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Andrew Korn tracks growth first. EliseAI had surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue when he spoke with us, and Korn tells us the company had maintained year-over-year growth above 100% throughout his four and a half years there—“correlation, not causation,” he adds.

That growth gives finance a clear assignment. According to Korn, EliseAI monitors gross margins and burn while ensuring its spending remains prudent and directed toward investments capable of moving the business forward.

The company operates in housing and healthcare, two industries Korn describes as representing about 40% of U.S. GDP combined. He tells us both depend heavily on labor while contending with regulation and legacy technology. The result is overwhelmed teams, administrative work, and consumers waiting too long or paying too much for essential services.

EliseAI enters primarily through the communication layer. According to Korn, its technology handles communications and repetitive work around the clock while providing accurate, compliant answers to renters, residents, prospects, and patients.

But awareness of AI has also created a different challenge. Korn says customers increasingly arrive interested in the technology, yet EliseAI must ensure they understand what they are adopting. The objective is not AI “just for AI’s sake” or something a company can place on its website.

Instead, Korn tells us, AI must improve operations, performance, and business capabilities in tangible ways. EliseAI therefore tracks leases, occupancy, rent collection, maintenance requests, resident renewals, patient calls, and scheduled appointments.

For Korn, the technology earns its place when customers can recognize its impact in the work being completed and the results being produced.

CFOTL: Andrew, we might have a few more career-related questions for you later, but right now, let’s find out about EliseAI. Can you help us understand this business today? What’s it about?

Korn: We’re obviously an AI company, as the name implies, serving two industries of fundamental human need: housing and healthcare. Those two industries share a lot in common. They’re both significant, large industries—combined, about 40% of GDP in the United States—and they both really struggle with some problems. They have a dependency on labor, high levels of regulation, and legacy technology systems. I think those all conspire to make it really hard for those industries to benefit from things like AI and other technologies.

You have overwhelmed teams buried in administrative work, and residents, in the case of housing, and patients, in the case of healthcare, who don’t receive great service, are waiting too long for the service they need, or are paying too much for it.

What EliseAI does is step in, primarily at the communication layer—whether it’s with your prospects, residents, or patients—to automate and handle that communication and busy work 24/7. We deliver real-time, accurate, compliant answers to the consumers, patients, and renters who need them. We take actions 24/7 across all channels and operations to improve experiences. The result is better-performing, better-operating businesses that serve their consumers better across both housing and healthcare.

CFOTL: Help us understand the customer demand. What’s driving it? Where does your message resonate most?

Korn: It’s evolved a bit over time. Before ChatGPT became a thing, around 2023 or 2024, it was really us pushing it more and helping people understand it. Since then, there’s been a broad awareness of AI that has gotten us a lot more inbound demand.

But even when we get that inbound interest and people are more open to talking about AI, it’s really important for us to work with our customers and prospects to make sure they understand what they’re signing up for. We pride ourselves on delivering AI not just for AI’s sake—not just to put it on the website and say you have it, or to tell your boss that you did it and get them off your back—but AI that really improves operations, performance, and the capabilities of your business.

With our best prospects and customers—and where we want to push all our prospects and customers—it’s about developing a deep understanding of their business and how AI can tangibly improve it, along with a real mutual willingness to partner in very specific and tangible ways to bring the benefits of the technology to them.

CFOTL: We want to understand your lines of sight into this business. What numbers or metrics are you watching closely and daily? For those unfamiliar with these two important verticals, what would you tell us?

Korn: From a business perspective, like most other growth companies, the number one metric I track is our growth and progress. We announced earlier this year that we’re over $200 million in annual recurring revenue. We’ve continued to grow rapidly since then, maintaining more than 100% year-over-year growth every year since I joined the company four and a half years ago—correlation, not causation.

Our growth is even accelerating. In the second quarter, we saw by far our best quarter ever from a bookings perspective and an acceleration in our year-over-year ARR growth. Below that, I track our gross margins and burn rate. We are burning money as a growth-stage company; that is why we raise capital. We monitor it closely, make sure our spending is prudent, and ensure those investments are going to the right areas to drive the business forward.

From a customer perspective—and this gets a little outside my most direct area of expertise—we have an insane amount of data about our customers’ performance. We pride ourselves on reporting that to our customers and tracking it internally to make sure we’re having an impact.

On the real estate side, that includes the number of leases we help generate, the occupancy of the buildings we directly impact, the amount of rent we help collect, the number of maintenance requests we help complete, and the number of resident renewals we help maintain.

On the healthcare side, we’re primarily automating the patient-intake and scheduling experiences. It’s a very voice-focused medium, so we track the number of calls we help handle and the number of appointments we help schedule with our products.

It’s really about helping our customers understand and drive all those business metrics, in addition to the tangible savings we help them achieve on the expense side, which primarily comes from handling repetitive tasks that were previously not automated.

EliseAI | www.eliseai.com | New York, NY

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In April 2020, Laura Miller stepped into her first CFO role at Pampered Chef. According to Miller, she was pregnant with her second child, working with a new CEO and joining an executive team that had never worked together in the building before the pandemic sent everyone home.

Demand was anything but predictable. Miller tells us that Pampered Chef’s independent consultants could hold parties online while consumers, confined to their homes, purchased kitchen equipment and looked for ways to earn money. That summer brought a business boom—and immediate pressure on working capital, supply chains and forecasting.

Miller says the company quickly replaced its rolling forecast with a daily forecast. One of her first CFO assignments was determining what would happen if the warehouse could not remain open as an essential business. Finance modeled scenarios “from zero to quadruple” while weighing when to continue accepting orders, when to stop, and how to manage back orders without overwhelming the business.

The professional challenge unfolded alongside a personal one: Miller tells us that she had her baby in June. Navigating both made the period “the fastest crash course into being a CFO.”

The experience also overturned much of her preparation. Miller says she had spent “16, 18 months prepping and planning to be a CFO,” yet none of the issues she had anticipated became her greatest challenges after taking the role.

Her lesson emerges from that collision between preparation and reality: the CFO’s work is not simply executing a carefully developed plan. Sometimes it means rebuilding the forecast daily, considering outcomes at opposite extremes and learning the role while the conditions surrounding it continue to change.

CFOTL: For listeners new to Strata, what does the company provide, whom does it serve, and where is the opportunity?

Miller: Strata Decision Technology serves highly complex industries. We don’t serve everyone; we’re in specific markets. You mentioned healthcare at the opening. We also serve higher education and financial institutions—complex, highly regulated industries. We serve more than 2,300 organizations, and we are a software platform that helps the CFO office, as well as the broader executive team and operational leaders within these organizations, make strategic and financial decisions. We bring financial, operational, and strategic data into one platform across many modules. There are modules such as budgeting, forecasting, planning, workforce management, and, forecasting, cost accounting management,, which is really important. Leaders use this platform to make strategic decisions every day.

CFOTL: Which customer need is creating the most momentum for the business?

Miller: Today, we serve quite a few healthcare customers, where the underlying thesis is around cost accounting, planning, reporting, and so on. The momentum comes from 30 years of data intelligence, experience, nomenclature, and data standardization across all of our 2,300 organizations. We do benchmarking and comparative analytics across the industry, so we’re well positioned for the direction we’re headed with our new product, which is an intelligence layer that sits on top of this and is driven by artificial intelligence. You’re able to use natural language to understand your business and what’s happening within it in real time, as quickly as possible, to make the best decisions. What’s driving the organization is our longstanding history with these customers and the underlying data we utilize.

CFOTL: Roper acquired Strata and Syntellis and brought the companies together. How is that combination shaping the business today, and what benefits are still emerging?

Miller: Just to clarify, Roper bought them, but those two events were pretty far apart. They were not simultaneous. Roper bought Strata and, years later, bought Syntellis and merged the two companies. The first benefit is that we continue to be the market leader in the industries we serve while bringing together the intelligence of the two organizations. With Syntellis also came two new industries. Strata had not previously been in financial institutions or higher education; those came with the Syntellis acquisition or combination. Previously, Strata was healthcare-focused, and now it has expanded more broadly into these highly regulated, complex environments. That’s the first major change. Beyond that, we’re bringing together the knowledge, the underlying data, and the broader infrastructure needed to remain experts in the markets we serve.

Strata Decision Technology | www.stratadecision.com | Chicago, IL

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In the early months of Francisco Partners, Samantha Greenberg sat in a room on folding chairs with the firm’s cofounders and one other colleague, planning the business.

According to Greenberg, the private equity firm was pursuing an idea that many considered impossible in the late 1990s: executing leveraged buyouts of technology companies. Greenberg tells us she was drawn to the vision because it challenged the belief that technology businesses could not be predictable or capitalized with debt.

During the firm’s first year, Greenberg says, the team closed its first fund. She helped build operating processes, worked on the first transactions, and participated in fundraising—experiences that she says made her a better operator years later.

That builder’s instinct eventually pulled Greenberg away from investing. After 18 years as a technology investor, she had come to appreciate the discipline of “separating signal from noise,” surfacing insights, and allocating capital. But Greenberg tells us that running her own hedge fund revealed something more personal: She found operating more engaging than investing because it gave her “a seat at delivering the value creation.”

She became a CFO in 2021 and deliberately chose an earlier-stage company instead of a more mature organization. According to Greenberg, the decision allowed her to develop the skills she lacked—leading finance transformation, implementing systems, driving operational maturity, and running an accounting department.

The transition also challenged an investing instinct. Investors can wait for the “fat pitches,” Greenberg explains, but rapidly scaling companies cannot wait for every decision to be perfect. Her operating lesson is more immediate: “Velocity matters too.”

CFOTL: You joined AlphaSense in early spring. Tell us about the company, the opportunity you saw, and what AlphaSense is about today.

Greenberg: Thank you for asking that. My journey and the origin story of how I came to be at AlphaSense is a funny one. AlphaSense is an AI market intelligence platform. We automate the entire research process for knowledge workers, and we’re quite scaled. We serve over 7,800 customers, including 75% of the S&P 500, and it’s a global business with thousands of employees.

We’re a vertically integrated research platform. That means we solve the full end-to-end stack of research automation in one place. We’ve indexed all the world’s valuable business content, whether that’s expert interviews, sell-side research reports, or financial and market data. We’ve built a context graph on top of all that intelligence, as well as an AI orchestration layer, AI tools that perform reasoning and synthesis, and workflow agents that agentically perform entire research workflows in one click.

Because we own the entire stack, we’re able to optimize the system so that the AI harness, the tools for the LLM to call, the context graph, and the data it’s reasoning over all work seamlessly together. That makes knowledge and research projects far smarter and more token-efficient.

With respect to how I came to AlphaSense, I was happily in my fourth year at a high-growth cybersecurity business. AlphaSense is used by 75% of the S&P 500, but it’s also used by hundreds of thousands of private companies. At my former company, ID.me, our finance organization was using AlphaSense day in and day out for every research workstream—from investor relations and FP&A market-sizing projects to competitive intelligence, strategy, and benchmarking projects. Research projects that used to take a finance team days were taking us 30 to 60 minutes on AlphaSense.

When they contacted me, I was convinced they had gone onto their platform and simply said, “Show us all the CFOs who are power users of AlphaSense.” The truth is, they found me through a recruiter—the classic way. But when they reached out, I told them I was a power user who used AlphaSense day in and day out. I truly loved the product.

For me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to join a company with such an exciting runway ahead, so much business momentum, and so much product innovation—but also one where I truly love the product and use it day in and day out. There’s this famous concept in venture capital about jaw-dropping customer experiences, like how you felt the first time you used an iPhone or rode in an Uber. For a finance professional and finance officer, that’s what using AlphaSense is like. I’m incredibly grateful and excited to be here.

CFOTL: There was a capital raise in the not-too-distant past. How are you assessing AlphaSense’s capital position today?

Greenberg: A couple of months ago, we announced a $350 million fundraise. It nearly doubled our last round’s valuation. We also announced that, back in Q1, we had surpassed $600 million of ARR, growing more than 40% year over year. We’re so pleased that our business momentum and product innovation were recognized by top-tier institutional investors.

That fundraise leaves us extremely well capitalized. But I should note that we’re investing aggressively for growth and to win the market, yet at the same time we’re scaling efficiently. If you look at measures of efficient scaling, like magic number or burn ratio, we are top quartile or top decile on those metrics.

That’s where it’s so important: If you want to deliver value for shareholders, you have to know how to invest your resources. But you can’t hesitate when you have these great opportunities to drive innovation, accelerate your product and engineering roadmap, expand your go-to-market, and expand internationally. You have to make analytical, rigorous decisions around deploying those resources because that’s how you deliver value for shareholders.

AlphaSense | www.alphasense.com | New York, NY

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In high school, Gary Vecchiarelli received day-old copies of Investor’s Business Daily from a business teacher. Stock prices still appeared in fractions, and the teacher told him that he would know he had made it when he rang the bell on Wall Street.

Vecchiarelli tells us that the remark stayed with him for decades. He later rang the Nasdaq bell—an experience made more meaningful because his family knew the story. Long before that moment, however, he had begun ordering boxes of annual reports and reading financial statements he did not yet fully understand. He was drawn to CFOs who carried financial responsibility while dealing with Wall Street.

That early interest eventually became a career defined by complex businesses and difficult financing choices. At CleanSpark, Vecchiarelli recalls confronting one such decision during a Bitcoin bear market. Debt was prohibitively expensive, and an at-the-market equity program was effectively the company’s only source of growth capital.

According to Vecchiarelli, CleanSpark faced an opportunity that required issuing shares at approximately $2.50. The decision was painful, but the capital funded land and power that the company now expects to convert into billions of dollars of shareholder value.

The experience gave Vecchiarelli a lasting appreciation for “optionality.” He tells us that CleanSpark can now consider high-yield debt, convertible securities, equity, and borrowing against its Bitcoin holdings. That range matters because, as he puts it, markets can be “real fickle.”

For Vecchiarelli, strategic finance is not simply raising and spending money. It means connecting execution, valuation, and capital so that today’s difficult decision creates more choices tomorrow.

CFOTL: Tell us about CleanSpark. What type of business caught your attention? What kind of opportunity got on your radar and made you say, “Yes, I want to be part of this”?

Vecchiarelli: CleanSpark originally was an energy company. They had microgrids and solar arrays, and it was basically local distribution of power. A year before I joined, they got into the Bitcoin mining business when the co-founders went to consult on an energy deal. A Bitcoin miner wanted to reduce its power consumption and increase its margin.

The co-founders walked away saying, “We should buy this and get into this business,” because they’re energy guys. It’s a whole lot easier for energy guys to learn Bitcoin than for Bitcoin guys to learn energy. They were operating Bitcoin mines, and Bitcoin was really exploding at the time.

When I did the interview, believe it or not, because I was well networked primarily in the small-cap and microcap area, I had actually talked to a few of their competitors earlier. But I was so loyal to Imatrex at the time that I was like, “No, no, no. I can’t do it.”

But now I took a fresh look at it, and CleanSpark just happened to be in the backyard here in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a small community. They knew my reputation. We had a conversation, and we just hit it off. Maybe it was a little bold, but I looked the CEO in the face during the first interview and said, “Why are you even in this microgrid business? It’s low margin, has high working-capital needs, and you have this huge-margin business over here in Bitcoin mining. It doesn’t make sense.”

He said, “Yeah, you’re right. We should exit it.” They brought me on board, and I helped them clean up some of the challenges they had. I ended up being a cleanup master, I think, in my post-public-accounting world because it seems like everywhere I went had accounting issues, finance issues, or process and systems issues. I had to take care of that first. Ultimately, within a year, I helped them exit the microgrid business and really double down on Bitcoin mining.

We went out and acquired a large amount of land and power. This ends up being a little serendipitous because, where we sit today, the company actually announced a transformative transaction just last week in which we’re now getting into AI data centers. Bitcoin mines are essentially very rudimentary data centers. AI data centers are just a completely different world. There’s a whole lot more complexity and a much more technical aspect to them.

At the end of the day, as fiduciaries, we saw that Bitcoin mining economics were extremely tough, and we weren’t getting the multiple our shareholders wanted. The best way to monetize that power in megawatts was to move toward data centers. We saw some of our peers doing that, and their multiples and market caps had exploded.

We signed a $6.6 billion deal last week with a high-investment-grade global technology company whose name you would probably recognize, but unfortunately, we can’t disclose it. It’s a 20-year triple-net lease for a data center. We’re going to take one of our largest Bitcoin mines, which is currently energized, and build a data center next to it that’s going to produce over $300 million a year of NOI at nearly a 100% margin, going directly to the bottom line.

When I joined, the market cap of this company was $400 million. This is a monumental event for the company. It took a lot of work to get to this point, and it’s not going to be the last one. We have a lot of land and power, which has made us very attractive during this AI boom. I have CNBC on TV all day, and I can’t count how many times they’re talking about power and data centers and how front and center this is.

It’s so important because if you don’t have land and power, you can’t power the chips. If you can’t power the chips, no one can use AI in their businesses to move those businesses forward. This company is really well positioned, all because of Bitcoin mining.

I wouldn’t say we’re doing a pivot. We’re really growing into data centers, and that’s where we’re going to allocate most of our capital. I’m really excited that I’ve seen this evolution of the company. We’re now a $4 billion market-cap company, which is 10 times what it was when I joined. I still think we’re significantly undervalued, so we have a whole lot more room.

CFOTL: Given the amount of money being invested—or that this is going to require—how do you decide how much and where to invest next?

Vecchiarelli: That’s a great question. To give you an idea of the scale here, when we’re building infrastructure, it’s about $10 million to $12 million per megawatt. This deal we just signed is for 175 megawatts of what they call critical IT. It’s a 250-megawatt site. There are 250 megawatts being energized and provided to the site, but there are 175 megawatts of chips that are going to be delivered.

The difference between 250 and 175—75 megawatts—is the amount of power that goes toward cooling. Because these chips have so much power running through them, they produce heat as a byproduct. You need to be able to cool them, particularly when it’s 100 degrees outside. This location is in South Georgia, and it can get really hot during the summertime. You have to fire up the HVAC systems and coolers to make sure the chips don’t melt, basically.

You have 175 megawatts that are going to cost $10 million to $12 million per megawatt. That’s about a $2 billion build just for the infrastructure. What’s crazy is that the chips and equipment our tenants and the hyperscalers put in there cost three times that amount. It’s more than $30 million per megawatt in addition to the infrastructure we’re building.

We don’t take on the $30 million number. We take on the $10 million to $12 million number. But that means we have to go out and raise $2 billion as a $3 billion or $4 billion market-cap company. Right now, the market is debt financing. This is essentially Real Estate 101. It’s just big numbers and a lot of technical complexity in the actual build.

For us, it’s about making sure that we take advantage of the capital markets, strike the right balance between debt and equity, and hit our targeted internal rates of return. Right now, we’re able to get 90% to 95% loan-to-cost. That means that, of the $2 billion, we can most likely borrow most of it. Historically, it hasn’t been that high. It has been more like 75% to 85%.

If there’s one rule I’ve learned as CFO, it’s that if the money is there, take it, because the market can be fickle and it might not be there the next day. The high-yield market and the bond market are very attractive right now, and that’s one of the areas we’re going to end up tapping.

Capital allocation is super important. How you determine which instruments to use to finance your growth initiatives is super important. At the end of the day—and this is something I learned at Galaxy Gaming—we were in an illiquid environment where the CEO owned 60%. He was very stingy with the equity. As much as I said, “No, no, you have to get equity out and do a deal,” I get it now. You see the light as a CFO on how important it is to control dilution because it’s too easy to go out, raise equity, and take that capital.

Sure, we can take that capital, deploy it, and earn a healthy return on it. But equity is typically going to be your most expensive cost of capital, particularly if you believe you’re undervalued. My job as CFO right now is to make sure that we’re controlling that dilutive strategy as much as possible.

That’s why we’re leaning more toward debt, because the equity is not properly valued. If I have the choice between taking paper at 6.5% or 7% versus equity where my cost of capital could be somewhere in the twenties, it’s a no-brainer. That’s something we have to keep in mind when playing with the toggles on capital allocation.

CleanSpark | www.cleanspark.com | Las Vegas, NV

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Mark Khavkin often finds his best ideas somewhere near the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Rula CFO tells us that he bikes from San Francisco across the bridge and into Marin County—not to compete, but to clear his mind, enjoy the view, and stop for a latte in Sausalito. “A lot of times great ideas come somewhere just before or after the bridge,” Khavkin says.

That preference for space and perspective also appears in how he leads. Compared with a decade ago, Khavkin says that he has become more comfortable trusting people to reach the right result, even when their path differs from the one he might have chosen. Rather than intervening with detailed instructions, he now tries to provide context. “I’m less prescriptive than I was ten years ago,” he tells us.

The shift does not mean avoiding hard decisions. At Rula, Khavkin says that new investments require clearly defined checkpoints and agreement—made in advance—about when the company will increase its commitment or stop an initiative. Once teams, careers, and expectations form around an experiment, he explains, ending it becomes difficult at a human level.

The same discipline shapes his view of AI. Khavkin cautions finance leaders against evaluating the technology primarily through cost savings. According to Khavkin, the greater opportunity is enabling people to perform higher-level work, make decisions faster, and access more organizational context.

For Khavkin, leadership is not about directing every turn. It is about creating the conditions for others to navigate—then knowing when to provide context, when to challenge assumptions, and when to let the road produce the answer.

CFOTL: Right now, we’d like to find out about Rula. How would you describe Rula’s business today? Tell us about it.

Khavkin: It’s a fantastic place. It’s by far the most mission-driven company that I have been a part of, and an eye-opening experience at that. Rula has an extremely important mission of making behavioral health work for everyone. As you mentioned in the opening, we are a mental health company. We connect patients who are brave enough to raise their hand and ask for help in the mental health domain with therapists and psychiatrists who are covered by insurance.

We judge ourselves based on how quickly and how much better the clinical outcomes of the care on our platform are compared with different platforms or different ways to engage those professionals. We have also opened up access to the world of therapists in the virtual domain. It is extremely difficult to find somebody whom a patient would trust, who specializes in the symptoms that the patient has, who is available on a schedule that is convenient for the patient, and who accepts the insurance that the patient has. We have opened up that world, and it makes me very proud to be solving this particular problem.

CFOTL: Help us better understand what is driving this model.

Khavkin: The best way to think about it is as a three-sided marketplace. You have patients, who are at the center of our world. They are one side of the marketplace, economically speaking. You have the clinicians, who are the second side of the marketplace, and then you have the payers—the health insurance companies—who are the third side.

For the patient, they raise their hand, and they need to find somebody whom they will trust quickly and in a modern way. For the clinicians, the value is obviously matching them with patients as well. It’s lead generation for them. It’s a way for them not to worry about anything but providing care.

On our platform, clinicians don’t have to worry about registering with health insurance companies, getting their credentials, chasing claims, disputing claims that are not paid, scheduling, and all of those things that are not clinical—not something they went to school for or dedicated their lives to. Basically, everything that is not clinically taking care of patients, we do for those clinicians.

In today’s U.S. healthcare system, that is actually a lot. You either spend 20 or 30 percent of your time doing administrative work, or you need to hire somebody. In either case, it disrupts you from doing what you love, and it is economically very disadvantageous. In some cases, it just prevents people from running their practice. So that’s the value to the clinicians, or providers, as we sometimes call them.

The value for our payer partners is creating a network that allows their members or clients—people who are insured—to find the care they need at a reasonable price, in network, and on a platform that they trust. With the network that we provide, their members and clients can get consistent care for as long as they need it, but no longer.

