failure,” explains Macleod, who says that he came to view “the job” of finance leadership in pharma as being one of enablement. Says Macleod: “I didn’t want scientists to be worrying about resources. I would take care of that. I had to make certain that they had all of what they needed to continue on their path.” Last January, when he entered Athersys’s CFO office for the first time, he would have only a mere few weeks to work alongside his new colleagues before the spread of COVID-19 within the U.S. led management to encourage employees to work from home. Suddenly, as the disease spread, ARDS began to garner headlines, and last spring, within a span of 6 weeks, Athersys was granted FDA approval for a COVID-induced ARDS study and subsequently began populating designated sites with patients.    “There is no known treatment for ARDS,” comments Macleod, who appears to be savoring his role as an enabler of science now more than ever. –Jack Sweeney Subscribe

It was October 2019. Red Hat, Inc., was preparing to submit its latest quarterly results to its new parent, IBM Corp., and Laurie Krebs had just been named Red Hat software’s new CFO. As a senior vice president of finance for Red Hat, Krebs had worked closely with the former CFO and more or less assumed that the acquiring company would likely prefer to fill C-suite spots from its “home team” talent bench of senior executives. In fact, Krebs says that during the course of her career she had never truly aspired to be a CFO: “I often wondered who would want all of that responsibility, especially after Sarbanes-Oxley came in. And then, at the time, I realized that IBM had just acquired us for $34 billion and that it was going to be up to us to deliver the results that were needed.”   Krebs says that the finance team at Red Hat, like many executive teams within newly acquired companies, had experienced some attrition and was perhaps not as highly functioning as it had been prior to its acquisition.   As the first quarterly close for the newly acquired Red Hat approached, Krebs sought to reassure her CEO that she would continue to lead the team. “I’ll help you out until you get a legit CFO,” Krebs recalls saying—to which her CEO replied: “No, no, no—we want you to be it.” The CEO then reassured Krebs that it had been a unanimous opinion across Red Hat’s and IBM’s leadership teams that she should become Red Hat’s next CFO. Still, the pressure was on, and Krebs had to not only deliver the company’s first post-acquisition quarterly results but also activate the collaborative processes required to satisfy a giant parent company.   “I did what I always do. I surrounded myself with the right talent and strong skillsets and created a team out of it,” comments Krebs, who says that her team today includes a seasoned “IBM finance partner” now tasked as sort of a go-between and translator for Red Hat and its parent. Echoing the executive’s words, Krebs relays his guidance: “Here are the deliverables that IBM’s looking for. Here’s why they look for them. When they ask for this, this is typically what CFO’s look for.” Krebs adds: “He has been what I call a ‘gift’ on our team." - Jack Sweeney  SUBSCRIBE

When Ray Carpenter retraces his steps to the CFO office at Xandr—an analytics and advertising company formed by AT&T’s WarnerMedia—he singles out two earlier roles as having been outside AT&T’s traditional finance track. “I actually got kicked out of finance for one role,” says Carpenter, referring to a stint as a marketer inside a start-up launched by AT&T’s emerging business markets group. “We did things that were uniquely different from what AT&T typically does when it launches a new business,” continues Carpenter, who in addition to marketing was responsible for the start-up’s pricing strategy.    Next, Carpenter joined AT&T’s mergers integration group, where he helped to lead integration planning efforts for different corporate functions, a role that made him keenly aware of the integration challenges such future acquisitions as DirectTV would present. From his stint in the mergers group, Carpenter stepped back inside AT&T’s more traditional finance and accounting ranks and was soon named CFO of its Entertainment and Internet Services division. “It wasn’t a forgone conclusion and still never is. AT&T has a habit of moving people around,” explains Carpenter, who mentions a number of different functional areas recently led by executives who in the past had held traditional finance roles. Says Carpenter: “I always knew that I’d be close to numbers, data, and analytics, and I felt that this would typically put me in the finance camp, but I wasn’t surprised when other opportunities surfaced.” –Jack Sweeney

Not unlike the careers of his finance leader peers, the finance career of Dave Jones, CFO of online car seller Vroom, has been shaped and influenced by economic crises of the past two decades. Last month, as the initial shock of the coronavirus waned and the stock market rallied back, Vroom moved quickly to go public. Explains Jones: “We consulted with our board and our investors and decided that the time was right.” After pricing its IPO shares at $22, Vroom saw their value more than double on their first day of trading. This was not the first time that Jones had discovered a window of opportunity in less-than-friendly economic times. Back in 2002, he had found himself in a tight spot while serving as a senior manager for Andersen, the historic accounting house that collapsed in the wake of the Enron scandal of the early 2000s. “The view at the beginning of crisis was that there was no way that Andersen would be taken down. For me, the lesson became to never say ‘never,’” says Jones, who adroitly stepped from the ashes of the once esteemed accounting house into a financial reporting role at Penske Automotive Group, where he entered the CFO office roughly 8 years later, in 2011. “I think that Penske was a $2 billion or $3 billion business when I first got there, and it was an $18 billion business when I left,” recalls Jones, who prior to entering the CFO office at Penske in 2011 had served as CFO of Penske’s European operations and consequently weathered yet another economic storm.  Back in 2008, Penske CEO Roger Penske had described the subprime mortgage crisis as “one of the most challenging periods on record in the automotive industry.” The automotive company would post its first quarterly loss in a decade and painful personnel cuts followed, but for future finance leader Jones, along with professional scar tissue would come valuable lessons for the future. - Jack Sweeney   Sign up for our newsletter

Dennis McGrath was only recently married and a new home owner when he was invited to a Phillies game by the CFO of AC Manufacturing. At the time, McGrath was working for Andersen as an auditor of a roster of growing companies, among which AC—a maker of industrial air-conditioning units—was perhaps not the most glamorous. “At the end of the night, the CFO told me that he wanted to hire me and would pay me a lot more than I was then making,” recalls McGrath, who doesn’t hesitate to reveal what allowed AC’s offer to trump all other opportunities. Says McGrath: “I went for the money.” However, what distinguished McGrath’s AC career chapter was neither compensation nor, for that matter, a lengthy tenure (McGrath was controller for 22 months). Adds McGrath: “It was not too long before the owner decided that he was going to sell the company and had a private equity group come in.”   Still in his mid-20s, McGrath took a seat across the table from a seasoned group of private equity executives. “For me, my career has just kind of been perpetuated from there in terms of deal-making,” explains McGrath, who has arguably occupied “the seat” from that day forward, guaranteeing  a CFO career chock full of M&A deal-making.  –Jack Sweeney

When asked to share a few of the experiences that he feels prepared him for a CFO role, Ashim Gupta recalls what he characterizes as a significant accounting problem. However, it was not the nature of the accounting snag that Gupta wants us to know about but instead how his initial response to the problem was somewhat clumsy and ineffective. The event occurred more than 10 years into his finance career and did not lengthen the path to his next promotion because he had only just arrived in a new role as a divisional CFO for GE Water, a General Electric Corp. operating unit specializing in water processing solutions. Gupta remembers the accounting problem as being “the first thing to pass across my desk.” Realizing the gravity of the challenge, Gupta picked up the phone and called the more senior finance leader who was responsible for a wide swath of GE businesses, including Gupta’s group. “I was nervous about it, and I did not articulate the issue in the way that I should have. I didn’t really treat it as a business issue. I almost treated it with some amount of fear,” explains Gupta, who says that the uncomfortable phone call later led him to reach out to a mentor. “He said to me, ‘Your job is to help the business face reality,’” recalls Gupta, remembering the words of his mentor. In short, the mentor told him that the senior finance leader wanted facts and not fear. “I had to learn through trial by fire, and I failed the first time,” admits Gupta, who believes that finance executives must be keenly aware of the facts when delivering bad news and seek to expose possible avenues to where a solution can potentially take root. Says Gupta: “You have to demonstrate that you are now a partner in navigating through whatever the problem may be.”

In the mid-1990s, when Jeff Epstein was busy satisfying the M&A appetites of media clients for First Boston, one of his smaller, but more boisterous clients asked him to join the firm as its CFO.   “It was the type of situation where if they had gone to a recruiter, I would never have made the resume cut because I had never been a CFO and I had never even worked for a CFO,” explains Epstein, who was 32 when he entered the lively entrepreneurial realm known as King World Productions. A one-time family-owned company, King World had seen its stature grow inside New York’s competitive media landscape as the firm began producing  giant hit TV shows such as Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and The Oprah Winfrey Show.  “It was actually a small company with only about 300 employees, but they had three of the highest-rated, most profitable shows on television, with about $300 million of revenue and $60 million of operating income,” recalls Epstein, who would go on to add consecutive CFO career chapters at DoubleClick, Nielsen (Media Measurement), and Oracle Corp., a mix that fortified his footing in both the tech and media worlds—but also revealed little preference when it came to company size. “King World had been a family business that had only recently become a New York Stock Exchange company when I joined them, so I had to put in place some basic procedures, but Oracle had been around for many years and already had very sophisticated processes,” notes Epstein, who today exudes as much enthusiasm for Oracle’s approach to simplifying and standardizing its internal processes as he does for the entrepreneurial instincts of King World chairman Roger King. “Three minutes from when an idea came out of my mouth, Roger King would have picked up the phone and be pitching our largest customer, ” says Epstein, whose CFO tenure there lasted 6 years—a span of time during which King World would triple its value and ultimately end up being sold to CBS Corp. It was following the sale of King World, that Epstein would open the career chapter that permitted his CFO career  to grow beyond a single industry.      “DoubleClick was an early Internet advertising technology company and wanted a CFO from either media or technology, so I had the media experience part,” comments Epstein. Today, as operating partner for Bessemer Venture Partners of Menlo Park, Calif., Epstein marvels at the continued evolution of the two industries that shaped his CFO career: “Two years ago, global Internet advertising surpassed global television advertising revenues to become the biggest media opportunity in the world—so if you’re around long enough, you see some incredible things.”   Sign Up for our Newsletter  

When asked what led him to open his latest career chapter as CFO of Biofourmis, Matt Borowiecki quickly mentions the 2018 sale of MassMutual Asia Ltd. to Yunfeng FG. After helping to piece together a string of strategic plays for MassMutual, Borowiecki was instrumental in effecting the Yunfeng FG deal, which was a standout for him personally as well as one that many industry analysts at the time deemed transformational for company. Having helped to spearhead the transaction, Borowiecki was subsequently asked to relocate to Hong Kong and lead international strategy and corporate development for the company. With his deal-making realm vastly expanded, Borowiecki might have been expected to rocket down MassMutual’s transformational M&A track for several more years.    However, the move to Hong Kong challenged him in ways that he had not necessarily anticipated. Seeking to discover new strategies for MassMutual to extend its reach in the region, Borowiecki frequently found himself in meetings with local Hong Kong venture capitalists and private equity firms. “I really started to understand the power of data science and how insuretech, fintech, and healthtech really were transforming,” explains Borowiecki, who found his career ambitions evolving and coalescing around the broader notion of making an impact on industries at large. Knowing that his M&A experience would serve him well inside the start-up realm, he soon saw a new career chapter come into focus. “Quite candidly, the exposure that I had to very different consumer patterns and thinking about health and wealth in different ways piqued my interest in the Biofourmis platform,” explains Borowiecki, who adds that the basic premise of Biofourmis is to enable patients to compare their own physiological signals to metadata from a vastly larger population pool in real time. Says Borowiecki: “We call them ‘Biovitals’—they’re effectively a real-time picture designed to help clinicians to predict and prevent serious medical events. For example, heart failure is one of our focuses.” It seems that as one career chapter closed for Borowiecki, yet another opened. –Jack Sweeney

Early in his finance career, Anders Fohlin discovered that he could ratchet up his capacity to consume information and problem-solve simply by drawing pictures. However, what had originated more as a personal observation would eventually evolve to something more as he discovered that his visuals could serve others.   “I started to regularly draw processes on white boards and paper to make things very visual for everybody and help others to get the full picture,” explains Fohlin, whose knack for creating visuals and goal of making things more visible “for everybody” led him to begin viewing routine meetings as opportunities for visualization. Says Fohlin: “I found that process maps and gathering people in the same room was a really good way to spark energy and collaboration and have people feel that they were important and doing something more than just shoveling coal.”    Fohlin adds that his early efforts to create greater collaboration and inclusion ended up opening the door for him to various senior finance roles and eventually led him to the CFO office at software developer Medius. Among the guiding principles that Fohlin says have influenced his leadership style and approach over time is the notion of transparency. Ten years ago, while a senior finance executive at NASDAQ, he participated in a series of meetings to discuss the adoption of an activity-based costing model. “We would sit around the table and go product by product to explore ways in which we could improve,” he recalls, “and this was done with representatives from all of the different functions.” Part of the approach involved sharing numbers more widely across the organization and downward to the workforce at large. “If each employee can see the overall picture and what aligns their daily activities with the strategy and vision of the company, then they make better decisions,” explains Fohlin, who adds that today—as a CFO—he’s still drawing pictures. –Jack Sweeney

Back in the mid-1990s, David Wells was a financial analyst for a Bay Area supply chain management company that boasted an impressive list of Silicon Valley marquee customers. Counted among their clients was a large chip maker whose customer relationship upkeep had over time become Wells’s responsibility. Because this was a coveted customer, Wells always sought to be highly responsive to any of the chip maker’s requests for information, but he increasingly found his company’s pricing model out of step with the customer’s needs. “There was a lot of confusion and a lot frustration over what the prices for our services and products should be. Basically, we needed a much more sophisticated pricing model that the customer would accept,” recalls Wells. Faced with growing customer unrest, Wells and a colleague created a new pricing model that was carefully tailored for the chip maker’s business. Says Wells: “It was very intricate and more specific, but it was modeled exactly the way the customer saw their business.” The customer quickly gave the new model a thumbs-up, and all was well—until roughly 4 months later, when Wells realized that the new model was about to deliver to his company a windfall that would generate 4 to 5 months of revenue within only 6 weeks. “When I saw what was happening, I went to the customer and said, ‘Listen, this model that we built … there’s kind of a flaw in it. It’s a flaw in our favor, but we didn’t intend for this to happen and we don’t want you to view us as being unethical,’” recalls Wells. To Wells’s surprise, the chip maker was not concerned about the imminent financial swell of its purchases. It was instead highly pleased to have had a model created specifically with its needs and requirements in mind.   “What this taught me was that as a CFO you’ve got to understand the customer and you’ve got to understand your business,” explains Wells, who believes that finance chiefs must first have visibility into customer engagements to better understand the inner workings of relationships with them.    He continues: “If you can distill it down into tools that will then quantify the activity, then as CFO you’ll be in perfect shape to make the right decisions both for the customer and for your company.” –Jack Sweeney

Jon Nguyen got his first taste of M&A-related work in the early to mid-2000s when he served as the finance partner for the auto lending unit of HSBC. “In consumer lending, you end up doing a lot of portfolio purchases rather than equity ones, but I have become more involved in the execution of deals over the past 8 years,” says Nguyen, who, distinguishes the past 8 years as a standout chapter -one that has allowed him to certify his M&A credentials and enter the CFO office at Kyriba. Turn back the clock 8 years, and Nguyen is vice president of finance for Mitchell International, a $600 million software and service business. As the company’s FP&A leader, Nguyen was tasked with supplying key insights to management decision-making behind the sale of Mitchell to KKR in 2013. Meanwhile, 5 years later, Nguyen was once more in the M&A diligence mix when KKR sold Mitchell to Stone Point Capital. Along the way, Nguyen’s M&A resume quickly expanded. “At Mitchell, we were very acquisitive, and during my tenure there, we acquired 12 to 15 companies,” says Nguyen, who frequently became charged with leading the integration of Mitchell’s latest bounty. In mid-2018, following the sale of Mitchell to Stone Point, Nguyen joined cloud treasury and finance solutions company Kyriba as senior vice president of FP&A. Roughly a year later, he was named Kyriba’s CFO—a development that came on the heels of Kyriba’s sale to private equity firm BridgePoint. There’s little question that Nguyen’s latest career chapter has a familiar ring to it and is perhaps part of a larger M&A volume that he first started creating 8 years ago. Says Nguyen: “It’s interesting how life can take you where you belong.” - Jack Sweeney

Finance leaders who remain skeptical of the prospects for economic recovery inside the 2020 calendar year may want to consult LYNX Franchising CFO Michael Borreca. “I don’t think that it’s going to take us to 2021 to get back to March sales levels,” says Borreca, who doesn’t hesitate to credit three nontraditional metrics for influencing his current thinking on the subject. The first is the volume of disinfectant currently being purchased by franchisees of JAN-PRO—owned by LYNX—which boast of being  the largest commercial cleaning franchiser in the country, with over 8,000 small business owners. “The more our franchise network is buying disinfectants, the more this means that more businesses are starting to reopen. They are doing a deep clean ahead of time, and then customers are being welcomed in,” says Borreca, who counts the lengthening commuting times surrounding LYNX’s hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, as yet another unconventional metric pointing now toward a recovery. The third metric influencing Borreca’s upbeat economic outlook is the growing digital sales leads for Intelligent Office, a virtual office business that LYNX acquired early last year. In addition to its à la carte virtual office assistant services, Intelligent Office also provides businesses access to furnished office spaces and meeting rooms. “Folks are looking for private space where they can go to get out of the house and work, but ours is not an open coworking environment,” explains Borreca, who says that as leases expire, the pandemic is already leading many companies to rethink how they use and pay for space. - Jack Sweeney  

It’s a story that Verizon CFO Matt Ellis seems to enjoy telling and one that he has undoubtedly related more than once before.  One evening while in high school, Ellis was working at the fish counter of a local supermarket when he received some feedback from the store manager. Earlier in the day, the man had asked Ellis to clean a number of shelves beside the counter, but Ellis had soon become busy with fish patrons and hadn’t able to complete the task. More than 30 years later, Ellis easily retrieves the store manager’s words: “I’m not disappointed that you didn’t get it done—I know that you were busy with your normal stuff. What disappoints me is that if you had only told me, I could have arranged to have someone else to do it.” This is a classic management lesson that many business leaders have communicated before, but when Ellis presents it, the message is endowed with renewed relevance for finance. It is easy for us to imagine Ellis retrieving the store manager’s lesson to enlighten a young finance analyst—or perhaps even his own approach as he prepares to brief Verizon board members on looming strategy snags. “This taught me two things: One was the value of communicating bad news as early as possible, and the second lesson was the way in which he gave feedback—ranting and raving is not the way to get through to people,” explains Ellis, who even today seems to muster genuine appreciation for—and perhaps even marvel at—the store manager’s evenhanded demeanor. It’s not surprising that Ellis shares a lesson that reveals the power of communication in finance. This is no doubt a skill he acquired early in his career and that has co­­­ntributed to his ongoing ascent in responsibility and reward. Having worked beside CFOs at Tyson Foods and Verizon for nearly a decade, Ellis arguably understood the CFO role better than most when he eventually became a CFO himself, at Verizon.  Asked what advice he would have given himself in the first week of his tenure, Ellis responds that the parts of the CFO role about which he was most uncertain turned out to be those that up to that point had not been part of his experience. “It’s the interactions with the other members of the senior leadership team that become different,” he reports. “It’s the importance of one-on-one communication—not the group meetings to which I had become accustomed before.” Here, too, Ellis’s communication skills have no doubt served him well. –Jack Sweeney

When the Sarbanes–Oxley Act was enacted 18 years ago, it required the Securities and Exchange Commission to create regulations to define how companies should comply with it—a mandate that would end up impacting the careers of finance professionals well into the future. CFO Jody Cire was one such professional. Back in 2010, Cire found himself in Boulder, Colorado, after having been relocated from a role in Germany as KPMG’s lead audit manager for SAP AG. In light of his recent large enterprise experience, KPMG had been eager to assign Cire stateside in order to scratch the Sarbox itch of some of its largest customers. Within a year, Cire found himself knee-deep in massive Sarbox compliance projects with a number of prestigious clients. Still, something was missing. Says Cire: “It just wasn’t where my personality or my curiosity really thrived. I just didn’t enjoy it and began to express that.” Meanwhile, his appetite for assignments involving start-ups and high-growth firms had never wavered, allowing him to confidently exit KPMG and step into a corporate role as vice president of finance and accounting for Boulder-based cybersecurity firm LogRhythm. During most of his career, Cire’s accounting and technical knowledge had made him a standout. At LogRhythm, he would be responsible for helping the company to develop a successful exit strategy, which eventually was implemented in 2018 when it was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. “We were already over $200 million—Thoma Bravo wanted some fresh blood and new management because there had to be some housecleaning and stripping out of costs,” says Cire, who served as LogRhythm’s interim CFO before joining cloud solutions provider AllCloud last year. –Jack Sweeney  Cire: We established a 2020 budget that was approved when we had a board of directors meeting on January 6. We were 6 days into 2020, and we already had an approved budget. I’ve never been able to accomplish a budget approval so fast in my life. Meanwhile, we also had an internal management plan. Unfortunately, in 2020, this doesn’t win you any prizes because within 6 weeks the world had completely changed. Right? So, in March, we suddenly found ourselves in a reforecasting period involving the general management of our regions, as well as the CEO and myself and my FP&A team. Together we had look at what we saw and what amount of cutting we might need to do. When it comes to our priorities going forward, we get a lot of inbound interest from potential investors. What they like about AllCloud as a company is that we have a senior leadership team that is structured very well. We’ve got people who have built and sold businesses before, so we are viewed as a good platform play for additional acquisitions. But to do this, there has to be a good succession plan. There have to be good people below me. so I have to continued to build my teams and to build systems that allow for easy integration, an easy bolt-on of other companies. This is what we are currently focused on and will continue to be focused on for certainly the rest of 2020 and probably through the first half of 2021. We’re still, to this day, probably two-thirds–based, 60% to 65%–based, in Israel, with a big presence also in Germany, Romania, Canada, and the United States. We closed a round of funding last December, our first round of preferred stock. We’ve already bought one U.S. company. We will use that series round in December to buy another U.S. company.  

