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