That, of course, reduces the cost of care in general because it is well established that people who are in therapy and are being helped with their mental health conditions end up fewer times in the emergency room and have fewer complications from diabetes, cardiovascular ailments, and things like that.

In short, it’s access for patients, support for providers, and access for payers. One other very important thing I omitted is that we provide a huge body of support to clinicians who may have a professional question or need a community of other clinicians and experts. They may turn to them if a particular patient presents an interesting dilemma or something that they are not familiar with. It’s a way to ask for specific medical support. There is also a platform with AI tools for that.

Rula | www.rula.com | Santa Clara, CA

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John Kinzer still remembers sitting in a closed meeting at MCI, presenting revenue results, when something unexpected caught his attention. It wasn’t the numbers he was reporting—it was the questions coming from the FP&A team. Listening to their discussion, he realized, “I also want to see that side of it,” Kinzer tells us. That moment led him from revenue reporting into business planning, where a manager helped shape the analytical skills that would define his career.

Looking back, Kinzer tells us those early experiences proved invaluable. Long-distance telephone plans behaved much like today’s subscription businesses, exposing him to churn analysis, lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, and cohort analysis long before SaaS became commonplace.

Equally important was another lesson from a mentor: always look 18 to 24 months ahead. If you’re no longer learning, growing, or able to see your next opportunity, it’s time to start thinking about what’s next, Kinzer tells us. That advice influenced several career decisions, including his move into the dot-com world, where he participated in his first IPO by helping write an S-1 and develop the company’s long-term financial model.

The same long-term mindset later shaped an even more difficult decision. After being passed over for his first CFO opportunity, Kinzer tells us he resisted the urge to react emotionally. Instead, he focused on developing new skills, particularly investor relations, believing the experience would prepare him for the future whether the opportunity came internally or elsewhere.

For Kinzer, career progression has never been about chasing titles. It’s been about continually putting himself in positions where learning comes first—and trusting that leadership opportunities eventually follow.

CFOTL: Can you tell us a little bit about OneStream’s future? Where is the company headed? What sets it apart when we look at the FP&A competitive landscape?

Kinzer: OneStream is an AI-powered financial platform built for the Office of the CFO. It’s close, consolidation, planning, reporting, and now agentic AI. Think of it as the financial operating system for the enterprise—a single platform where finance teams manage their most critical data, workflows, and decisions.

The latest evolution is agentic AI. We were fortunate to acquire an AI-first company several years ago, so we’ve been at this a little longer than most companies. We started with machine learning to improve forecasting, and that’s morphed into this new agentic layer we’re now pursuing.

When you think about the agentic layer, we go after high-volume, labor-intensive areas like close, reconciliation, variance analysis, and forecasting—areas where there are rules-based processes that can be automated. But what makes finance uniquely demanding is that every action must be fully traceable, authentic, and mathematically defensible. This can’t be wrong. This is finance.

OneStream is built for that. We have four offerings on the agent side. We have a Financial Analyst agent that allows finance professionals to query all the data, even if they’re not power users, so they can get deeper insight into the business. We also have a Search agent that allows you to search across your documents without digging through folders, making it easy to find the information you need. We also have a Deep Analysis agent that goes through thousands of unstructured documents and delivers insights. That’s a game changer for both the audit and compliance side.

Then we have a Forecast agent that allows analysts to come in with the answers on the forecast—the variances to scenarios, the growth drivers, and all the things that would have taken them a lot of time to prepare. Now they have that work prepared so they can spend their time thinking about the answers and being the expert when all the questions come up about the forecast.

CFOTL: When it comes to that agentic layer, are the rules of resource allocation different? Have you had to look at those investments differently than other investments?

Kinzer: We really have leaned in here, and we have some really talented individuals. One of our top product leaders told us he’s a hundred times more efficient programming through AI, and he’s actually on the AI product side. So the pace of innovation and what we’re able to release has been incredible. At Splash, people were really excited about what we were releasing. You have to lean into that area.

That was also part of the thesis behind going private. As a public company, it’s really hard to make investments, make model changes, and do things like that in the public spotlight. Every quarter you’re explaining why something went up by a tick or another thing went down by a tick. In this world, pricing is changing all the time, and investments in developers and engineering talent are real investments.

With HG as a partner, it’s allowed us to make those investments with their expertise. They have around 60 companies going through some part of this transformation, and that’s been super helpful. We were fortunate to acquire a company several years ago that gave us the talent, and we’ve been able to attract really smart people who are doing really good work. I think we’re ahead of the curve when it comes to AI for finance professionals.

CFOTL: We frequently talk with finance leaders about the tradeoff between growth and efficiency. What are some of the tougher tradeoffs facing the business?

Kinzer: One example is the investment in markets like Japan and the broader Asia-Pacific region. Those are really significant investments, and as a public company they would have been difficult to make. But if the returns and the opportunity are there, that’s the kind of short-term tradeoff in profitability you make for long-term growth.

Another example is the investments we’re making to transform the business so we can better serve the mid-market. Those are also short-term profitability tradeoffs that create longer-term opportunities to grow and scale.

And then, of course, there’s AI. We’re investing heavily there. R&D continues to be an area where we’re making significant investments because we think there’s a tremendous opportunity, and finance professionals are asking for it. We believe it’s the right investment to make.

OneStream | www.onestream.com | Birmingham, MI

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When Shane Hostetter arrived at Chemours in 2024, he stepped into a company facing liquidity challenges while also pursuing important long-term growth opportunities. His goal was not to replace decades of institutional knowledge but to complement it. Chemours CEO Denise Dignam brought nearly forty years of experience with DuPont and Chemours, while Hostetter brought an external perspective. Combining those viewpoints, he tells us, helped create “the best of both worlds.”

That approach reflects much of Hostetter’s broader leadership philosophy. Rather than viewing finance solely through the lens of reporting, he focuses on building a stronger foundation for future growth through disciplined capital allocation and balance sheet management.

Hostetter tells us the company developed a three-year strategy designed to strengthen Chemours over both the near and long term. Portfolio optimization became one important pillar, including shutting down selected production lines and divesting non-core assets to improve cash flow. Underlying every decision, he tells us, was a disciplined capital allocation strategy intended to improve financial flexibility.

At the same time, Hostetter has become an advocate for helping others better understand what Chemours actually does. Although many people still associate the company with its legacy DuPont products, he explains that Chemours today serves critical industrial markets ranging from next-generation refrigerants to semiconductor manufacturing, AI infrastructure, electric vehicles, and advanced cooling technologies.

Looking ahead, Hostetter’s emphasis remains consistent: strengthen the balance sheet, allocate capital thoughtfully, and position the company to create sustainable long-term value. For him, finance is ultimately about creating the platform that allows strategy to succeed.

CFOTL: When you’re out talking to people about Chemours today, what surprises them most about the company?

Hostetter: It’s interesting because Chemours was spun off from DuPont ten years ago, and many people still associate us primarily with those legacy products rather than the company we’ve become today. That’s something I spend a lot of time helping people understand.

The reality is that we have three businesses, each built around critical chemistry that supports many of the world’s essential needs. Most people recognize the Freon® brand, but today we’re developing next-generation refrigerants used in home air conditioning, automobiles, and commercial refrigeration. People also know the Teflon brand, but our business isn’t consumer products—it’s industrial applications. Our materials help protect equipment operating in high-heat or highly corrosive environments, making them essential for data centers, AI infrastructure, wiring, and cabling.

Our third business produces the titanium technologies that make paint, plastics, and paper white. In many ways, our products are part of everyday life, even though most people never realize it.

What’s especially exciting is that Chemours is participating in virtually every major industrial trend people are talking about today. Whether it’s advanced cooling technologies, AI data centers, semiconductors, electric vehicles, or critical minerals, our chemistry plays an important role. We have unique technologies supporting semiconductor manufacturing, wire and cable applications, and other emerging markets. I don’t think many people fully appreciate just how closely Chemours is connected to these growth opportunities—or the value that creates for our business.

CFOTL: You joined Chemours in mid-2024. What chapter are you helping write for the company?

Hostetter: When I joined in 2024, I brought an external perspective to a company with deep institutional knowledge. Denise, our CEO, has spent nearly forty years with DuPont and Chemours, so she knows the business better than almost anyone. My role has been to combine that internal expertise with fresh outside perspectives to create the best of both worlds.

Our focus has been executing a clear strategy built around strengthening the company over both the next three years and the long term. That includes optimizing our portfolio, whether through shutting down underperforming production lines or divesting non-core assets to improve cash flow. Underpinning all of it is a disciplined capital allocation strategy.

When I arrived, we were facing liquidity challenges and important strategic decisions about where to invest for future growth. We’ve worked hard to strengthen the balance sheet while creating a platform that positions Chemours to thrive over the long term.

Chemours | www.chemours.com | Wilmington, DE

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Sinohe Terrero still remembers the timing. He joined Envoy in January, only to see the workplace transformed just two months later as offices around the world shut down because of COVID. The company had been building products for offices, but suddenly, almost no one was going to the office, Terrero tells us.

That abrupt shift forced Envoy to rethink its future. The company quickly introduced a product called Protect to help organizations safely welcome employees and visitors back into their facilities. From there, it expanded into desk management, room scheduling, deliveries, analytics, and ultimately a broader suite of workplace security solutions.

Today, that evolution has reshaped the business. Envoy now helps organizations across industries such as aerospace, defense, biopharma, and manufacturing secure their physical workplaces. Emergency notifications, visitor management, identity verification, and real-time visibility into who is inside a facility have become central capabilities, Terrero tells us.

Looking back, Terrero sees a different challenge driving the company’s growth. During the pandemic and the inflationary period that followed, organizations struggled to determine whether they would operate remotely, in hybrid environments, or fully in person. Now that most companies have settled on their workplace strategies, the demand for operational data has increased significantly, he tells us.

That demand extends beyond simply managing office attendance. Organizations want software that can verify identities, monitor facility access, manage security risks, and provide real-time information rather than relying on manual logs or random sampling. For Terrero, Envoy’s journey reflects how quickly a company can evolve when changing customer needs require an entirely new way of thinking about the workplace.

CFOTL: Tell us about Envoy. What is this company about today? What’s happening there?

Terrero: We’ve gone through quite an evolution over the last six years. When I joined Envoy, we were primarily known for our visitor management product. If you’ve ever signed into an office using an iPad, you’ve probably used our software. Then COVID happened. I joined in January, and by March we were sheltering in place. We suddenly found ourselves building products for offices when nobody was going into offices.

We had to pivot quickly. We introduced a product called Protect to help companies safely bring employees and visitors back into the workplace. We built desk management because organizations needed to manage spacing and hybrid work. We’ve always offered room scheduling and delivery management, and analytics became increasingly important.

Today, we’re really more of a security company. We help some of the world’s largest organizations secure their physical spaces across industries like aerospace, defense, biopharma, and manufacturing. Our customers need to manage risk, prevent theft, verify identities, comply with regulations such as ITAR, and understand exactly who is entering their facilities.

Our latest products focus on emergency notifications, tightly integrated with our broader platform. If there’s an emergency, we can take over digital displays, notify visitors and employees, and immediately identify everyone who is physically in the building. That’s critical information when every minute matters. Our visitor product is still the market leader, but today it’s part of a much broader workplace security suite.

CFOTL: Can you help us understand what is driving the growth of this business today?

Terrero: It’s really a combination of factors. I’ve been here six years, and for the first four we were navigating circumstances completely outside our control—first the pandemic, then inflation, which I like to call COVID’s ugly cousin. Companies didn’t know whether they’d be fully remote, hybrid, or back in the office full time. We were steering the business through an enormous amount of uncertainty.

Today, that uncertainty has largely disappeared. Most organizations have decided how they’re going to operate, and that has created a much greater need for data. Before COVID, companies could reasonably estimate how many people would be in the office on any given day. Today, that’s no longer possible. Organizations need real-time information to manage their workplaces effectively.

They’re also recognizing that software is the right way to solve these problems. No one wants to rely on pen-and-paper visitor logs anymore. Companies need to verify identities, maintain watchlists, manage security risks, and know exactly who’s entering their facilities. Whether it’s protecting against disgruntled former employees or meeting regulatory requirements, those capabilities have become essential.

The same is true in industries like manufacturing and freight, where companies now have far better visibility into inventory, theft, and operational losses. Instead of relying on estimates or random sampling, they have access to real-time information—and that requires knowing exactly who has been in their facilities.

Envoy | www.envoy.com | San Francisco, CA

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When Martino Cadoni joined DeepL, he arrived with an unusual perspective—he already knew the company’s product firsthand. Earlier in his career at Klarna, he had helped introduce DeepL as a translation solution, making the transition from customer to CFO especially meaningful. Today, DeepL is backed by investors including HV Capital, Benchmark, Index Ventures, ICONIQ, and Atomico, Cadoni tells us. Working alongside those firms, he says, continually pushes him “out of the comfort zone.”

That mindset mirrors the company’s trajectory. DeepL supports “almost 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies,” Cadoni tells us, while continuing to grow and mature for its next stage of development.

Rather than viewing language translation as a commodity, Cadoni emphasizes its strategic importance in critical business workflows. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, rely on accurate translation of regulatory documentation before commercializing new drugs, he tells us. Legal firms, airlines, manufacturers, and multinational organizations face similar challenges where translation quality directly affects operational outcomes.

Customer adoption reflects those varied use cases. DeepL monitors daily and monthly active users, translated character volumes, language pairs, and traditional financial metrics, Cadoni tells us. He notes that demand often extends well beyond English, highlighting significant activity between Japanese and Korean as well as Portuguese and Spanish.

Enterprise relationships frequently begin with a single geography or department before expanding across functions, Cadoni explains. One airline customer, for example, uses DeepL to translate aircraft maintenance documentation before selling planes internationally, illustrating how specialized AI can solve highly practical business problems while supporting global growth.

CFOTL: You joined DeepL last fall. What chapter are you opening for the company now?

Cadoni: DeepL is a fantastic company backed by some of the best Silicon Valley and European investors, including HV Capital, Benchmark, Index Ventures, ICONIQ, and Atomico. Having that caliber of investors was one of the reasons I was—and still am—so excited to join the company. Working with people who constantly push you outside your comfort zone helps you become a better version of yourself. DeepL has been on a great trajectory for nearly a decade. Today, we support almost 50 percent of the Fortune 500 across multiple industries and use cases, and we’re continuing to grow rapidly while maturing as a company so we’re ready for whatever comes next.

CFOTL: What business opportunity is DeepL targeting as it looks toward future growth?

Cadoni: DeepL has one of the largest AI research labs in Europe, and our models are purpose-built for language translation. Although we compete with companies like Google and Microsoft, our models consistently rank at the top for translation quality. Accuracy is always important, but it’s especially critical in high-stakes workflows.

A pharmaceutical company, for example, must translate regulatory documentation accurately before bringing a drug to market. Better translations can accelerate approvals, helping patients receive treatments sooner while allowing companies to generate revenue earlier. The same principle applies to legal firms, airlines, manufacturers, and virtually every global business that needs to localize content across multiple markets. We help organizations execute that internationalization accurately and efficiently. Today, customers include companies such as Klarna, Mazda, FIFA, and NVIDIA, and we support nearly half of the Fortune 500.

CFOTL: How do you measure whether customers are adopting your offerings successfully? What signals tell you you’re on the right path?

Cadoni: We monitor a broad range of KPIs, from financial metrics to product usage metrics. We track daily and monthly active users, the number of characters translated, and which language pairs customers use most frequently. Many people assume translation is primarily into English, but that’s often not the case. For example, there’s significant demand between Japanese and Korean, as well as between Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America. Understanding those usage patterns helps us see where adoption is strongest. Alongside those product metrics, we monitor the traditional financial indicators as well.

CFOTL: When you begin working with a Fortune 500 customer, does the relationship usually start globally or expand over time?

Cadoni: It really depends. Sometimes an engagement starts in one country before expanding globally. Other times it begins with a single department—such as marketing—and later extends into legal, engineering, or product teams. One example is an airline customer. Airlines periodically replace their fleets, and much of the maintenance documentation for older aircraft exists only in the local language. When those aircraft are sold internationally, the documentation must be translated accurately for the new market. DeepL enables that process to happen quickly and with the precision those critical documents require.

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When Jean Compeau joined Sonar as CFO in March 2025, AI coding was not yet dominating industry conversations. By the summer and fall that followed, however, the landscape had shifted dramatically. Today, AI agents are producing software code at a pace that humans cannot easily verify, creating both opportunity and risk.

That shift sits at the center of Sonar’s mission. The company is the global leader in AI code verification and governance in what it calls the agentic-centric development lifecycle, or “ACDC, just like the band,” Compeau tells us. The scale is significant. Sonar is trusted by 7 million developers, processes 750 billion lines of code daily, serves 25,000 paying customers, and counts 75 percent of the Fortune 100 among its customers, Compeau tells us.

For Compeau, growth is measured through both financial and operational signals. ARR, NRR, GRR, and EBITDA remain core metrics, she tells us. But she also watches utilization, adoption, lead generation, pipeline activity, and free-to-paid conversion rates because these indicators can reveal future performance before financial results arrive.

That perspective shapes how finance participates in strategic decisions. As Sonar invests in new AI-driven products, finance evaluates not only bookings potential but also the company’s long-term position in the AI market, Compeau tells us. The finance function remains involved throughout the process, helping operationalize everything from product introduction and revenue tracking to order management and cash collection.

For Compeau, finance’s role is not simply to measure growth—it is to help shape it.

CFOTL: So we might have a few more career-related questions a little later. Right now, we want to talk to you about Sonar, where you stepped in as CFO in March 2025. Tell us about this company. What’s it about today?
Compeau: I’m very excited to share. Sonar is the global leader in AI code verification and governance in the agentic-centric development lifecycle. We call it ACDC, just like the band. Just to give you a little bit of information on the scale of Sonar, we’re trusted by 7 million developers, we process 750 billion lines of code daily, and we have 25,000 paying customers. Of those, 75 percent of the Fortune 100 are our customers. So I’m very proud to be part of this journey.

CFOTL: Could you tell us a little bit more about the growth journey? How has that evolved over time?
Compeau: Last year, when I joined the company, AI coding wasn’t being talked about as much. Then last summer and fall, AI coding became really popular. Today, AI agents are writing massive volumes of complex code faster than any human can verify. AI code is less reliable and more complex, and only 3 percent of developers highly trust the accuracy of AI code. AI tools are also generating more verbose code, meaning expanding lines of code. AI code tools are generating about 50 percent more lines of code than developers to complete the same task. That gives you a sense of the magnitude. This puts Sonar in a mission-critical position to verify this exponentially growing volume of code and help enterprises increase reliability, maintainability, auditability, and, most importantly, trust in AI code.

CFOTL: So tell us, what numbers are you looking at to understand how the company is performing or growing? What are these metrics?
Compeau: We measure quite a few metrics. Financially, we look at ARR—annual recurring revenue. NRR and GRR are pretty common financial metrics, and of course profitability. We look at EBITDA, but we also look at a lot of leading indicators. The KPIs I mentioned are lagging indicators, so the leading indicators I look at are in various areas. For example, in product, I look at utilization, because utilization drives adoption, and eventually your ARR and NRR will grow. I also look at marketing data in terms of leads and pipeline generation. We also have a free-trial online business, so traction in the online business and free-to-paid conversion are early indicators of how the business will do.

CFOTL: Are these being watched weekly, or can you give us a sense of the frequency with which you’re taking a dive into these numbers?
Compeau: At least weekly. We have regular dashboards and regular monthly reporting. There are dashboards that the management team looks at closely to analyze the data. I would say that is a big part of the finance organization: to monitor and look around the corner to see what could go wrong, and then be able to work with the business to get ahead before the problem really becomes a problem.

CFOTL: Could you tell us how, when a major product investment is going to be made, that is done at Sonar in relation to finance being at the table? Departments or product areas come forward and ask for a sizable investment because they see an opportunity. What unfolds?
Compeau: Take this AI shift, for example. The product team at Sonar has been working on agentic products for some time, and it has been in open beta since late March. The process begins with seeing the market shift. It’s critical to ensure there is no gap in our product that we need to address proactively. In any product organization, there are teams that work on new features and new products, and there are teams that support and maintain the current products. In a high-growth technology company like Sonar, we invest heavily in new features and new products. From finance’s seat at the decision table, we look at the return—not just in terms of bookings, but also in terms of the company’s position in the AI revolution. We look at how we are going to track AI ARR and AI revenue. All of that is part of finance’s responsibility in new product introduction, in addition to operationalizing the entire process from taking the order all the way to collecting cash.

Sonar | www.sonar.com | Austin, TX

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In this Planning Aces episode, Jack Sweeney and thought leader Brett Knowles explore FP&A lessons from three CFOs tackling AI’s promise and limits. Craig Foster (Pax8) sees AI as an efficiency engine, projecting “20% more with 20% less” via agentic tools across functions and for SMBs. David Obstler (Datadog) outlines monetization—AI-native demand, LLM-powered products, and internal coding and finance agents—while prudently building ROI evidence. Ben Gammell (Brex) tempers hype, saying humans still forecast better beyond 90 days, yet crediting AI with faster analysis. Together, the trio charts a spectrum from pragmatic efficiency to skepticism.

Brett Knowles – Key TakeawaysBrett Knowles spotlights the spectrum of AI maturity: from skepticism about forecasting to aggressive deployment across products and functions. He argues ROI is the wrong early question; focus on cost discipline, leading indicators, and avoiding incremental spend. AI should augment teams—“another seat at the table”—while humans stay in the loop. He expects productivity: onboarding cycles collapsing, agents boosting SMB agility. He notes CFOs are candid about efficiency tradeoffs as AI embeds across workflows.

Our Planning Aces: Where They Differ Primary value lens: + Craig Foster (Pax8): Operational efficiency & SMB enablement—“20% more with 20% less,” agentic tools across functions and partners. + David Obstler (Datadog): Platform monetization & product coverage—AI-native demand, LLM-powered features, internal agents; prudent, staged ROI proof. + Ben Gammell (Brex): Analytical acceleration, human-led forecasting—AI excels at diagnostics; beyond ~90 days, expert intuition still edges models. * Forecasting stance: + Skeptical: Gammell—models miss strategy shifts, ramp dynamics, new markets. + Execution-forward: Foster—focus on throughput, cycle times, headcount leverage now. + Enable-then-measure: Obstler—build capability, track adoption/revenue, prove ROI over 2–3 years. * Time horizon & scaling: + Near-term lift: Foster (immediate efficiency, onboarding compression). + Balanced horizon: Obstler (near-term monetization + medium-term ROI instrumentation). + Guardrailed near-term:* Gammell (use AI for speed/insight; keep humans steering forecasts).

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“InvoiceCloud is not just payments,” Chris Sands tells us. Sitting inside the company’s finance organization, he sees a platform built to change habits—helping businesses shift customers from paper invoices and mailed checks to fully digital transactions. The success metric, he adds, is simple: “Do more of their customers stop receiving paper invoices, stop mailing in checks, and do both of those things digitally?”

That clear yardstick reflects how Sands thinks about growth. He describes a foundation rooted in existing customers even as the broader economy accelerates toward digital payment adoption. Utilities and insurers remain core markets, yet new verticals, such as consumer finance, beckon. Each expansion, he notes, must rest on data that confirms user behavior is truly changing.

Read MoreInside finance, Sands has built what he calls a Strategic Finance function to mirror that discipline. The group handles special projects and, increasingly, AI initiatives—efforts he says once fell entirely within FP&A. Now they stand on their own “leg of the stool,” amplifying how finance supports innovation.