When a new CEO is recruited to lead a company, it’s not uncommon for the incumbent CFO to be replaced. However, there are certain network-savvy CFOs who are able to muster enough influence with their boards to easily discourage incoming CEOs from implementing their displacement as part of sweeping the C-suite clean. Angiras Koorapaty was not one of these well-connected CFOs. Or at least he wasn’t about 20 years ago, when he found himself forfeiting a finance leadership position to a newly arrived CEO’s CFO pick. “This was a pivotal moment for me at the time, and it led me to do some reflection and to think about my career,” explains Koorapaty, who says that he later realized that as a CFO he had been too focused on the company’s internal operations and had failed to build important relationships with board members, investors, and other stakeholders. Says Koorapaty: “As a result, there was a change in finance leadership.” The eviction prompted Koorapaty to take action. Eager to put the experience behind him and open the door to new opportunities, he began working with a business coach, an advisor who specialized in coaching CEOs but understood the CFO role well. Koorapaty says that he personally “set the agenda” and identified the areas that he wanted to address—but that the coach held him accountable. “Oftentimes, I found him to be a pain in the neck. I did not always look forward to our calls, but I stuck with them. This made me a better CFO and a better partner for CEOs, and—most important—it made me a better communicator with my boards and a better relationship builder,” he explains. Several CFO tours of duty later, Koorapaty is now CFO of ReversingLabs, a cloud-based security and networking company based in Cambridge, MA. “When I joined the company, a number of board members approached me with their views,” recalls Koorapaty, who says that he listened carefully before adding a number of items to his list of CFO priorities. For Koorapaty, better communication begins with listening. –Jack Sweeney OPTIN  TO OUR NEWSLETTER

Years from now, when Will Costolnick thinks back to the start of his CFO career, he will likely count the 12 months that preceded his appointment as CFO of Hire Dynamics as part of the same chapter, for—not unlike many of his CFO peers—Costolnick first found his footing at his new employer by slipping into a vice president of finance role for a year or two. In Costolnick’s case, the interim role lasted 12 months, or just long enough for Hire Dynamics to reformulate its management ranks and expand its C-suite. Still, Costolnick hit the ground running by using his interim credentials to begin putting in place processes that would accommodate new growth, which was indeed a priority for satiating the staffing firm’s newfound appetite for acquisitions. Four years ago, Hire Dynamics had but 10 offices in the Southeast; today, this number is 47. The growing office numbers follow a recent spurt of deal-making by Hire Dynamics, which today boasts of being the Southeast’s second largest commercial staffing firm. Clearly, the timing of Costolnick’s arrival was no accident. Moreover, the firm’s newly charged CFO had spent four of his previous six years evaluating acquisition targets for LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “We looked at 40 acquisitions during that period and closed on eight,” explains Costolnick, who served as lead finance analyst for the company’s internal mergers and acquisitions group. “I think that this was really a pivotal moment for me. I would be sitting in a room with the leaders from product development, marketing, and sales, and I got to observe them as they looked at these targets strategically,” says Costolnick, who later served as director of finance for the Atlanta-based firm. While acquisition targets are no doubt part of Costolnick’s world these days, so too are the processes and technologies that in the future will permit Hire Dynamics to satisfy the demands of an organization many times its present size. –Jack Sweeney 

Unlike the music artists and instructors recruited by School of Rock to provide music lessons at its 270 locations around the globe, John Cappadona was first hired by the firm to provide a crash course in accounting. “The day I joined, my controller and I walked through the door together not knowing anything,” explains Cappadona, who stepped into the CFO role at School of Rock shortly after its CEO, Rob Price, moved the music lesson provider’s headquarters to the Boston area. Says Cappadona: “For the first couple of months, it took us almost 25 days to close the books—and we needed to shorten that number in order to start making decisions sooner.” Next, Cappadona set out to enhance the management team’s visibility into the business. “We wouldn’t have known that we were going to run into an iceberg until we hit it,” comments Cappadona, who adds that while his team did not come across any icebergs, the company’s sales reporting numbers were just not visible enough. After making a number of accountant hires, Cappadona says, he became focused on developing School of Rock’s FP&A function to better reveal the performance at its 270 locations—49 of which were company-owned. The company’s finance team keeps a close eye on the number of new students as well as School of Rock’s net promoter score. Still, when it comes to measuring customer behavior, Cappadona believes that as a consequence of the pandemic, School of Rock‘s lines of sight into customer behaviors are poised to grow rapidly. “We are deriving 100 percent of our revenue right now from something that did not exist 2 months ago. We were an in-person education business. We had to pivot immediately to deliver a remote solution,” says Cappadona, who recorded an episode with CFO Thought Leader in early May 2020. As it turns out, a customer lesson delivered remotely would appear to be a nice complement to School of Rock’s in-person lessons. Notes Cappadona: “At the end of the day, the mission is really the same—and it’s our sense of community that sets us apart.” –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: Tell us about a finance strategic moment … Cappadona: I’ll tell you about my time at WB Mason, where I was really charged with bringing up the FP&A department, with creating it. Previously, they really hadn’t had the sort of financial insights coming forth that they needed. What really comes to mind is Hurricane Sandy, or Superstorm Sandy, which hit the East Coast hard, as you may recall. WB Mason was primarily focused in the Northeast, so pretty much all of our operations were out of business for several days. We had to quickly engage our forecast models, and there were some tough decisions that we had to make. We had to shore up costs because we had bank covenants that we had to maintain, and we had to make sure that given the decreased revenue, our cost structure was going to be fine. This was one of those strategic moments when we had to look ahead to say, “Well, when are these businesses going to be coming back?” It was very similar to what we’re facing today with the pandemic. Now I’m digging back into my bag of tricks just as I did seven or eight years ago when I was trying to model things out. There was a lot of pressure to do the work and get the answers right. What I’ve found is that you’re never going to have all the answers. You have got to make the decision based on what you know at the time and monitor it. And then if you’ve got to course correct, course correct. That’s the approach that we’ve been using here. If we had waited to get all of our data in to make sure that we knew every answer, we still wouldn’t have a remote offering right now. School of Rock is now remote, and we did that it in 12 days. So if you’re going to fail, fail quickly and move on.

In the late 1980s, when Gordon Stuart exited a 4-year stint as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he bid accounting farewell—or at least he did until he stepped into a CFO role roughly a dozen years later. Ever since, he has occupied multiple CFO roles, helping to remove any doubt about his finance and accounting orientation. Still, Stuart’s appetite for broader business experiences during the early part of his career set him apart from many of his finance leader peers. During the 1990s, as a senior engagement manager for strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Company, he found job satisfaction across a variety of industries. Asked what originally led him to join McKinsey rather than take on a more traditional corporate finance role, Stuart says that “the opportunity that I saw would allow somebody who’s naturally curious about business to build a better set of capabilities, frameworks, experiences, and connections to further their career.” Looking back, Stuart says that his biggest take-away from his 6 years with McKinsey involved the approach that McKinsey uses while serving clients. “It taught me an awful lot about how to work with teams and rapidly assimilate and understand businesses and business models, as well as how to communicate with others. In fact, I think that this was probably one of the key learnings,” says Stuart, who would leave the strategy house in 1998 to become director of strategy for Dell Europe, where he would ultimately set up and lead the technology company’s Web hosting business for Europe. “Our timing was unfortunate because the dotcom collapse of 2000 kind of reset priorities within Dell, and that’s when my CFO career began,” explains Stuart, who left Dell after the CEO of a UK software company (and former McKinsey colleague) convinced him to accept the software firm’s finance leadership role. “I never set out with an ambition to be a CFO, but as time passed, I kind of realized that if you pick the right business and it lines up with your interests, CFOs influence a lot of what happens in a business. And having an impact is very satisfying,” he explains. –Jack Sweeney

When John Bonney joined San Francisco–based Harness a little more than a year ago, he became not only the company’s first CFO but also its first finance hire. “For me, this was the first time that I came into a role with a blank slate—it was at Ground Zero,” explains Bonney, who says that the software start-up specializing in the automation of software applications delivery had theretofore been outsourcing its finance, legal and IT functions. Initially, he recalls, he was somewhat doubtful that he was good match for such an early-stage firm—and especially one with such meager internal operations. However, he became intrigued by the challenge that Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal put before him. Looking back, Bonney says that he knew that “we could become really big, and here was a chance to set the foundation right.” Within 5 months, Bonney relates, he had fielded a team of roughly eight people, including a controller, an FP&A leader, and department heads for legal and IT. “Generally, when companies are really small, it doesn’t always make financial sense to have people in-house, but as you grow to 100 people and beyond, what you quickly begin to experience are bottlenecks impacting responsiveness to IT needs or legal bills that are beginning to balloon,” explains Bonney, who adds that positions outside the finance realm were filled first, with the FP&A hire a more recent addition to the team. Says Bonney: “When a company has raised capital and the question becomes ‘Where do you put that capital?,’ the CFO and FP&A team have to impact this and monitor it.” Meanwhile, as Harness scales, the company has prioritized the use of new applications and technologies to perform work traditionally completed by back office hires. For example, Bonney says, Harness did not hesitate to adopt applications vendor Airbase of San Francisco to manage its companywide credit card spending and expense management. Asked to reflect on his first year as CFO of Harness and his Ground Zero “to do” list. Bonney quips: “12 months gone by in a blink of an eye.” –Jack Sweeney

Mair: It was  probably in the first week of March, we had to close our Seattle office and have people work remotely. And it was about the second week in March that we did the same for our Portland office. We have the good fortune of having had a lot of experience working remotely as an agency. A lot of people have flexible schedules, a lot of the work we do is digital. But (COVID) is impacting us. It's still unclear as to what the second quarter's revenue is going to look like, but we're projecting it it'll be down probably by 25% at least. We know from a couple of large events that our clients we're sponsoring have been canceled, so that has a direct impact on some of the projects we were doing. But we also see there are some opportunities for us to use our services, to help in this sort of environment and get the messaging out in paid and social media, in ways that don't require a physical conference or event. So it's going to be interesting. We were... I got to say this in the nicest way, we strive to not have to close the business or seriously cut back staff. We had a relatively small riff of about 5% of the population last month and we imposed a salary reduction, sort of a tiered salary deduction, depending on how much your annual salary was, to avoid a more broad riff, if you will. And we have recently applied for relief through one of the Cares Act programs, the payroll protection program to be specific. But it's going to be largely based on how much revenue we continue to generate while we're in this sort of remote environment.

Related Article From Forbes.com Years from now, when Hilla Sferruzza recalls her initial actions to buffer the impact of COVID-19 on home builder Meritage Homes Corp. (NYSE: MTH) of Scottsdale, Arizona, she will likely not forget the seemingly endless calls that she placed to land sellers across the country. “It’s not like I’m calling a manufacturer and telling them to bring less raw material to my factory. I’m calling land sellers in every one of our markets to start the renegotiation process,” says Sferruzza, who, as finance chief for the seventh-largest public home builder in the U.S., is no doubt accustomed to having her calls returned. “They’re reading the same newspapers that we are and they know what’s going on, so they’re fairly understanding,” observes Sferruzza, who has been using her phone time to push back on seller payment terms and defer or delay home building projects in nine different states. Meanwhile, Karri Callahan, CFO of RE/MAX Holdings (NYSE: RMAX), the global franchisor of real estate brokerages, has been formulating her own mode of outreach to RE/MAX’s franchisees, who understandably have been signaling some pushback of their own. Factors such as social distancing and governmental stay-at-home orders are slowing the amount of home buying and forcing real estate brokers to tighten their belts. Suddenly, the franchise fees that real estate brokers pay to RE/MAX and other franchisors are looming large on broker P&Ls, leading franchisors to take action and pull back fees. “Our franchisees can now defer their fees and pay them back later in the year as real estate transactions occur, or they can pay now, but at a reduced rate of 50% of what they would have normally paid,” explains Callahan. Still, it’s the variances of COVID-19’s impact from state to state that is summoning real estate CFOs like Sferruzza and Callahan to be more accessible and visible to their firm’s extended network of partners and stakeholders across different geographies. “Clearly, some of the challenges have to do with how different governments—whether at the state, county, or city level—have classified real estate and whether it’s classified as ‘essential.’ But transactions are still occurring, albeit at a reduced velocity,” says Callahan, who credits the size and breadth of RE/MAX’s franchise network with helping to minimize the impact of those jurisdictions that have classified real estate transactions as being “nonessential.” To better assess Meritage’s sales pipeline and extend her lines of sight deeper into the business, Sferruzza has been keeping a close eye on sales appointment numbers. “I’m also looking at cancellations because as important as it is for us to get sales, I need to make sure that the backlog’s not eroding at a magnitude that’s overcoming sales,” she notes. Still, when it comes to protecting the health of the business, Meritage’s CFO makes it clear that her primary focus remains on cash flow and preserving whatever she can of it to help Meritage weather what lies ahead. Hence her recent outreach to land sellers. “It’s a pretty long cycle, and there is a substantial cash outlay at the start of the life of a community versus at the tail end, which is really when it is cash flow positive,” reports Sferuzza, who estimates that the cash outlays for most of Meritage’s communities run two to three years before becoming cash flow positive. “We have to buy the land, which is expensive, and we have to develop the land, which is expensive. We have to build the models and then we have to build the homes,” adds Sferruzza, whose top-of-mind cash flow priorities are not unlike those of other finance leaders whose businesses were pursuing steep growth trajectories. Meritage, for example, told industry analysts last November that they should expect the home builder to grow by 25 percent in 2020. Meanwhile, more regular communication with the analyst and investor communities has swiftly become a priority for both Callahan and Sferruzza as they seek to tamp down fears across the board. “In terms of the employees, I split my responsibility with the rest of management—my main focus remains on our investors, in terms of where I take primary ownership,” explains Callahan, who since mid-March has participated along with RE/MAX senior management in two companywide “town hall meetings” for all 500 RE/MAX employees. Says Sferruzza: “I think that the real fear in the marketplace right now is one that I think we’ll be able to overcome, and it’s simply whether people will still feel confident about making a home purchase.” As for Meritage’s balance sheet, Sferruzza explains that “it’s actually not as stressful a scenario for us as it might appear to be. We become extremely cash accretive during a downturn because we stop spending money on new land, and everything on our balance sheet converts to cash.” Asked whether additional cash preservation techniques may be required, Sferruzza is quick to add: “If the shelter-in-place extends beyond May, June, July, different decisions will need to be made.” - Jack Sweeney

When Amir Jafari looks back and reflects on his path to the CFO office, he includes two character traits that have arguably long distinguished finance leaders from other functional leaders.  “We in finance have high levels of accountability and integrity, and these are the things that we’re able to then transpose in terms of what we do and how we are able to lead as CFOs,” explains Jafari, who says that it was his ability to “transpose” these traits during a recent career chapter at ServiceNow that allowed him to ultimately gain the leadership experience required to step into a CFO role at Reputation.com.   “I landed at ServiceNow as their corporate controller, but the biggest twist in my entire life—and one that I think ultimately helped me to prepare for a CFO role—is that I had a chance to be the general manager of a business unit,” explains Jafari, who notes that his GM tour of duty was rooted in the creation of two applications that ultimately evolved into a business unit. “Being able to lead a product management team, an engineering team, a design and go-to-market team is very different from my past assignments and has really helped to round out the core elements of what we do in traditional finance,” comments Jafari. While there’s little doubt that Jafari’s ascent into leadership roles was aided by more than accountability and integrity, he credits his finance career track for helping to preserve and nourish these traits along the way, allowing him to more confidently assume leadership roles when opportunities arrived. –Jack Sweeney

At the age of 31, David Woodworth was offered CFO positions at two different firms. The first offer came from his then current employer, where as vice president of finance he was keenly aware of urgent challenges that the company’s next CFO would need to address. The second offer came unsolicited from a smaller company in the same field, where he could expect to ease into the role and set the pace for his first 100 days. “It was a hard decision, and one where you wish there was a silver bullet,” says Woodworth, who opted to stay where he was, which was at a highly leveraged firm that had recently been taken private by a group of investors. Woodworth’s early chapter flies in the face of the widely expressed conundrum that to become a CFO, you have to be a CFO. However, in Woodworth’s case, the price of entry to the CFO office was a cool head and an even keel—or at least being someone capable of working alongside a group of edgy investors. “I had to embrace the role pretty quickly and operate in some unique environments,” he adds. Thinking back on his first CFO tour of duty, Woodworth concludes by saying, “The advice that I would like to give to someone stepping into a CFO role would be about how to prioritize and how to say ‘no.’” – Jack Sweeney