That mindset extends beyond the department. Sands helped stand up an AI Ops team—an internal SWAT group that guides employees exploring AI tools. Instead of experimenting in isolation, staff can bring use cases to the team for help. For Sands, finance’s role is to stay analytical amid the excitement: “We can add more value … by helping the rest of the org with [AI] and using our finance skill set to understand where the best opportunities to create business value exist.”

CFOTL: The payments space is crowded. What makes InvoiceCloud stand out? What’s distinctive about this business?

Sands: InvoiceCloud isn’t just a payments company—it’s a billing and payments software platform. The formal category is called electronic bill presentment and payment, but essentially, we help businesses with B2C use cases distribute invoices and collect payments digitally.

The company’s been around for more than a decade and has been owned by several well-known private equity firms. What really differentiates us is how we solve our clients’ biggest pain point: driving digital adoption. When customers implement our solution, we measure success by whether their end users stop receiving paper invoices, stop mailing checks, and start doing both digitally.

It’s a strong combination of software and payments, and we believe our offerings are best in class on both fronts. That combination has proven to be a powerful growth engine.

CFOTL: What are the growth opportunities in the near term for InvoiceCloud?

Sands: The foundation for growth starts within our existing customer base. As digital payment adoption continues across the economy—people paying their utility bills or insurance premiums online, for example—there’s a secular tailwind that drives expansion.

On top of that, we’re signing new customers both within our core verticals, like utilities and insurance, and by moving upmarket in those areas. Beyond that, we see potential in adjacent verticals such as consumer finance, which have similar use cases but remain untapped. The opportunity horizon here is long and exciting for the next several years.

Read MoreCFOTL: Tell us about your finance organization. Have your priorities or structure changed since your first CFO role?

Sands: Structurally, there’s nothing radically different, but there’s one element I have now that I didn’t in my first CFO role—a dedicated strategic finance team. That’s partly a function of scale and partly from what I’ve learned over time about what makes finance teams most effective.

This team focuses on special projects, growth initiatives, and increasingly, our work around AI. In many companies, those efforts sit entirely within FP&A, and that can work fine. But giving strategic finance its own lane within the broader finance function has proven really valuable. It expands the team’s overall impact and ensures we’re deeply connected to where the business is heading.

CFOTL: How is AI influencing how you and your finance team partner with the rest of the organization?

Sands: AI is a huge focus here, as it is across most businesses. I appreciate how you framed the question, because the conversation often centers on AI inside finance. We’re exploring that, but honestly, the strongest AI use cases right now are emerging in engineering, development, customer success, and sales—not necessarily finance.

So our question has become: how do we use our finance skill set to make sure the organization succeeds with AI? That means identifying which functions benefit most, how we can support them, and how to assess the ROI on all these new tools.

To accelerate this, we created an AI Ops team—think of it as an HR business partner model for AI. It’s a cross-functional group that helps people across the company experiment and implement. Instead of employees figuring out AI tools on their own, they can go to this team with a use case and get support.

It’s been a huge accelerator. And finance plays a key role by providing a discerning lens—evaluating where AI can truly create value amid all the noise and vendor pitches. In that way, we add as much value by helping the rest of the business adopt AI effectively as we do by experimenting within finance itself.

InvoiceCloud | www.invoicecloud.com | Braintree, MA

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During a period of rapid global expansion, Kimberlee Duval centralized fragmented procurement and built accountability across teams, transforming chaos into cohesion. Within 10 months, out-of-stocks fell below 1% and fulfillment hit 48 hours, helping revenue grow from $140 million to $500 million—proof that finance leadership can drive both operational resilience and strategic growth.

Now Watch the Complete Episode Featuring CFO Kimberlee Duval of CymbiotikaAt Cymbiotika, CFO Kimberlee Duval frames finance as the integrator for a bootstrapped brand scaling from DTC into retail. She describes taking on debt (not equity) to fund a Sprouts rollout in early 2024, then readying a launch into 1,988 Target stores. Duval restructured finance—centralizing operations in NetSuite, building FP&A and cost accounting, codifying SOPs—while keeping the team lean through automation. She resists e-commerce/retail silos, pushing cross-functional visibility so metrics become actions. Her “explain the why” leadership invites CX, supply chain, and marketing into the model, tightening decision speed and transforming finance from reporter to strategic driver across the business.

| CFO’s Strategy Playbook | | --- | | • Centralize systems; keep teams lean with automation. | | • Resist silos; enforce cross-functional visibility, always. | | • Explain the why to speed decisions. |

1133: Finance That Explains (and Scales) the Why | Kimberlee Duval, CFO, Cymbiotika

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“We’ve always believed in meeting businesses where they are—inside the systems they already trust.” – Lacerte

At SuiteWorld 2025 in Las Vegas, René Lacerte, founder and CEO of BILL, discussed how AI, automation, and embedded partnerships are transforming the financial operations landscape for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Lacerte described AI’s evolution in finance as a shift from do-it-yourself workflows to do-it-with-you solutions—and now toward do-it-for-you capabilities powered by agentic AI. He emphasized that automation isn’t about replacing humans but about eliminating friction in back-office tasks like payments, reconciliation, and collaboration, enabling finance leaders to focus on higher-value strategy.

The conversation also touched on BILL’s newly announced embedded partnership with NetSuite, which integrates BILL’s payment automation directly into the NetSuite platform. Lacerte said the move reflects BILL’s long-standing approach of meeting customers where they already work—whether through banks, accounting firms, or software partners. With more than 500,000 businesses and 8 million vendors on its network, BILL processes about 1% of U.S. GDP annually, positioning it at the forefront of intelligent finance for SMBs. Looking ahead, Lacerte believes AI will continue to unlock creativity and strategic capacity for business leaders by removing the grind of financial administration.

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When Kimberlee Duval arrived at Cymbiotika, the wellness company was preparing a leap few bootstrapped brands attempt—moving from direct-to-consumer to retail shelves. “Our two owners, Charlene and Shahab, have done everything direct,” she tells us. “They wanted to build an organization for the long term.” That resolve led the company to take on debt rather than private-equity money to fund its Sprouts launch in 2024. The risk paid off: Sprouts highlighted Cymbiotika’s success in its quarterly earnings release, proof that intentional growth can outperform speed.

Now, with products heading to 1,988 Target stores, Duval’s finance team is focused on scaling without losing clarity. “We restructured the finance function to align with that growth strategy,” she tells us, pointing to centralized operations in NetSuite, expanded FP&A and cost accounting capabilities, and the creation of clear SOPs. Technology, she believes, is the enabler that keeps teams lean and insights sharp.

Read More“There’s no reason to segregate between the groups,” she explains, describing her cross-channel approach to e-commerce and retail finance. AI tools and automated workflows now handle much of the transactional load, freeing her people to focus on analysis and collaboration.

At the heart of her leadership philosophy is unity. “We’re a team … with a common purpose and a common goal,” Duval tells us. That ethos—pairing disciplined systems with shared intent—continues to shape Cymbiotika’s transformation from a digital wellness brand into a multichannel movement for intentional living.

CFOTL: Let’s find out about Cymbiotika. Tell us about this latest chapter—what is the company, and what are its offerings?
Duval: Cymbiotika is a wellness brand focused on premium, bioavailable supplements that support holistic health. What sets us apart is our commitment to transparency, scientific integrity, and customer education—particularly in the vitamins, minerals, and supplements space. We’re not just selling products; we’re building a movement around intentional living.

CFOTL: We understand the company raised some debt financing last year. Can you share a bit about Cymbiotika’s capital structure?
Duval: We’ve been bootstrapped from the start. Our two owners, Charlene and Shahab, have funded the business directly to build for the long term—without PE or VC pressures that might compromise product quality (or limit innovation beyond powders and pills).

Read MoreMoving from DTC to retail is capital-intensive—inventory, setup, and extended payment terms. We took on debt to enter Sprouts in early 2024, saw strong results—Sprouts even mentioned us in their Q2 earnings release—and then put more robust financing in place. We’re still not ready to give up equity. Next up, we’re launching in Target—1,988 stores (in about a week and a half).

CFOTL: As the company scales across e-commerce and retail, what does your finance organization look like?
Duval: We restructured finance to match our growth strategy—centralizing operations in NetSuite, building FP&A and cost-accounting capabilities, and creating clear SOPs for scale. NetSuite streamlines reporting, improves visibility, and supports cross-functional decisions. We’ve moved from broad generalists to clearer swim lanes where it helps.

CFOTL: Will your people be dedicated to retail or e-commerce, or do you plan to rotate them?
Duval: We’re not splitting teams by channel right now. Retail is growing and will require certain dedicated roles by transaction flow—AR for retail, for example—while B2C via Shopify is pay-as-you-go. But for FP&A and cost accounting, I want teams looking across the whole business to avoid tunnel vision and capture synergies. Our bias is to use systems, AI, modules, and workflow automation to scale—rather than building an overly large finance org. Too much separation can hide information. We’re one team with a common purpose, so we design the work (and tools) to keep visibility and leverage high.

The Cohort Compass for Omnichannel Growth | Kimberlee Duval, CFO, Cymbiotika

Cymbiotika | www.cymbiotika.com | San Diego, CA

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Within 72 hours of becoming CFO at Elance, Steve Sutter uncovered that thousands of customer account balances were commingled with corporate cash—an oversight with serious compliance risk. He immediately convened the board, secured nearly $20 million to correct the issue, and implemented proper segregation—restoring financial integrity and safeguarding the company’s future transactions.

Now Watch the Complete Episode of CFO Steve Sutter of Celigo Celigo’s finance chief views AI not as disruption but as acceleration. Steve Sutter tells us finance must design sustainable business models grounded in unit economics—understanding every dollar of new ARR and the cost to deliver it. Partnering with go-to-market leaders, he uses metrics like quota-to-OTE ratios to guide efficient scaling. When growth experiments stall, he moves quickly to shut them down and redirect resources. Across Celigo’s automation platform, Sutter sees AI as pervasive and enabling—simplifying the mundane, sharpening execution, and allowing finance to lead where technology and human performance converge.

| CFO’s Strategy Playbook | | --- | | • Build Growth on Proven Unit Economics | | • Coach GTM Through Measurable Efficiency Ratios | | • Fail Fast and Redeploy Capital Wisely |

1132: Infrastructure First: Where AI Actually Adds Up | Steve Sutter, CFO, Celigo

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When Steve Sutter joined Celigo five years ago, he stepped into a company positioned not as another SaaS app but as what he calls “the infrastructure, the piping, the plumbing” of business automation. Celigo, he tells us, moves data between systems like Salesforce, NetSuite, and Snowflake so companies can “create very sophisticated business processes” without the friction of disconnected silos.

For Sutter, the real work of finance begins behind that plumbing. “As CFO, you have to build a sustainable business model,” he tells us, one rooted in clear unit economics—how each dollar of new recurring revenue is earned and what it costs to deliver value. That analytical discipline, he explains, gives finance a vantage point “no one else has,” allowing it to balance engineering ambition with go-to-market execution.

Read MoreWorking inside a privately held, fast-growth environment, Sutter views resource allocation as both art and accountability. Sometimes, he says, companies must “invest in sales and marketing at an excessive rate” to gain traction—but the test is whether the model still makes mathematical sense. He partners closely with the CRO and CMO to watch metrics like the quota-to-OTE ratio and pipeline efficiency, adjusting as conditions change.

Even at scale, Sutter keeps a simple mantra: acknowledge failure quickly. “As soon as you’ve acknowledged failure,” he tells us, “you can move on to something that will likely be successful.” It’s a principle that keeps Celigo’s growth disciplined—and its automation ambitions grounded in financial logic.

CFOTL: Well, please tell us more about this company. Then it’s not quite the company you joined five years ago. Tell us about Celigo today—what’s it about? What is this company up to?
Sutter: Celigo is an intelligent automation platform—we’re an infrastructure technology company. We take data from one application and integrate it with another to support end-to-end business processes. SaaS adoption created data silos; to run an intelligent process, you might need customer data in NetSuite and Salesforce, plus product-usage data from (our) app, and perhaps aggregate it in a data lake like Snowflake or Databricks for BI. Celigo provides the “piping”—connecting cloud apps, databases, and EDI partners—so companies can design simple or sophisticated processes across those endpoints.

Read MoreCFOTL: Looking at your five years, what were the financial priorities that underpinned growth over that period?
Sutter: As CFO, the job is to build a sustainable business model grounded in unit economics—what $1 of new ARR costs, new-logo efficiency, and the time to initial value. You allocate scarce resources across engineering, product, sales, and marketing from a whole-business vantage point that even a CEO doesn’t always have day-to-day. On paper, you prove the model—then execute to it—so the organization marches toward a scalable, thoughtful, intelligent business model.

CFOTL: You’ve been in private and public companies—how does being privately held shape your long-term strategy?
Sutter: You often invest in sales and marketing ahead of efficiency to establish traction, but you must define what “efficient GTM” looks like. I “plant seeds” with the CRO and CMO: maintain a healthy quota-to-OTE ratio (if we pay more, ASPs and quotas should rise), set the right SE-to-rep mix, and understand unit economics by pipeline stream. As you scale toward $100M, you will make mistakes—acknowledge failure quickly, shut down what isn’t working, and redeploy to what will scale. That discipline is how you make the model sustainable and profitable.

From Experiments to Engines: Scaling the Mid-Market | Steve Sutter CFO, Celigo

Celigo | www.Celigo.com | Redwood City, CA

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Beth Gaspich recalls ringing the NYSE bell in 2008 as RiskMetrics went public amid extreme market volatility. After months of S-1 prep and roadshows, the decision to proceed came “down to the wire.” Executing successfully proved the value of preparation, decisive timing, and clear investor storytelling in uncertain markets.

Now Watch our Complete Episode Featuring CFO Beth Gaspich of NiCEJack speaks with NICE CFO Beth Gaspich about transforming a legacy software company into a cloud-first, AI-driven platform. She recounts ringing the NYSE bell during RiskMetrics’ 2008 IPO and how preparation, storytelling, and decisive action shape her leadership. At NICE, she moved from Actimize CFO to corporate CFO in 2016, accelerating platform integration, disciplined M&A, and AI investments, including Cognigy. She widens ROI beyond headcount, redeploying talent to higher-value work while embedding “AI champions” with measurable KPIs. Priorities: deeper instrumentation, forecasting rigor, ERP and order-to-cash modernization, and investor communication. Her playbook: immerse with customers and sales, measure, decide with conviction.

| CFO’s Strategy Playbook | | --- | | • Immerse with sales, customers, and investors. | | • Measure outcomes with transparent, predictive KPIs. | | • Prioritize AI capabilities, platform integration, scalability. |

1131: Building an AI-Ready Finance Engine | Beth Gaspich, CFO, NiCE

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In 2008, Beth Gaspich stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, ringing the bell as RiskMetrics went public. What made the moment extraordinary was its timing—amid one of the most volatile markets in decades. The IPO decision, she tells us, came “down to the wire.” After months of preparing the S-1, long roadshows, and weekend work with auditors, leadership had to choose: delay indefinitely or seize a fleeting opening. They chose action, and the listing became a defining milestone in her career.

Read MoreThat experience shaped her conviction that preparation and clear communication are indispensable when markets are uncertain. It also foreshadowed the way she would later lead NiCE through its own transformation. When she became CFO in 2016, NiCE was largely an on-premise software company with roughly $1 billion in revenue. Today, she tells us, the firm is approaching $3 billion, with $2.2 billion in cloud revenue. “We don’t put boxes around people,” she notes, describing a culture where finance leaders are expected to help drive strategy, not just report results.

Her approach to AI investment echoes that belief. She explains that NiCE’s AI and self-service ARR reached $238 million, growing 42% year-over-year. Rather than measure ROI only through headcount reduction, she emphasizes redeploying people to more strategic work. Internally, AI “champions” in each function track outcomes with KPIs.

CFOTL: My familiarity with NiCE is that it makes software that helps big companies answer phone calls, keep track of what was said, and ensure banks and businesses follow the rules. But tell us about NiCE today. This company is several decades old—what is it about now?

Gaspich: Well, first, I would say we’ve come a long way. We still do some of the things you mentioned, but we do significantly more. We are an enterprise software firm delivering AI on a cloud platform that was built natively in the cloud. For more than 30 years, we’ve continued to transform as a company. We’re traded on two stock exchanges—NASDAQ here in the U.S. and TASE in Israel. Today we’re about $3 billion in revenue, serving over 25,000 customers in more than 150 countries.

Read MoreIn the early days, we focused heavily on the contact center—providing call recording and routing. But over time, we greatly expanded. A major acquisition, right around the time I stepped into the CFO role, resulted in our CXone platform on the customer experience side. That started with improving agent efficiency but has evolved. Today, our growth is driven largely by AI in our cloud platform. It’s fully integrated—AI augments agents when consumers reach them, while also providing human-less (AI-based) interactions that extend far beyond the contact center. We’ve really expanded into a full, end-to-end customer experience offering.

CFOTL: Looking at the economic environment today, what external factors are playing the largest role in shaping your financial strategy?

Gaspich: Not surprisingly, AI is a major factor. Since the introduction of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, every enterprise software provider is being evaluated through the lens of AI. For NiCE, the question is: where are humans most involved, and where can AI replace or augment them?

What makes me proud is that we’ve been ahead of the curve. As a 30-plus-year company, our software has always been grounded in analytics and early AI, like machine-based learning. Even before 2022, we were winning awards for our “Enlighten” platform, which applied AI use cases to improve outcomes between organizations and their customers.

When conversational AI emerged, we moved quickly into next-gen capabilities. Most recently, we closed the acquisition of Cognigy, a leader in conversational AI. Adding it to our platform strengthens our growth engine. Fundamentally, we believe AI is best delivered when it’s integrated with a cloud-native platform and has access to relevant data. That’s exactly what we offer at NiCE.

Acquisitions As Customer Experience Strategy | Beth Gaspich, CFO, NiCE

NiCE | www.nice.com | Ra’anana

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During post-COVID uncertainty, David Obstler spotted early signs of customer optimization and reprioritized Datadog’s investments. By pulling back selectively while sustaining rapid investment in key areas, he preserved profitability, avoided layoffs, and strengthened the company’s ability to reaccelerate growth—building long-term resilience without compromising culture.

Now Watch the Complete Episode Featuring CFO David ObstlerDavid Obstler explains how Datadog scaled by pairing product-led growth with disciplined investment. He describes joining in 2018 as observability expanded into logs, application monitoring, and security amid the broader shift to cloud. Datadog now serves 31,400+ customers and recently joined the S&P 500 after reporting over $820 million in quarterly revenue, 28% year-over-year growth, and $200+ million in free cash flow. Obstler emphasizes calibrating spend during uncertainty—“we pulled back a little bit”—to preserve profitability and avoid layoffs while staying close to customers, sustaining mid-to-upper-90s gross retention. Looking ahead, he’s investing in AI capabilities and infrastructure to support global scale.

| CFO’s Strategy Playbook | | --- | | • Prioritize product-led growth with disciplined investment | | • Calibrate spend to protect profitability and agility | | • Use customer signals to guide prioritization |

1130: Building Resilient Finance in Uncertain Times | David Obstler, CFO, Datadog

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One of the key lessons that helped advance Jim Benson down the CFO path was one in clarity and focus during his tenure as FP&A leader for the customer service division of Compaq, freshly acquired by Hewlett-Packard. Eager to influence how the division’s performance was presented, Benson dedicated himself to crafting detailed reports and narratives. However, each time he handed his work to the general manager—a skilled storyteller in his own right—his carefully prepared materials were distilled down to two or three essential points.

Read MoreAt first, Benson found the process frustrating. “You work very hard to prepare a set of materials and a narrative,” he recalls, “but he would take my materials and build his own narrative.” Yet over time, Benson began to see the value of simplicity and focus, especially in conveying complex financial information to large audiences. The customer service division was in the spotlight for HP’s earnings, so every quarter required a clear, compelling story that was rooted in financial reality and accessible to diverse audiences.

Through this process, Benson honed his storytelling skills, learning to construct narratives that cut to the core of the message without sacrificing key details. This foundational experience shaped his leadership style, setting a high standard for strategic communication throughout his career. Today, as CFO of Dynatrace, Benson applies his hard-earned proficiency for clarity and focus to ensure that every financial story aligns with the company’s mission, balancing growth, profitability, and innovation.

“My career path has been very much one of building breadth and depth… Sometimes you have people that very early in their career are looking for progression, and progression to them is a promotion. I would say, in order to become a seasoned executive, what you really need is experiences.” – Jim Benson, CFO, Dynatrace.

CFOTL: Tell us about Dynatrace. What does the company do, and what are its offerings today?

Benson: Dynatrace is a technology company operating in what’s known as the “observability segment.” Simply put, when companies have applications and different workloads, these workloads need monitoring. Dynatrace’s software monitors these workloads to quickly identify potential problems—whether they’re application issues, infrastructure issues, or server-related.

Our platform, even before AI became a buzzword, was designed with AI capabilities. It can pinpoint specific pain points in software, diagnose issues, and guide users on how to fix them. This function is particularly critical today, as data and workloads migrate increasingly to complex environments like public cloud platforms—such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud—or private networks. In these dynamic settings, telemetry is essential to ensure that end-user experiences remain seamless and uninterrupted.

Read MoreDynatrace is a B2B company with revenues surpassing $1 billion, growing rapidly, and maintaining strong profitability. Its growth reminds me of my journey at Akamai, where we also navigated rapid market expansion and infrastructure development to meet evolving customer needs.

CFOTL: Tell us about your CFO priorities for the coming 12 months.

Benson: My biggest priority is alignment. By that, I mean aligning all functions within Dynatrace in an integrated, cohesive way. I like to use the phrase “the ropes have to touch the ground,” which signifies the need for operational integration across all business areas to achieve better outcomes. My finance team is heavily involved in working across functions to ensure we’re aligned on mission-critical goals, identifying key leading indicators that will help drive us toward these targets.

Dynatrace is a growth company, so our initiatives are largely growth-oriented. Beyond alignment, another priority is enhancing leverage within the company—specifically, exploring efficiencies in G&A to optimize our operations. AI is also on our radar; we’re in the early stages of understanding its potential to drive productivity. Right now, we’re still learning how best to apply it to our processes.

Lastly, because our finance team is geographically dispersed, we’re focusing on establishing global standards. These standards will help guide our practices across regions and improve decision-making regarding where certain work should be done. Overall, while there are many smaller initiatives, alignment remains my primary focus.

Dynatrace | www.dynatrace.com | Waltham, MA

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In this episode of “The Mentoring Round,” Guardian Pharmacy CFO David Morris reflects on decades of growth and persistence, emphasizing the importance of human capital, data-driven decisions, and patient, long-term strategy. Morris shares insights into Guardian’s journey from a single pharmacy to 50 nationwide, discussing the strategic milestones of investing in talent, data infrastructure, and a robust financial planning process. His experiences underline the power of team empowerment and preparation for continued growth in a competitive healthcare market.

1049: Beyond the Balance Sheet: Leveraging People and Data for Success | David Morris, CFO, Guardian Pharmacy

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Sandra Wallach of Amprius Technologies shares her proactive approach to staying closely connected with customers and sales teams through weekly revenue calls. She discusses overcoming misconceptions about Amprius, emphasizing their established experience in the aviation battery market and their unique capabilities. Sandra also reflects on her personal drive to take on challenging assignments where she can make an immediate impact. Looking ahead, she outlines her priorities to future-proof the organization for significant growth.

1048: Strategic Growth and Leadership in Hard Tech Finance | Sandra Wallach, CFO, Amprius Technologies

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When it came to the public markets, no one can accuse David Morris and his seasoned C-suite colleagues, Fred Burke and Kendall Forbes, of being impatient. Guardian Pharmacy Services, a company they built from the ground up, recently raised $112 million in an IPO, listing on the NYSE under the symbol “GRDN.” The milestone reflects a culmination of over three decades of ever thoughtful, strategic decision making in a highly specialized market.

For CFO David Morris, the path to the public markets wasn’t about rapid scaling or chasing quick wins. “We knew from the start that success in healthcare is a long game,” he says, underscoring the team’s deliberate approach. CEO Fred Burke, COO Kendall Forbes, and Morris founded Guardian Pharmacy with the understanding that meaningful growth would come through a patient, steady process of building relationships and refining operations. They entered a complex space, providing technology-enabled pharmacy services for long-term care facilities (LTCFs) across the U.S., from assisted living to behavioral health facilities.

Today, Guardian’s 50 pharmacies serve approximately 174,000 residents in 6,700 facilities across 36 states. With more than two-thirds of its revenue coming from assisted living and behavioral health facilities, Guardian has become a trusted partner in the long-term care industry, where patient care and regulatory oversight demand careful attention.

The IPO marks a new chapter for Guardian, yet Morris, Burke, and Forbes remain dedicated to their original mission. As the company grows in the public eye, their focus remains on delivering results through quality service and operational insight, underscoring the patient leadership that has driven Guardian’s success.

“We almost consider ourselves a healthcare data analytics company because that’s the way we’re running it.” David Morris, CFO, Guardian Pharmacy

“I spend more time than I did five years ago on the human capital side of the business, working with our teams who are helping our local pharmacy operations in leadership development, hiring, training, and retaining talent.” – David Morris, CFO, Guardian Pharmacy

CFOTL: What are your priorities for the coming 12 months?

Morris: We’re very focused on getting the people and systems in place to not only manage what we have but to prepare for the inherent growth we’re expecting over the next two or three years. As we approach the next three or four years, with industry growth, trends, and the initiatives we have in place, we should be able to take this north of a billion dollars. We’re making sure to continue the practices we’ve established in the past few years, focusing on having the right leaders to run the businesses that serve our customers. In support services, we’ll continue to lay a solid foundation by investing in business acumen, IT acumen, human capital management, and sales expertise to better support our local partners in the field. So, we’ve got our hands full.

Guardian Phamacy | www.guardianpharmacy.com | Atlanta, GA

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Sitting quietly at the back of a crowded GE conference room, a young Sandra Wallach diligently took notes during an executive briefing. As one of the newest inductees into GE’s esteemed Financial Management Program (FMP), she was eager to absorb every detail. Unbeknownst to her at the time, this moment marked the beginning of a transformative 17-year journey with General Electric.

“FMP allowed me to figure out what I really like to do, what I gravitate towards, and what I’m not as interested in,” she reflects. From aircraft leasing to manufacturing finance, each rotation broadened her expertise and honed her adaptability.

Read MoreGE’s approach to talent development was immersive and expansive. Wallach continues, “I had 10 different roles in nine different physical locations over my time.” This constant movement not only built her resilience but also provided her with a holistic understanding of GE’s diverse businesses. The culture emphasized being an integral part of the senior leadership team and driving change. “They expected me to be able to speak to the business almost as well as the leader that I was supporting,” she notes.

This high standard pushed her to develop skills beyond traditional finance roles. Along the way, Wallach says GE’s culture exposed her to the personal attributes that would become increasingly critical as she advanced into leadership positions. “Do you have personal edge? Can you make the tough calls? Do you have personal energy?” she explains. Serving as a Master Black Belt and later as a pricing executive, she stepped outside traditional finance roles, gaining valuable insights that would later prove essential in the C-suite.

Beyond GE, Wallach tells us there were still a few boxes to check before she could step into a CFO role. Positions at Intuit and MiaSole provided her with exposure to Silicon Valley’s fast-paced culture and the opportunity to work directly with boards and investors. These experiences, coupled with her GE foundation, ultimately paved the way for future CFO appointments and her latest CFO chapter at Amprius Technologies.

“What success looks like for you will change as you enter the CFO role. More than ever, the responsibility for building a great team is critical, and developing them to take things off your plate will allow you to focus on your specific learning goals for the role.” —Sandra Wallach, CFO of Amprius Technologies, Inc.

CFOTL: Tell us about what Amprius Technologies does and its offerings today.

Wallach: So Amprius Technologies is transforming electric mobility with lithium ion batteries that pack more power into a smaller, lighter package than anything else that’s available today in the market. Our products enable new applications and accelerate markets that couldn’t exist without our capabilities that we provide.

Imagine your drone flying twice as far, your wearable battery, and if you’re in the military doubling your mission time before you have to recharge your electric car going almost twice as far on a single charge. All of that is possible with Ampreus batteries delivering up to 500 watt hours per kilogram today, which means they hold a lot more energy.

Read Morefor their size and weight. So we’ve got incredible energy density, again, that we care about because of the impact on the longevity of the device that you’re using. We have a fast, extreme fast charge, which means it gets from zero to 80% in six minutes or less. So if you think about if you’ve ever tried to charge your Tesla, you know that that’s not what we have today.

It operates in extreme temperature ranges. It is safe, proven safe. We’ve had it verified by a third party to pass the military nail penetration test specification. And it has high power, meaning that it has the ability to accelerate, lift off, take off and landing, all the attributes that you need for something that you’re trying to move.

So we’ve got industry leading customers. The ones we can talk about include Airbus and the US Army. And we’re just excited about the space we think batteries are critical to enabling so many applications that we have today. And we are at the forefront of pioneering the next generation of batteries.

Amprius Technologies | www.amprius.com | Fremont, CA

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In this episode of “Planning Aces,” finance leaders explore the evolving role of FP&A as a strategic partner emphasizing the importance of reliable data in aligning decision-making and resetting priorities. The CFOs discuss how setting clear constraints enhances strategic planning and drives more thoughtful decision-making. Leveraging AI emerges as a key theme for optimizing financial processes and enabling real-time collaboration. Additionally, they highlight the necessity of educating business units on financial metrics to align organizational goals and improve overall performance. Their insights illustrate how Finance can proactively drive growth and innovation across departments.

Featured Planning Aces:

Regi Vengalil, CFO, Trax Retail
Matt Steinfort, CFO, DigitalOcean
Isabelle Winkles, CFO, Braze

Co-Hosts Jack Sweeney & Brett Knowles

Regi Vengalil, CFO of Trax Retail, emphasizes the importance of reliable data and aligning expectations in Finance and FP&A. He highlights the need for consistent data to prevent outdated information from driving debates and poor decisions. Vengalil discusses resetting priorities from growth to margin focus and fostering strategic conversations around minimum margins with flexibility for long-term partnerships. Additionally, he stresses the significance of bringing FP&A functions in-house to ensure accurate, timely insights, making Finance a trusted partner in guiding business decisions effectively.

Matt Steinfort, CFO of Digital Ocean, underscores the importance of constraints in Finance and FP&A. Drawing from his experience in constrained industries, he learned that setting clear limitations leads to better strategic planning and decision-making. Without constraints, planning becomes unrealistic and wasteful. Finance must provide guidelines to help teams make trade-offs. He focuses on capital allocation to drive growth, particularly in AI investments, optimizing cash flow, and enhancing free cash flow per share as a key metric.

Isabelle Winkles, CFO of Braze, emphasizes the evolving, strategic role of Finance and FP&A as partners to business units. She highlights the importance of FP&A in quantifying implications of choices and aiding leadership in decision-making. Winkles advocates for real-time analysis, quicker reporting, and scenario planning to guide resource deployment effectively. Additionally, she underscores the need to educate teams like Sales on financial metrics, such as revenue recognition, to align organizational goals and enhance overall financial performance.

Support for CFO Thought Leader comes from Planful, the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software. The Planful platform is used worldwide to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and analytics. www.planful.com

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By Elias MurrayMetzger

As the Chief Financial Officer of Botrista, growth is often a high-touch and high-demand focal point of my days. During the past year our company has grown from an ambitious startup to a prominent market leader in data-fueled beverage automation. With the recent closing of our Series C funding, we are poised to grow at an even faster rate. This journey has been both a challenge and a distinct career reward, offering valuable insights into the intricacies of scaling a business in the competitive food tech industry. Scaling efficiently is a special challenge where compromises, tradeoffs and finding value combats with the object of growing at all costs. Learning to scale efficiently, no matter your role, is a valuable skill to master if you are presented with the opportunity.

The transition from a promising startup to an established industry player is a path fraught with both obstacles and opportunities. At Botrista, we’ve navigated this journey by focusing on key areas of development, continually refining our process, and listening to our customers while maintaining our vision for a better future. Our growth story underscores the critical importance of investing in core functions, finding and improving operational efficiency, and achieving economies of scale – all while remaining true to our mission of transforming the beverage landscape for restaurants and consumers alike.

The Early Days: Laying the Foundation

When Botrista began, we were a small team with an ambitious vision: to improve how restaurants serve trending beverages. We had developed an innovative product that was gaining traction, and like many startups, we were presented with the challenge of transforming that initial success into a scalable business model.

In those early stages, our primary focus wasn’t just on refining the product – it was on figuring out how to grow our operations to meet increasing demand while addressing increasing operational complexity with limited resources. This challenge is common to many startups in the restaurant technology space. The excitement of innovation (especially the reaction from customers) often overshadows the complex realities of scaling a business. However, we quickly learned that successful growth requires a strategic approach that goes far beyond the initial product excitement.

Scaling with Purpose: Investing in Core Functions

As the company began to gain momentum in the market, it became evident that we needed to make significant investments in three core areas: supply chain, customer success, and beverage development. These investments are crucial to our ability to scale effectively and efficiently. Improvement in each area by itself would help support growth, but combining the three have taken us from startup to recognized name.

Supply Chain: Building a Robust Foundation

One of the most significant challenges we faced as we grew was managing our supply chain. As demand for our product surged, ensuring a steady supply of high-quality components and ingredients became increasingly complex. Our global sourcing techniques for premium fruit purees, creamers, coffees, teas and energy boosters required us to build a strong network of providers. Expanding our supplier networks beyond machine manufacturers adds complexity but also enhances our ability to deliver top-quality, unique craft beverages with a complete solution. It’s this capacity that allows us to fully implement our vision for a better consumer restaurant beverage experience and greater operational profits for our partners.

We faced many challenges while building our supply chain operations. Sourcing the best products from around the world requires long lead times, human and capital resources and careful planning. However, we’ve learned that investing in these operations is crucial for delivering consistent quality while meeting ever expanding complexity and demand. Hiring the right people who can quickly build these relationships and anticipate operational complexity without compromising quality is key. We needed to find people who care enough about our vision to recognize that growth at all costs isn’t a viable strategy. The why and how of our growth is every bit as important as the velocity of our growth.

Our approach to supply chain management has evolved significantly as we’ve grown. We’ve invested in advanced inventory management systems, forged strategic partnerships with key suppliers to develop new innovative ingredients, and utilized predictive analytics tools to anticipate demand fluctuations. These investments were designed to address supply chain disruptions and to position us to achieve greater economies of scale while also doing it efficiently.

As we’ve expanded, we’ve been able to leverage increased purchasing power to negotiate better terms with suppliers thus improving our margins but also allowing us to pass on cost savings to our customers, making our solution even more attractive to restaurants of all sizes. These savings give our customers new tools to engage the end consumer with high quality drinks at a very attractive price, which is a win, win, win for us, the restaurant and the consumer.

Customer Service: A Key Differentiator

In the restaurant industry, customer service is more than just a support function – it’s a key differentiator in a competitive market. As we’ve grown, we’ve made significant investments in building a world-class customer success organization. Every company has it, few master it.

We’ve found that partnering closely with our customers crucially requires involving ourselves in their daily operations to help them grow their businesses. Joining their operations boosts their chances of success with our launch. We provide our expertise in the industry, even with operations, along with a full-service partnership that benefits both parties and eliminates the need for customers to create their own beverage operations team.

This customer-centric approach has led us to develop a range of support services, from 24/7 technical assistance to personalized menu development consultations. We’ve also invested in advanced CRM systems and significantly expanded our support team to ensure that customer inquiries are addressed promptly and effectively. In most cases, customer issues are addressed and solved within hours.

As we’ve scaled, we’ve had to find ways to maintain the personalized touch that our customers value. Technology has been a great enabler in this regard, allowing us to provide high-touch service at scale. Remember – technology is great, but a human element will always be better-received.

Developing Products for the Right Reason

Botrista’s growth hasn’t just been about operational excellence – it’s also been driven by a keen understanding of consumer trends. Thanks to our continued heavy investment in built-in data analytics and our world-class team of Beverage Directors, each BotristaPro drink placed on a menu is a carefully considered offering designed to capture current market preferences and uniquely pair with our customers’ culinary offerings. Curating a drink menu is about understanding timing, consumer psychology, market trends, and much more. We aspire to capture the emotional uplift when the right beverage is chosen that augments the flavors and aromas of an entrée thus turning a food choice into a meal and memory!

We’ve positioned ourselves at the forefront of two major shifts in the beverage industry: the rise of efficient cold drinks and the increasing demand for visually appealing, unique beverage options. We’ve been at the center of the ‘iced is the new hot’ trend, recognizing a significant shift in consumer preferences towards iced and frozen beverages that offer flavors and toppings not seen elsewhere.

Moreover, we’ve tapped into the Gen Z market by focusing on creating visually striking, Instagram-worthy drinks that also align with health-conscious lifestyles. Today’s young consumers want beverages that not only taste great but look amazing and fit their wellness goals.

Challenges and Opportunities Ahead

While Botrista’s growth story has been impressive, we’re not slowing down. As we continue to scale, new challenges and opportunities are emerging that require us to maintain our position as a high-growth, reputable company in the market.

One of our biggest challenges going forward will be maintaining our innovative edge as we grow larger. With the recent raising of our Series C funding, we’re re-investing heavily in R&D to ensure that we continue to lead the market in beverage advancements. From new flavors from different corners of the world, to explosive toppings and functional boosters to give the consumer the customization they’re looking for – it’s becoming a time for our scaling strategies to evolve even further.

As we enter new markets, we must be mindful of local tastes, regulations, and business practices. It’s a complex undertaking, but we believe the potential rewards are well worth the effort.

The Road Ahead

As Botrista continues its journey from startup to established industry leader, we remain committed to our core mission of empowering our customers to serve exceptional beverages profitably and efficiently.

We’re proud of how far we’ve come but are even more excited about our future trajectory. By continuing to invest in core functions, improve processes, and stay attuned to market trends, we believe we can drive even greater value for our customers and shareholders in the years to come.

Botrista’s growth story offers valuable lessons for other startups looking to scale their operations effectively. By focusing on supply chain excellence, customer-centric service, and continuous process improvement, it’s possible to achieve impressive growth while also building a sustainable foundation for long-term success.

As the food tech industry continues to evolve, companies that can balance innovation with operational excellence will be best positioned to lead the way. For all companies at the unique stage of being poised for growth, the journey we’re on is a compelling testament to the power of vision and strategic growth.

At Botrista, we’re just getting started. The future of the beverage industry is exciting, and we’re thrilled to be playing a key role in this transformation. As we continue to grow and evolve, one thing remains constant: our commitment to helping our partners succeed. Because when they thrive, we all win.
About Elias MurrayMetzger
An accomplished, hands-on leader in financial, cultural, and administrative operations, Elias’s career has included financial leadership roles for leading software, biotechnology, manufacturing, media, and software companies. Elias has developed cross-functional proficiency from board and legal management to facilities, distributed hybrid workforces, and other company-building functions. He has led finance and operations at PWC, Centra Software, Avistar Communications, WibiData, Gigaom, and now, leading beverage platform, Botrista, placing and raising hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and equity capital for startups and multi-national organizations.

About Botrista
Founded by serial entrepreneur and ex-Tesla automation engineer, Botrista is a comprehensive beverage platform crafting data-backed, on-trend beverage programs for restaurant chains, universities, corporate workplaces, and amusement parks. Specialty

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO John Gronen discusses Yooz’s strategic investment in AI and machine learning to enhance accounts payable (AP) automation, fraud detection, and efficiency. Gronen highlights how AI streamlines invoice processing and identifies fraud risks, reducing the need for manual checks and freeing up valuable employee time. He also shares insights on the evolving role of CFOs, focusing on risk management, technological adaptation, and scaling operations. Gronen emphasizes a forward-looking approach to leverage technology for sustainable growth.

1047: Balancing Risk and Opportunity in a Changing Finance Landscape | John Gronen, CFO, Yooz

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Inside The Mentoring Round, David Eckstein shares insights on the collaboration between CFOs and CEOs, emphasizing the importance of shared vision and cross-functional partnerships. He highlights how CFOs, like himself, play a pivotal role in executing long-term strategies by identifying operational levers. Eckstein discusses his focus on building Vanta’s annual and three-year plans, aligning leaders around a unified strategy, and creating a “frictionless organization.” He stresses the CFO’s role as an enabler of smart investments to drive sustainable growth.

1,046: Transforming Finance from Reactive to Proactive Leadership | David Eckstein, CFO, Vanta

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It was not the first time John Gronen addressed the staffing company’s board — but it was very likely the most consequential. At the time, Gronen was vice president of finance, responsible for assessing acquisitions and analyzing their outcomes. The company operated two businesses: one generating about $30 million in EBITDA, while the other incurred annual losses of roughly $10 million. Gronen proposed a strategy to merge the two operations, consolidating efforts to increase profitability.

Once the board approved the plan, Gronen led efforts to align sales teams and streamline processes. In just a few days, he and the leadership team developed a plan to reduce overlapping costs and improve operational efficiency. The merger cut $10 million in expenses, turning the combined business into a more profitable operation that was ultimately sold to a public company.

This experience shaped Gronen’s career, reinforcing his commitment to taking on complex challenges and thinking beyond traditional finance roles. Looking back, Gronen tells us his involvment with M&A began during his time at Alltel, where he contributed to a number of M&A transactions. Subsequent roles at Technosource and VPay expanded his skills into operations, sales, and human resources, giving him the well-rounded experience necessary for senior leadership.

Now serving as CFO of Yooz, Gronen draws on this experience to focus on scaling the company through automation, AI-driven processes, and product expansion.

“Get up from your desk and talk to your coworkers, because you will learn more from a conversation with them about their issues than you ever will by trading emails. Learn all you can about every role in the company and the challenges of each, as they are all applicable to finance in one way or another.” —John Gronen, CFO, Yooz

CFOTL: Tell us about what this company does and its offerings today.

Gronen: Yooz is an AP (accounts payable) automation and payments company. AP refers to the process of paying vendors, and it’s an industry that’s ripe for automation. Right now, many companies receive invoices in paper envelopes. They open the envelope, scan the invoice, manually input the data, and attach the invoice to the system. This manual process can take anywhere between eight and twelve minutes per invoice.

Automation shortens this process to just a minute or two. We use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to auto-code invoices. Invoices can be emailed directly into our system, which then processes them automatically. The AP clerk only needs to verify that the invoice is assigned to the correct department and has the correct GL (general ledger) code, eliminating the need for manual data entry.

One of the most valuable things Yooz offers is time. With automation, employees can focus on more meaningful tasks like vendor analysis, pricing evaluation, or reporting, instead of being bogged down by manual processes. Additionally, Yooz provides advanced fraud prevention tools. Fraud, such as fake vendors or altered bank account details, is a growing concern in accounts payable. Our AI tools help identify suspicious activities, reducing the risk of financial loss.

Another key advantage is traceability. During financial audits, Yooz makes it easy to retrieve invoices and provide documentation to auditors. The system creates a clear record of each invoice’s journey—submission, coding, and approval—ensuring smoother audits with fewer errors.

We also reduce human error by leveraging machine learning. For instance, if you process hundreds of checks manually, mistakes are inevitable. With Yooz, our system generates checks directly from the platform, feeding payments seamlessly into the system and eliminating those manual-entry errors. In short, Yooz empowers companies by simplifying AP processes, enhancing accuracy, and enabling employees to focus on higher-value work.

Yooz | www.getyooz.com | Dallas, TX

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It wasn’t long after Laura LaPeer left public accounting to climb the corporate career ladder that she encountered her first delicate challenge as a controller. Just a year into her new role, her employer was acquired, and LaPeer was unexpectedly asked to explain complex working capital issues to the new owners. The head of finance for the acquired firm struggled to present the information clearly, while the new owners shifted uneasily in their seats. LaPeer instinctively stepped in, simplifying the explanation of complex details and demonstrating her ability to distill intricate financial data while effectively reading the room.

Read MoreThis experience—although occurring prior to her role at Plante Moran—laid the foundation for her approach to leadership. By the time she became recruited to join Plante as corporate controller, LaPeer had already honed her ability to navigate complex situations and build relationships. The Plante’s collaborative culture—not to mention the promise of a CFO role within a few years—aligned perfectly with her leadership ethos and goals. Moreover, her early experience had not only solidified her decision-making and communication abilities but also prepared her for the strategic demands required of the leader of Plante Moran’s finance function.

On transitioning from public accounting to industry:

“I wanted to feel connected to a business, as opposed to maybe going from every company to company that we were auditing. I wanted to have a team that I could help to develop and grow and to really be in a place where I felt like I was making a difference.” –Laura LaPeer

On partnership culture and collaboration:

“We partner really closely here—our finance department, our HR department, our technology department. It was important for me right off the bat to have recurring meetings set up with the leaders of these areas to make sure that we were all aligned on our priorities.” –Laura LaPeer

This episode of CFO THOUGHT LEADER was recorded at Workday Rising

CFOTL: Tell us about Plante Moran … what sets this accounting firm apart from its competition?

LaPeer: This really comes down to our culture. I know that a lot of people say this, but we truly mean it. We live within the credo of every person coming to work every day giving their whole self to what we do.

On the face of it, we are a public accounting firm that does auditing, tax, and consulting—as well as provides wealth management services—but, in reality, we’re really a people company that’s kind of disguised as an accounting firm. We really value our people, and we believe in what’s known as the Wheel of Progress: If you have good people doing good work for clients, the clients are going to be delighted by this work and will pay good fees for the value-add that we can bring—which will then, in turn, help to fund the firm and allow us to invest in new technologies as well as our people. Our folks thus become even more experienced and hopefully even happier, enabled and more motivated to go back out to our clients to continue to delight them even more. This is our people-first mentality.

Read MoreI started at the firm 10 weeks before the pandemic hit. I was soon sitting in on a lot of leadership meetings, mostly every morning at [7:00] o’clock, when our leadership would say very clearly that if we took care of our staff first and our clients next, everything else would fall into place, wherever that might be. Mind you, please, that I had been there only 10 weeks and had left I place I loved. I had just been looking for the next great opportunity. No one had expected a global pandemic, but, as a 13-year veteran at that point, I understood that things like this were just part of the world in which those of us in finance live and breathe.

I think that this “can do” attitude really shines through to our clients. We are looking to do what helps them and not just what might be advantageous to us. We try to look at the four corners of every firm to see if maybe they might be about to make some big, transformative implementation. We have a consulting branch that might be able to help them with this or maybe with an acquisition. We can help with succession planning, too.

We really try to think of meeting the customer where they’re at. What do they need that we can offer? We’re not into hardcore sales—it’s more about the relationship. Our business is really driven by the business insights that we can provide and by identifying for our clients how we might be able to help. We want to be right there with them and to partner with them on their path to success.