Earlier this year, when the FDIC approved fintech start-up Varo Money’s application to become a national bank, Thibault Fulconis’s latest CFO career chapter suddenly appeared to make perfect sense.    Still, it was only two years ago that Fulconis’s entry into the land of fintech start-ups no doubt raised a few eyebrows among his former colleagues at BancWest Corp., where he most recently served as vice chairman and COO. “I was coming from a position where I had about 3,000 direct reports when I was COO to an entity where I had three people reporting to me,” says Fulconis, whose banking resume, rich with senior leadership roles, spans nearly 30 years with roots inside BancWest’s parent company, BNP Paribas.  While certainly not the first banker to find a door-of-entry into the realm of fintech start-ups, Fulconis, in light of the FDIC’s recent approval, became the first CFO of a fintech start-up that is able to hold customer deposits—much the same as in the world he left behind. Until recently, fintech firms have partnered with community banks to actually hold customers’ money, while start-ups like Varo have traditionally handled only the consumer interface and mobile app technology portion. Who better than a seasoned banking leader to help architect a finance function capable of responding to the breadth of consumer activities on a national scale? “When I arrived at Varo, we were at version 76 of our financial model. Now, a year and a half later, we are at version 180,” says Fulconis, who routinely expresses his fondness for Varo’s nimbleness. –Jack Sweeney

Last February, following his arrival on a flight to Israel, Tomer Pinchas recalls receiving a startling text from the Israeli government. Having recently visited Italy, the text explained, passenger Pinchas must now agree to enter self-quarantine for a period two weeks. As CFO of Kryon—a Tel Aviv start-up specializing in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)—Pinchas, like most business travelers, was well aware of the recent spread of COVID-19. Still, the order to self-quarantine seemed aggressive to Pinchas, who at the time could not have imagined that in a few short weeks he would be sheltering in place with the rest of Israel. “The actions taken by Israel were quite drastic and came pretty much a few weeks before the rest of the world, but what we learned during the process was that we can work anyplace—and sometimes we can be even more organized,” says Pinchas, who believes that a new business environment is beginning to come into view. So far, the remote workforce is perhaps the new environment’s most pronounced characteristic. However, some of the more interpersonal attributes of doing business may be compromised. “Due to the fact that we work with enterprise customers and many things that we use to install are on-premise, we would often meet the customer face-to-face, so this will be kind of challenging in the new environment)” explains Pinchas, who says that while face-to-face selling will likely be curtailed, Kryon’s RPA offerings will find new traction among companies seeking new tools to help automate repetitive tasks and help them to better engage and respond to customer demands. Fortunately, the RPA start-up closed on its latest round of financing within weeks of Israel sheltering in place. “I really believe that you need to raise money when you can and not necessarily when you need it,” remarks Pinchas, who believes that as long as a company has a strategy that it’s prepared to execute—and not just an appetite for cash—the timing of a capital raise should not matter. Says Pinchas: “Don’t wait for the right time, because the majority of the time, there’s no such thing.” –Jack Sweeney

When John Theler stepped into the CFO office at SaaS developer Avetta last summer, among his list of priorities was the daunting task of better articulating supply chain hazards to management teams and industry at large.   Nine months later, Theler has no doubt added a number of items to his list of finance leader priorities, but his articulation task has become far less daunting. Not surprisingly, it seems that his thoughtful comments on the perils of poorly managed supply chains have paled in comparison to the high-wattage exposure that COVID-19 has suddenly brought to supply chains—an illuminating spotlight that Avetta and other suppliers of supply chain risk management services are now eager to put to work. “There clearly are some supply chain challenges and weaknesses that have already been uncovered through this crisis that we’re in right now, and one of the long-term effects of this is going to be a higher scrutiny of supply chains going forward,” explains Theler, who says that while many company boards have made supply chain risk management a bona fide component of their environmental sustainability and governance (ESG) efforts, COVID-19 is suddenly causing some firms to take a closer look at what’s under the ESG hood.   “Our biggest competitors, frankly, are supply chains belonging to firms that just want to do it in their homegrown solution,” says Theler, who quickly mentions the advantages of using Avetta’s technology to address supply chain risk versus relying on typical in-house supply chain risk solutions. There’s little doubt that COVID-19 and its impact on industry at large will play a defining role in the careers of many finance leaders. For Theler and other CFOs, the pandemic is a house filled with obstacles and innovation where for every door that closes there’s another that swings open. –Jack Sweeney

It was supposed to be the type of introduction that would help to break the ice between a new business leader and her direct reports. However, the words spoken by the managing director (MD) became frozen in time. Or at least this was the case for Virpy Richter, who at the age of 27 had only recently relocated from Germany after having accepted a promotion to oversee the finances of her company’s Dutch operating unit. “This is the German girl from our central unit. Be nice to her. She is just visiting us,” Richter recalls the MD saying, as her 25 direct reports curiously stared back at her.   In retrospect, the MD might even be commended for having had language skills sufficient to so thoroughly and completely undermine a colleague in the space of a few short sentences, which was no small feat considering that he was able to reference Richter’s youth, gender, and nationality while at the same time even summoning doubts about the permanence of her position. While these words remain frozen in time for Richter, the lesson that she would carry forth from this role involved more their aftermath.   “This was my first leadership role, so my response was much more intuitive because at that age I had not taken any leadership seminars and didn’t have any past experiences on which to draw,” explains Richter, who says that her intuition told her to be a good listener. “Listen to the people—listen to their expectations and let them help you to understand,” she explains. Fast-forward a number of years, and Richter is once more crossing borders—this time into Russia, where she is working as a senior finance professional for myToys, a large German e-commerce retailer. Says Richter: “I had three months to set up the Russian entity, recruit the people, and make the goods available because we wanted to be operating by Christmas.” Today, Richter resides in Germany, where as CFO of Awin Global she applies her cross-border lessons to Awin’s quickly expanding operations. –Jack Sweeney

When it comes to raising money from the investor community, finance executives often find themselves standing in line for job assignments that promise to make them active participants in the process. Such roles allow aspiring finance leaders to check off one of the more essential items on the demanding list of prerequisites required of high-growth­–firm CFOs. For those executives who have climbed the accounting career ladder or toiled for years in an FP&A cubicle, the “money box” is often one of the last ones to get checked off. Such was the case for finance leader Chris Mausler, who after a decade of devouring high-calorie FP&A assignments at IBM Corp. exited the computer giant to join a string of Silicon Valley firms.  Removed from IBM’s sprawling organization, Mausler found himself in closer proximity to the action. Nevertheless, it would take years for the seasoned FP&A executive to land a role that allowed him to check that box and ultimately raise money for a variety of different firms. “Even though my assignments had touched on treasury-type operations in an indirect way, I myself had actually never directly raised money before,” says Mausler, who last fall helped to raise $31 million in funding for San Jose, California’s PeerNova, the data governance company that he joined as CFO back in 2014. “I’m certain that there are companies out there that make their first pitch and get funded with a term sheet, but this is not the norm,” says Mausler, who notes that most companies can expect to receive only a handful of term sheets from roughly 100 pitches.    “It's a little bit of an art, a little bit of a science for anyone going through it,” he adds. –Jack Sweeney      Mausler: As I’m sitting here at home under a shelter-in-place order, my first priority clearly is to manage our company over the next couple of months to make sure that we don’t lose any efficiency and effectiveness in meeting our short-term goals, and this is certainly a new challenge through these times. Other than that, the challenges that I have remain much the same at PeerNova. We raised a good financing last fall. We announced a $31 million round that’s going to take us for a while. We have goals and milestones for getting us through a large kind of growth round in the future. We’ve got to make sure that we get there, so it’s making sure that we’re hitting the near-term milestones and tweaking our strategy to hit the next ones. Here at PeerNova we had good data, so it was just a question of organizing it into one place so that we could manage the business. It’s been very much of a journey for us as we’ve raised rounds to build out this platform and worked with early customers on projects to grow our business. The most critical thing at PeerNova has been to raise the right amount of capital to help to get us to the next set of milestones and to make the right set of investments to get to these milestones so that we can continue to grow the company and keep this kind of growth pattern going. At this point, having worked with a number of large institutions, we’re in that growth phase of a company where we’re ramping up revenue. For me, it’s always been about trying to balance how quickly you grow the company to achieve the next milestone while keeping in mind how much cash you will need to manage the company until the next round. You’ve got to keep an eye on both. You want to build a company that’s growing extremely fast, but you have to reconcile this to some extent with how much capital you have. You also have to organize the milestones that you need to hit to get to the next round as well.

For many future finance leaders, the year 2020 is destined to provide the dark moments of doubt that sweeten the upsides to be savored in years to come. Certainly, few business lessons are more widely cherished than those related to challenging economic times—and few are summoned more by finance leaders when it comes to explaining their business-building philosophies. Such is the case with Narvar CFO Jim Emerich, who in recounting the experiences that have prepared him for a finance leadership role always singles out the year 2001, when the September 11 terrorist attacks disrupted an economy still reeling from the burst of the dotcom bubble. That May, Emerich stepped into a controller position at Salesforce, the pioneering SaaS developer that had only recently entered the ranks of midsize companies. “We were burning cash throughout that year, and we were getting pretty close to the end. What saved us was the knowledge that eventually people realized that the world hadn’t ended,” recalls Emerich, who confidently and swiftly draws a line from his early Salesforce days to his arrival at Narvar earlier this year. As at Salesforce, Emerich is now tasked with building the financial infrastructure of a SaaS developer in the midst of economic uncertainty. But now is a time well suited to experienced leaders accustomed to quelling doubts and exposing the path to the future. –Jack Sweeney

Having built a successful career in private equity—including 13 years with formidable Carlyle Group—Sameer Bhargava was probably not the most likely candidate to fill a CFO position at Clark Construction Group of Bethesda, Maryland. The two businesses belonged to strikingly different worlds. Whereas Carlyle populated its world with leading-edge investment vehicles and innovative global assets, Clark has left its mark with signature skyscrapers and civic projects that are credited with transforming public spaces in a big way. Still, both Washington, DC, area–headquartered businesses share what arguably remains industry’s greatest hiring determinant: a common geography. Clark Construction’s resume is filled with “hometown” projects of stature, including The Wharf—a pedestrian-oriented DC waterfront community—and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. “In every block that you drive by, Clark is building something incredibly impressive,” remarks Bhargava, who quickly emphasizes Clark’s national footprint by mentioning other Clark credits, including San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower and San Antonio’s Frost Tower. While Bhargava’s enthusiasm for Clark’s work is evident, he makes it clear that his move to Clark was driven by more than geography and the firm’s A-list menu of cityscape projects. “In medicine and other industries, you get better and smarter the more specialized you become, but in business it’s quite the opposite,” says Bhargava, who encourages others to “take the risk to be uncomfortable” and “do things differently.” –Jack Sweeney

Years from now, when Andrew Casey reflects back on his CFO career and seeks to make sense of its various chapters, he may want to title the mythical volume Timing Is Everything. Certainly, few expressions might better summarize the career path of a finance executive who for years diligently checked off each CFO prerequisite only to arrive in the CFO office in March 2020—the very month when industry faced the seismic consequences of COVID-19. No matter what lies ahead for Casey—or how he chooses to label his arrival in the C-suite at SaaS digital adoption enabler WalkMe—there’s little doubt that COVID-19 and industry’s response to it will become a defining chapter of his finance career. Says Casey: “You learn from the good times and the down times, but when finance is most important to an organization is the down times because finance is the unbiased party in the room with respect to employee priorities as well as overall priorities.” Turn back the clock to 2019, when Dan Adika, CEO of WalkMe, was meeting with Casey to make the case for the widening appeal of WalkMe’s digital offerings. “About halfway through the meeting, I said, ‘This is one of the strangest interviews I’ve ever had,’ and he asked, ‘Why is that?’ I said, ‘It feels like you’re just pitching me on the company.’ He stopped midstream and looked me in the eye and said, ‘Well, you know, we’re already convinced about you. We’re just trying to sell WalkMe to you.’ At that moment, I knew that I could ask any question, and I knew that my rapport with Dan was going to be strong,” recalls Casey, who at the time was a senior vice president of finance for cloud computing giant ServiceNow. “At that moment,” there was little question that for Casey, timing was everything. –Jack Sweeney

Purchasing bananas and moving them through a warehouse in less than 24 hours is perhaps not a professional experience widely shared by today’s finance leaders. Still, as Topia CFO Terry Schmid tells it, mastering banana logistics may just be a worthy prerequisite for many of today’s CFO roles. “It taught me to think about the process that you go through to understand how things flow, how things actually work, and how you can improve things,” says Schmid, who first entered the professional world as a software coder specializing in COBOL—a language that landed him a consulting engagement with Safeway, Inc., in the 1990s, where he spent months alongside a team of Safeway buyers building a new logistics and warehousing system. “Being responsible for the produce piece, I had to learn how they buy produce and move it through the warehouse, after which we wrote a system to automate the process to a large degree—particularly the buying part,” explains Schmid, who recalls the Safeway team as being at first somewhat doubtful about the new system. “Automation has a tendency to unnerve people. It was my job to convince these guys that using the system was going to be beneficial to them and make their job better. It wasn't going to replace them. It was just going to make their job simpler,” he recalls. Schmid doesn’t hesitate to draw a line from his COBOL coding days straight to the CFO office. “The opportunity that I got out of that was a solid understanding of how businesses work, how information flows, and how important it is that information is timely and accurate,” notes Schmid, who characterizes the CFO role as one dedicated to helping organizations fix broken processes or adopt new ones in order to clear the path for growth. This is a role widely coveted inside the tech sector, but few CFOs have been as frequently recruited as Schmid, who has to date served as CFO in more than a half-dozen early-stage companies. Twelve months into his latest CFO role, at Topia, Schmid is back to fixing processes and studying workflows and purchase patterns just as he did in the 1990s. In one way or another, it seems that he’s been moving bananas ever since. –Jack Sweeney         

Last November, CFO Bob Feller achieved a career milestone of sorts when he celebrated his fifth anniversary as Workforce Software’s finance leader. “Prior to this, the longest that I have ever stayed anywhere has been four years,” explains Feller, who says that the cadence of his CFO career transitions is normally in step with those of other tech sector CFOs, who are known to job-hop every three to four years. Still, Feller mentions his recent anniversary to draw our attention to his resolve to help build Workforce into a formidable SaaS challenger inside the realm of workforce management software. “It reminds me of when I started at Salesforce and we were up against Siebel—which was then acquired by Oracle—and everyone thought that we didn’t have a chance,” says Feller, who held controller and VP of finance roles during a four-year stint at Salesforce. Feller says that Salesforce’s singular focus as a SaaS company allowed it to overstep its merged rivals, who—while many times the size of Salesforce—failed to exploit all of the maturing advantages of the SaaS model. Feller believes that this rivalry was similar to one that Workforce has today with HR software behemoth Kronos, of Lowell, Massachusetts. “With every deal that we close, we pretty much take market share from Kronos,” says Feller, while naming the widely known rival that is roughly 15 times the size of Workforce. Says Feller: “We like to say that we’re ‘Zeus to Kronos’—and if you don’t know your Greek mythology, just search on ‘Zeus, son of Kronos’ and you will discover just what Zeus ended up doing to Kronos.” Needless to say, there’s a reason that Zeus, and not his father, was known as ruler of the gods. –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: Tell us about your arrival at Workforce and what this career chapter means for you? Feller: How has my career evolved? I tend to be a builder and a fixer. I come into situations when some kind of a transformational event either has happened or is about to happen. This obviously goes back to Salesforce, where I had to build a team as we were building the company and prepping for an IPO, and has continued on to Workforce, where the company was founder-led for a number of years. You know, the founder did a great job in building the company, but it was really his first job out of business school. His first job out of business school was being our CEO. This happens all the time. The company did a lot of things well, but on the administration side, there was a lot of work to be done. When we were acquired by Insight Venture Partners in 2014, I was the first hire that they made. They were looking for an experienced SaaS CFO who really knew how to put together not just a team but also the appropriate SaaS company metrics—the KPIs—and who knew how to work with a private equity firm and build a team to support that. Yes, this took time, but this is part of what I do to transform an organization. It’s not like I come in and aim to replace everybody. There’s a lot of great talent in these companies. It’s really putting them in the right place and in a position to succeed and then making sure that they know what they’re in for when they’re coming out of what the company used to be and going through the transformation into what it’s going to be. The way we think about community is important. It’s not just our employees—our employee community— but also the greater communities that we’re part of. We’re a global company. We’re part of the Michigan community. We’re part of the Sydney, Australia, community. We’re part of the London, UK, area community. We try to do a lot to support community activities everywhere.

Back in 2008, when auction giant eBay acquired Bill Me Later (BML), a Maryland-based payment credit company, Brian Whalen and his BML colleagues breathed a sigh of relief. “We had just enough liquidity and options to give us the runway to sell to eBay and PayPal, so—from a learning perspective—it was really about asking the questions ‘How do you keep those options open?’ and ‘How do you keep your liquidity choices available to you so that you can capture the moment?’” says Whalen. Having served in a number business development roles at BML, he recalls as if it were yesterday the sudden wallop that the credit crisis delivered: “It hit us like a sledgehammer, so we made the decision to tighten credit and sacrifice some growth for the quality of our assets.” In addition to preserving cash, BML would raise $100 million from Amazon and T. Rowe Price, while having discussions with a string of potential suitors. Ultimately, in October 2008, eBay acquired the firm for $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in stock. “People will joke and say, ‘It’s better to be lucky than good,’ but to a certain extent, we made our own luck by being prepared,” explains Whalen, who relocated to California following the acquisition of BML to serve in a number of business development and finance roles at PayPal headquarters, including CFO of PayPal’s global credit group. Eventually, he stepped back onto a more entrepreneurial FinTech path that has led him to the CFO office at Branch, a start-up specializing in what are widely labeled as “financial wellness” offerings for companies and their employees. –Jack Sweeney

When asked whether a new sales enablement hire would be a “direct report,” Bill Koefoed, CFO of OneStream Software, replied: “Organization matters only when your processes and relationships don’t.” It’s an observation not shared widely perhaps among newbie CFOs, who upon their arrival are known to rely more on organizational reporting lines than relationship potential to assert their influence. Nevertheless, four months and one pandemic into his latest CFO tour of duty, Koefoed has his relationship-building skills in high gear as he works alongside OneStream’s sales leaders to better identify those factors contributing to sales productivity. According to Koefoed, the challenge is not just about sales productivity, though, but also about how to make the team productive more quickly. Hence OneStream’s new sales enablement hire.  Says Koefoed: “People don’t have to sit in finance to be effective, and having great partners and relationships in other areas of the business is just a great way to run the business.” In addition to sales, Koefoed’s relationship-building skills also appear to be focused on OneStream’s customers. How long a customer has been in the pipeline frequently correlates to deal size, says Koefoed, who concedes, “Obviously, big deals take longer.” Still, Koefoed says that his focus these days is more on something that he refers to as “customer familiarity”—and here, too, he’s looking for ways to accelerate OneStream’s upward climb on his customer awareness meter. “The more familiar somebody is with your company, the better able they are to make key decisions,” adds Koefoed, who note that in the case of OneStream, “key decisions” are what trigger the movement of customers to OneStream’s software offerings and away from software provided by larger, more established rivals. –Jack Sweeney

When Mohit Daswani stepped into the CFO office of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ThoughtSpot this past January, he ascended to something more than just another finance leadership position inside a SaaS start-up. Daswani was joining an influential class of CFOs distinguished by their ability to communicate a vision that connects not just with investors, but also with other CFOs. This is a cohort widely visible within the realm of business Intelligence, or BI, the space where finance leaders frequently shop for new technologies and tools to analyze their business data while surveilling the messaging of BI’s latest class of CFO thought leaders. From the perspective of ThoughtSpot, which raised $248 million in late-stage funding last August, the world of BI is now colliding with the world of artificial intelligence and moving the competitive state of play from visualization to real-time data delivery. “This is just a very different offering and value proposition from the current state of BI,” explains Daswani, who was previously the head of finance and strategy at payments company Square, Inc. “This is about giving business customers not just a static dashboard, but also the ability to query the data in real time and create a natural language search on the front end,” adds Daswani, who quickly lists Walmart, 7-Eleven, Celebrity Cruises, and Hulu as ThoughtSpot customers. For some BI watchers, Daswani’s arrival is a feat of fortunate timing, perhaps matched only by that of those executives who once occupied the CFO office at such companies as Cognos and BusinessObjects, the pioneering BI technology companies that many credit with having helped to launch the first big wave of wide-scale BI tool adoption. Then came Tableau, with its powerful visualization tools that indoctrinated even more CFOs into the ranks of the BI faithful. Acquired by Salesforce last June for $14.6 billion, Tableau was a property whose sale became a milestone that few BI watchers could ignore. Add to this, Google’s purchase last year of Looker, another visually driven developer, and it’s clear that visualization is now in BI’s arsenal, says Daswani. “If I’m a CFO or marketing lead, I no longer have to enlist a data scientist to go build a query or dashboard for me,” notes Daswani. “We're talking directly to that decision-maker and company and saying, ‘How do we make your life easier? If you're a CFO, you need to understand what's going on with working capital, because you're managing your cash flow. Let us make it easier for you to do that directly,’” reports Daswani, who these days is busy standardizing work flows and procedures in preparation for ThoughtSpot’s much anticipated IPO. “The Valley is building a lot of great companies right now. I’ve met with many of them over the past few years, but ThoughtSpot stood out for me in multiple dimensions,” says Daswani. Still, ThoughtSpot has company. Among those companies now amplifying the messaging behind BI’s next big wave to both investors and CFOs are Celonis, Sisense, and DataStax.