Plante Moran | www.plantemoran.com | Southfield, MI

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In the mid-2000s, the world’s attention increasingly began to focus on Asia, attracted not just by the region’s rapid economic growth but also by the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It was within this atmosphere of excitement and potential that Joey Wong made a very pivotal career decision. Having grown up in Los Angeles after her family had emigrated from Hong Kong, Wong had always been drawn to math and science, a passion that eventually led her to MIT, where she studied economics and business.

Initially, her goal had been to pursue a career in in the world of governmental economic policy, but the lengthy academic path that such an end result would require made her rethink her future. “I realized that this would mean many more years of studying before I could actually have the credentials,” she recalls.

Read MoreDetermined to put her skills into practice, Wong set her sights on the business sector instead. Feeling a deep connection to Asia and recognizing that her Chinese language skills might help to provide a competitive edge, she took the bold step of accepting an internship role with Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong. Immersed in the vibrant financial markets of Asia, she initially centered her attention on media and telecommunications companies—two sectors experiencing significant growth in the region.

Today, as CFO of Lenovo’s Asia Pacific (PCSD) division, Wong continues to leverage her deep expertise in regional markets, utilizing the financial and strategic acumen that she had begun to acquire very early-on in her career. Her understanding of the business landscape in Asia has made her a key player in Lenovo’s growth story, as she has helped to drive initiatives that capitalize on the region’s evolving opportunities.

In an interesting twist, it turns out that the same Beijing Olympics that had helped to attract Wong back to Asia had also played a significant role in shaping Lenovo’s global brand image. As an official sponsor of the 2008 Games, Lenovo provided more than 30,000 pieces of equipment, including PCs and servers, which all served to showcase on the world stage the firm’s technological prowess.

It is fitting, then, that the Games that in part first sparked Wong’s desire to return to Asia also foreshadowed her future at Lenovo, where she now contributes to the same brand that had made headlines during the Olympiad. In some ways, the excitement of those Games might be seen to have marked the start of a new era not only for Asia but also for Wong’s career.

“Being an investment banker taught me the importance of structuring information, communicating with senior executives, and developing an advisor mindset – skills that have been invaluable throughout my career.” – Joey Wong

“As an investor, I learned to think like an owner, be agile, and focus on leading indicators. This risk mitigation mindset has helped me make more informed decisions as a finance leader.” – Joey Wong

CFOTL: What are your priorities as a finance leader over the next 12 months?

Wong: Given the AI boom, this is a very exciting period for the tech industry. The key job of a CFO like me right now is to ensure that we have the right resources to allocate to the right investments. For example, Lenovo has committed another $1 billion toward investment in AI, so I have to do my part to ensure that we generate sufficient flow to support this commitment, as well as to make certain that we allocate it to the most beneficial areas with Asia Pacific. This is my first priority.

Expand TitleMy number two focus will be on the new business models that we’re going into. We’ve been on our services transformation journey for a couple of years now, just as we continue to grow our hardware offerings as a truly scalable services business. At the same time, we are dedicated to the growth of our AI-related products.

So, one of my key priorities is figuring out how to design the right sets of metrics to measure the success of our new, fledgling, business innovations. I don’t think that we should be viewing these through the same lens that we use to look at mature businesses. So that they can track progress, we need to provide to our business leaders visibility into every corner of everything PCSD.

Our BMS is probably not currently structured to provide optimum visibility into tracking some of our new products and services. Thus, for me, it will be really important to enable transparency in all of these new areas.

My last major concern would be to be keenly aware of the macro volatility of everything in business today, especially in terms of ethics. From a finance perspective, how do we anticipate some of the implications of this? How can we create stronger scenario planning, better analyses of future financial situations, and better analyses of risks and the means for their mitigation? These are all very important considerations in my own mind.

Lenovo www.lenovo.com Quarry Bay, Hong Kong

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In this episode of Planning Episodes hosted by Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles, three CFOs—Don McGuire of ADP, Scott Blackley of Oscar Health, and Patrick Fleury of TeraWulf—share their insights on financial planning and analysis (FP&A), with a focus on navigating complex business environments. Through their stories, listeners will gain a deeper understanding of how these finance leaders simplify intricate financial models, communicate effectively with stakeholders, and align strategic decisions with business growth.

Don McGuire (ADP):
McGuire discusses how ADP’s highly predictable revenue model allows the FP&A function to centralize financial planning processes and delegate business unit (BU) CFOs to focus on project-specific competition and market intricacies. He emphasizes that while predictability is a strength, it also sets high expectations, as the company cannot afford to miss financial targets. His calm and steady communication style masks the complexity of dealing with payroll services during volatile times like the pandemic, where the expectation of seamless execution never faltered.

Scott Blackley (Oscar Health):
Blackley outlines the transformation of FP&A at Oscar Health after its IPO, separating it from the controllers’ function to build more robust financial models suited to the complexities of healthcare. He highlights the evolution from rudimentary financial planning to a data-driven approach that helps business leaders understand costs on a per-member-per-month basis. By blending general financial expertise with tenured healthcare experience, Blackley’s team has created a structure that better addresses the unique challenges of a public healthcare company.

Patrick Fleury (TeraWulf):
Fleury simplifies the complex world of Bitcoin mining by comparing it to traditional commodity businesses, focusing on cost structure and profitability per unit mined. However, he reveals a broader vision for TeraWulf’s future in high-power compute and AI infrastructure. While Bitcoin mining currently drives revenue, Fleury emphasizes that the long-term strategy involves building data centers to support AI workloads, positioning the company as a key player in this emerging sector.

Brett’s Key Takeaways from our Planning Aces: Clarity and Communication: A shared theme among the three CFOs is their ability to simplify complex business models and present them in a way that stakeholders can easily understand. Whether it’s Don McGuire managing ADP’s predictability, Scott Blackley transforming FP&A in a volatile healthcare sector, or Patrick Fleury explaining Bitcoin mining as a commodity business, each leader excels at delivering financial clarity. * Complexity and Calmness: Bret’s metaphor of a calm duck with busy legs beneath the surface captures the CFOs’ approach to managing complexity. While their businesses operate in complex environments, their ability to project calmness and control is a hallmark of effective FP&A leadership. * Strategic Alignment and Adaptability:* Each CFO demonstrates a unique fit between their personal style and the demands of their industry. The hosts question whether these CFOs would be as successful in different industries, emphasizing the importance of aligning one’s approach with the company’s needs.

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Regi Vengalil reflects on his early days as a CFO, sharing the challenges of overcoming imposter syndrome and learning to trust his own voice. He advises his younger self to have confidence in his insights and not hesitate to share strong perspectives. Vengalil highlights a pivotal moment in his career at Expedia’s corporate travel business, where he realized the importance of factoring in working capital utilization to assess client profitability. This lesson has remained central to his strategic approach. Looking ahead, his priorities include enhancing financial controls, embedding finance in business decisions, and optimizing working capital management.

1,037: Optimizing Growth and Margins: A CFO’s Strategic Playbook | Regi Vengalil, CFO, Trax Retail

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When the opportunity to help lead Expedia’s corporate travel business arose, Regi Vengalil knew that this was exactly the role that he had been seeking in order to put his CFO career on a new and better track. Stepping into this CFO position meant overseeing a business unit with $600 million in revenue and $120 million in EBITDA—and Vengalil was eager to take on the challenge. Prior to this, he had been leading a team of strategy and M&A professionals, but the new position would offer a much broader scope of responsibility.

As Vengalil recalls: “This was a way for me to jump with both feet into an opportunity to use many of my skills, as it wasn’t just a pure FP&A role. I had had experience in commercial finance, accounting, systems, and financial operations—so, here was a full CFO role with a global team that I still knew very well because I had led strategy for the company.”

Read MoreThis transition marked a critical point in his career. It had been only 2 years earlier that upon joining Expedia’s corporate development arm, Vengalil had immediately became thrust into high-level decision-making, including one particular meet-up with Barry Diller and Dara Khosrowshahi, for which Vengalil had been tasked with providing input on a strategic deal. After Khosrowshahi expressed support for the proposal, Diller turned to Vengalil, who was new to the room, and asked, “Hey, new guy! What do you think?” Vengalil, although only in his first week, was still able to confidently lay out the reasons why he thought that the deal posed more risk than reward, despite its appeal.

Reflecting on their relationship, Vengalil benefited by observing a deep mutual respect between the two business leaders, forged during years of close collaboration. Khosrowshahi had worked closely with Diller on many deals, and Vengalil noted the rapport that they shared, particularly with regard to how they approached complex issues.

Diller, known for his sharp insights and high standards, preferred discussions to be clear and lucid. “If you don’t understand the complexity of something,” Vengalil observes, “you won’t be able to communicate its essence simply.” This self-demand for clarity has continued to push Vengalil to deliver concise, well-reasoned perspectives, an expectation of himself that has both challenged and strengthened his leadership capabilities. To be sure, such an early exposure to Diller’s precision thinking has had a lasting impact on Vengalil’s strategic mind-set. –Jack Sweeney

“Always be clear about what is most important, since things can change quickly [e.g., COVID]. Ruthlessly prioritize your time, since everyone will want a few minutes. And trust your voice. You deserve to be here, and your judgment and experience can make a difference. –Regi Vengalil, CFO, Trax Retail

CFOTL: Tell us about Trax Retail … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Vengalil: Seen from a high level, Trax’s solution can be understood as capturing real-time images of shelf conditions in order to convert them into data that firms such as the largest CPG brands in the world—like Diageo, Mondelēz—can use to make better-informed decisions in order to drive incremental sales by knowing what is happening at the shelf level. We’re the global leader in providing these types of image-recognition solutions to brick-and-mortar CPG companies.

CFOTL: What are your priorities as a CFO during the coming 12 months?

Vengalil: First, we need to prepare our company for any future surprises. This means ensuring that we have the right compliance measures and controls in place, with regard not only to enterprise systems but also to core financial controls.

Second, this is really all about continuing our business partner journey.

Read MoreIt’s ensuring that we’re embedded in all of these conversations, that we’re delivering on the timelines to which we have committed, and that, quite frankly, we’re more proactive than reactive regarding the types of needs and questions that we’re assessing for the business.

As the saying goes, “last but not least” is continuing to optimize our working capital. In the short term, this means managing payments, but in the medium to long term, it will be all about how to design new business models that are more attractive to the market. When you work with large CPG companies, they tend to think about and ask for very long-term strategies, philosophies, and plans. So, how do we design new approaches for partnering with them that are advantageous for all?

Trax Retail | www.traxretail.com | Boston, MA

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Dayton Kellenberger shared a key moment from his time at Coleman Company that reshaped his view of finance. Tasked with addressing declining gross margins, Kellenberger used a detailed price-volume mix analysis to uncover that low-margin products were unintentionally replacing higher-margin ones. His findings led to a transformation in how Coleman priced products and conducted annual line reviews with major customers. By embedding finance into the decision-making process, Kellenberger helped optimize margins and improve business strategy, highlighting finance’s vital role in driving growth and strategic decision-making across the company.

904: Becoming a Catalyst for Growth | Dayton Kellenberger, CFO, Vendavo

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In 2012, after having spent nearly two decades in the airline industry, Zane Rowe made a bold career pivot. Leaving behind his role as CFO at United Airlines, he stepped into the tech world, joining Apple in a sales position—a move that many saw as risky, but one that would ultimately shape his perspective on finance leadership in the Digital Age. This decision marked the beginning of a transformative journey that would prepare him to navigate the integrated complexities of technology, innovation, and data-driven strategies that lie ahead.

Rowe’s time in the airline industry had enabled him to build a solid foundation for an analytical mind-set. Reflecting on his experience, he is quick to note that “I recognized early-on the power of data and the power of technology and how these could differentiate a good airline from a bad one.” As he tackled the capital-intensive, data-heavy world of aviation, Rowe developed an appreciation for how technology and data could unlock operational efficiency. His work on profitability models helped him to understand how data could unlock hidden insights, a lesson that would become crucial in his later roles in the tech sector.

Read MoreAt EMC and VMware, Rowe saw firsthand how technology could revolutionize business operations. His ability to bridge financial expertise with technology adoption became a defining strength. Now, as CFO of Workday, he applies these lessons to the evolving world of artificial intelligence, aka AI. To him, AI is not simply a tool to streamline processes but also a strategic asset that can unlock untapped value, differentiate companies in competitive markets, and drive business transformation.

Rowe views AI as an extension of his long-standing belief in the importance of data. By leveraging AI to analyze massive data sets, CFOs can make faster, more informed decisions. This, he believes, enables finance leaders to be not just stewards of the bottom line but also key players in shaping company strategy and future growth. Rowe’s multi-industry career journey, with its blend of traditional finance and cutting-edge technology, has uniquely equipped him to be a leader in the Age of AI.

“Never stop having the flexibility to ask for advice and talk to peers about what they’re thinking and doing… As CFOs, we don’t do it as much as other executives. Understanding your stakeholder base and the impact of decisions on others is very important.” – Zane Rowe, CFO, Workday

This Episode: What’s in store?

The Role of AI in Finance and Future Plans

Zane elaborates on the role of AI in financial planning, emphasizing the importance of data and accurate forecasting.
He discusses the potential of AI to improve financial processes and decision-making, making them more efficient and effective.
Zane mentions the company’s long-term use of AI and the upcoming developments in this area.
He outlines his priorities for the coming year, focusing on driving growth, leveraging AI, and ensuring the company’s investments are aligned with its strategic goals.

CFOTL: Most finance executives know that Workday is a cloud software company that helps companies to manage their human capital, finances, and operations … but what is it that sets this firm apart from its competitors, and what is this company really all about in 2024?

Rowe: We have more than 17,000 customers, with 1,000 or so having attended our annual Rising get-together in person, along with many of our partners. There is truly an ecosystem of opportunity here, in both the human capital management and financials sectors—areas where we can leverage our platform. Everyone is talking about AI, but throughout my career, I’ve found that it’s always been about data—how to grow and leverage it.

Read MoreBeing cloud-enabled from Day One, we manage billions of transactions every year, helping our customers to grow in the critical areas of people and financials. We’re privileged to be embraced by our customers and prospective customers, and now is an exciting time to be growing with the company.

CFOTL: What are your priorities as a CFO for the coming 12 months?

Rowe: We have such a great opportunity ahead with our customers and in helping them to grow around the world. It’s all about being able to execute on this opportunity, as we have so much momentum, which we saw evidenced once again at our latest Workday Rising event, thanks to our enthusiastic customer base and our great technology. As a CFO, I understand that the challenge for me is to always make sure that we’re investing in the right areas so that we can drive some of the change that everybody really wants in their everyday worklife. This is how AI can really help us. It’s actually going to make all of our lives that much better. But, right now, it’s all about how to seize this opportunity and leverage it, so I need to step up and do my part in driving this innovation forward during the next year.

Workday | www.workday.com | Pleasanton, CA

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Daniel Welch emphasizes the dual nature of Kate Farms as both a healthcare and consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, with long-term customers who rely on its plant-based medical nutrition products. He highlights the importance of understanding customer lifetime value relative to acquisition costs, particularly in the company’s e-commerce expansion. Welch also stresses the need to balance paid digital marketing with brand-building investments to achieve sustainable growth. With 80% of business coming from the medical sector, Kate Farms has made significant strides, including securing a contract with Kaiser Health. Looking forward, Welch prioritizes leveraging operational efficiency while maintaining disciplined execution.

1,035: Balancing Growth and Sustainability: The Financial Strategy Behind Health Innovation | Daniel Welch, CFO, Kate Farms

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In 2018, Daniel Welch made a life-altering decision when—after having spent a decade in investment banking working on high-profile IPOs and M&A deals at Morgan Stanley—he found himself at a crossroads. The birth of his daughter and a health scare involving his father led him to question the career path that he was on. “I was mentally stimulated by the work, but it didn’t align with my personal values,” he now reflects. Burned out and seeking more purpose, he left the corporate finance world to pursue mission-driven opportunities in the health and wellness sector.

Welch’s career pivot first brought him to Sonos, where he helped to lead the company through its IPO. He later transitioned to Oura, maker of the Oura Ring, to end up playing a key role in guiding the firm through a critical growth stage. These experiences solidified his desire to combine financial expertise with personal passion.

Read MoreIn 2023, Welch found his ideal role as CFO of Kate Farms, a company focused on revolutionizing the field of plant-based medical nutrition by providing organic products free of common allergens and designed to improve health outcomes for patients in medical need. Its mission resonated deeply with Welch’s personal health journey, which had begun with his own transition to a plant-based diet.

Backed by investors like Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Novo Holdings, Kate Farms continues to grow its presence in hospitals and home care systems across the U.S., making Welch’s leadership integral to the company’s scaling efforts. His career transformation highlights how purpose and profit can intersect when leadership is guided by personal values.

“Our focus is on gaining leverage on OpEx in order to continue to build a business that is valuable to both shareholders and stakeholders. We need to learn the most efficient use of our resources and be disciplined in the execution of our operations. These are the things that we’re building into our plan for next year and will be successfully implementing this year, always keeping our nose close to the grindstone.” –Daniel Welch, CFO, Kate Farms

CFOTL: Tell us about Kate Farms … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Welch: Kate Farms is a truly disruptive nutrition company. I realize that the term “disruptive” has been very much overused in the past—especially by people like me who come from a technology background—but what we are doing is really revolutionary in a category that hasn’t seen any innovation ever, basically.

We probably all know someone who has nutritional requirements that just simply can’t be met through normal diet alone, or maybe they’re unable to eat a normal diet. There are millions of folks who are tube-fed. Maybe they’re going through cancer treatment and can’t swallow or ingest normal nutrition or meals. Most often, undernutrition is due to a medical condition—but not always. Sometimes, people’s life circumstances alone can mean that they don’t get enough nutrition, and they become malnourished in some way. Inasmuch as we are in general sort of chronically overnourished in the developed world, we tend to overlook that there are a significant number of people in the United States and globally who are deficient in many aspects of their nutrition.

Read MoreMedical nutrition can actually be life-changing for undernourished people. If they have the right nutrition, oftentimes supplemented by medical nutrition products, they can regain strength. Children who are not on the normal growth curve and/or are falling behind can gain the extra nutrition or calories or protein to catch up. Even more broadly, having high-quality, highly efficient medical nutrition is really essential to lowering the cost of healthcare, as it leads to fewer complications, shorter hospital stays, reduced mortality, and so forth.

Local grocery stores have exploded with health and wellness products over the past several years, but if you go to their pharmacy section and specifically look for medical nutrition, you’ll find that there is a large amount of shelf space dedicated primarily to shakes. Flip over one of these products and look at the ingredients list. You’ll find that corn syrup has a big presence, as well as artificial flavorings and dyes. Almost all of them are formulated using milk-based protein, which—although not necessarily bad in and of itself—is not always well tolerated by everyone. This is especially true for folks who are sort of in a medical-need state.

Perhaps just as important, if not more so, these are more often than not formulated with sort of the cheapest, lowest-quality ingredients—the same types that have found their way into the hyperprocessed foods that are, quite frankly, destroying the health of the developed world. The thing is, we have children and adults, including seniors, in various states of medical need who are relying on these products as their only or primary source of nutrition or as a supplemental source in addition to what they’re eating day-in and day-out.

We’ve seen an explosion of organic, plant-based, “better for you” products basically everywhere else in society, except in this category. There really had been no innovation, until along came Kate Farms, the story of whose origin is interesting as well as fascinating. The family had a daughter with cerebral palsy. She became severely malnourished because she wasn’t able to tolerate the sort of junk that was on the shelf and was being recommended by her pediatrician at the time. Thus, they set out to build a nutritional formula based on very high-quality ingredients and designed for being tolerated.

Kate Farms is really changing this landscape of medical nutrition. Everything we make is organic. It’s plant-based, which means that it’s much more easily digestible. Our products are designed for tolerance. They’re free of most common allergens that are out there. Every product is packed with plant phytonutrients. The majority of our products are nutritionally complete, so they can stand alone as an independent nutrition source. We’ll never make a product that has artificial flavorings or dyes. In fact, we actually have a strawberry-flavored product that surprises: If you pour it into a glass, it’s not red like you would expect, because when you put organic strawberry flavor into a product, it actually oxidizes and the red coloring disappears. So, anytime you see a red strawberry food product, there’s probably been something added to it to make it red, as natural strawberry just doesn’t do that.

Kate Farms | www.katefarms.com | Santa Barbara, CA

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Inside The Mentoring Round, Deanna Strable revisits some pivotal moments that reshaped Principal Financial Group’s strategic direction. A key decision was exiting certain underperforming businesses, a result of a comprehensive strategic review conducted in collaboration with the board. Strable emphasizes the importance of focusing on a combination of metrics rather than a singular financial figure, noting that perfection is often unnecessary. She also highlights the need for continuous, detailed analysis to uncover insights often masked by broader metrics. Additionally, Strable stresses the importance of external interactions, as they offer fresh perspectives, especially after many years within the same organization.

1,034: From Earnings Growth to Long-Term Success: A CFO’s Strategic Shift | Deanna Strable, COO & president (CFO emerita), Principal Financial Group

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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.”

Read MoreThis 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.

“Don’t assume that everyone is on the same page—be deliberate in ensuring that business leaders are aligned on shared priorities and outcomes. Surround yourself with the right people and leverage their strengths. Above all, don’t take yourself or your work too seriously.” –Deanna Strable, COO & president (CFO emerita), Principal Financial Group

CFOTL: Tell us about Principal Financial Group … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Strable: Principal Financial Group is known as a global financial services company. We have 20,000 employees in 80 countries around the globe. We were actually started 145 years ago as an Iowa-based insurance company. We still offer insurance products today, but our product set has morphed more into the retirement sector. We’re one of the top three or four 401(k) providers in the United States. We’re also a leading asset manager. From an insurance perspective, we really focus on offering a great breadth of employee benefits solutions to small and medium-size businesses. I think that folks don’t always realize the scope of the offerings that we can provide, not to mention our geographic footprint around the world. In fact, more than half of our customers and half of our employees are outside the U.S.

Read MoreCFOTL: When you first stepped into the CFO role, was the company that much different from today with regard to capital structure, lines of business, and so forth?

Strable: We actually had two pretty significant divestitures during the time that I was CFO that have made the company much more focused and changed its profile. We decided to exit both the retail annuity business and the sale of life insurance to individuals. We still are in the annuity business, but we are very much focused on the variable annuity space. In the life insurance area, we now offer it only through employers or business owners. Thus, in the one situation, we stopped a product line, while in the other, we left a customer segment. These decisions were based on financial performance, as well as our analysis of how successful we might be in trying to differentiate ourselves in the future with these two offerings that had become very, very commoditized in their markets. They simply weren’t generating the returns that we or our shareholders required. So, one difference that has occurred is that we have become much more focused on our businesses that show a great prospect of being successful over the long term.

Principal Financial Group | www.principal.com | Des Moines, IA

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Ben Averis’s journey toward becoming CFO of Yoto was shaped by many 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 at the same time maintaining their core values. His work on transactions involving the integration of smaller, family-run businesses into larger corporate structures revealed to him a key financial risk: While large companies can gain operational efficiencies through acquisitions, at the same time, they often lose the customer-centric magic—aka revenue—that had made their target smaller businesses special to begin with.

Read MoreReflecting on these experiences, Averis notes: “What you sometimes find is that when you get to that ‘buy and build’ moment and actually integrate the businesses, some of the magic can be lost—and you lose a bit of the customer obsession.” This insight has become central to his strategic mind-set as CFO of Yoto, a founder-led company with a strong customer-first philosophy.

Averis’s understanding of the “buy and build” moment continues to shape his leadership at Yoto, where he balances the need for growth with preserving the company’s entrepreneurial spirit. He recognizes the unique passion that founders bring—especially through their deep connection to customers, which can become diluted in corporate acquisitions. As Yoto scales, he is committed to ensuring that this customer obsession remains at the heart of the business, reinforcing the proven notion that a well-run, founder-led company often thrives because of its focus on continuing to deliver tailored customer experiences—a prosperity that can sometimes be lost in the pursuit of sheer scale. –Jack Sweeney

“When you get to this ‘buy and build’ moment and start to integrate businesses, some of the magic can be lost, and you lose a bit of the customer obsession. Today, in finance, the focus is increasingly on the customer, and I have found that working for a founder-led business has been all about caring for the customer.” –Ben Averis, CFO, Yoto

CFOTL: Tell us about Yoto … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Averis: Well, it just so happens that I’ve been walking around at SuiteWorld today, evangelizing about Yoto. I think that we’re best described as a kids’ audio platform, a mix of carefully designed hardware and some really smart software. It’s all there just to make it super-simple for kids to enjoy audio—with them in control. There are no screens, no microphones, no cameras. We’re just a good simple way for kids to listen to audio.

Read MoreCFOTL: Are you for “kids” of all ages, or do you have a specific target demographic?

Averis: It’s all about the range of content. In this world of Goliaths like Netflix and Amazon, we focus on having a really good curated set of content. Our age ranges are normally from about 3 up to 10, 11, 12. We’ve worked really hard to get Harry Potter into our library and were able to release it last week, so this has been a huge win for us.

CFOTL: Please help us to understand what you mean by “content.” When you say that you’ve added Harry Potter, what does this mean? Your website looks quite extensive.

Averis: We have quite a range of titles, which are mainly audiobooks of classics like Winnie-the-Pooh, The Magic Faraway Tree, and works by Roald Dahl, just to name a few—stories that parents have known since their childhood. We have music, too, including vintage stuff from the Beatles and Queen, for example. This all presents an opportunity for kids themselves to discover music or for parents to share with their kids their history of listening to music that they love. We have lots of educational content, too—from science-based stories explaining volcanoes, for instance, to articles explaining the game of football and how the rules work. In our educational content alone, we have this broad mix of more than 1,200 titles.

Yoto | www.yotoplay.com | London, United Kingdom

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Patrick Fleury shares key insights into TeraWulf’s approach to cash management and the company’s strategic pivot toward AI and high-power compute. Fleury emphasizes the importance of using a 13-week cash flow analysis, a tool he implemented during restructuring to stabilize operations and manage finances. This practice provided critical visibility into the company’s short- and long-term financial needs. Fleury also discusses TeraWulf’s transition from Bitcoin mining to becoming a key player in the AI space, leveraging low-cost, low-carbon energy to power AI data centers. Over the next 6-12 months, the company will focus on executing contracts and building data center capacity

1,032: From Bitcoin to AI: How Financial Strategy Can Drive a Company’s Evolution | Patrick Fleury, CFO, TeraWulf

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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.

CFO Todd Patriacca of BVI Medical discusses BVI’s monthly review process, known as Site week, which includes financial and operational reviews. The company has enhanced standard reports to ensure consistent data across regions. Working capital has been a significant focus, with the implementation of standard AP and AR dashboards to track DPO, DSO, and lever terms. Patriacca highlights the importance of making customer holds and credit limits more visible to the sales team to improve payment collection. The company aims to standardize cash application processes and is energized by the opportunities for improvement, including automation, to reduce costs and enhance team scalability for future growth.

CFO Eric Emans of Nintex, emphasizes the importance of a leader’s ability to assess a team and make necessary changes. He believes in the concept of “net positive” and “net negative” when evaluating team members. Emans values his head of finance and controller as his right and left hands, stressing the need for talented individuals who can contribute diverse perspectives. He has experienced turnover due to various reasons, including a desire for more in-person collaboration and better alignment with the company’s culture. Emans focuses on building from existing talent, particularly in financial operations, data, and analytics, and has seen positive changes in the finance and accounting side.

CFO Clemente Cohen of PG Forsta reveals details behind the hiring of a skilled individual with a background in analytics and architecture to integrate data from various sources, enabling better decision-making on product investments and portfolio management. CFO Cohen emphasizes the importance of developing relationships with the team to understand their needs and preempt questions, showing appreciation for their efforts despite the challenges of using suboptimal systems. The conversation underscores the value of cross-functional collaboration and the significance of making data accessible to business leaders for informed decision-making.

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Matt Steinfort tells us how DigitalOcean is making AI more accessible to small tech companies by offering AI compute capacity in manageable, on-demand chunks. This allows smaller developers to integrate AI into their applications without needing extensive resources. Additionally, DigitalOcean is using AI to enhance its own services, making them easier to consume and more efficient. Steinfort also highlights the company’s focus on driving growth through strategic capital allocation and improving customer retention.

1,029: A Unique Advantage: When CEO Experience Informs CFO Leadership | Matt Steinfort, CFO, DigitalOcean

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While most CFOs climb the ranks through finance-related roles, Matt Steinfort’s path ended up taking quite a significant detour—which saw him leading a company as CEO before unexpectedly stepping into its CFO role.

Steinfort’s transition from CEO to CFO occurred when he was approached by Dan Caruso, a longtime mentor and successful entrepreneur. The two had had a history of working together that had started at Level 3 Communications and continued through various other ventures. While Steinfort was leading Envision, a software company that he co-founded, Caruso was simultaneously building Zayo Group. Although they were in separate companies at this time, they shared an office space, which fostered a close working relationship.

Read MoreWhen 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. Meanwhile, his business-building tenure as a CEO had made him more than a little familiar with the complexities of strategic budgeting and resource allocation. This experience, combined with the trust and confidence that he had built with Caruso and Zayo’s board, positioned him as an unconventional yet highly capable candidate for that firm’s CFO role.

Steinfort’s move from CEO to CFO, while rare, highlights the importance not only of adaptability but also of developing and leveraging a broad skill set. His success as a CFO, first at Zayo and now at DigitalOcean, underscores the value of diverse experiences in shaping a holistic approach to financial leadership. –Jack Sweeney jb

“Quickly understand the key business drivers and don’t be afraid to question and challenge everything. Don’t assume that the business, regardless of how well the company is operating or how fast it is growing, is highly functioning and optimized—you should always be able to find opportunities for improvement.” –Matt Steinfort, CFO, Digital Ocean

CFOTL: Tell us about DigitalOcean … what does this company do, and what sets it apart from its competitors?

Steinfort: DigitalOcean is a cloud service provider, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Very simply, we provide computers to our partners—so, think in terms of storage, computing power, and bandwidth. In this way, they can run their own software on our assets without having to buy their own equipment, establish their own relationships with data centers, and figure out how to get connected.

Read MoreOn a somewhat higher level, we simplify cloud computing so that developers and small technology companies can spend more time on building software that changes the world than on wondering how to do it. We have 650,000 customers worldwide, and 70% of our revenue comes from outside the U.S. Our partners range from tiny little developers to bigger companies. These larger firms may not be enterprise entities in the grander scheme of things—like a JPMorgan or Chipotle—but they are still very important.

Our partners tend to be small companies with 400 to 500 people. They’re very technology-driven—building apps, building websites. They’re using technology to provide services to their customers. They come to us, and then, in a matter of just minutes, they are able to learn about all of the technology that we have available.

We have lots of tutorials on how to build software and so forth, which I think is what draws people to our site. If they wish, it’s really simple for them to then click a button to enter their credit card information—and they’re up and running, so to speak, to spin up their own applications. We don’t really have a sales organization as such. We rely on what’s considered “product-led growth.” People come in to learn about our product through all of this extra content that we provide, they sign up, and then they grow on our platform.

DigitalOcean is really a phenomenal company. Our differentiator is that we speak to everyone. If you’re an individual or tiny company, why or how can you even comfortable exist with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the like—companies that are growing massively and have tens of billions of dollars in revenue in a market that is growing by 23% or so per annum? These megafirms target the biggest customers in the world, enterprise clients with giant workloads.

What they don’t do as well is to serve the little people, the little developers, the individuals, the hobbyists, the people who are just trying to have a side job in the space. These folks may have a day job and want to go home and learn how to code so that they can start their own business. They’ll never get any attention from the larger companies. Our solution is differentiated by being super-simple—not as feature-rich as the offerings of the big guys, maybe, but this is on purpose. Our pricing is lower and very transparent, unlike that of the hyperscalers, whose pricing is based on so many options and so many knobs that you can turn on—much of it usage-based. With the big guys, it’s almost like the old days in telco, when you needed one single person dedicated to understanding your bill, which was very unpredictable and hard to understand.

Our offerings are incredibly simple. We also provide a very high level of support that you won’t get if you’re a tiny fish in a big megaprovider pond. And then there’s our community. We have hundreds of thousands of developers who love our platform and themselves have sub-Reddits and Discord channels. Lots of times, when somebody posts a question somewhere on how to do something, our developers will be right on it. Often, though, it’s our active, cross-channel community who gets there first.

As I said, this is a market that is growing by 23% per year right now, with a current cap of about $114 billion, according to IDC. We feel that we’re in a very, very competitive position here, being purpose-built for the smaller-customer tier. These are exciting times, which only have proved to underscore why I originally joined DigitalOcean. You know, I come from telecom and other tough industries. To put it simply, like a lot of folks, I’ve been through a lot of challenging financial crises from a sales and growth standpoint.

When DigitalOcean came up on the radar, I was like, “Wait, you guys were growing in the mid-30s but now you’ve slowed to the high teens—yet you’re complaining about this while at the same time generating this great free cash flow, with a giant market opportunity continuing to evolve?” Clearly, this is an industry that I could get excited about, so I came over. It’s been a bit of a wild ride during the past 18 months, in that we’ve had some some challenges as well as opportunities, but I’m very excited about where we sit and the growth trajectory that we’re on.

DigitalOcean | www.digitalocean.com | New York, NY

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Clemente Cohen highlights the importance of being opportunistic and adaptable when dealing with data, noting that sometimes 80% accuracy is sufficient if it allows for timely decision-making. On a personal note, Cohen shared his passion for fly fishing, a solitary hobby that contrasts with his high-energy professional life. He revealed that fly fishing provides a peaceful escape, allowing him to disconnect from work and recharge, a pastime he has enjoyed both in the U.S. and Europe.

1,028: Shaping Finance Operations to Support Global Growth | Clemente Cohen, CFO, PG Forsta

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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 some 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 having moved from South America, originally joined Silicon Graphics as an accountant, a role that quickly enabled him to demonstrate to others an 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 his understanding of finance operations on a global scale.

Read MoreOver the ensuing decade, Cohen’s career with Silicon Graphics expanded to include positions not only in Germany but also in the UK. Ultimately, he became the firm’s international CFO, overseeing all finance and business operations outside the U.S. After a dozen years with Silicon Graphics, Cohen then joined the London office of CA Technologies, where he played a pivotal role in M&A activities and helped to drive the company’s transition from hardware to software.

After having spent much of his career in large, global companies, Cohen then made the deliberate decision to pursue CFO opportunities at smaller, private equity–backed firms. This shift allowed him to be more hands-on in driving business transformation and growth in a more direct way. Making such a move was not done without more than a little hesitation, though, as smaller companies often come with greater challenges and fewer resources. Still, Cohen ultimately embraced the opportunity to apply his experience in ever more entrepreneurial settings.

CFOTL: Tell us about PG Forsta … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Cohen: To understand PG Forsta, you need to go back some 25 years, when it was simply Press Ganey, a company that surveyed patients through paper. As you may remember, there was a time when you went to the doctor or hospital and would receive a questionnaire that asked you to say whether you were happy with the services provided, with the care, and so on—and then you would answer the question “What could we do better?”

Today, the company finds itself really evolved from dealing with such important information in paper form to being able to provide solutions suitable for phone and other newer technologies via our unified technology platform. Just as important, starting from this healthcare focus—through which we have supported both employees and patients—we now have expanded our expertise to helping non–health sector and commercial businesses as well by specializing in the customer experience and customer service.

Read MoreMaybe you make a new purchase today, say, from a big-box home improvement store. You then receive an email or text message with a questionnaire about how it went. These are the types of solutions that we provide to our customers. Over time, our CEO, Pat Ryan, has led Press Ganey through several transformations that have now positioned us to be a leading technology provider in the areas that I mentioned. There is an ever-growing customer experience opportunity these days, and now, thanks to our merger with Forsta—a company better known on the commercial, non-healthcare side that also brings along a strong tech capability—our new combination called PG Forsta is poised for an exciting future.

PG Forsta | www.pgforsta.com | Stamford CT

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Salman Khan highlights the transformative strategy at Marathon Digital, shifting from renting data centers to acquiring operational capacity, driven by his experience in the heavy industry and M&A. He emphasizes the importance of articulating decisions methodically, especially when data is incomplete. Khan also discusses the similarities and differences between Bitcoin mining and AI data centers, focusing on energy use. He addresses the challenges posed by the regulatory environment, stressing Bitcoin’s bipartisan potential.

1,027: Strategic Finance in the Digital Asset Industry: Lessons From a Bitcoin-Mining Leader | Salman Khan, CFO, Marathon Digital Holdings

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When Salman Khan arrived in Dubai from the U.S. in the early 2000s, he was already a seasoned auditor with PricewaterhouseCoopers, ready to narrow his focus to 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, he may have 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 also demands a strategic approach to harnessing the limited supply of energy needed to generate 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. There, 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 his 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, he believes that his 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. –Jack Sweeney jb

“Think strategically but be prepared to dive into details. Anticipate senior leadership’s needs to be a proactive problem-solver. While data is crucial, decisions often come from limited information. Make swift decisions and stand by them. Learn from mistakes and seize every opportunity to live fully!” –Salman Khan, CFO, Marathon Digital Holdings

CFOTL: Tell us about Marathon Holdings … what does this company do, and what sets it apart today?

Khan: Marathon is the world’s largest Bitcoin-mining company—it’s publicly traded and the largest in the pack, so to speak. To be sure, there are a handful of other public companies out there that are focused in this area. We are truly a global company, with operations in multiple areas, including the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, South America, and the U.S. We continue to expand. We’ve grown tremendously over the past few years and continue to deploy capital to grow responsibly from here on as well.

Of course, there has been a lot of tailwind in this industry. A short time ago, I had the opportunity to advocate for it in political circles, as well as to meet with former president Donald Trump, who has since adopted key components of our concerns and recommendations into his campaign agenda. There are now more than 40 million Americans who own cryptocurrencies—many or most of them with Bitcoin, specifically. Most of these are between the ages of 25 and 45, making them prime voting targets for any presidential candidate. Since then, two other presidential candidates have come forth to provide their policies around Bitcoin and holding Bitcoin as a Strategic Reserve asset like oil or a “hard” asset like gold.

As an asset, Bitcoin is very unique, in the sense that it’s highly accretive. It has accreted over recent years at a rate not even comparable to that of other asset classes. It’s expected to improve even further from here, primarily because of the limited capacity that’s available for it forever, period.

I come from the oil and gas industry. You have to think that our petroleum resources are limited out there, but every few years, you have ExxonMobil or Chevron or Saudi Aramco going out and making huge discoveries of oil or natural gas. In the case of Bitcoin, you can’t make such discoveries. The Bitcoin digital asset is limited by its own protocol, and nobody can change the way in which it has been designed. While it will be possible to mine 21 million coins over the life of the asset, about 19.5 million have already been mined—so, the race is on for the remainder. This is why you’re seeing people like BlackRock, Fidelity, and others really buying into this space. As I say, there’s a huge amount of tailwind in this sector, which is expected to drive significant growth. jb

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Inside The Mentoring Round CFO CFO Kabir Ahmed Shakir highlights the importance of business intimacy, functional skills, and diversity within his finance team.Additionally, he emphasizes the company’s focus on driving profitable, sustainable growth through margin expansion, operational efficiency, and strategic reinvestment. This approach has enabled Tata to fund acquisitions, such as Switch and Kalera, using internal resources. Shakir acknowledges that these investments temporarily impacted key financial metrics like return on capital employed and EBITDA, but he remains confident in the company’s plan to restore and exceed previous performance levels.

1,026: Partnering for Growth in the Age of AI | Kabir Ahmed Shakir, CFO, Tata Communications

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According to CFO Kabir Ahmed 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 Communications’ 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.

Read MoreOf 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 the company’s ability to deliver cutting-edge solutions, particularly as the world increasingly embraces AI-driven technologies.

Tata Communications’ 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 Communications’ 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.

“We have new ammunition because we have a bigger debt capacity. We now have the ability to buy bigger targets, so we’re going to use it to propel this organization forward. This is a very inspiring time, and we’re extremely energized by being able to have finance stand shoulder-to- shoulder with the rest of the business.” –Kabir Ahmed Shakir, CFO, Tata Communications

CFOTL: What makes Tata’s approach to partnerships unique, different, or otherwise meaningful? What do you think sets Tata apart?

Shakir: Our watchwords continue to be “Leadership with Trust.” Governance with ethics is #1 for us, closely followed by #2, which is an intrinsic commitment to business excellence in the full realization that our global presence requires us to always be able to fund or otherwise provide solutions for any challenges that may arise. New projects are fine, as long as they add value. We really have virtually no capital constraints regarding anything, as long as it provides the right returns. Our various partners understand this.

Read MoreGoing forward, it’s very important that I keep my feet on the ground, as you’re only as good as your last quarter or last deal. We need to continue to execute well on an ongoing basis with our partners such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, with which we’ve recently signed a very big deal. We had to fight for this with a number of other competitors, which only goes to show that we take nothing for granted.

You always need to be able to offer a good solution with a good price and a good value. Your partner always needs to be comforted in knowing that you have a track record of delivering your obligations in full and on time. These are the elements—credibility and reliability—that are key not just to making a deal but also to making sure that it creates value all along the line, especially in data and communications. Our partners know that they can count on us to make this happen.

Tata Communications | www.tatacommunications.com | Mumbai, India

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Inside The Mentoring Round CFO Chikako Tyler reflects on a significant transformation in her approach to financial management. Initially focused on revenue and expense containment, she once viewed expenses strictly as costs. However, after managing a sales team, she shifted her perspective, now seeing expenses as investments with potential ROI. This change has led her to prioritize strategic spending that drives revenue growth, moving beyond budget constraints to foster more dynamic and forward-looking financial management.

1,025: From Cost Management to Strategic Investment | Chikako Tyler, CFO, California Bank & Trust

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In her role as CFO of California Bank & Trust, Chikako Tyler once found herself facing the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank—as it turned out, not the first financial crisis of her career, but the second. However, unlike with the first—the Great Recession, which forced her to leave a rewarding career in commercial real estate—this time, she was prepared to take charge of her professional destiny.

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.

Read MoreBy the time Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023, Tyler had had nearly 5 years of experience as CFO under her belt. Drawing on lessons learned during her diversified career, she confidently navigated the crisis, and—having shed the uncertainty that she had faced during the Great Recession—she now found herself able to lean in to her role in guiding her team through this tumultuous period. Among other successful tactics, she championed her bankers to manage their customers proactively. in order to quell any possibility of panic.

CFOTL: Tell us about California Bank & Trust … what sets it apart from other banking institutions?

Tyler: As a division of Zions Bancorporation, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City, we cover the whole state of California. This being said, though, what’s really unique about us is that we run our own bank: We have our own CEO and our own CFO and executive management team, and we operate much like a community bank. Our customers know us. We know them. They have access to quick, local decision-making, but we have the capital, liquidity, and technology products of an $80 billion bank.

Read MoreWhat’s really special is that when you come in as a small business, your banker is going to give you personalized attention as your financial partner, helping to advise you not only on how to grow but also on how to continue to prosper through almost any kind of life event. Whether you might want to ultimately sell the business, pass it down to your children, initiate an IPO, or whatever, we have all of the capital markets capabilities of a large institution that you might need, while at the same time still being able to offer you the personalized service of a community bank.

Most banks are either quite large or else community types, so for us to be able to operate a regional bank like ours with our kind of structure—with access to local decision-making—is pretty unique. What’s really exciting is that we can have this amazing connection with our customers. We can take them all the way from the beginning of their business’s life to having the ability to bank it at the end, whether through a pass-down or sale. We help them to get to where they want to be, as well as to manage their wealth along the way and afterward.

What this all boils down to is that we have this entire suite of products that can enable you to really never have to convert your banking again. After you do it once with us, we are going to help you to profit—in more ways than one—throughout the entire life of your business. This is very, very exciting to me.

California Bank & Trust | www.calbanktrust.com | San Diego, CA

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CFO Tom Bock reflects on two pivotal experiences that shaped his mindset as a leader. The first is a lesson from his childhood in communist Hungary, where his grandmother taught him the importance of responsibility and learning from life’s challenges. This early lesson instilled in him a lasting sense of duty and resilience.

Fast forward to 2005, during his first banking job at Citigroup, Bock worked 63 hours straight to prepare a pitch, ultimately leading to physical exhaustion and failure. This experience taught him three critical lessons: the importance of breaking down tasks into manageable parts, taking care of his physical well-being to maintain productivity, and recognizing when to seek help instead of trying to be a hero. Bock emphasizes that these lessons not only helped him improve his approach to work but also underscored the value of teamwork and learning from adversity. Bock tells us these insights have become foundational to his leadership style, ensuring that he prioritizes both his team’s well-being and their collective success.

1,024: From Overdrive to Insight: Lessons Learned in the Pursuit of Success | Tom Bock, CFO, SmartFinancial

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In 2005, fresh into his first banking job at Citigroup, Tom Bock found himself working 63 hours straight in preparation for a critical pitch. Fueled by a desire to prove his worth, he pushed his limits, refusing to rest until the task had been completed. However, this grueling experience came at a cost—his nose began bleeding, a stark sign of physical exhaustion. Despite his best efforts, though, the pitch fell short—leading him 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 came to recognize 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.

Read MoreThis experience broadened his understanding of success in finance. It turned out that this wasn’t about just individual heroics, he realized, but about effective teamwork and sustainable work practices. As Bock transitioned into more senior roles, these lessons became foundational to his mind-set 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 SmartFinancial, Bock applies these insights to ensure long-term success, both for himself and his organization. –Jack Sweeney jb

“When I look back I think on the one hand, I should have made the switch to the corporate side sooner. But on the other, everything happens for a reason. Maybe it helped me to have a few extra years to get stronger in people management and general patience in order to ensure my eventual success as a CFO.” –Tom Bock, CFO, SmartFinancial

CFOTL: Tell us about SmartFinancial … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Bock: Let me somewhat oversimplify this by saying that SmartFinancial is an insurance marketplace that matches consumers with carriers and agents. But there’s a lot more to us than that. We’re a tech company, and there’s technology in everything that we do. We use technology to match the consumer who calls in to the ideal contact center rep for them, for example. We also use tech in a lot of other different ways. Ultimately, our goal is to generate an excellent customer for carriers and agents, with a high lifetime value and low churn. We have a very robust tech offering—including Anton, our AI solution—to help us do this. Fortunately, one of our two cofounders is deeply involved in this technology, and we also have with us an ex-NASA scientist who works very hard on developing Anton as well as more use cases for it within our organization.

Read MoreCFOTL: As a CFO, what are your priorities over the next 12 months?