As the newly appointed CFO of agtech start-up Cooks Venture, Ankur Agrawal lists one of his favorite duties as designing menus. Of course, we are referring to the menu of performance measurements featured on the poultry company’s maturing business dashboard. “One of the beauties that comes with joining a new company is that you get to build from scratch,” explains Agrawal, who says that he’s relied on some of his earlier experiences using dashboards at Pepsico and Blue Apron to help Cooks Venture to build a better one. According to Agrawal, a successful dashboard begins with understanding what measurements are needed inside a company’s different business functions. At Blue Apron, Agrawal says, the firm’s finance leader improved the company’s dashboard design by first asking functional leaders across the company, “What are the two or three measurements that you are looking at?” “Once he got that list from everyone, he said, ‘All right, now let’s create our dashboard.’ I’ve tried to take a similar approach in which we talk to people and try to understand what they need to see,” explains Agrawal, whose tour of duty at Blue Apron offered far more than lessons in dashboard design. As a finance director for the innovative meal-kit company, Agrawal worked closely with Blue Apron’s cofounder and COO, Matt Wadiak, who left the company in 2017 to establish Cooks Venture.   Says Agrawal: “We had worked closely for four years. We had a great partnership and complemented each other very well. We had been talking for a while, so when he started this company, essentially it became the right time for the business and for me because I had been looking for the right opportunity.” -Jack Sweeney

Along his path to the CFO office at technology firm Trintech, Omar Choucair’s segue from radio to high tech was among his most consequential career transitions. “There were not a lot of radio companies based in Dallas, Texas, at the time, and there was this young but growing tech company. While it was a calculated risk on my part, I liked the people, and the executives were hard-charging, which I also liked,” says Choucair, when asked to recall some of the decision-making behind his leap to the high-tech realm. Today, as Trintech’s finance leader, Choucair has a list of CFO priorities that includes making performance measures more accessible across the organization. When it comes to Trintech’s approach to FP&A, Choucair is typically analytical: “I think that the bones are there and the data are there, but the difficult part lies in organizing the FP&A team around the question of how we get this put together into a form that people can really look at and use to make decisions.” Choucair says that he wants people to second-guess the factors currently driving performance and that they should be routinely asking the question, “Why did this happen last week or last month versus three months ago?” One recent development that is helping to energize performance measurement at Trintech as well as across the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) realm is the broadening publication of KPIs. “Today, versus a couple of years ago, we now have many of these public companies publishing their KPIs through their Investor Day presentation decks or their 10-K and 10-Q financial filing disclosures. So there's a lot of information that we can now mine in order to track how we’re doing when compared to everybody else,” explains Choucair. CFOTL: Tell us about your experiences inside the high tech industry? Choucair: Trintech is my third technology company as CFO. Immediately before this, I was with a software company that was another private equity–backed firm that sold digital advertising on a subscription basis. We had a platform that was a B2B play and very competitive with a lot of the other technology companies that were selling into B2B with marketers all across the U.S. Before that, my first CFO opportunity was with a technology software company that distributed TV commercials and other short-term content on behalf of advertisers and marketers to television stations and cable outlets. So, I’ve been in an interesting space in that I’ve been in three different technology companies and the last two were SaaS. The first one was software, but it was sold by the drink. I think that what’s interesting about this business is that there’s a significant opportunity on the large enterprise side. The office of the CFO has changed tremendously in the sense that there are so many different applications that you can bring to automate a lot of the functions, whether it’s your financial planning, your tax compliance, and so forth. It could be your payroll; it could be your travel; it could be your HR. With all of these additional SaaS-based applications today, maybe only a third or 25% of them were even available two or three years ago. In terms of where we think we are today, we think that we’re in the second or third inning of what we can do with the office of the CFO in terms of automating and creating this ROI for CFOs and automating the way that they close the books.

Nestor: Energy Focus is an LED lighting and controls company. LED lighting is like comparing a smartphone to a rotary phone. LED lights are actually extremely high-tech—it's almost like having a laptop inside the light. If you were to take one apart, you would be amazed at how many computer components and wafers and chips are in there. These lights are not a commodity. They are very differentiated. Unfortunately, the industry historically has sold them very much like a commodity, through the same channels as fluorescent and incandescent lights. Energy Focus does not. One thing that sets us apart is that we use a direct sales model, which does give us, we think, a competitive advantage. We will soon be launching a new product that has dimmable and tunable LED lighting. It allows you to leverage your existing wiring without having to use Bluetooth or wifi or do a big rewiring in a facility. This is coming out in the market soon, and we think that it will be revolutionary. The people who have seen the demos have been very excited about it. This type of approach is what sets us apart.  I think that we're a very unique company that is positioned very well in an industry that's going to be growing extraordinarily rapidly over the next 10 years. The key to success is growth, profitable growth, and we will do that. I really want to return Energy Focus to cash flow break-even—this is a very important goal for the next 12 months. We will be getting this new product launched successfully, and of course I'm always focused on generating shareholder returns. One of my key objectives that is the underpinning of everything that I do is generating shareholder returns.

CFOTL: Tell us about this business - what does it do and what are its offerings?  Richards: Centauri is a government services business. We've been growing at about 20% a year, on an organic-only basis, for the past four or five years. We just reached just under $500 million in revenue in 2019, and I'm looking to continue growing in the 20% to 30% range in 2020. We're really focused on space and missile defense and where those domains intersect and create sort of an ecosystem in the defense world. We focus on employing what we believe really is our strength, which is the top technical and specialized talent needed to support the missions of our customers. What makes us different from other government services providers is our focus on the people. I think that a lot of government services companies see the billable staff as not really employees of the company but just products that are being sold. When one contract goes away, so do their products, and when you get a new contract, you go hire new people. We really focus on our technical talent as part of the company. They're not tied to a specific contract or project, but we will develop their career, invest in them from a training and professional development perspective, and move them between projects so that they get enhanced skills that allow them to move up in their career. This allows us to retain a lot of the really critical talent that our customers need and move them between various kinds of mission sets over time. This really separates us from the other sort of body shop types of government services businesses. The next 12 months are really about process optimization. We're setting goals right now and objectives for 2020 that are really based on looking at what we're doing and figuring out how we can do it better. How can we measure this? How can we identify that we've successfully improved the way that we do business and operated within the CFO organization to better support the company's growth through better and stronger processes and optimizing the way that we do business?

CFOTL: Share with us a finance strategic moment?  Coletta: The most recent strategic moment that sticks with me goes back two years to when I moved to our North America organization as CFO. We were on the battlefield of innovation and the cloud business, and we were carrying a big share of the company's business, with high expectations on the street already. We had a business that had been a bit bumpy in the beginning of the year, but we had a solid team that was always seeking to improve itself. To me, it was, Okay, what do I bring to the table and how do I change the dynamic here? The good news was that we had a lot to work with, but the bad news was that when you are public and in a very exposed environment, you never have as much time as you’d like. It's very important not only to deliver quickly, but also to change or invert some trends. I really make sure that I bring value to the business. My team and I give advice and make fact-based decisions that really form a success plan for the remainder of the year at any given time. The strategic moment for me came at the end of the year. We had a very sound acceleration and great financial results, and the team got recognized as Finance Region of the Year. We had gotten employee engagement going up, as well as leadership trust. Service attitudes with regard to the business were way above the benchmarks, and all of this was performed with quality, so we had gained in predictability, efficiency, energy, and credibility. Obviously, the credit goes to the team all together, and this takes an entire leadership team really rising to the occasion. But it's quite powerful to see how dynamics can change and how you can sustain success when you focus on the right things. This strategic moment for me was then when I entered that office and got so much responsibility put in front of me. There were a lot of areas to improve—I won’t say “fix”—but to improve. At the same time, we had a very high run rate, and some areas were doing fairly well. We had a business environment that was quite steady, a big customer base, and so on. So, how do you really drive change in a short period of time, which in this case was the seven months left in the year to make an impact and turn the ship, so to speak? We have been riding this wave ever since. We have a lot of positive momentum across the board on the business front and also in finance, and I think that inverting some of the trends at the right time was critical. You learn a lot about yourself. You also learn a lot about the ability to drive change and people. To me, this was a very strategic moment in my career in terms of really having the ability to build on everything that I had learned before and everything that I had seen in different capacities in order to really move the needle quickly.

CFOTL: What are your priorities as a finance leader over the next 12 months? Freedman: Here at Room to Read, we've just launched our 2020–2025 strategic plan, of which one of the core parts is the continued build of our financial sustainability. I'm super excited and proud that we are launching a five-year, $10 million initiative—we're calling it a Future Fund—to which we're asking our donors to contribute. In addition to funding our day-to-day programs, we're looking to build out funds that will be unrestricted and allow us to get to six months' operating expense coverage, which is best-in-class. This would allow the organization to really build out its operational reserves to give us the wherewithal to weather ups and downs in the financial markets as well as to take some small risks with innovation to try some things out, test some things—to learn quickly and, if necessary, to fail quickly, as our board says—and to then adapt. Having those extra months of operating coverage will really make a difference for us. My own organization has a leadership role in this, in partnership with the development team. We'll be talking to donors and working with all sorts of organizations to describe the need for having that kind of operating expense coverage to give us real sustainability for our future.

Less than a year after his arrival at Splunk—a fast-growing, San Francisco–based software developer—CFO Jason Child appears to have been fully repatriated to his native land. To be clear: The “land” to which we refer is not the code-crunching zone of software development but the turf of business growth and scale—a locale in which Child resided for more than a decade while serving in multiple finance leadership roles at Amazon. Child first joined that company in 1999 as a corporate controller before being reassigned to the firm’s FP&A function. During his 12 years at Amazon, the online retailer grew into a colossus, with annual revenue jumping from roughly $1 billion in 1999 to $50 billion in 2011, the year following his departure. Since his stint at Amazon, Child has occupied the CFO office at multiple companies, including Groupon, where, less than a year after his arrival, the company would raise $700 million in an initial public offering—the second-biggest tech IPO in history at the time, behind only Google’s. Still, as Child points out for us, he had yet to nab a CFO position inside the more traditional software development realm, where his “growth and scale” credentials appear to always be in high demand. At Splunk, where sales grew 38% year-over-year in 2019, Child appears to have found a software match. – Jack Sweeney   Less than a year after his arrival at Splunk—a fast-growing, San Francisco–based software developer—CFO Jason Child appears to have been fully repatriated to his native land. To be clear: The “land” to which we refer is not the code-crunching zone of software development but the turf of business growth and scale—a locale in which Child resided for more than a decade while serving in multiple finance leadership roles at Amazon. Child first joined that company in 1999 as a corporate controller before being reassigned to the firm’s FP&A function. During his 12 years at Amazon, the online retailer grew into a colossus, with annual revenue jumping from roughly $1 billion in 1999 to $50 billion in 2011, the year following his departure. Since his stint at Amazon, Child has occupied the CFO office at multiple companies, including Groupon, where, less than a year after his arrival, the company would raise $700 million in an initial public offering—the second-biggest tech IPO in history at the time, behind only Google’s. Still, as Child points out for us, he had yet to nab a CFO position inside the more traditional software development realm, where his “growth and scale” credentials appear to always be in high demand. At Splunk, where sales grew 38% year-over-year in 2019, Child appears to have found a software match. – Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: What was the business opportunity that brought you to Splunk? Child: When I found out that the Splunk job was open, I jumped at the chance just because I had seen that Splunk really has a chance to be one of the next generational software providers and that it just has a really unique approach to managing the largest datasets. In the software business, we don't have COOs. There's typically a TRO, which we have, and a president of sales. We've got the technology and engineering organizations, of course. My team is trying to really build up the business operations and the transformation teams. I'm taking on those teams, which is a recent decision that we've made. I want to see the finance function become the team that really helps to drive our operational cadence and our progress because this company is growing. Our ARR growth is over 50%—we're at $1.44 billion. We have pretty high growth and already pretty large numbers, so it's all about getting the operational cadence, getting the dashboarding and the weekly business reviews and all of the right operational reviews in place to make sure that all of the right info is in place. Things are breaking every day somewhere, and being able to identify as early as possible where things are breaking and where resources and attention are necessary is critical to being able to fulfill our growth objectives. That's on top of the normal things, like being tied to controllership, having great transparency with investors, and having an efficient and timely close process. We have all of these kinds of table stakes, but the goal is really to help the finance organization to have a front seat at what I call the truth-seeking table. We just want to tell it like it is. We want to provide metrics that tell what is happening in the business, not what we want to have happen, so we have to partner with every part of the business to do this. This is our focus for this year. We're off to a good start, but we have a lot of work to do.

When finance leader Carolyn Koehn looks back on her career to identify the experiences that she feels best prepared her for a CFO role, she shares a candid observation: “I went to places no one else wanted to go.” Such was the case in the late 1990s, when she moved to Bogotá, Colombia, for Nortel Networks, after having helped the company’s finance leadership understand why she was a good match for a sudden job opening. “I was the only interested candidate who wanted to go,” recalls Koehn, who says that her initiative and willingness to relocate helped her to become short-listed for other roles in Nortel’s Latin American finance operations. When a more senior role opened up in Mexico, Koehn’s Bogotá experience helped trump that of a second interested job candidate. “When I look at those two opportunities in hindsight, they honestly were like mini-CFO roles, where you are pulled into everything from facilities and supplier relations to local communications, customer meetings, and more,” says Koehn, who in 2003 became a finance director at Dell, where multiple finance leadership roles would eventually bring her to the position of VP of finance for all of Dell’s global sales compensation. “A lot of people would look at this as a thankless role, but it’s one of the most critical ones when it comes to turning sales strategy into execution,” she explains. “This was about taking 31,000 salespeople and applying $1.5 billion in commissions,” adds Koehn, who credits the role with having challenged her “soft skills” as she became tasked with bringing different parts of the organization together to better inform her decision-making. A number of years into her sales comp tenure, Koehn began hearing about yet another opportunity in a different land. After spending most all of her career in helping to grow hardware and infrastructure technology businesses, Koehn became interested in a CFO role at one of Dell’s software-as-a-service businesses, Boomi. Not unlike the role in Bogotá, it was a match. –Jack Sweeney

It doesn’t take long for CFO Guido Torrini of Celonis to draw our attention to the burden of the growing pools of data within organizations and the great irony that is afflicting many corporate finance departments today. He’s referring to the fact that while at no time have finance organizations had more data to help them better expose the opportunities that lie ahead, at no time has finance been at greater risk of losing the focus required to help their organizations benefit from the opportunities. “You can’t just throw new dashboards at people and make them awash in KPIs,” observes Torrini, who believes that it’s the responsibility of the CFO to first “distill the numbers” and then share them in a way that doesn’t undermine the focus required for organizations to succeed.  “The ability to successfully execute is completely tied to focus,” says Torrini, who underscores his point by recalling the “3 C’s”—a favorite mantra of one of his early mentors, who implored his finance team to make every communication “crisp, clear, and concise.”  Beyond clarity, Torrini points out, messaging is about consistency and making certain that the organization as a whole is able to receive it.  “This is about crafting a message and delivering it over and over again, making sure that it goes across the organization and that there’s a structure and cadence to communicating and reviewing it,” notes Torrini, whose emphasis on “cadence” makes us think that he has perhaps added a fourth “C” to his mentor’s mantra. Says Torrini: “It’s almost like a song that you find yourself repeating in your head without really understanding why.” –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: What are your priorirites as a finance leader over the next 12 months? Torrini: I like to describe the CFO as being kind of like the architect of the enterprise, in the sense of being someone who can actually design the machine and explain to people how the machine works and root every function in the organization in the revenue equation. This is how we make money. There are four or five important variables that matter at the company, and it’s all about how everyone can align around how we move these variables up and down so that we grow and expand our business. I think that it’s about not only providing the theoretical context for these, but also then leading people with the practical data and resolve and follow-through and monitoring that shows progress. Ultimately, you end up being not only the architect but also the drummer for the business–the one who sets the cadence and gives the rhythms on what’s working, what’s not working, and what we need to improve and on how we decide to allocate capital among the different initiatives, depending on what’s yielding the best results. I think that the CFO position is amazing because you have a unique vantage point in having the opportunity to run the data side of things as well as the finance function. The standards compliance and stewarding responsibilities are very enriching and something that I’m very excited about. Throughout my career, I’ve tried to progress and be ready to do more. You go from steward to operator to strategy, but I think that the bigger role that synthesizes it all is this idea of the architect and the drummer. A priority for us is making sure that the company can continue to double in size and create scalable and repeatable processes around the way that we operate and execute. This is pillar #1. Pillar #2 is to up our game in the way that I and our organization and the broader group that we’re building here can come to the front lines to not just be a good sparring partner but also actually drive business and drive revenue.