Bock: I need to ensure that our cofounders’ vision is being made into reality. They’re visionaries, so my job is to do everything that I can to help them to execute this amazing foresight. I help to manage risk, and I also work closely with our general counsel and operations people to make sure that we eliminate any kinds of openings in our shield. From a capital markets perspective, I am also focused on continuing to have a good relationship with our current bank, Texas Capital, in order to enable straightforward access to capital, if needed. As far as this goes, I believe that I have also developed good relationships with other banks, too. Our goal is to have banks that will support us in the event that we want to make an acquisition.

We also have some private equity folks with whom we have had discussions. They would obviously be able to invest in bigger deals, since banks can usually support only smaller ones. We are very, very low-leverage. We could take on new things, so we need to continue to nurture our financial relationships. I’m always trying to think three steps ahead to make sure that if there is a change in plans—if there’s a hiccup in the industry, if there’s faster growth, whatever happens—we’re prepared for as many eventualities as possible. In the meantime, I’m trying to innovate to make sure that our finance and accounting teams are not bottlenecks in our company’s growth.

SmartFinancial | www.smartfinancial.com | Newport Beach, CA

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| Inside The Mentoring Round CFO Doug Potvin reflects back at his time at the National Marine Fishery Service, where Potvin had a pivotal moment that shaped his career aspirations. Frequently told to “talk to the owner” when discussing business and financial matters, Doug realized the importance of being deeply involved in all aspects of a company. This revelation drove him to seek roles where he could influence beyond traditional finance duties. Doug emphasizes that a solid CFO must understand the stories behind the numbers, impact lives, and contribute to the company’s overall growth and strategy. Beyond his professional life, Doug also serves as a pastor for a small church in Westover, Maryland, bringing his real-world experiences and challenges to his congregation. |

1,023: How Finance Propelled a Tech Enthusiast Into the C-Suite | Doug Potvin, CFO, Trinity Logistics

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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, he 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 Fisheries Service (NMFS), where he gained invaluable experience in loan origination and financial analysis.

Despite the security and stability of his government job, Potvin felt increasingly constrained by bureaucratic micromanagement. Seeking greater autonomy and having a desire to directly impact business operations, he made the key 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 a business’s strategic goals.

Read MorePotvin’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 that of general manager, overseeing HR, legal issues, farming operations, and technology integration. This hands-on experience in a diverse set of responsibilities provided Potvin with a comprehensive understanding of business operations beyond finance.

In 2006, drawn by the challenge of transforming and growing the company, Potvin joined Trinity Logistics as CFO. Under his financial leadership, the firm has grown from a $100 million company to a $2 billion enterprise. Potvin’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 your own values and aspirations, demonstrating how a strategic shift can lead to remarkable professional growth and success.

“The difference between a solid CFO and an ordinary finance person is the ability to tell the stories behind the numbers. A CFO can effect change. You can influence possibilities and have a much larger presence at the table. If I’m interviewing for a new CFO role, I’m asking about the opportunities that exist to actually be involved in helping the company to change and grow—rather than to just report the numbers.” –Doug Potvin, CFO, Trinity Logistics

CFOTL: Tell us about Trinity Logistics … what does this company do?

Potvin: Trinity Logistics is a freight broker, or middleman, between shippers who want to move goods from point A to point B. We also offer freight services to motor carriers who have the capacity to do this. During the 18 years that I’ve been here, we’ve always been among the top 20 brokerage firms nationwide.

Read More We coordinate approximately 550,000 shipments a year and have 450 team members across seven offices within the United States. We also have 160 independent contractor freight agents throughout the U.S., two in Canada, one in Mexico, and a few overseas.

This job can be done simply with a computer and phone, so there’s nothing that we’re really making. We thrive simply on the people-centric way that we treat all of our stakeholders: shippers, carriers, team members, agents, and the communities in which we find ourselves. We also have a 501(c) foundation that we utilize to benefit these local communities.

Trinity Logistics | www.trinitylogistics.com | Seaford, Delaware

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Inside The Mentoring Round CFO Todd Patriacca emphasizes the strategic implementation of technology automation, focusing on areas that enhance efficiency and reduce internal costs. He advocates for leveraging automation to handle routine tasks, allowing teams to concentrate on strategic exceptions. Todd also champions Lean methodology, applying its principles of continuous improvement and waste elimination to finance. He believes in early exposure to Lean thinking for finance professionals to foster a mindset of ongoing process enhancement and collaboration.

1,022: The Power of Lean Thinking | Todd Patriacca, CFO, BVI Medical

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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.

Read MoreIt 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.

“Ask as many questions as you can and ‘go and see’ where the work is being done. You can’t fully understand an issue or the business—or solve a problem—if you aren’t asking questions and gaining a deep understanding of the work being performed.” –Todd Patriacca, CFO, BVI Medical

CFOTL: Tell us about BVI Medical … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Patriacca: We are a diversified surgical ophthalmic business, focused on the surgery or operating theater with a broad range of medical device products. We make interocular lenses, capital equipment, consumables that are used within surgery, and surgical fluids that support cataract and refractive surgeries, as well as procedures for glaucoma, vitreous and retinal issues, dryness, and so on—basically, everything in ophthalmic surgery.

Read MoreOver the years, we’ve done a really good job of acquiring complementary companies to broaden our product portfolio. The business was originally just the consumables, but now we have a line of knives and blades that’s been around for decades and still is one of the premier brands within the space. Subsequently, we’ve added cannulas, forceps, and other similar products, as well as cotton swabs, drapes, and other things that might be needed in the surgical suite. To do this, we have acquired a number of equipment companies, including an intraocular lens (IOL) manufacturer. Significantly, we have created this complete product portfolio while still continuing to invest in new development activities.

In the not-too-distant future, we’ll be coming out with some new products that will be supported by our complete portfolio of offerings. Surgeons or staffs with be able to use our equipment platform to pull in both captive and discretionary consumables as well, so we will really be a one-stop shop where they can get everything that they need.

Another thing that we do—with which we’ve had tremendous success—is to make custom packs. Let’s say that surgeon Smith wants his surgical pack set up in a particular way: This knife is on top, this drape is here, this sponge is there. With one of our custom packs, the nurse just opens the thing up and the doctor doesn’t even need to lift his head up off the microscope—he just reaches in, and the next tool that he wants is right there, in the order that he wanted. These packs allow them make their surgeries as efficient as possible, so that they can maximize their revenues and ultimately their profits.

This is really an exciting business. We’ve made a number of acquisitions over the past 7 or 8 years to really leverage our base platform into a full-spectrum provider for ophthalmic surgery. One nice thing is that we are still a rather small player in this. True, we are in 90 countries, but we’re not in 90 countries with every single product. It takes time to get things registered and and so forth, so there’s still a lot of opportunity for us to grow this business with an eye toward what is known as PACE—Performance, Adoption, Confidence, and Expectation—as we expand into new geographies and get products registered in the U.S. and elsewhere.

For example, we’re now in the process of launching our FINEVISION IOL product in the U.S. We’ve implanted over a million of these throughout the rest of the world but have just needed to get through an FDA clinical trial here. We wrapped up the last patient visit for this a couple of months ago, so now we’re compiling all of the study data. We’ll get it submitted to the FDA and hopefully be able to launch sometime soon thereafter. This is a great opportunity for us, right? We’re not selling any IOLs in the U.S. right now, but they’re a quarter of our business elsewhere.

These new products are really going to accelerate our growth, as has been happening in Japan, where we’ve been launching a new product every 6 months or so. We’re enjoying outsized growth, so there are a lot of exciting things happening at BVI right now.

MVI Medical | www.bvimedical.com | Waltham, MA

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Inside The Mentoring Round, Larry White looks back on his U.S. Coast days and spotlights the shift from a rigorous budget-focused approach to a more strategic, mission-oriented model. He empowered his team, decentralizing budget responsibilities and cutting excess spending by 70% to better align resources with actual needs. His philosophy fostered transparency and trust, emphasizing operational performance over mere cost considerations, improving financial decision-making and resource allocation.

1,021: A Taste for Professional Growth: How the U.S. Coast Guard Granted Larry White an Expansive Finance Career

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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 advanced through a series of operational roles before deciding to pursue an MBA at Columbia University. 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.

Read MoreGoing 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. –Jack Sweeney

“Very often, finance people are stuck with whatever the financial reporting systems and general ledger puts out, but this information has all of the really interesting operational detail pretty much stripped away from it. In order to find out what’s really going on, you have to go out and talk to people. I learned to understand people first and always began by going around and asking them, ‘What is it that you really want to achieve?'” –Larry White, commanding officer (emeritus), U.S. Coast Guard Finance Center

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| Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Seth Wunder shares a finance strategic moment that explores an earlier career chpater where he was working for an underperforming mission-driven company in 2016-2017. He realized that a strong customer experience must align with financial sustainability. Through close collaboration with management, he learned the importance of balancing growth and profitability to fulfill long-term missions. This experience shaped his decision-making at Acorns, where he prioritizes focus and efficiency. |

1,020: A Savvy Investor Cracks the Operator’s Code | Seth Wunder, CFO, Acorns

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At a recent executive team dinner, several Acorns executives were reminiscing about their childhood professional aspirations. While many had had career dreams that had lost their luster—to be an astronaut and such—Seth Wunder shared that his early focus on the world of investing was not only unwavering but also formative. “I grew up in a household and family that was focused on investing and on the growth of the markets,” Wunder recalls. As a teenager, he was already engrossed in financial markets, which would set the stage for a career path that would eventually lead him to the CFO office at Acorns, a pioneering investment platform.

Read MoreWunder’s journey began in investment banking, where he honed his analytical skills and developed a keen eye for financial opportunities. His transition to running an investment fund further solidified his expertise, allowing him to delve deep into the intricacies of market dynamics and company valuations. It was here that Wunder cultivated his strategic mind-set, learning to balance short-term gains with long-term value creation.

Still, the transition from investor to operator is a pivotal career chapter. He noted that one of the everyday challenges in this is to translate financial concepts. “When you’re in finance, everyone around you understands the technical language, but as a CFO, you have to communicate in a way that everyone can understand, regardless of their domain expertise,” Wunder explains. This insight has led him to make clear communication a priority, although he admits that optimizing the skillset needed to break down complex ideas into simple building blocks remains a work in progress.

Upon joining Acorns, Wunder quickly found his footing during the acquisition of GoHenry, which expanded Acorns into international markets. This transaction showcased his ability to integrate teams and drive synergies, ultimately enhancing the company’s growth trajectory.

On the home front, Wunder, a father of three, says that he is committed to instilling sound financial habits in his children. He believes in the power of early financial education and is determined to help shape their financial futures—much like he aims to do for Acorns users.

“Learn and do as much as you can early on in your career. As someone who’s worked in hedge funds, portfolio management, and entrepreneurship, I can say that all of these different experiences have informed how I make decisions at Acorns and helped me to be a well-rounded and strategic CFO.” –Seth Wunder, CFO, Acorns

CFOTL: Tell us about Acorns … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Wunder: Acorns is a savings and investment platform. We focus on helping everyday consumers to save, invest, and enjoy financial wellness for the long term. We got our start with Round-Up, our tool through which you could round up your spare change and move it into diversified portfolios. We give people all of the education necessary to understand how long-term investment in the stock market—and the compounding benefit of time—can really build great financial wealth over the long term.

Read MoreWe’ve broadened the business significantly over the years. We now have banking features, including our partnership with Dwayne Johnson for our Mighty Oak debit card. We’ve also acquired GoHenry, which is targeted at helping kids—and teens, for that matter—to learn how to save and bank and eventually invest. This has moved us fully into the whole-family space, in that we now serve kids, teens, and adults by giving them lots of tools and a suite of products for long-term financial planning and investing, all of which we bundle into subscription tiers based on value. Basically, in a fiduciary way, we are helping folks who are just starting out or even continuing their financial education to learn about money things with which they may not be familiar—all with a focus on the long-term benefits of being financially well.

Personally, this is just obviously a natural extension in so many different ways of where I have come from historically. I think that I can speak with some authority about what it’s like to see people trade securities aggressively and the differences between different types of trading behaviors—and what long-term investing really looks and feels like. I am quite passionate about this.

Also, I have three kids—15, 13, and 9 years old—and I am enjoying watching them begin their journey in financial awareness and education. As we all know, developing really good habits at a young age helps people to sustain them as they grow older, whether these practices are physical, exercise-related, dietary, financial, or otherwise. As it turns out, the missions of my personal and professional lives are sort of holistically intertwined: What I would like to see my children achieve over the long term is exactly what I would also like to help all of our customers to achieve, as well.

Acorns | www.acorns.com | Irvine, CA

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This episode Jack an Brett discuss the commentary of the three Planning Aces, CFO Sandeep Aujla from Intuit, CFO Shelagh Glaser from Synopsys, and CFO Seth Wunder from Acorns. Each Planning Ace highlights their distinct approaches to strategic finance, organizational structure, communication, and business growth. Interestingly, while all three CFOs 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.

Linking Strategy to Investment: Glaser focuses on aligning investments with strategic goals and business outcomes, emphasizing the importance of reviewing and redirecting resources as necessary.

Improving Communication with Investors: Glaser highlights the need for clear segment reporting to better reflect business operations and communicate with investors effectively. This helps align internal and external understanding of the company’s strengths.

Emphasis on Intellectual Qualities: Aujla focuses on hiring leaders with intellectual horsepower, curiosity, and ambition, regardless of their backgrounds. This approach aims to bring diverse perspectives into the finance team, pulling talent from various fields like engineering and consulting.

Integration with Business Strategy: Aujla sees finance leaders as business leaders who should add value and drive growth. The goal is for finance professionals to deeply understand the business and contribute creatively to business discussions.

Building Collaborative Teams: Wunder emphasizes creating a culture of collaboration by broadening team responsibilities and avoiding duplication of work, thus enabling employees to advance in their careers.

Simplifying Complex Information: Wunder stresses the need to translate complex financial language into simple, understandable terms for all team members, ensuring clear communication across different domains.The post Ep 37: Navigating Communication Challenges appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Steve Vintz of Tenable shares key career insights, emphasizing his passion for growth companies and entrepreneurship. Early on, he realized the appeal of smaller, venture-backed companies over large corporations, leading him to a career focused on growth-oriented businesses. Vintz discusses a critical acquisition decision where he advocated against proceeding with a deal, highlighting the importance of discipline and listening to one’s intuition. He stresses the need for careful evaluation and strategic understanding in pursuing business growth, prioritizing informed decision-making over rapid expansion.

787: Listening to Your Inner Self | Steve Vintz, CFO, Tenable

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Shelagh Glaser discusses how AI is transforming Synopsys Inc. at multiple levels, from accelerating engineering solutions to enhancing internal operations and forecasting. CFO Glaser also shares insights for new CFOs on how to navigate organizational dynamics in a remote work environment and preparing for market shifts.

1,018: From Complexity to Clarity: Simplifying Business Segments for Investor Insight | Shelagh Glaser, CFO, Synopsys

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Josh Schenker may well be the only CFO we’ve interviewed who claims to have dropped out of high school—which he actually did, sort of. In order to accelerate his academic ascendance, Schenker passed 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.

Read MoreSchenker 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.

CFOTL: Tell us about Aditude … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Schenker: Aditude is one of the largest header bidding and advertising operations companies in the world. We power advertising for hundreds of sites and process billions of events on a monthly basis. I would say that what truly separates us from our competitor set is not just our best-in-class technology—which I think a lot of companies try to say—but also our unparalleled customer service. Even though we have a lean team, with maybe only about 30 people on this staff, we’ve obviously been able to scale the business pretty substantially because of our methodology.

Read MoreWe try to make sure, basically, that the people who can solve problems for our customers are never more than one or maybe two steps away from them. So, instead of having layers and layers of customer support people and having it take lots of time to get an answer, we prioritize the ability of our clients to talk directly to the folks who are actually going to be able to solve their problems. I think that this is what sort of sets us apart and has made us successful to date.

CFOTL: Who is a typical target customer? What size would they be?

Schenker: We work with companies large and small in two different specific arenas. Primarily, we work with content publishers. These are online publishers that run the gamut in terms of genre: gaming, sports, leisure, entertainment, news. We work with tons of sites that sort of span these types of industries.

We also work with advertisers. In March of this year, we bought CPMStar, which is what’s called a supply-side platform. As a result, we’re now selling directly into advertisers for the inventory that they’re bidding on. So, we sell into both of these categories of customer base.

Aditude | www.aditude.com | Bronxville, NY

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When asked to share a single career chapter that has influenced her strategic mind-set as a finance leader, Synopsys CFO Shelagh Glaser knew exactly what to cite.

She described a period that had unfolded during her 29 years at Intel Corp., when—seemingly overnight—consumer appetite for tablets had begun to upend Intel’s enduring PC chips business. The initial response within the company was one of denial, she explains. Certain voices could be heard saying, “This isn’t really happening” or “These tablets are just toys; we build real computers.”

Read MoreAccording to Glaser, the initial reaction was akin to one the five stages of grief. However, stepping back revealed the stark reality that Intel had seemingly lost about a third of its market overnight, which translated to a dramatic 100 million units. This pivotal moment demanded urgent action and set the stage for a string of days and nights that would expose to Glaser the critical alignment required between crisis management and swift strategic decision-making.

“We needed to be able to describe the situation to people very quickly and answer the important question, ‘What does this mean for me?,'” explains Glaser, who notes that Intel thereupon executed a 25% reduction in investment and workforce, understanding that immediate action was crucial to stabilize the business. This was followed by a strategic refocus on key growth segments, such as business professionals and gamers, who would ultimately revitalize Intel’s PC division. This experience embedded in Glaser the importance of making quick, informed decisions during crises, a principle that she has carried into her role as CFO at Synopsys.

At her present firm, Glaser applies this strategic mind-set by emphasizing efficient resource allocation and aligning investments with long-term goals. Her approach ensures that every dollar spent is directly tied to strategic objectives, which fosters a culture of strategic finance that drives sustainable growth.

Moreover, her tenure at Synopsys has underscored her commitment to clear communication and investor relations. Recognizing the complexity in how the business was being presented, she revamped segment reporting to clarify the company’s diverse operations. This transparency has improved investor understanding and aligned internal focus on critical metrics.

Glaser’s career journey from Intel to Synopsys highlights her expertise in navigating crises and fostering transparent communication. These experiences she tells us shaped her into a CFO who excels in strategic alignment and effective stakeholder engagement.

“The people who get ahead in life are the people who drive business impact. Be one of them. As you look to advance your career, think about exactly what it is that is propelling the company forward. Does what you work on contribute? If not, how can you better position yourself to elevate your value to be in line with the company’s strategic priorities?” –Shelagh Glaser, CFO, Synopsys

CFOTL: Tell us a little about Synopsys … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Glaser: In simple terms, we make software that is used to make semiconductors—which means that we have to be seeing into the future even before our customers can see what the future holds for them as far as products go. We had to have been building the software for whatever Nvidia or AMD or Microsoft is building today before they could even envision what they would be doing.

This is super-exciting because we’re on the leading edge of a lot of things. You can’t build an advanced semiconductor product without us. As we all know, semiconductors really fuel the world—they fuel all of the technology, as well as this software that I was so interested in learning about. We have a once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity here because we make the very, very complex work that goes into building chips easier for everyone who does it.

Read MoreCFOTL: Can you tell us about the AI opportunity and what it means for Synopsys?

Glaser: We see three levels of impact. First of all, there’s simply the sheer number of AI chips that will need to be built, which no one can do without our tools. We will greatly benefit from this need. Second, we’re infusing AI into every one of our products, so customers can buy them with or without it. But if they choose to take advantage of our AI capability, their engineering team becomes sort of turbocharged because it helps them to find solutions even faster—in a world where they’re dealing with enormous complexity. Third is the fact that we are really incorporating AI into as many of our own operations as possible, from engineering to sales to finance and so forth—into literally every part of the company. How do we, as our founder would say, eat at our own restaurant? How do we start to transform how we offer things up inside every function of the company? As you can see, we have a unique opportunity for amazingly impactful transformational change in all three of these areas.

Synopsys | www.synopsys.com | Sunnyvale, CA

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In this 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
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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.

Jack Sweeney: We want to want to touch on AI with you. And we’re wondering, from your viewpoint, how you believe it’ll impact the role of finance leaders, what’s going to happen here, what’s happening now?

Tal Kirschenbaum: So obviously, there’s there’s a lot of hype and attention and focus being given to AI. I think rightfully so. And there’s a few different opportunities. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for AI to bring value to finance teams, who are drowning in this tsunami of financial data and to and then need to make sense of it all. And again, freeing them from the manual data work and enabling a much more strategic oversight capability. And there are two main use cases that I think will surface as ones that are much more viable and feasible in the immediate future, at least, and that will help transform finance teams, I think the first one has to do with operating with a very high volume of unstructured data. I’ll give you an example. That’s something that we use AI for.

Read MoreIf there’s a broken string, and a bank statement, or a company that has changed its name, AI can then be used to solve this gap by being able to connect the dots and fill in the blanks. And at ledge we use AI for smart matching, for those exact instances name mismatches between a bank transfer and invoices, which are unbelievably common, but quite brutal when you operate at a massive scale. And the second use case that I think is quite relevant in the immediate future has to do with AI being I think, quite well suited for forecasting. And using things like linear regression together with user inputs, to actually able to, to actually help predict various types of outcomes. Now, this, again, is another one of those tasks that can quite easily help free up the finance team’s time, from the manual side of data entry, data manipulation, and enable them to really think about the so what what do we now do with these insights that we have. The other thing I’ll quickly mention on AI, is that we need AI and robust technology to help compensate I think, specifically for the shortage that we’re seeing in finance in general. But I think even more specifically, within the accounting space. Obviously, accountants are quite often the backbone of a finance team and as a byproduct of many businesses. And there’s been this acute shortage of them in the market. And so there’s this desperate need for technology to start to step in and help fill that gap really. And it’s not just about the labor gap, but it’s actually also about being able to increase the retention of accountants of finance operators, by again, moving them away from the repetitive, tiresome, low value tasks and towards a much more interesting and strategic work that the could be doing.

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Inside the Mentoring Round, CFO Eric Emans emphasizes the importance of overcoming the fear of failure early in one’s career, as learning often comes from making mistakes. He fosters an expectation-based culture where finance professionals are encouraged to engage with the business, challenge assumptions, and drive insights. Emans believes this approach distinguishes great organizations from good ones. His priority over the next 12 months is focusing on existing customers, ensuring they value purchased products, and exploring cross-sell or upsell opportunities. Additionally, Emans will concentrate on strengthening the collaboration between the chief product officer, CMO, and CRO to refine product strategy and market approach.

1,017: Two Hands, One Vision: A Balanced Approach to Finance | Eric Emans, CFO, Nintex

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Eric Emans, CFO of Nintex, tells us that his career has been built upon learning from mistakes and driving an expectations-based culture in finance: “I see the fear of failure as being so detrimental to so many people early in their career. In their mind, failing is often outsized, but most of the time, the things that you’re dealing with when you’re up-and-coming are expected to involve some failure. This is how you learn.”

In fact, Emans views failure as a critical learning tool. Starting his career in juvenile rehabilitation, he tells us, he gained unique insights into human behavior and communication that later influenced his approach to leadership. When he transitioned to finance, Emans was determined to understand the business holistically—not just through numbers.

Read MoreAt 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 to avoid common pitfalls and develop a nuanced understanding of financial operations.

As CFO of Nintex, Emans has continued to foster a culture in which 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 hands. Not only do they need to be talented, but also I need to be able to speak to them about almost everything going on in the company,” he notes.