Among the more novel approaches that CFO Anup Singh has recently used to help advance a more open working environment at Illumio, of Sunnyvale, California, was the creation of a channel inside the instant messaging application Slack through which employees can access Illumio’s finance leader by tagging their queries with an unassuming “#CFO ask me anything”. “They will ask me my views on things. This is about high employee engagement and being really accessible to the employees. I’m letting them know that they’ve got an avenue where we can be straightforward and very transparent with sharing information,” says Singh, who joined Illumio in early 2019 after having served in the CFO role for several different companies, including Anaplan and Nimble Storage. According to Singh, the CFO Slack channel extends his reach beyond his finance team members and helps him to communicate with Illumio employees with whom he may not ordinarily engage. Says Singh: “I can use the opportunity to explain the meaning of some of the financial analyses and metrics to a nonfinancial audience, and this is information-sharing that is conversational.” At the same time, Singh’s efforts to inject more openness into Illumio’s finance function and the company at large have also involved more conventional methods. Such is the case with “The Bottom Line,” a label given to a number of somewhat impromptu meetings that Singh has held to better engage with Illumio employees. “I do these a couple of times a quarter here at Illumio. It’s off-the-cuff. I show up for an hour in the break room and employees can dial in from anywhere around the world and ask me questions,” says Singh, who frequently uses the words “openness,” “conversation,” and “engagement” when describing the role of finance at Illumio. “As a CFO, you are truly a cross-functional executive. You’re wearing the hat of a GM. So this is about getting in there with sales and marketing and product people and sharing a very clear understanding of the value drivers and how your team helps the organization,” he explains. –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: What are your priorities as finance leader over the next 12 months? Singh: In looking ahead at Illumio, my big focus is on continuing to support our go-to-market expansion. Our company's growing quickly. We're expanding globally. This means recruiting in different geographies, expanding our offices, and so on. This is something that I and my team do a lot to support. In the past year, I would say that we've also worked hard to transform Illumio into a really data-driven environment as well as to emphasize the operational excellence of the company. The ongoing task is to continue to automate our metrics and automate our key processes. This obviously helps us to manage our growth efficiently. The last thing, which is very near and dear to my heart and a priority for me every year, is to continue the journey in building out a world-class team here at Illumio. This is an ongoing quest that we have. We try every year to just be better and better. When you have a model such as ours, which is very much "land and expand," having a healthy NRR or net revenue retention rate is a great indicator that the customers that you are getting in and winning are coming back to buy even more. You look at things like renewal rates and churn and so forth. These are good metrics to examine not just because they impact revenue but also because they act as good indicators of customer satisfaction, of how the product is doing, of the value that the customers are getting from our software, and so on. In addition to growth, we also track a bunch of other KPIs and metrics to ensure that we're achieving a healthy mix between growth and improving our margins and leverage in the business. We want to ensure that over time our gross margins are healthy and that we see this sequential improvement in margins every year.

Knowing that Mike Ellis has been the CFO of several growth companies, we can’t help but ask him about his tour of duty at the Massachusetts Port Authority, where the experienced finance executive served as controller from 2006 to 2009. Although the Port Authority is not exactly the type of employer that you would expect to find on the resume of an accomplished “growth CFO,” Ellis is more than happy to answer our question. “The Port Authority was not tax-funded—it was a bona-fide business with multiple revenue streams generating profits,” he explains, while characterizing the government agency as a $600 million business that contributes enormous value to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “I had never worked for a not-for-profit from the inside, but what made me excited about the Port Authority was the sheer size of it,” says Ellis, who during his tenure as controller would sign off on the accounting operations of three airports and a patchwork of revenue streams across Boston’s sprawling seaport. Looking back, Ellis says that up until the Port Authority, his senior finance leadership roles had permitted him to make decisions on his own, whereas inside the Port Authority—as in any large enterprise businesses—decision-making had to be more collaborative. “I had 40 people reporting to me at the Port Authority, and whether you are public or private or a not-for-profit business, decision-making has to be more collaborative,” Ellis explains. “It was awkward at first, but in the end, being able to achieve collaboration and innovation as a group versus having to just make the call myself made me a better CFO,” says Ellis, whose Port Authority career appears to have been well timed when you consider that it roughly coincided with the beginning of the CFO role’s ongoing march toward requiring more overtly cross-functional leadership and regular collaboration with other functional groups and leaders. –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: Tell us about the history of the company's capital structure? Ellis: I started with Flywire four years ago. We were basically a series C business at the time, basically a break-even business, so we really didn't need any additional capital. We have raised our series D, which came in approximately 18 months ago and was about a $100 million round. We've raised roughly $140 million for the business over the course of its nine-year history, and we still have plenty of it left. We've done a really good job of being efficient with our capital structure as well as making sure that the business model itself works appropriately and is efficient across all of its different tailored offerings to its customers. We're able to show that we're basically a moderately break-even business with respect to the business data analytics. We get real-time data on an hour-by-hour basis, essentially, so I'm able to understand our revenue and our transaction counts well by different verticals, by different geographic locations, by size, and by everything else across our different verticals. That's really robust, and there are no issues there. With respect to the financial investments, this really came down to the ability to close more quickly in order to get information out to the business leaders in a more timely fashion. This is really what the investment has done historically, enabling us to be really strong and robust on the business operations side and have the business at our fingertips on a real-time basis as to our clients so that the business leaders have the same view into that information. It took some time to kind of get that financial information and be able to close more rapidly. We have a different program within the organization, our business operations team, which basically--with the help of the data architects--really augments and creates the analytical function as it relates to what we're seeing in the data. This is a shared services model, with multiple people working together collaboratively to be able to share with the executives what's really happening in our business, and we can cut this up in multiple ways.

mong the different experiences that Alan George credits with having prepared him for a CFO role, one office meeting looms large. After he had spent days and nights preparing his first presentation for the president of a portfolio company, George recalls, the meeting came to an abrupt end when the executive reached across the table and shut George’s laptop. “Come with me!” was the curt command he recalls being issued as he followed the executive out of the office. Over the next few days, George says, he toured the company’s manufacturing facility alongside the executive and went on visits to different suppliers. “We were literally riding on delivery trucks and talking to retailers, and he took me through the entire life cycle of the product,” says George, who credits the excursions with illuminating the realities of the business and delivering a lesson that to this day informs his decision-making. Of course, the experience that truly sets George apart from those of most of our CFO guests is one that happened at midstream in his career, when—after having spent a number of years at JP Morgan as an investment analyst and ridden inside delivery trucks as a private equity executive—he exited the business world and joined the U.S. military. “I usually tell people that I took a five-year sabbatical,” says George, who, after completing basic and airborne training, was selected as a Green Beret and assigned to a team within U.S. special forces with which he remained engaged for three years. “I was obviously older than most people, and I think that if I had waited three more months, I would have been over the age limit,” explains George, who adds that a desire to serve in the military first took root while he was working at JP Morgan in New York in the months after 9/11. Six years later, his plans took flight. –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: What are some of your top of mind numbers? George: The first thing that I look at is daily sales. I get a report that comes out in the middle of the night. I know what we did in sales the day before, and then I can drill down into it and say, OK, since I'm primarily a direct-to-consumer business, I want to see my traffic conversion and AOV. I want to see how we're doing relative to our forecast. I want to see how any specific programs are driving those key metrics. For us, specifically, traffic is a huge driver. We have really strong conversion and AOV. Traffic-driving awareness programs have a huge impact for our business. When we're looking at where we're spending marginal dollars, the ROI of driving traffic to our site today is really high, so the couple of betas that we've done to drive traffic have been really, really meaningful for us. The other thing that I look at is repeat purchase rate. I think that this is an indicator of the health of your product portfolio and the quality of the products that you're delivering. I tell everybody that it's easy to get that first sale. It's really hard to get that second and almost impossible to get the third. So, how do we be the best at this? By getting our consumers to buy into what we're doing and continue to purchase. These are the major things that we look at today. When I came in, I revamped the forecasting model. The team had done a good job with the limited resources that they had in putting together a forecast to try to stay ahead of growth and be able to manage inventory and cash properly. When I came in, I tweaked the process. The biggest thing was instituting a weekly direct cash flow model. As an early-stage company, cash is the most important thing for us. We're in the middle of a fund-raising round, so being able to manage my cash flow on a weekly basis until we get that round closed is critically important. This is something that I do and look at every day—tweaking the forecast based on what I'm seeing and being able to make sure that I have visibility into what the cash flow will be for the next 13 to 26 weeks.

Years from now, when finance leader David Burt is reminiscing about his varied career chapters, you might imagine a captivated listener politely interrupting the veteran CFO with the question, “Excuse me, but what exactly was your profession?” This is a query perhaps more likely to be asked of veteran CFOs than other seasoned business leaders, in light of how finance leaders are less tethered than others to any one industry or opportunity throughout their careers. Such is the case with Burt, who, as CFO of ServiceTitan, is busily applying his patchwork of business and industry experiences to the multibillion-dollar residential home services industry. Turn back the clock 20 years, and you’d find Burt helping companies expand into China as a Bain & Company consultant based in Sydney, Australia, his original home. Ten years later, you’d find him evaluating digital media acquisition targets as an investment banker with JP Morgan. Only 8 years after that, you’d see him roaming the frontlines of the streaming wars while serving as co-head of corporate development for Netflix. Today, Burt views his finance leadership role as being not unlike that in an earlier chapter as a strategic advisor, when he sought to help empower management to be more outward-looking. He says that finance executives “oftentimes get boxed into just looking at the internal aspects of the company.” To highlight his point, Burt recalls that back in 2012, Netflix realized that three companies—Disney, Nickelodeon, and the Cartoon Network—would someday soon wield a powerful advantage inside the realm of children’s content as more consumers turned to streaming. “I asked myself, ‘If I were sitting in the FP&A teams for those companies, what would things look like?’ I realized pretty quickly that this meant that we as a company would need to begin investing in original content much sooner,” explains Burt, who says that up until that time, Netflix had been focused on developing content mostly for more mature audiences, with shows like the “Orange Is the New Black.” – Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: What are your top of mind numbers?  Burt: The first things that I look at on a weekly and monthly basis tend to center on the fundamentals. Once we're in the door with a customer, there's an opportunity for us to provide additional services that might add additional recurring revenue. This growth is really important because it allows us to forward-invest into areas of R&D, sales and marketing, and so forth. We are of a certain size today, but we have aspirations to be much, much bigger, and as we grow, we are enabled to do more and more for our customers more efficiently because we can scale our investments in R&D across a larger base. The second big area that I like to focus on is our unit economics. In particular, one of the key metrics within the unit economics would be how efficient we are in delivering the service. The financial measure that we look at there would be ongoing gross margin. Then there's how efficient we are at actually acquiring a customer, so we have a set of measures around customer acquisition costs. There's also how good we are at satisfying the customer, which manifests itself in churn. You can get pretty misled by churn, particularly in a B2B software company where your software is so critical to a company. It's important to look at not just the numbers and the financials, but also what might be underlying indicators of key metrics in this third area. Our measures of customer satisfaction are important here, and in particular we spend a lot of time looking at net promoter score, NPS, among a few other C-SAT types of metrics.

Inside the world of retail businesses, Greg Wookey’s CFO career has advanced down a path that parallels the sector’s growing appetite for more sophisticated software. Such was the case roughly 10 years ago, when he stepped into the CFO office at Mindbody—a firm whose well-known software helped fitness centers across the country to manage the demands of their clientele—and such is the case today, as Wookey serves as CFO of Boulevard, a SaaS developer whose offerings are specially tailored to high-end salons and spas. This arena—in what Boulevard and other software developers commonly refer to as “appointment-based retail”—is where Boulevard now hopes to help salon and spa owners to achieve a more sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing customer booking experience. “We saw that there was an inability of salon owners to connect effectively with their clientele, so this was about making booking appointments and integrating payments easier so that salon owners could accept payments more easily,” says Wookey. Meanwhile, Wookey is keeping a close eye on Boulevard’s own customer engagement activities. “We actually have very good metrics in terms of the size of our pipeline, the pipeline velocity, and how fast the opportunities are moving through that pipeline. Then we measure the direct marketing spend that we have and how that relates to new business,” the finance leader explains. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about a finance strategic moment. Wookey: One that comes to mind was back in 2009, when I started at a company called Mindbody. We were a little bit bigger than Boulevard is now and we were a few rounds of investing ahead of where we are at Boulevard, but it was very clear that the business was growing extremely fast and that there was the potential that at some point in the future we might be able to become a public company. With this in mind, I knew that there were certain things that we needed to do at Mindbody to prepare for that moment--which didn't come until six years later. But in the time that I was heading finance there, what I tried to do was lay the foundation for what would be the ability to go public at some point in the future. This really involved several things. One was to build out a more robust internal team in terms of accounting and finances and FP&A. Another was to create the ability to use tools that would be more supportive of a public company--for example, moving off of QuickBooks and onto NetSuite so that our reporting would be stronger. We also changed relationships in terms of our audit, banking, and legal. These were all things that I set in motion very early on in my career there. This eventually proved to be something that was important for the ability of the company to go public, which we did in 2015. This was a moment when I looked at the finance operation, looked at what the state of it was at the time, and then thought about where it needed to be several years down the road. You have to start these processes in motion and not wait too long, or suddenly you're up against it in terms of timing. This was a very strategic thing that I did in terms of trying to make sure that the company was prepared in case this happened, which it eventually did, and it goes well beyond finance. It touches the entire company in terms of how we operate, what processes we put in place, how we access data, things of that nature. For me, this was probably the most significant strategic initiative that I embarked on that started from finance and really ended up impacting the entire company.

In the past, Sue Vestri has told friends that she has achieved CFO success by routinely working herself out of jobs. Vestri is not alone. Certainly, many of her finance leader peers have helped to create some exciting M&A deal-making chapters only to be “written out” of the newly merged business’s future script. “Being put out of a job isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one opportunity can open the door to the next—or at least it has for me,” says Vestri, whose latest career post as CFO of Greenphire opened up just as her previous role as CFO of Artisan Mobile of Philadelphia was closing down with the sale of the company in 2015. “I was thinking that I’d actually take the summer off, but that didn’t happen,” says Vestri, who remembers being contacted by a recruiter about Greenphire, which was yet another Philadelphia-area company that had recently been acquired and was looking for some local C-suite talent to beef up its management ranks. Along the way, some of the local deal-making impacting her career has involved out-of-town acquirers. Such was the case back in 2010, when Dell acquired Boomi, a Philadelphia-area technology developer specializing in integration technologies. At Boomi, Vestri had advanced into a finance leadership role just as the giant technology provider from Round Rock, Texas, came knocking. Says Vestri: “With Dell being public at the time, the whole process and early discussions had to be kept very confidential.” In light of Dell’s concerns, Vestri says, Boomi looked for space off-site and ended up renting a hotel meeting room for a period of months. “The process involved maybe a half dozen people from our side, but there was literally an army of executives from Dell,” she recalls. –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL When it comes to customer measurement whatare you focused on? Vestri: I think that everyone tries to measure customer service and customer support in some way. In the past, we historically have done customer surveys and implementation after implementation periodically throughout the year. It's always challenging as to who actually responds and how you disseminate the information and make any use of it. We still do these types of things, but recently we've actually gone out and done some user forums where we've sat in the room with some of our users. To be honest, not all of the feedback was good. There were some pretty harsh critics in the room at some of these forums that we did. It was really actually good for us to hear this, and it's driving a different strategy for us going into 2020. We're going to literally have a team dedicated to site satisfaction and getting training to our sites. In the clinical trial world, there are certainly a lot of sites in the U.S. and they're easier to touch, but ours are worldwide. They're all over the world. You have language barriers that you're dealing with. We rely on our partners to do a lot of the training on how to utilize our software, and we're finding that this may not be the most successful way to get people up and using it. For us, a big driver of revenue is getting clients worldwide to use the software in the way that it was intended. We are spending a tremendous amount of energy on understanding our clients and what it's going to take to make them happy and be advocates of using our products in our industry. We're very focused on and paying attention to a number of key strategic initiatives. There's an innovation one and a process optimization one. Things around site adoption and client experience. Everything that we're going to do in 2020 is going to focus on these key initiatives.

Back in the early 1990s, with both feet firmly planted on an auditing career path inside Price Waterhouse’s Tampa, Florida, office, Raj Dani decided to take a detour into the accounting house’s M&A advisory practice. Over the next few years, the one-time auditor began providing deal-makers with financial and operational due diligence on their future mergers and acquisitions. “I became focused on cash and EBITDA generation, the strategic value of two enterprises coming together, and how you drive synergies and value for shareholders,” explains Dani, who says that his segue into M&A opened the door to experiences that have never for a minute led him to reconsider the auditor’s path. Dani’s jump into Price Waterhouse’s M&A advisory services also allowed the former auditor to gain international experience when the M&A practice shortly thereafter transferred him to Zurich, Switzerland. It is perhaps little surprise that Dani’s post-PW career has also involved both M&A and Europe. Looking to enhance its European operations as well as its new ventures portfolio, Jabil Circuit enlisted Dani to help lead its corporate development efforts from its Milan, Italy, office. Reflecting on his different M&A roles overseas, Dani says that “it was just a major life lesson on how to treat people when you’re integrating two cultures and how to be respectful of people and their differences.” Today, as CFO of Ping Identity, of Denver, Colorado, Dani credits his early-career “M&A detour” along with his budding relationships inside the private equity realm for having helped advance him into the CFO office.  CFOTL: What are your priorities as a finance leader over the next six months? Dani: In terms of our priorities at Ping Identity and my own as a finance leader overall, my first priority is making sure that I continue to work from a team perspective, to work on progressing my team's knowledge base and experience, and to thus give them greater career path opportunities. If you don't think long-term about your people, they're thinking long-term about themselves, and they want to make sure that they're partnered with a company and leader who have their best interests in mind. This is not something that most leaders think of just off the top of their head as their number one priority, but It is absolutely all about the people for me because without these people, we would get bogged down very quickly. We hire well, we train well, and we make sure that they're getting out of the company just as much as the company is getting out of them. You cannot have this equation be out of balance. So, I really do prioritize the people-centric initiatives from a business perspective. We're doing several things in terms of new products that we've introduced in the past few quarters. As we mentioned on our last quarterly call, we're now really leaning into designing sales and marketing investments to monetize some of these product investments. A lot of my focus will be on the operations of the business and making sure that our new CMO is successful and getting what he needs to continue to elevate our brand such that Ping Identity is top-of-mind in any cybersecurity discussion with global systems integrators, with board-level folks, with C-suites, and so on. I'll also be making sure that our execution, from marketing to product to sales, is just a smooth supply chain, if I can use that analogy. There are investments that we need to make in each, so just making sure that we're making the right investments at the right time and really enabling our teams to be successful is top-of-mind for me.

CFOTL: What are your priorities as finance leader over the next 12 months?  CFOT:" Here at Eventbrite, my priorities are to bring focus and simplicity. We just went through our planning experience for 2020. We started with 12 different strategic initiatives, and I'm happy to say that eight of them wound up on the cutting room floor. We've got four that everybody is really focused on. These four initiatives had 20 subprojects, and these, too, have been dialed down to four. We're just bringing focus and clarity and simplicity. I teased the team in our flash report. On the 57th page, we put a little note which said that the first person to read the page and call Lanny Baker would get dinner at the restaurant of their choice. That was three months ago, and the phone still hasn't rung. This was just my way of showing the team that some of the complicated reporting that we were doing just wasn't making a difference. Nobody's looking at it, and that's why I'm trying to bring some simplicity and focus. All of this is in support of allowing the company to drive long-term growth. One of our priorities on the finance team is helping the company to accelerate growth, make the right decisions, pick the right priorities, make the right investments, track these, manage these, and get the payoff, which will be acceleration and sustainable long-term growth for the company. The other thing that I'm trying to do at this particular organization is to always put creators first. As we're developing metrics, as we're developing our financial measures, as we're thinking about our messaging to employees, to customers, to shareholders, and even to the board of directors, we want to make sure that everybody sees that this is a company with creators first. The metrics that we talk about start with creators, and that's helping us to focus. And this focus, I think, helps us to drive growth.

Step inside CFO Kevin Jacobson’s office at LogicGate, and there’s little question that you’ll think you’ve entered a realm where growth and risk are often two sides of the same coin. In fact, LogicGate’s fast path to achieving “product market fit” was no doubt shortened by early customers who today wield a similar growth/risk mind-set. Four-year-old LogicGate, a provider of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software, now expects its workforce to expand to 170 employees before 2021. Says Jacobson: “I tell our team that going forward, we are going to be breaking records across every metric in every quarter.” With yet another year of impressive growth behind LogicGate, Jacobson says that the company’s foundation has been firmly laid for a new growth chapter to be built. “We’ve grown significantly since last year, and my role is now about keeping a vigilant eye on what matters in this new context, this next stage of growth,” he explains.

We are nearly at the end of our interview with Scot Parnell when we ask him to explain what led him to accept the CFO position at DailyPay, a company with a pioneering technology inside the human capital management realm. This is a question that we had asked a little earlier in the interview, but this time we want to know what other factors may have contributed to his decision. Although Parnell has already put forth a compelling explanation of DailyPay’s unique offerings, he is happy to share a bit more with us. “This role was absolutely fascinating. I was at a place in my life where I could take some risks, and I also think that I’ve got some runway here. For me, it was too important to be absolutely excited about goingto work every day. It makes me a better leader. It makes me a better husband and father when I find fulfillment in what I’m doing,” explains Parnell, whose response suddenly widens our lens to a better view of what sets apart his latest CFO career chapter from earlier ones. “As I sat back and looked at what I wanted to do next, this just felt like I could get more excited about it and put more of my soul into it, so that’s what I did,” he continues, while expressing a sentiment that many finance leaders experience but frequently resist acting upon. Having spent the past 20 years as a finance leader in large enterprise organizations, Parnell has observations about the entrepreneurial realm that undoubtedly signal a fresh enthusiasm that few CFOs can muster—and particularly those who may have built their careers as start-up CFOs and but over time have become more integrated into their surroundings. Nonetheless, when it comes to CEO–CFO relationships, Parnell’s comments are suddenly strikingly similar to those of a broad swath of his CFO peers: “The CFO and CEO have to do a Vulcan mind-meld to make sure that they’re not only of the same mind, but also able to work together as a team and provide each other balance and support.” –Jack Sweeney

Tannenbaum: At Brex, pretty early on, I was kind of familiar with the banking landscape from when I had been in investment banking. The group that I had been in actually served regional banks, so I did a lot of regional bank mergers and acquisitions. Then, at SoFi, I had built a lot of relationships with regional banks. I think that when you start in fintech, there's always this belief that you're competing with big banks. That was a lot of the marketing positioning of my former employer, SoFi, but at Brex I saw this opportunity to partner with banks because I was familiar with the card landscape. At least in the commercial card space, outside of the Big Four banks--Wells, Citi, Bank of America, Chase--there are very few financial institutions that actually issue corporate cards. I decided that even though we were a small company, subscale, no one had heard of us, and we had a stupid name like Brex (which actually wasn't as stupid as our first one), banks might want to partner with us because they themselves were fighting their own battles with the Big Four issuers, as well as American Express. So we partnered with a number of banks very early on in a way that most people would think was not possible and was unusual. Ultimately in financial services, brands, particularly with regard to trust and stability, are super important. Today, what's exciting is that technology is changing so many industries and creating lots of opportunities, as well as disruption and uncertainty. Finance is a kind of universal language. At Brex, we need to be known for the brand of our risk management because ultimately we're asking both customers and other businesses to trust us with their money--to buy loans from us, to buy deposits from us, to partner with us and give us access to payments networks. To do this, we really need to be known as a high-quality risk management brand.

CFOTL: Having splitout from GE- we would imagine there were certain business processes already in place at Synchrony, while others processes had to be reestablished or developed. Wenzel: The processes that have been developed are probably the core part of our business. We had to build everything from scratch. Even the processes for things like very mundane benefits in HR, and paying people, and for some of the regulatory reporting–we had to build all that up. But we did take a process from GE that was a very good process in the credit risk world, a very traditional process. You go out and get underwriting scores from credit bureaus, you look at your data, you kind of put a score together, and you say yes or no. We have developed this process more and invested so much in it. Now we’re taking multiple data elements into consideration, including what we get from our partners. We have a thing called “engagements” through which we know how “Jack” is engaged with our retail partners before he engages with us, so we have an idea of who you are. We look at our 80 million active cardholders. You’re probably one of our active cardholders. We look at the information there. We have a much better picture. Then we take these other sources of data from different sources so that we can get more information on you. We use technology now to authenticate you. If you’re using your cell phone, we can prepopulate applications down to two different sources. We’ve allowed these things to come in so that we know the customer better. We use the combination of data and technology and are then really able to put it into our credit operating model. This was very good under GE, but we have brought it really to a much higher-class standard. For us, the next 12 months are really about creating the 2025 vision. What are the tools and technologies that we have to begin building now to be adaptable to the business and how the business is changing? The second thing that we’re trying to do is, again, to have this maniacal focus around customers and in getting value-added jobs out. We’re moving faster when it comes to the artificial intelligence and the robotic process automation that happens more in the controllership or accounting world and driving meaningful projects that will deliver results this year.

It was back in 2002, Stephen Grist says, when he first punched through a surface of rigid assumptions to grasp the innovative levers that would propel him into the ranks of strategic CFOs. At the time, Grist was the CFO of Viatel, a technology company whose management and sales teams were eagerly seeking to reestablish the company’s footing along a growth path after having recently emerged from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. With its bankruptcy in the rearview mirror, the company emerged with an unbridled appetite for growth—but one that was perhaps lacking in long-term vision. Says Grist: “The existing business managers were so focused on ‘Take that hill!’ and ‘This is our business, and this is the path that we’re going down!’ They just were not capable of identifying the disruptive risks.” Having already logged a string of seven-day weeks to hasten Viatel’s exit from bankruptcy, Grist might have found it easy to applaud the sales team’s mounting tactical wins and provide diligent governance. Instead, he engaged the company’s general counsel, and together they approached a number of bankers in order to “add on” some small Internet businesses that could quickly diversify the types of services that Viatel offered to its small to midsize customers. According to Grist, Viatel at the time was struggling with the “The Innovator’s Dilemma”—a phrase referring to disruptive competitors first coined and used as the title of a popular text by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. “You’re so caught up in your vision of the company that you’re not really capable of identifying where those disruptive risks are affecting the company as they come in from different, different directions,” says Grist, who looks back at 2002 as a turning point for both Viatel and his CFO career. Moving forward, Grist has entered new CFO roles as a disruptive risk expert tasked with questioning assumptions. “Every time I’ve come into a company, it’s been like, ‘Okay, it’s time to do the long-term business plan’—but you’ve got a different view of the world, so you can ask all those questions,” says Grist, who since Viatel has served in a string CFO roles for both founder-led and VC-backed companies. Says Grist: “As the CFO, you bring your experience to bear and you identify risks as you build the next year’s budget or the long-term model from really being in a position to question assumptions.” - Jack Sweeney

Asked to reflect on those experiences that she feels prepared her for a finance leadership role, a cash flow statement quickly comes to mind for Anna Brunelle, CFO of Kinestral Technologies. Only months into her first industry finance job, Brunelle was tasked with preparing her company’s cash flow statement, and she didn’t like some of what she discovered about the business. “I realized that there were a couple of businesses that the company had acquired a few years earlier that had some elements that were kind of dragging down our profitability,” explains Brunelle, who after digging a little deeper and more closely studying the businesses realized that the areas negatively impacting profits frequently involved certain offerings of recently acquired European businesses that offered limited cross-selling potential. “Not knowing any better, I went to the CFO and CEO and said, ‘Hey, have we ever thought about transferring some of the elements out of these businesses?,’” recalls Brunelle, who even today as a CFO appears somewhat surprised by her early-career assertiveness. She continues: “I say ‘I didn’t know any better’ because I was only two months on the job, and I didn’t know that there was probably more of a process of going through your manager to do this. Instead, I just said, ‘Hey, has anybody thought about this?’” According to Brunelle, only days later she was boarding a plane to Europe to help execute on her suggestion and sell off underperforming assets and parts of the business that were perhaps not as profitable as was desired or in line with the company’s future direction. “I got on a plane having never traveled to Rome before, not knowing any lawyers or accountants or bankers there. I worked through getting an introduction to a banker to help us package these businesses and find buyers and then getting an introduction to an attorney who could help us with the local Italian law and how to structure the contracts for these transactions,” says Brunelle, who credits the resulting deal-making with helping to distinguish her as an executive “who gets things done.” “They were relatively small transactions,” she adds. “I think that one was about a $10 million sale and one was about a $30 million sale. But for me, so early in my career, this was the moment when I realized that finance was the way to open the door to being part of the more exciting strategic business conversations.” –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: What metrics are top of mind for you these days? Brunelle:  We've been selling commercially for about two quarters now out of our factory in Taiwan, so we think carefully about quite a few metrics. Obviously, cash is very important. We have to finance the company through our early-stage growth until we reach a point of profitability, just like every other growth company. This is very important. Because we have a fairly complex business, we have to have a pretty well thought out strategic plan and metrics. By "complex business," I mean that we have the Taiwan factory and we also have research and development teams here who are creating new products as well as innovating on existing products to make them less expensive. We also have a chemistry division that applies what you would think of as the ink that causes our windows to darken; the do the chemical formulations and composition here. We have the software division in Salt Lake City. So, we're really running a fairly complex business in which multiple elements have to come together in order for us to be successful. When you think of customer experience metrics, you think of how it's really important for us to be on time. The factory has to be very responsive to customer needs. We have to monitor on-time delivery and make sure that our customers are getting the products that they need to button up their building projects in a timely manner. In terms of quality, we look a lot at yield in the factory in terms of efficiency. We're thinking about throughput and how much product is being produced on the line per day, per week, per month. Obviously, because we have a factory and these other elements of our business such as the chemistry and R&D and pilot plant elements, compliance with health and safety is very important, so tracking this and making sure that it's at the forefront of everything we do is key. And then there's reducing costs, such as the manufacturing costs per unit or per project and watching that. Finally, the number one metric that can really poorly influence all of your other metrics is sales growth. If you don't have sales growth, the rest of your metrics will suffer.

Ten years or so ago, the expression “never waste a downturn” became a popular maxim among business leaders who viewed the economy’s downward spiral as an opportunity to trim waste and restructure portions of their businesses. The expression also summed up the mind-set of a unique class of executives who, despite a bleak hiring environment, viewed the period as being potentially transformational for their careers. Such was the case with CFO John Evarts, who entered the downturn as a CFO for a not-for-profit and exited as CFO of Mediafly—a small content asset management company that in the coming years would open a new growth chapter by answering the demand for more compelling content in sales enablement. “From late 2008 to 2009, there were some challenges inside the not-for-profit sector, so I started looking for an opportunity to broaden myself beyond the not-for-profit realm—I was comfortable in taking that risk and making a bet on myself,” explains Evarts, who had originally transitioned into the not-for-profit sector from the world of investment banking and has also taken on the title of COO during his Mediafly tenure. “When I shifted from the not-for-profit area into ‘start-up land,’ I was fortunate to have this amazing opportunity to play a more strategic role and determine how to deploy resources in a more strategic way.” - Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: Share with us a finance strategic moment of insight? Evarts: Our first opportunity for mergers and acquisitions was really what I would say was a watershed moment for me. I had never had the opportunity to pursue an acquisition before, and I needed to figure out for myself what a framework would be in order to determine whether this was a good one or not a good one. It's very different from what's in the textbooks. When you get into the actual practical matter of pursuing an acquisition, you need to be very disciplined in how you look at it, how you think it through. We had to come up with this construct that we call our 100-day plan. When I started thinking about how to make that construct and 100-day plan--what we call "one Mediafly"--it really started driving home the point that culture is critical. The reason why we're acquiring this company is so that not only do we get the benefit of the products, but also we get the benefit of the really great people who are on the team. We were able to get this 100-day plan around M&A as a way for us to think about and philosophize about this "one media fly" concept, which is, for example, the way that we look at how to source the capital that is necessary and how to figure out how the people need to work within the organization. So, it's not only how many resources we need in order to acquire this company, but also what does the construct in the comp model look like afterward? What is the expectation of revenue production that's going to come out afterward? Then, over time, you get to the point where you're also talking about culture and its impact. What do you think about when more than 50% of the company is outside of the Chicago headquarters? What do you do? How do you think about remote work? So, all of this goes beyond the typical finance conversation. It's really about culture, by the time you get it all the way out. This, for me, was kind of an "A-ha!" moment, once we got to this concept of "one Mediafly."

Years from now, if Silicon Valley’s glitterati were ever to gather to celebrate the opening of a National Cloud Computing Museum, CFO Raman Kapur would make an excellent tour guide for the facility’s finance wing. In fact, he could just chart the trajectory of his career from the dot-com bubble forward to help the world at large to better grasp how the cloud opportunity has grown and reshaped the finance business function. Our tour could begin at Intuit, the accounting software developer that Kapur joined in 2001 while seeking shelter from the dot-com bubble burst, where he quickly found his footing as a controller inside the company’s fast-growing QuickBooks division. Looking back at his Intuit career chapter, Kapur recalls a loud internal debate that would ultimately determine the fate of a money-losing unit known at the time as “QuickBooks on the Web.” “I’m proud to say that I was among those who helped to make the decision not to close it. There was still a lot of talk around the question, ‘Should we just close it down?,’” explains Kapur, who says that while the answer may seem obvious now, there was still room for debate back then, in light of the unit’s losses. Kapur’s controllership savvy propelled him into the cloud-friendly Big Data era at Splunk, where for nearly a decade he helped the data-hungry company to chart new growth paths as he himself advanced into the role of vice president of finance—capping a tenure that exposed him to the likes of Godfrey Sullivan, a Silicon Valley stalwart who served as Splunk’s chairman and CEO. Today, Kapur recalls a quarterly meeting at which Sullivan surveyed Splunk’s senior executives about the future direction of the company. According to Kapur, the discussion focused mainly on two areas where the company’s offerings had been experiencing some extra traction. Still, not everyone viewed the new areas of traction as resources-worthy, at which point Sullivan remarked: “Your successful tactic becomes your strategy”—an insight that Sullivan used to open the minds of his management team and which led the company to double down on one of the two areas – a space Splunk has since grown exponentially.   Meanwhile, Kapur is able to quickly validate the insight as he reflects back on his own experiences: “More often than not, you try a couple of things and one of them becomes the bigger part of your business,”  says Kapur, who would exit Splunk in 2018 to step into the CFO office at Moogsoft. –Jack Sweeney

Perhaps, unlike most of her professional peers, when Bea Ordonez first interviewed for a CFO role, she got the job. At the time, perhaps no one was more surprised than Ordonez, whose finance resume—while impressive for a 26-year-old—still lacked a number of C-suite prerequisites. Twenty years later, she still resides in the C-Suite, having filled a number of consecutive CFO and COO roles over the years. Nonetheless, she credits her first CFO tour of duty with having opened the door for everything that has followed. “On paper, at least, I was woefully underqualified for the job. I interviewed, landed the role, and then worked really, really hard to learn the business from the ground up,” says Ordonez, whose first CFO stint was with a joint venture originally formed with Bloomberg Tradebook known as G-Trade. Located on the island of Bermuda, the broker-dealer start-up no doubt found Ordonez an attractive hire in part because she was at the time an island resident. Still, for all of those trying to decode shortcuts to the C-suite or uncover a coveted secret behind becoming a 26-year-old CFO, we’d wager that Ordonez’s words “worked really, really hard” perhaps best reveal her world of both today and 20 years ago. As G-Trade grew, Ordonez became tasked with quickly adding talent to help answer the organization’s growing demand for financial and operational support. “We were providing support for trading activities across close to 90 global markets and at the same time building a culture and creating a work ethic that even to this day I am very proud of,” recalls Ordonez, while once more drawing our attention to her unwavering appetite for the work itself. “At times in my career, I didn’t have any personal life, and what time I did have, I used for sleeping,” confides Ordonez, who adds that today—more than ever before—she is achieving a positive work/life balance. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: What metrics are top of mind for you? ERTEL: Largely defined, most of Vizient's revenue is—I'm going to put it in air quotes—"subscription-oriented." Some of it is literal subscriptions, whether SaaS or other offerings, but much of it is driven by multiyear contracts that operate as subscription services, such as for clinical data or for a group purchasing organization. While on the one hand this provides great visibility on future revenue, the challenge with these types of organizations is to not just sit back and rest on your laurels. What offerings enhancements do you put forward to really take advantage of the built-in stickiness that you have because it's either a contract or a subscription that serves as a contract? How do you really enhance something so that you're providing value to those customers on an ongoing basis by improving the offerings? That's a good starting point, but it doesn't change the dynamic of the fact that you have to be out there every day as a company, whether you're on the back office or CFO side of the equation or you're out with customers. I think that it's an important point for a company like this to understand and rise to that challenge. As far as metrics go, it's revenue per customer, it's margin per customer, it's overall EBITDA margin when you look at financial statistics, but then it's also member retention. That's not literally measured every single day, but certainly it's something that's looked at month by month. How many of our customers do we retain? Another metric is new business, what our market share is, and so forth. So, there are probably 10 to 12 metrics altogether.

CFOTL: What are the numbers or metrics that are always top of mind for you?  Shelly: Ninety-five percent of our revenue is driven by the volume that we clear, settle, and risk-manage every day, which is something that we don't control. We charge a clearing fee for our services, and as a low-cost service provider, I can't just charge any old amount. I'm very cognizant of how much volume we clear every day because our budget is based on an average daily volume rate. I'm also very cognizant of expenses. I'm okay with spending money, but I want to do it in a smart way. Last year, we began what we call our Renaissance initiative. It's a multiyear, multimillion-dollar program through which we are replacing our core technologies. The system that clears, settles, and risk-manages those positions every single day is about 20 years old, so we are looking to create a more modular, more agile system whereby we can increase our processing, we can better utilize the data that we receive every single day, and we can expand upon the risk management services that we provide. Right now, it's currently being done on premises on a couple of mainframes. We'll be looking to move all of that processing up into the cloud so that as our volume increases, we can expand and manage it without an issue. Now, don't get me wrong: The mainframes that we currently have can process an exorbitant amount of volume. In 2019, I think that we had a few days where we cleared and settled over somewhere between 30 and 35 million contracts. In 2020, we are clearing and settling, on average, probably about 19.5 million contracts every single day, and the system works just fine. It's just very cumbersome to make changes to it, and that's another part of the reason for the drive to make a change.

Few megadeals within the past decade have received as many recurring kudos as the acquisition of Genzyme, of Cambridge, MA by France’s biggest pharmaceutical company, Sanofi. The marriage of Sanofi and Genzyme appears to have exceeded expectations, allowing all of those involved in minting the newly merged entity to rightfully keep a feather in their postmerger caps. Thus it was for Mike Kaseta, who in the wake of the merger found himself tasked with integrating the finance and IT functions of the two companies. “It’s probably the achievement that I’m most proud of in my career,” explains Kaseta, who, after nearly a decade climbing the finance ranks inside Sanofi, exited the giant pharmaceutical company to stake a claim inside the realm of early-stage biotech, where today he is CFO of Aerami Therapeutics. Looking back, Kaseta believes that the greatest lessons he gleaned from the Sanofi–Genzyme merger were people-related: “There was no iron fist. We listened to employees. We understood. In the end, we had no control deficiencies, no comments from our external auditors, and the integration occurred in a timely manner.” Looking forward, Kaseta says that raising money now tops his list of CFO priorities at Aerami. “We have to get our story out,” he adds. “We have to get it out to the right people and really engage with investors, allowing them to get as excited about our story as we are.” –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

Among the many lessons that David Moss has learned along the trajectory of his 25-year finance career, the one to which he refers simply as “the $3 million sweatshirt” is perhaps the most enduring. Even after 20 years, Moss can’t help but mention the sweatshirt bearing the logo of Pets.com, which he kept as a souvenir from an earlier career chapter involving a $3 million investment in the infamous dot-com retailing upstart. Pets.com began operations in November 1998 and shut down in November 2000, becoming one of the more high-profile victims of the dot-com bubble. However, looking back, Moss says that while the economy’s sudden gyrations certainly contributed to the firm’s demise, other mistakes also came into play, including the filling of leadership roles with executives from large enterprise companies. “Someone from a large business often has a difficult time in adjusting to dynamic environments where you have to get your hands dirty and wear all of the hats and take the trash out,” says Moss, who clearly has kept his appetite for investing in early-stage companies—especially inside the biotech realm, where he now resides as CFO and cofounder of INmune, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company. “We don’t have a lot of complexity when it comes to how we built the business or the way that our accounting works, ” adds Moss, who, along with two other cofounders, formulated a plan to self-fund INmune. “Our mantra is to keep things simple,” explains Moss, who says that the firm’s capital structure underscores this philosophy, along with a preference for selling only common stock. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about a finance strategic moment? Moss: One very strategic moment in our business at INmune Bio had to do with something that we did that was very unusual with regard to our financial situation. When companies go public, they typically go and hire an investment bank first. Then they go and draft all of their financial documents, and then they go and do their IPO and raise the money. We did the opposite here at INmune, which is probably very, very rare. We went and actually drafted our financial documents, got them approved by the regulatory authorities like the SEC and the NASDAQ, and then went and got our banks to do our capital raise. We did this because we wanted to be in the driver's seat. You know, we kind of have this view that you want to drive your own destiny. You put yourself more in the driver's seat, show that you can do it, and then try to bring your financial players on board. That's what we did here. As a result, what does this mean? There are positives and negatives with everything that you do. One positive is that because we drove the deal, it was mainly on our own terms. We also were able to maintain a lot of insider ownership, because we're big believers in this business. We believe in simplicity, so we wanted a simple cap structure. We didn't want to go into preferreds, we didn't want to go into convertible debt. We didn't want to go into warrants or anything like that. So, we kind of drove that on our own. A negative is that we weren't able to attract investor audiences as large as we would have if we had been more flexible in our terms and our deal structure. But all of this led to us ringing the bell on the NASDAQ, where we were actually the first biotech IPO of 2019.   Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

Ravi Chopra has built his career inside finance functions designed to serve growth-minded management. Such was the case in the late ’90s when Chopra joined Cisco Systems, which at the time was experiencing 50% growth annually. Jump forward 10 years, and you’ll find him busy leading the FP&A function for growth-driven Juniper Networks. Asked to reflect back on a 25-year finance career, Chopra doesn’t hesitate to cite his former employer. “I learned most of everything that I know today at Juniper,” says Chopra, who quickly names Robyn Denholm, Juniper’s former CFO and current Tesla chairman, as a present and former mentor. Still, when the door to the CFO office swung open for Chopra, the accomplished finance executive no doubt found his operations knowledge being put to the test. In 2017, Chopra would exit Juniper Networks and take on the CFO role at SonicWall, a company that had neither a finance nor an HR organization after it split off from Dell, Inc., in late 2016. Dell had acquired SonicWall in 2012 but divested the business along with Quest Software as part of the larger Dell EMC integration. Despite some missing parts, SonicWall arguably split off with something far more valuable intact: its brand name. Prior to being acquired by Dell, the cyber protection company had long since established itself as a leader in the small and midsize business space. “It was just an amazing challenge, and I think that we have now come out on the other side of it rather well,” explains Chopra, who believes that the speed with which SonicWall built its new infrastructure and achieved operational efficiencies allowed the firm to more quickly determine where to allocate capital. –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

Had Valerie Burman entered the CFO office a decade ago, you wonder whether the role would be as good a match for the accomplished finance executive as it appears to be today. Back in 2007, after working nearly a decade in M&A as an investment banker, Burman exited a banking career to take on a corporate development role at Business Objects, a French software company that was soon to be acquired by SAP. Post acquisition, Burman quickly found a groundswell of opportunities coming her way inside SAP, where she would serve in a variety of roles involving technology partnerships, business development, and product management.  Fast-forward a few years, and we find Stanford Law graduate Burman serving as general counsel first to Mindjet and then to crowdsourcing innovation upstart Spigit. “I would say that working from those perspectives—although it is a bit of a roundabout way to become a CFO—has really led me to a place where I can be a CFO with a business-minded, strategic approach,” says Burman, who points out that along the way, she was given the opportunity to closely observe the board room decision-making behind certain acquisitions designed to drive growth. “The breadth of experiences that I have taken with me are not necessarily specific to my core finance role, but speak to my ability to understand cross-functionally what’s important to my peers,” Burman observes, while underscoring the growing cross-functional role that finance plays in business today. For just as Burman’s resume has evolved, so too has the role of CFO. – Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

When Chris Sands accepted an investor relations position at a midsize health care firm, he did so with the understanding that he would be permitted to occasionally sink his teeth into some of the firm’s growing FP&A challenges. Having a resume rich with investment banking experience, Sands was now determined to add some FP&A, a tour of duty that he viewed as a necessary prerequisite if he were going to advance down the CFO path. Unbeknownst to Sands, his FP&A plate would shortly be overflowing following the acquisition of his new employer by Thermo Fisher Scientific of Waltham, Massachusetts. In the aftermath, Sands was enlisted to help lead the science giant’s planning function, which allowed him to dine regularly on high-calorie planning and begin to consider his next opportunity. Sands would open what he views as the third chapter of his career at MineralTree, after having been recruited by CEO Micah Remley, with whom Sands had worked earlier in his career. “Anytime a company is looking to hire a CFO, they inevitably ask for CFO experience as if people are born with it, so, for me, getting that experience became really important,” observes Sands, who describes his decision to join MineralTree as a “no-brainer.” Looking back, Sands says that he would advise up-and-coming finance executives to actively seek out leadership mentors and not hesitate when it comes to expressing aspirations to become a CFO. Says Sands: “People aren’t mind readers, but if they are a true mentor and know what your aspirations are, they will seek to enable you on your journey.” –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

For every top sales leader who confides to friends that he or she is really a numbers freak at heart, there’s an Andrew Hicks, who, as CFO of Advanced, would be just as apt to boast about a sales funnel innovation as he would about the adoption of a new accounting rule. In fact, it would probably not surprise Hicks’s past and present business colleagues to learn that when asked to identify a mentor from his past, Advanced’s CFO chooses the head of sales for a former employer. “It was because of this relationship that I first experienced an inkling of how people can think about the business differently and think differently about what drives value in the firm,” explains Hicks, who found his mentor after being transferred to Austin from London by Misys, a UK-based software developer that today is part of Finastra. “I had moved across the world, and the sales leader took me under his wing a bit as someone new in the U.S. who didn’t really have family or friends nearby. Talking to him really piqued my interest in learning more about how the business worked,” recalls Hicks, who would remain in the U.S. for nine years before being recruited for a CFO role back in London. Along the way, Hicks’s professional network became energized via a budding relationship with private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, which enlisted him as an advisor after Vista bought a portion of Misys’s healthcare business. “Vista is continually working its network to find talent, and I was found by that means,” says Hicks, whose CFO career chapter has to date been populated by multiple Vista-owned companies. –Jack Sweeney  Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

As is the case with many finance leader resumes, Cort Townsend’s reveals a repetition of professional advancement and achievement that allows casual readers to quickly validate his CFO credentials. However, like those of many, Townsend self-tale is only a shorthand rendering of a career path filled with twists, turns, and high-stakes industry drama. Such was the case in 2015 and 2016, a period in Townsend’s career annals with enough M&A high jinks and boardroom intrigue to fill an entire volume. Subsequently, though, in July 2017, Townsend landed neatly inside the CFO office of Kofax via an appointment that casual readers of his resume might have assumed was the natural next step for a dedicated senior executive who had already served as the firm’s controller and vice president of finance. So, where was all the drama? Lost between the lines of Townsend’s resume was the acquisition of Kofax by Lexmark International in 2015 and the subsequent acquisition of Lexmark by Apex Technology in 2016. Along the way, Townsend was named finance chief of Lexmark’s enterprise software group, which turned out to be an abbreviated tour of duty that made him the obvious choice for a C-suite posting when Lexmark opted to spin off the software group in late 2016 and later sell it to private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The sale of the group would be completed in July 2017, the very month in which Townsend was appointed CFO of newly branded Kofax. Witness just the type of swift-moving, complex narrative that allows even detail-oriented leaders like Townsend to much appreciate the virtues of a shorthand bio. –Jack Sweeney   Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

CFOTL: What are your top of mind metrics? Karnes: I think about metrics sort of under three rubrics. The first is what I would think of as a customer-centric layer. Then there's the financial performance one that we all think about as CFOs, and then there's a very distinct operational layer. On the customer-centric layer, we think about things like SLAs, our service-level agreements with our customers, uptime, system availability. These are the things--before we get to gross margin--that really impact our success as a business and what our next quarter is going to be like. There are things like customer health scoring in your customer success organization. Happy customers don't leave. Keeping your revenue is much cheaper than trying to go acquire new revenue. Things like NPS, net promoter score. Things that I watch very, very carefully are very customer-centric, as opposed to what's next, which is more pure financial performance. At the end of the day, your economics are based on your base business, your new business, and the investments that you make going forward. That's what drives economic performance. The first thing that I look at in the morning is churn and retention. "Churn," for those who aren't SaaS experts, is simply our subscriptions that are terminating and my customers that are leaving me or deciding to subscribe to me in a lesser amount. So, it's lost revenue. After that, it's gross margin. Obviously revenue is tops. Churn is my top line. Gross margin is after my cost of goods sold and tells me how efficiently I'm delivering my product. All of these businesses are built on free cash flow. After I pay my G&A, after I pay the capex that I've got, how much cash am I making and am I self-sufficient or dependent on the equity markets to grow my business? That's a really important part of the business, from a baseline. New business cost is very important. These are things like customer acquisition costs. I'm making an investment for every customer. How quickly do I get that investment back? How many months? Is it six, 12, 18 months before I recoup that investment? And, like all good SaaSware companies, we invest a tremendous amount of money in our future through research and development. The question is, What is the rate of return that we're engineering to for that research and development? How does this correlate with other opportunities that we may have, like acquisitions or debt repayment?

When asked what sets BioXcel Therapeutics apart from other clinical-stage biopharmaceutical companies, CFO Richard Steinhart doesn’t mention a specific drug or therapy. Instead, he describes a system that the company developed to advance the speed with which drugs are commercialized. According to Steinhart, the biotech company’s system uses artificial intelligence to reveal “hidden connections” that, once exposed, can multiply opportunities for the application of certain drugs. “Good drug developers can see first connections between drugs and diseases and they are pretty apparent to everyone out there, but second- and third-degree connections are not apparent,” explains Steinhart, who says that such connections have been too time-consuming and expensive to expose in the past. “The last company I was with took 10 years to go from the discovery (of a drug to the licensing of the discovery to a phase two trial,” adds Steinhart, who reveals that it was BioXcel’s system for shortening the path to commercialization that first attracted him. –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

The way Ken Stillwell tells it, his career as a CFO can be divided into two distinct worlds: the world before ARR and the world after ARR. ARR, of course, is the acronymic identifier for the widely used SaaS metric known as annual recurring revenue. Stillwell prefers to put his own twist on the acronym by declaring its actual meaning to be annual recurring relationships—as in client relationships. Says Stillwell: “Whatever metric you use to measure recurring relationships is really misunderstood in the marketplace until you start to track it.” What happens next has led many a finance leader to shout, “Where have you been all my life!” Or so Stillwell might have us believe in light of his evident passion for the metric and the singular emphasis that he places on it when asked about the career chapter that he has opened as CFO of Pegasystems, a firm specializing in customer engagement solutions. “Once CFOs track it and begin reporting it, its value becomes so obvious—not just the value of the metric, but also that of the relationship with the customer and of the different mind-set and shift that occurs when you are an ‘as a service’ company and of making customer success a key part of keeping that relationship,” says Stillwell, who began his finance career in Price Waterhouse’s audit advisory services practice, which he soon exited to become part of an early PW mergers and acquisitions group where he would become involved in various deal-making activities outside the US. It was this experience that Stillwell says helped to propel him into a number of consecutive CFO roles, including his latest CFO tour of duty at Pegasystems. “The one thing that’s different about Pega from my earlier experiences as a CFO is that Pega is one of those rare examples where a company is growing both at an accelerated pace—by this, I mean that it’s growing faster than the market growth rate—and also at significant scale,” explains Stillwell, who adds that Pegasystems is quickly approaching $1 billion in annual revenue. “In my previous experience, the companies were typically slower-growing and focused more on operational excellence and how to maximize shareholder value when growing in the single digits. Pega is an interesting mix of both growth and scale.” –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more  

Few finance leaders have boiled down the take-aways from their career journeys into as many palatable, bite-size portions as John Pokorney, CFO of LeTip International. Having found his original finance door of entry at Intel Corp. in the early 1990s, Pokorney credits the chipmaker’s collaborative culture for prodding him to speak the language of others and tap the power of narrative. “I wasn’t there to create numbers for the engineering group that I was working with or the logistics organization that I ended up supporting, but I was there to be a business partner—and when you’re a business partner, you have to talk the language of the group you’re working with,” explains Pokorney, who would enter the ranks of entrepreneur CFOs after leaving Intel, where in a span of eight years he occupied the roles of finance analyst, finance manager, and group controller. Reflecting on a number of different CFO tours of duty, Pokorney is able to quickly bring forth detailed memories of different places and times when business challenges were addressed and lessons learned. While certain ilks of finance leaders have reduced their career highlights to a single stock price or capital raise, Pokorney can be counted among the finance realm’s artful communicators who routinely draws people in by sharing wins, failures, and hard-earned insights. –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

After years of careful finance career–building within the healthcare sector, Paul Willson came upon an opportunity inside Austin’s energetic technology start-up community that he found hard to resist. Becoming employee number 23, he was immediately dubbed “the finance guy”—a label that he would wear for only 5 days before the ambitious start-up announced that it was being acquired by BMC Software. At the time, Willson no doubt harbored some frustration concerning the timing of his arrival in the realm of entrepreneurial tech. However, in the weeks and months to come, the conventional wisdom that had fueled the tech community’s bravado would be stood on its head as the dot-com crash of 2000 scorched the entrepreneurial landscape and ended the life of many a start-up. Back at BMC, Willson weathered the storm and joined their finance rank-and-file, where he grew accustomed to the ebb and flow of the technology world before jumping to Convio, a small, Austin-based, technology firm with IPO ambitions. “It was a great experience to build Convio from scratch, and this being 2005 when we started—the early days of SaaS companies—we were looking for any information that we could find on the business model,” explains Willson, who today credits Convio for allowing him to open the entrepreneurial career chapter that he had needed to put on hold a few years earlier. –Jack Sweeney   Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leadership? There’s no shortage of courses out there that promise to help you build a finance career. But the vast majority of these courses are taught by people who’ve never actually advanced into the CFO office.  The reason is pretty simple: CFOs are too busy helping to lead their companies to begin offering courses!  Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE  

­­­When it comes to guessing a person’s email address, most of us would agree that the best way to optimize your odds of success is to first assume that the person was using their actual name as part of the address. From there, your next decision arguably is whether to spell out the individual’s first name or use an initial for it. For Tim Zue, the calculation behind one guess was a bit more nuanced because although the first name of the person he was emailing was Lawrence, the man was widely known as Larry. With little to lose, Zue addressed the email to [email protected]. Sixteen years later, Zue is CFO of the Boston Red Sox, and his “initial decision” sticks with him perhaps as a reminder that every carefully built career contains serendipitous moments. Still, the email that Boston Red Sox then-CEO Larry Lucchino received from Zue did not come from a career-minded controller or accountant, and it was not a job inquiry. At the time, Zue was teaching 8th-grade math in the Boston public school system, and with a summer break quickly approaching, he had a thought: “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to work for the Boston Red Sox as an unpaid intern?” Such a thought is not unlike one widely shared today by Zue’s CFO peers, but in this case, there’s one necessary modification: “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to be CFO of the Boston Red Sox?” Meanwhile, not wanting to overstate the rewards of a correctly addressed email, it’s probably worth mentioning here that Lucchino’s unpaid intern was an MIT graduate with a prior tour of duty at Bain & Company as a management consultant. –Jack Sweeney   Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leadership? There’s no shortage of courses out there that promise to help you build a finance career. But the vast majority of these courses are taught by people who’ve never actually advanced into the CFO office.  The reason is pretty simple: CFOs are too busy helping to lead their companies to begin offering courses!  Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE

As an Indian citizen living in the United States and working for a Dutch company, CFO Smital Shah frequently spends her days on conference calls with investors from Asia, Israel, or Europe. On every investor call, at every board meeting, and at every employee gathering, the same question gets asked: “How far is ProQR from serving patients?” Each time she hears this, the firm’s worldly finance leader provides a thoughtful and measured response. This is a question that punctuates the tenure of finance chiefs inside every clinical stage start-up, and one that Shah says has led her to seek out any synergies that she can between the finance function’s accounting and compliance processes and ProQR’s greater goal of creating medicines for patients who suffer from rare diseases. Shah asks: “How do we facilitate—within the confines of finance—what we need to do in order to achieve this?” ProQR expects to have collected the necessary data from its ongoing clinical trials to seek out approval for its new medicine from the Food and Drug Administration by early 2021 or perhaps sooner. As for the “confines of finance,” any functional borders within ProQR have clearly already been breached by Shah, who implores her finance team to regularly listen to those beyond the functional boundaries. “This is about understanding that you as an individual contributor cannot always affect the magnitude of change that you want. Change will depend on your team and all of the stakeholders around it. So I think that this is about stakeholder management and truly listening to all and realizing that you achieve impact as a group,” explains Shah, whose finance leadership mind-set is perhaps the offspring of a borderless career. –Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or buy our latest issue HERE

Like a savvy investor, Lucy Rutishauser built her early career by carefully tracking the activities of different companies. Sometimes, to glean better insights, she would actually cold-call a company and ask for the finance department. But Rutishauser wasn’t looking to invest money—instead, she was looking to invest that all-so-valuable commodity known as career-building years. “The take-away here is that as you are growing your professional career and moving from job to job, it’s crucial that the decisions that you make be valuable to a future employer and not just great for your bank account at that moment,” says Rutishauser, who would join Sinclair Broadcast Group after placing just such a cold call back in 1998. Providing some additional background on what led her to originally place the call, Rutishauser explains: “I had been reading about Sinclair rolling up the industry and driving industry consolidation. They were located here in Baltimore, which is where I live. I figured that they were probably going to need an assistant treasurer, so I cold-called them and created a job for myself.” While Rutishauser had successfully identified a hiring hot spot inside Sinclair, she sensed that the growing company appreciated her willingness to open the door and take some initiative—and would perhaps be open to more job creation down the line. “I selected a job that filled gaps in my background because Sinclair, being a smaller company at the time, really let me do a lot more than what a traditional assistant treasurer would be doing,” she recalls. In 2016—nearly 18 years after she placed her cold call—Rutishauser entered Sinclair’s CFO office, where she has already helped the media company to open a new chapter of growth – one that only last month led Sinclair to triple in size. –Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE  

While tours of duty at struggling companies are seldom viewed as enviable career chapters for most professionals, finance leaders are often apt to savor the lessons that such tours of duty bring forth and even draw attention to such early chapters. Such is the case with CFO Jason Lin, whose career journey includes chapters with a rapidly rising juggernaut (TripAdvisor) as well as with the revitalization of a flickering fallen star (Monster.com). When asked why he singles out his “Monster chapter” as an experience that prepared him for a finance leadership role, Lin recalls the valuable lessons learned from “having to manage people through tough times—to motivate them without being able to offer a bonus or a salary increase and still be able to move the team forward.” “There are challenges in both environments, and I think that having been at both ends of the spectrum has been beneficial for me,” says Lin, while quickly segueing to his days at TripAdvisor, where a cash-rich balance sheet and seemingly unlimited growth summoned finance to remain a calming influence and the guardian of responsible spending practices. At Centage, Lin is opening yet another growth chapter, where scale is now top-of-mind and manual processes are being closely scrutinized as the upstart developer’s new CFO seeks to unclutter the path and prepare the runway for unencumbered growth. – Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE  

The mass migration of software developers from perpetual licensing to subscription licensing models has allowed quite a few CFOs to enrich their strategy credentials in recent years. It’s a movement that has allowed finance chiefs to rebrand themselves as champions of change, and one that has helped to dismiss the image of CFOs being the C-suite’s most dependable naysayers. Nevertheless, saying “no” to a migratory deadline is what CFO William Edmondson counts as one of his career’s most memorable finance strategic moments. As CFO of 1E—a UK-based IT software and services company—and like other top officers, Edmondson nurtured a sense of urgency for the adoption of the new licensing model but at the same time remained wary of mandatory deadlines.  “Just as I had finally gotten reasonably comfortable with the fact that we were ready to do it—just as we were going to go ‘live’—there was a bit of a downturn in the business and I actually said ‘No, we have to pull it.’ Even though it was the right strategic thing to do, I said, ‘No’—there was just too much risk.” Having spent the previous six months helping reset the mind-set of the organization, Edmondson recalibrated his approach and briefed the company’s board—this time as not only as a champion of change, but also as a regulator of risk. “Typically, under a subscription license, in year one you would get between 30 percent and 50 percent of the value that you would get under a perpetual license, whereas over a period of three to five years, a business can earn a lot more than it would under perpetual—but when you make this transition, there is always a working capital crunch,” explains Edmondson, who says that 1E ultimately pulled the trigger on the adoption nine months later, after the company had put in place a “standby” credit facility. “That way, if things didn’t pan out in the way that we expected them to, we would have the additional line of credit as insurance,” recalls Edmondson, who gives kudos to 1E for completing the migration within only two years—a journey that he says takes most organizations three to five years. –Jack Sweeney  Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE    

When Sharif Metwalli decided that the time was right to accept a CFO position with Vantage Data Centers, he was confident that he had found a company that allowed him to check all of the boxes when it came to his finance leader search criteria. Box #1: Know and respect the management team. Box #2: Know and respect the owner. Box #3: Know the industry and be bullish on the sector. Says Metwalli: “After 19 years of banking, I wanted to apply my skillset on the corporate side, and an opportunity arose to work for a client that I knew very well.” As for the nearly two decades that he spent inside the world of investment banking, Metwalli says that he was fortunate to have latched on to opportunities and roles that shielded him—not once, but twice—from the mayhem brought on by economic downturns. “Back before the dot-com bubble burst, I had started off in a group that was heavily focused on equity and M&A, and I made a proactive effort to move to a different industry group,” explains Metwalli, who may have landed in the bank’s lending business just in the nick of time. “I figured that we’d never get out of the lending business, and I could learn the debt side of the balance sheet. Not only that, but I could become a more well-rounded banker in general.” Fast-forward seven years, and Metwalli says that he was able to successfully weather the Great Recession because by that time he had developed an expertise in telecom infrastructure. The CFO recalls spending his days burrowing down deep into the wireless space, a realm quickly being populated by spectrum towers and data centers. “When the banks began to consider who they wanted to keep inside the different industry groups, even though I wasn’t a senior banker at the time, my expertise allowed me to survive and maintain a career,” explains Metwalli, whose expertise around data center infrastructure only continued to grow in the years to come, allowing him to check the boxes with confidence when the opportunity with Vantage Data Centers came along. –Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE  

When asked about the experiences that prepared him for a finance leadership role, Brian Swartz, CFO of Cornerstone OnDemand, doesn’t hesitate to mention his tour of duty as controller for EaglePicher, a collection of businesses founded in 1842 that stubbornly has reinvented itself from one century to the next. However, as the small conglomerate was entering the 21st century, it found itself burdened with enormous debt, which led to a bankruptcy filing and a transformative restructuring—all of which controller Swartz got to observe firsthand after the company’s CFO and treasurer made a hasty exit. “I kind of stuck around. While I would never want to work in that environment again, in that type of situation you do learn to understand all of the reasons why we have contracts and what all of the provisions in the contracts mean. The reality is that the provisions are not relevant until things do not go as planned, and that is basically what a Chapter 11 is,” explains Swartz, who ultimately helped to lead EaglePicher’s finance function through the Chapter 11 process and out of bankruptcy. Reflects Swartz: “The experience made me think about things differently as I moved on to become CFO of Apollo Education Group.” He would serve as AEG’s CFO for eight and half years before leaving the multibillion-dollar provider of education services to enter the software technology realm. Today, Swartz characterizes his departure from mission-driven AEG as a distinct milestone in his career—one that required him to leave behind a role that he had found enormously satisfying in order to be challenged in new and different ways inside the data-addicted but always inspiring technology sector.

As she approaches her 20th year with BSI Group, Sarah Murphy repeats the word “variety” when asked why she turned a blind eye to other opportunities outside the company known to many as an exemplar of business standards. “There was always something new to move on to,” says Murphy, who, having spent the past decade in the United States as CFO of BSI Americas, is about open yet another career chapter as she returns to the BSI’s headquarters in London. The “variety” that Murphy has long pursued has led her to open different career chapters in Hong Kong, London, and Paris. Prior to arriving in the U.S., she served as a global finance director as well as a finance director of BSI’s Asia Pacific region. Still, there’s little doubt that while BSI has offered Murphy a varied menu of opportunities from which to choose, it’s a passion for driving change across the BSI organization that has routinely opened the door to new opportunities and allowed Murphy to savor greater career satisfaction. “There’s always been a real commitment here and a drive for change,” explains Murphy, who says that finance got to play a central role in helping BSI Americas to “hit the reset button.” After years of flat sales, says Murphy, BSI Americas transformed itself by adopting a new go-to-market strategy and entering the consulting services arena. “Now the question has become ‘How do we maintain the growth?,’” adds Murphy, who doesn’t hesitate to mention BSI’s growing appetite for M&A. -Jack Sweeney

  When a company opts to recruit a finance leader from the “outside world,” it’s not uncommon these days for the future CFO to first serve in a provisional role—one that can provide a wide view of the business while allocating a little extra time for on-the-job learning. So it was for Constance Minc, a veteran investment banker who logged 12 months as head of business operations for IFS before entering the ERP vendor’s CFO office last May. According to Minc, her 12-month stint in operations was as much about building bridges as it was about learning. “I was able to build trust with our key business stakeholders and create a bridge between the business and finance that has enabled us to transform finance,” she explains, while also noting that she used her stint in operations to develop a three-year business plan that now serves as her road map as IFS CFO. “This helped me to understand how our customer strategy needed to evolve and allowed me to build the business model with the business,” says Minc, who also spent time evaluating “the inputs” being used by IFS to formulate its forecasts. “We wanted to make certain that the numbers were driven by very concrete and business-driven inputs,” she adds. Asked about her priorities as a finance leader going forward, Minc emphasized the importance of aligning the organization with a standard set of finance principles, optimizing business process efficiencies, and fostering trust with all business stakeholders.   When a company opts to recruit a finance leader from the “outside world,” it’s not uncommon these days for the future CFO to first serve in a provisional role—one that can provide a wide view of the business while allocating a little extra time for on-the-job learning. So it was for Constance Minc, a veteran investment banker who logged 12 months as head of business operations for IFS before entering the ERP vendor’s CFO office last May. According to Minc, her 12-month stint in operations was as much about building bridges as it was about learning. “I was able to build trust with our key business stakeholders and create a bridge between the business and finance that has enabled us to transform finance,” she explains, while also noting that she used her stint in operations to develop a three-year business plan that now serves as her road map as IFS CFO. “This helped me to understand how our customer strategy needed to evolve and allowed me to build the business model with the business,” says Minc, who also spent time evaluating “the inputs” being used by IFS to formulate its forecasts. “We wanted to make certain that the numbers were driven by very concrete and business-driven inputs,” she adds. Asked about her priorities as a finance leader going forward, Minc emphasized the importance of aligning the organization with a standard set of finance principles, optimizing business process efficiencies, and fostering trust with all business stakeholders. - Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: What comes to mind when we ask for a finance strategic moment? Friedman: MCI itself, during the ’90s, was a great place. I was there for just a little bit more than nine years. The opportunity within that organization to have different roles and different responsibilities that were all progressive, or progressing, was really key for me. When I had my first real corporate finance job at MCI, I literally was a direct report to the CFO. While I wasn’t going to show up on an org chart, it was kind of heavy for somebody who’ was in his late 20s at the time—to be able to have one-on-one conversations and have a real impact on decisions that were made and, toward the end of my tenure there, the direction that the company was taking. I recall a time when I was working with the internal wireless strategy group. We went to Wall Street to talk to analysts about their views on the emerging wireless market. Keep in mind that this was 1997-ish, right? For CDMA, there were still five or six different providers. T-Mobile hadn’t come around yet. Nextel was still a viable player. Everybody had their projections for the adoption of wireless communications in terms of revenue, and all looked like reasonable growth curves—25%, 30% a year for the next X number of years. And then we met one analyst who said, “You know, they’re all wrong. This thing is going to explode. Every kid in the country is going to have one of these things. You’re going to be talking to your grandmother while you’re standing in line at Starbucks.” This one person had a different insight and a different view that proved to be correct. For me, this was the moment when I gained the realization that conventional wisdom can be stood on its head—that just because there’s a herd mentality around what the right answer is, you don’t necessarily have to go with it. That’s something that has stuck with me every day.

“A CFO role was something that I had not yet really envisioned for myself,” explains CFO Erik Ostrowski when asked about the investment banking chapter of his early finance career. Still, Ostrowski says that he always found the challenges facing smaller or high-growth firms more interesting than those encountered by large enterprises. “I had a choice as to whether I wanted to work for a larger bank that worked with larger, established companies or for a boutique working with smaller firms, and I found that I was pulled to emerging-growth companies,” he explains. Today, as CFO of biotech company AVROBIO, Ostrowski says that he likes to remind himself that while there are many aspects of business that can be controlled, many cannot be. In terms of which variables are beyond a CFO’s grasp, Ostrowski lists the economy, followed by the performance of capital markets. As far as what CFOs can control goes, AVROBIO’s CFO makes it clear that a highly engaged CFO is often the determining factor when it comes to achieving effective investor relations. Says Ostrowski: “Make certain that you are presenting the company’s business proposition in a clear and concise way. And be ready to answer anticipated investor questions effectively.”  –Jack Sweeney    Ostrowski: There are many things in business that you can control and many that you can't. In terms of variables that you can't control, a good example might be how the economy is doing or how the capital markets are performing. What you can indeed help to control would be, for example, things on the IR side: making sure that you're presenting the company's business proposition in a clear and concise way and being ready to answer anticipated investor questions. Another thing is having the team of bankers and lawyers that helps you with the fund-raising process ready. These are things that you can control. By having these pieces in place, when business developments and capital market conditions align, you're ready to take advantage of the opportunity and, in this example, to conduct a successful fund-raise. So, it was nice to see that play out recently at AVROBIO. Just a few weeks ago, we were able to raise $138 million for the company on the heels of positive interim data from our Fabry gene therapy program. I think that it was proper preparation along with favorable market conditions that helped to make that capital raise a great success for us. Over the next 12 months, my priority is to continue to help effectively manage the growth of the company as we continue to progress our activities not only in Fabry disease, which is our lead program, but also in developing treatments for patients with Gaucher cystinosis and Pompe disease, as we look to build out what we think is really one of the leading pipelines in gene therapy.

The recent opening of a Chicago office of ANGI Homeservices is one that the firm would like to replicate, but not in terms of size (the site has a capacity for roughly 100 sales representatives) or even necessarily geographic location. Instead, the home services player plans to duplicate the approach that it used to determine whether a Chicago location was worthy of investment, according to ANGI Home Services CFO Jamie Cohen, who says that signing a 10-year lease for tens of thousands of square feet is often just too big a gamble when so many questions remain unanswered. “Can we recruit in this market? Can we sell in this market? And can we build upon this foundation?,” rhetorically asks Cohen, who adds that the approach involves “a pop-up sales center” concept that permits ANGI to test out new markets in a “low commitment manner.” In the case of Chicago, ANGI deployed a small team of about 20 people into a Chicago-area WeWork location, where they soon found answers to Cohen’s questions that allowed her and ANGI’s operational team to green-light a larger, more permanent home for the team. Meanwhile, Cohen’s finance function is now home to ANGI’s real estate team, which oversees about 1 million square feet of property. Besides being one of ANGI’s heftiest expenses, real estate is part of a more collaborative financial model that operates in lockstep with the company’s capacity for hiring sales personnel—the same people that ANGI uses to determine future office space commitments. – Jack Sweeney

For most of us, the act of “throwing the book” at someone is just an expression meant to conjure up the image of a judge throwing a book of laws at a criminal as punishment. However, the visual that CFO John Orton summons in the opening minutes of our talk is the act of having a physical book thrown at him by a manager during the early days of his career. It’s clear that Orton found the experience unsettling, and from that day forward, he explains, he became committed to the idea that treating others with respect must always be a key tenet of his CFO leadership. We should mention here how very often finance leadership is summoned to help address bad behavior in the workplace (even at those times when CEOs have behaved poorly). Conventional CFO wisdom tells us that incivility not only is a nuisance, but also is a threat to a company’s bottom line. Still, by identifying the experience as one of a select few that shaped his CFO leadership, Orton does something that most of his CFO peers dare not when he extracts a leadership lesson not from an esteemed mentor, but from a troubled manager. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: What comes to mind when we ask for a finance strategic moment?  Parikh: I think that I'd have to go back to the great financial crisis for a finance moment, the week after Lehman Brothers failed, when I actually pulled all of the top-line numbers for the hotel. For the first time in my life, I said to myself, "Well, something is just drastically wrong with our accounting system because these numbers just don't make sense. We've never seen a drop this precipitously this quickly." That was the time of one of the hardest decisions, because we had never cut our dividend up to that point. From 1999 to 2009, we had been a very consistent dividend payer. Not one of the highest dividend payers in the lodging REIT world, but I think that's when you look at forward bookings, you look at what's happening, and you have to make a very difficult decision. We probably cut our dividend at that time by 70% because we looked at it, I looked at it, and I said, "It's more important to batten down the hatches to make sure that we don't violate any of our debt covenants, to make sure that this company's on sound footing for the long term." Of course, the shareholders aren't going to like their dividends being cut by 70%, but it was the right move. You know, you can't let Wall Street and your investors' sentiment on any single day drive your decision-making. There are times when you have to call it the way you see it. I'm happy that we did because it would have been very challenging to continue to pay that type of dividend—and I'm sure that we would have violated some type of cash flow debt covenant.

CFOTL: When we ask for a finance strategic moment what comes to mind? Yenaropulos: Maybe we can look at one of my experiences when I was living in Chile and I was the CFO of a company whose main business was to provide services to trade and eliminate industrial and hazardous waste. The revenue recognition process began with the reception of the waste the bulk form. The next step was to identify the type of waste and then finally to define and apply the chemical process required in order to convert it into nonhazardous waste. All of these processes were very manual, which as a result had a huge impact on the finances and working capital. Imagine if a company was not able to invoice for services to the client until it had finished the identification of the waste and its subsequent treatment. Additionally, another problem was that the company was held responsible for any environmental damage that may have occurred from the hazardous waste that it had already received and that was waiting for its final treatment. What we did was to create a team from the operations people, the commercial people, and the technology department of the company. We proposed and successfully implemented a plan that reduced the days of accounts receivable from over 200 days to just 90 days in only one year. This was achieved due to changes in the processes from the client’s side and from the operations side and by adding new software capabilities to the process. Of course, we don’t want to forget about the importance of training all of the employees involved in the process—that is very important to also highlight. So, finally, after a year of working with a new team, With a clear plan, and milestones well defined we were able to consistently track our progress by changing commercial and production processes, and achieve extremely positive financial impacts for the firm. By implementing a sizable reduction in days of accounts receivable, we’ve been able to generate an impressive positive cash flow for the company.

Among all of what is remarkable about Andreas Schulmeyer’s finance career, the timing with which he enters and exits different career chapters is most worthy of some added attention. For instance, consider his timing at Pepsico, where in the late 1990s he arrived inside Pepsi’s corporate strategy group—the beverage behemoth’s performance-minded brain trust headed by none other than Pepsi up-and-comer Indra Nooyi. It’s just this type of timing that makes you doubt that Schulmeyer ever has had to cross-examine himself by deploying a few “If onlys … .” To prove our point, we thought that we might speculate on what such a self-inquiry by Schulmeyer might sound like, so here goes: “If only … I had been part of Nooyi’s group when it helped to hatch Pepsi’s historic acquisition of Quaker Oats.” But wait: I was part of that very group. “Well, if only … I had agreed to join Pepsi China Beverages as CFO when Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred to the People’s Republic of China.” But wait: I was CFO of Pepsi China Beverages when Hong Kong was handed over to China. “Well, then, if only … I had agreed to join Walmart’s e-commerce business as CFO, today I would be a seasoned C-level e-commerce executive with a wealth of experience.” But wait: I was CFO of Walmart’s e-commerce business. Finally, one “if only” of our own. “If only we told you how truly remarkable Schulmeyer’s career has been.” But wait: We just did. – Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Ballbach:  We found something really interesting on the go-to-market side that I believe will have a major impact on our top-line growth, and it came through the analysis that the finance team conducted. We looked at our sales model and at the number of customers that we have around the country. We looked at the run rate and the renewals and the retention of these customers. In partnership with our new head of sales, we then did a deeper dive into what kind of time was spent by our sales force—that is, primarily our outside salesforce. We noticed that the sales enablement infrastructure was not set up so that our sales folks could go out and win big deals—win big deals that could make a step change difference in our business. Instead, they were spending a lot of their time on working with the existing customer base. So we are actively now reinventing our go-to-market by investing in tech enablement for our sales folks so that they are freed up to truly do what they do best, which is to sell and to go obtain new logos with more strategic and kind of longer-term sales cycles. The second thing that came out of this was a desire to invest in digital marketing. There's never been any testing of what kind of ROI we can get from investing marketing dollars in these new areas. Given the long list of customers that we have and the disparate array of long-sale customers that do relatively small deals, we suspect that we can invest in digital marketing that will that will return a very high ROI on the investment as opposed to what we get with the kind of legacy sales model.