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 that I asked for, that’s great,” he reports. “But if they go further and provide additional insights, this is what makes the difference between a good organization and a great one.”

“I would emphasize the importance of embracing failure as a profound learning opportunity. To an extent, failure is expected, and people will more often judge you for how you learn from a failure than for the failure itself. I’ve found that this is a pivotal part of career progression that’s critical for shaping resilient leaders.” –Eric Emans, CFO, Nintex

CFOTL: Tell us about Nintex … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Emans: We are a global company that, as we like to say, sets the standard for process intelligence and automation. We have more than 8,000 private and public sector organizations from 90 or so countries that are using our process platform to accelerate and optimize the path to digital transformation.

When I went to look at this company, I really was attracted to the role and aperture of the CFO here and what it was going to allow me to do, which was to actually run data and analytics and pricing. This is a wider scope of responsibilities than you would traditionally find in even the best private equity–backed companies.

Read MoreI really appreciated that aspect of it, but I also really liked our mission. I’ve always found that it feels as though finance itself has to constantly be giving back to the bottom line and scaling. Another thing that I’ve found over my career is that you keep people by making sure that they’re working on the highest-value tasks—and not on things that a machine or process could do. So, the technology here just resonated for me because it is enabling a lot of the stuff that I had been driving in my other organizations, whether as a line of business owner or CFO. Everything was a really good fit.

Now, of course, in this day and age of AI, our attention will need to be focused not on replacing functions and processes with it but on using it to make automation quicker and more seamless and to allow people to build newer and better products more quickly. What I really like about Nintex is that we give people time to work on higher-value things. Your employees are always your highest-value asset, especially in a technology company.

One other thing that I like about our company is its global scale, as I’ve spent most of my career in pretty much U.S. domestic companies. Nintex has offices all over the world—headquarters in Washington state, plus developers in Johannesburg and footprints in Melbourne, the UK, and so on.

Nintex | www.nintex.com | Bellevue, WA

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Inside the Mentoring Round, CFO Sandeep Aujla explains why his eight-year investment at Intuit was driven by the continuous learning opportunities and professional growth the company offered. Although he could have become a CFO sooner elsewhere, Aujla tells us chose to stay at Intuit to deepen his expertise, gain more diverse experience to better prepare for the CFO role.

1,016: When Career Years Are Investment Years | Sandeep Aujla, CFO, Intuit

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By the time Sandeep Aujla arrived at Intuit in 2015, he had already invested 7 career-building years as a senior finance executive at Visa, so his path to the CFO office was presumably getting shorter and shorter. Still, it would be another 8 years before he would be appointed Intuit CFO.

While there’s little question that during those 8 years Aujla could have likely nabbed CFO appointments elsewhere. Certainly, many finance organizations experienced a migration of senior talent during the covid years. Aujla’s decision to stay and complete yet another tour within Intuit reminds us that the shortest path is not always the best.

Read MoreAujla’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 to transition Intuit from being primarily an accounting software provider to representing a broader platform offering services such as payments, payroll, and Mailchimp.

Aujla played a pivotal role in this transformation, co-leading the small business group and driving the strategy that shifted Intuit’s main 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, Aujla 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, Aujla 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, Aujla 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 mind-set, honed through years of navigating Intuit’s complex business landscape, well positions him to lead the company through its next chapter of growth.

“You always have to be proactive in managing your career, but this doesn’t mean being impatient or expecting a linear progression. Deliver top-tier performance in your role and don’t hesitate to raise your hand for projects or roles that are outside your comfort zone. You also need patience and a willingness to play the long game. When I left Visa for Intuit, I moved to a smaller company in a different space, no longer reported directly to the CFO, and took a smaller scope than what Visa was offering me as a counter. However, I knew that the role at Intuit would expand my skills across different business models, as well as better position me to be a C-suite leader downstream. It is this focus on growing your skills, feeling your brain hurt, and delivering positive tangible impacts that becomes the differentiator.” –Sandeep Aujla, CFO, Intuit

CFOTL: Tell us about today’s Intuit … where does its future lie, and what does it represent inside its marketplace?

Aujla: Intuit is a young 40-year-old company with a long history of both disrupting and reinventing itself. This is the overarching theme. We are a company that supports 100 million customers, about 90 million of whom are consumers and 10 million, small businesses. We are very much rooted in helping to address the key needs of these customer bases, which is the the entire focus of our corporate strategy.

Read MoreWe are largely a fintech company that provides a platform of services that include software, of course, but also a set of money movement tools. In fact, not only are we one of the largest payment processors in the U.S., but also we are the third largest payroll provider in this country, servicing over 17 million employees. In addition, we have a capital business that I played a role in setting up, and last year, we helped more than 45 million people file their taxes. We have over 40 million monthly active users making financial decisions through our Credit Karma offerings, so we’re very much a platform that’s helping our 100 million consumer and business customers to make their very best financial decisions according to their own specific situations.

Intuit | www.intuit.com | Mountain View, CA

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Inside the Mentoring Round, CFO Mark Khavkin of MinIO explains how as a CFO his interactions with customers in the past allowed him to detect discrepancies between how his prior company and its customers perceived pricing and value, leading him to refine the pricing strategy based on customer insights. When it comes to building relationships with customers Khavkin suggests that CFOs begin by building trust with their CEO and executive team to facilitate customer interactions. He recommends joining existing customer calls to build rapport and demonstrate value without disrupting established relationships. Customers often appreciate having a C-level executive involved, enhancing their trust and satisfaction. By being present and asking insightful questions, CFOs can contribute meaningfully to customer relationships and company strategies

1,015: Aligning Investor Narratives With Operational Strategy | Mark Khavkin, CFO, MinIO

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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.

Read MoreTransitioning 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.

“Ditch the silo! Get in the habit of spending time with customers, partners, and—critically—your own sales team. Talk their talk, grasp their motivators, grok their processes, learn who your customers are, and bridge the gap between the ocean of data and the real world.” –Mark Khavkin, CFO, MinIO

CFOTL: Tell us about MinIO … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Khavkin: MinIO is a software company that provides data infrastructure for exceptionally large AI workflows—specifically, it’s software-defined object storage that’s AI-ready and can work at exoscale values. It’s cloud-native, compatible with major cloud technologies, and highly performant, which allows our customers to run big AI workloads on huge volumes of proprietary data in a highly efficient and cost-conscious manner.

Read MoreOur last funding round was in early 2022, when we raised over $100 million on a valuation of over $1 billion. This was the major turning point in company history and an obvious validation of the addressable market and of the product and business strategy that the company is pursuing.

MinIO was able to attract phenomenal investors, including strategics and financial investors, who have remained highly engaged to this day and are very helpful to us. We were founded only a few years earlier, so it’s exciting to look ahead from this phenomenal inflection point in an industry where we’ve captured such a leadership position.

MinIO | www.min.io | Redwood City, CA

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Inside the Mentoring Round, CFO Karen Williams of American Express Global Business Travel showcases a growth mindset, turning career hurdles into invaluable learning experiences. Her journey from networking struggles at Mars to recognizing its significance underscores the power of building essential professional relationships. Williams’s emphasis on “connecting the dots” to glean insights from past missteps sets the stage for future triumphs. Along the way, Williams candidly discusses the compromises often necessary for a fulfilling life.

1,014: Passion and Purpose: Building a Vibrant Finance Culture | Karen Williams, CFO, American Express Global Business Travel

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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 that she would reach only much later, when she personally witnessed the power of networking and personal connections.

Read MoreThe 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.

CFOTL: Tell us about American Express Global Business Travel … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Williams: American Express Global Business Travel is a leading provider of software and services for meetings, events, and expenses. We essentially provide tech and services, as well as act as a marketplace for suppliers of air, rail, hotels, car hire, and so forth. We also have our own clients, who span the spectrum from global, multinational firms on down to small and medium-size enterprises.

Read MoreOur company offers a wide range of products. At the high end, we can provide basically “white glove” service. For clients who want to be more hands-on, we have offerings like our Agenzia product and tech platforms that really allow you to self-serve. All of our tech and services have an extremely digital focus and together serve to offer a wide variety of choices. We are a global organization out there in 140 countries, renowned both for the quality of our services and the capabilities of our platforms. jb

“The CFO role has evolved into an increasingly multifaceted position. Beyond finance, you must be a fully integrated strategic partner to other business functions, tech-savvy, up-to-date on the latest risk management and compliance parameters, and a positive people leader. A great support network and the self-confidence to do things your way are key.”

–Karen Williams, CFO, American Express Global Business Travel

American Express Global Business Travel | www.amexglobalbusinesstravel.com

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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, Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles, highlight the shared themes of data curiosity, the evolving role of finance in operational decisions, and the importance of cross-functional competencies.

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Mo Shahzad of Relativity Space highlights the company’s mission to revolutionize space launch with next-generation rockets, including a larger model set to launch in 2026. Emphasizing 3D printing technology, Shahzad detailed their impressive investor support and multi-billion dollar launch agreements backlog. Shahzad tells us his leadership philosophy centers on fostering a collaborative work environment and prioritizing fundraising to ensure a strong balance sheet as Relativity transitions to scalable manufacturing and high ramp rates.

1,013: The Curious CFO: Crafting the Future of Space | Muhammad Shahzad, CFO, Relativity Space

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

Read MoreRelativity Space, a trail-blazer in aerospace manufacturing, stands at a critical juncture. The company’s ambitious vision to revolutionize space travel through 3-D–printed rockets requires substantial funding to transition from prototype to mass production. Investors need more than just numbers—they need to believe in the vision and its feasibility. This is where Shahzad’s storytelling ability becomes indispensable.

Shahzad tells us that along the way, his career has been marked by a relentless pursuit of knowledge and an ability to distill complex concepts into engaging stories. His experience has spanned sectors from investment banking to corporate finance to—now—aerospace, providing him with a unique perspective that resonates with diverse stakeholders. This breadth of knowledge, combined with his knack for storytelling, enables him to paint a vivid picture of Relativity Space’s potential, making its technical and financial aspects accessible and exciting for investors.

In a post-COVID world where hybrid work models prevail, Shahzad’s approach to leadership is more important than ever. He leverages every opportunity to connect with his team, understanding their motivations and challenges. This empathy and engagement ensure that he remains attuned to the company’s pulse, enabling him to articulate a coherent and compelling vision for investors.

CFOTL: Tell us about Relativity Space … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Shahzad: At the core of it, Relativity Space is just a next-generation launch company. We’re building a rocket that’s about 40% to 50% larger than Falcon 9, which arguably is the most successful commercial rocket that SpaceX has made. We’re going to take satellites up into orbit for customers. We’ve sent a smaller rocket up into space, in one of the most successful first-ever launches for anybody, which has resulted in a multi-billion-dollar backlog of launch agreements. We’re working on a larger rocket, too, that will launch in 2026—and we’ll quickly ramp from there.

Read More I continue to have the privilege of working with an amazing set of investors—not just public company–style but also crossovers like Fidelity and BlackRock. We have a bunch of growth-oriented venture capital firms, a couple of sovereign wealth funds, and some high-profile individuals, as well. At the core of some of what we’re doing is also additive technology, such as the 3-D printing of some of the parts of the rockets that we’re building .

So, while rocketry remains our core business, we do have a few other things that we do, too, such as interacting with the federal government’s needs and applying our knowledge of 3-D printing in consultation with large-scale manufacturing. This is lots of exciting stuff. We’re at the absolute forefront of technological advancement. As for me, I’m a lifelong learner—which is what keeps me curious here. I’ve spent 4 years in trying to walk the floor to learn everything that I can about what our great team is doing there, and this had been very valuable not only for me but also, I hope, for our company. jb

“Always think about how to move the business forward—and always wear a general manager’s, enterprise hat. The job isn’t about getting audits done and setting budgets.” –Muhammad Shahzad, CFO, Relativity Space

Relativity Space | www.relativityspace.com | Long Beach, CA

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO John Lutz of Sellars highlights the company’s innovative use of recycled paper technology, providing a unique market advantage. His current priorities include enhancing IT systems and customer interaction platforms, along with further automating processes to leverage data effectively. Separately, Lutz reflects on his days at Charter Steel, where he identified gaps in the company’s financial modeling and spearheaded the implementation of an advanced costing system, involving cross-functional teams for better accuracy and buy-in.

1,012: The Last Unlock: Empowering Teams | John Lutz, CFO, Sellars

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Looking back, John Lutz doesn’t hesitate to recall a strategic turn along his career journey when, during his tenure as director of finance at Charter Steel, he transitioned a cumbersome, error-prone Excel model into an advanced, activity-based costing system. By involving stakeholders from across the company, Lutz tells us he not only gained buy-in but also unlocked the power of teams to create a tool that transformed the way the business operated, enhancing both efficiency and profitability.

Read MoreYears later, as CFO of Sellars, a manufacturer of household products and supplies, Lutz spearheaded efforts to modernize the company’s data infrastructure. “We’ve come a long way in two years,” says Lutz, who tells us that in the not-too-distant past, the company’s data storage strategy involved a row of filing cabinets. Along the way, real-time dashboards replaced static reports, enabling instant access to crucial data. These changes, Lutz explains, turned the finance department into a strategic partner that proactively identified and addressed issues.

His commitment to leveraging technology hasn’t stopped there, as he looks to introduce robotic process automation to streamline repetitive tasks, freeing up his team to focus on higher-value activities. Extending beyond internal collaborations, his approach to empowering teams was further evidenced by his close cooperation with supply chain partners to optimize procurement processes and nurture long-term, sustainable relationships.

Lutz’s CFO mindset exemplifies how embracing the power of teams and technology can drive transformative change. By fostering collaboration, leveraging data, and empowering his team, Lutz says he has been able to propel organizations forward, demonstrating that finance can be a catalyst for strategic growth and innovation.

CFOTL: Tell us about Sellars … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Lutz: If you’ve ever done any home improvement or painting projects or worked on your car or motorcycle or boat, there’s a chance that you’ve purchased some of our products. If you go into any Home Depot or Lowe’s around the country or an auto parts store like O’Reilly or NAPA—or even Walmart—you’ll see them. We sell white rags in a box, blue shop towels, all kinds of heavy-duty wiping and cleaning supplies.

Read MoreWe have a proprietary technology that takes a giant roll of base paper—think 8 feet long and 12 feet in circumference—and runs it through our process to create this strong, absorbent product that you can use to clean up, well, whatever it is that you have to clean up. We have a patent on how we use recycled paper for this, so we’re the only company in the world that has patents for both this technology and its use of recycled paper. Kimberly Clark is another company that has this technology, but we have the recycled aspect of it, which gives us a cost advantage against them. We can use curbside cardboard as part of our raw material input instead of virgin paper, which means quite a savings for us.

The other sort of main product that we have brought to market has been our new kitchen towel, Bravo, which is now available in about 300 Target stores nationwide. It’s made of 90% recycled material and performs well against big names, but it’s recycled. You know, this is kind of an interesting business to be in. We sell things that are designed to be thrown away, basically. So, when we add the recycled aspect to our products, this makes consumers feel at least a little bit better. jb

“Just remember that you don’t have to do it all yourself! Your role as CFO is to build a team that can drive the business forward whether you’re there or not. Recruit for fit, develop the skills, provide the tools and direction, and then get out of the way!” –John Lutz, CFO, Sellars Absorbent Materials

Sellars | www.sellarscompany.com | Milwaukee, WI

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`Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Carol Lee of LogicMonitor discusses the key lessons that can be learned from the buy-side and sell-side of M&A, why financial planning must be your organization’s numerical roadmap, and the strategic advantages AI is bringing to financial analysis and customer interactions.

1,011: Balancing Agility and Structure for Strategic Growth | Carol Lee, CFO, LogicMonitor

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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.

read moreEarly 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. Her journey underscores the value of diverse experiences in shaping a well-rounded, adaptive, and visionary CFO.

CFOTL: Tell us about LogicMonitor … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Lee: LogicMonitor is the only hybrid observability platform that can combine a single resource view for a hybrid environment, both on-premises and cloud, powered by AI. What does this mean? When you think about companies today, you realize that digitization is very important and that most businesses depend on their IT infrastructure, which in many ways is similar to a city’s infrastructure.

Read More Having the right observability platform is like having the right surveillance system or super-high-power binoculars that enable you to see everything. LogicMonitor is very unique in that it can take in all of the data—all of the telemetry—from both on-premises IT infrastructure and your cloud infrastructure. You can also add in your applications or basically whatever else you have in your IT environment and then, through a single pane of glass, see everything, everywhere. This means that you can spot problems before they happen. jb

“Grant yourself grace. You’re entering a fast-paced career that is changing by the moment, literally, and will require a lot of learning along the way. You’re not expected to know the answers to everything right away, but you are expected to keep learning so that you figure continue to figure things out.” –Carol Lee, CFO, LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor | www.logicmonitor.com | Santa Barbara, CA

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(Arista Networks)

CFO Tenure: Named in 2024

CFO Appts.: 2

Career Span: 27 yrs.

C-Suite: 3 yrs.

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(Cloudera)

CFO Tenure: 1 yr. (Named in 2023)

CFO Appts.: 2

Career Span: 27 yrs.

C-Suite: 9 yrs.

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The post #18 Dilip Upmanyu appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.

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(Pactum AI)

CFO Tenure: 1 yr. (Named in 2023)

CFO Appts.: 1

Career Span: 25 yrs.

C-Suite: 1 yr.

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The post #19 Sarah Alper appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.

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(6sense)

CFO Tenure: 9 yrs.

CFO Appts.: 1

Career Span: 24 yrs.

C-Suite: 9 yrs.

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The post #20 Rob Goldenberg appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.

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(SentinelOne)

CFO Tenure: 11 yrs.

CFO Appts.: 1

Career Span: 33 yrs.

C-Suite: 11 yrs.

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The post #16 Dave Bernhardt appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.

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(Mobileye)

CFO Tenure: 1 yr. (Named 2023)

CFO Appts.: 1

Career Span: 21 yrs.

C-Suite: 1 yr.

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The post #15 Moran Shemesh appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.

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(UiPath)

CFO Tenure: 5 yrs. (Named in 2019)

CFO Appts.: 1

Career Span: 24 yrs.

C-Suite: 5 yrs.

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The post #14 Ashim Gupta appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.

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(Weights & Biases)

CFO Tenure: 3 yrs. (Named in 2021)

CFO Appts.: 3

Career Span: 24 yrs.

C-Suite: 5 yrs.

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Michael O’Grady explains how he initially struggled to understand why he wasn’t succeeding despite positive feedback from colleagues. O’Grady explains how he developed strategies to block time for important tasks and manage daily operational duties more efficiently. O’Grady Highlights the importance of clear communication and education about key financial metrics to align the organization’s efforts.

1,010: When SaaS Became His Native Language | Michael O’Grady, CFO, Permutive

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(Databricks)

CFO Tenure: 5 yrs.

CFO Appts.: 4

Career Span: 36 Yrs.

C-Suite: 18 Yrs.

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(Nvidia)

CFO Tenure: 11 yrs.

CFO Appts.: 1

Career Span: 33 yrs.

C-Suite: 11 yrs.

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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 led to Ellucian’s acquisition by TPG for $3.5 billion, demonstrating the power of cohesive strategic financial planning.

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.

O’Grady’s next significant experience was at a rapidly growing tech start-up. The fast-paced environment there and challenges of scaling operations under tight financial controls begat a formative period for him. He learned to think strategically and act decisively, actions that would define his approach going forward.

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. –Jack Sweeney jb

CFOTL: Tell us about Permutive … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

O’Grady: We work with 150 or so of the premium publishers in the world: News Corp., with all of its properties; Washington Post; Financial Times; Daily Mail; Telegraph; Guardian; Marie Claire; Conde Nast. Publishers are in a really tough space, which they’ve been in for going on 20 years, thanks to the Internet. There’s this thing called the third-party cookie, which, like navigation on the Internet, is something that ends up basically being intermediated between publishers, who have the most valuable asset in the world—their audiences, not to mention advertisers who want to speak to those audiences.

A lot of technology has gotten in the middle of all of this, as everyone’s taken a 5 cents here, 10 cents there, cut. Today, if a a publisher sells $1 worth of advertising inventory, they’re getting only 20 to 30 cents in their own pocket. However, there are a bunch of people along the chain who are eating this up.

Permutive was built to do two things. Number one, to put publishers back in the driver’s seat, through enabling them to either rebuild or build really powerful direct sales organizations. Number two, the consumer doesn’t want the Internet knowing everything about what they do anymore. So, between the consumer side and the tech side—from Safari at Apple to Chrome and Google—the availability of and access to that tiny little piece of data called the “third-party cookie” is going away.

Today, more than 70% of the Internet is blind to advertisers. Our technology helps publishers to market to their audiences, but in such a way that even the publisher doesn’t know their identity. They just know what you like, and how you behave on their website, and how you engage with their content. They can more effectively say to an advertiser, for example, that they’re one of the leading daily publications in North America, print and online, and that they have a weekend section, a lifestyle section, a men’s fashion page—not to mention 50,000 people, every Saturday morning, who are engaged on this page because of everything else that they do on the website. We know that whether they’re in finance or M&A or business numbers or media in general, they are probably well-read and high-net-worth individuals.

Still, every Saturday, some 50,000 are looking at this fashion column. Don’t you want to advertise right around this? If you’re a fashion brand, this is a very, very powerful, compelling message that we’re able to bring to publishers. We’re working on the other side of this, directly with advertisers, too, saying, “Do you really want to have to go through every one of these transactions sort of on a direct sales basis, or can we can help you to find audiences that are looking for what you’re selling at scale?’ We are in between, helping everyone to talk to each other in a way that is much more effective—without all of the privacy issues that are plaguing the industry. Today, ad tech is broken. We’re fixing it. jb

“Assess your team quickly and make the necessary changes ASAP. Hesitation and fear of disruption will hurt more down the road. Think carefully and be surgical about where and how you spend your time. Find the right balance between being responsive to the business and its focus on the urgent issues of today and spending time with the team, customers, prospects, and others in your market to be prepared for what will be important tomorrow. Read the business context closely and be willing not only to take on more risk but also to be accountable for the outcomes. What got you here—strong execution, good command of the facts, and ability to communicate them—is not everything that you will need to be successful as a CFO. You will need to rely more on the instincts and experience of your peers, and operate more often than not on imperfect data.” –Michael O’Grady, CFO, Permutive

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Tony Querciagrossa discusses a strategic moment of insight he experienced earlier in his career at Medline Industries, where he collaborated with a commercial leader to address recruitment and organizational challenges, leading to the creation of the commercial finance function. Looking forward, CFO Querciagrossa identifies several key priorities for the upcoming 12 months, including handling various “firsts” for the business such as the first 10-K, first proxy statement, first shareholders’ meeting, and the first full year of fiscal guidance.

1,009: From GE Conference Rooms to Pinstripes Boardroom | Tony Querciagrossa, CFO, Pinstripes

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Two-and-a-half years ago, CFO Tony Querciagrossa began a discussion with Dale Schwartz, founder of Pinstripes, that would eventually lead to Querciagrossa joining the experiential dining up-and-comer as CFO. Turn back the clock a little, and you would see that Pinstripes, aiming for a traditional IPO, had engaged Goldman Sachs to solidify its path toward benefiting from a permanent capital structure. However, the emergence of the omicron variant of you-know-what disrupted these plans, placing the firm’s IPO on hold as uncertainty loomed.

Read MoreDespite the sudden challenges, Pinstripes pivoted swiftly to seize the opportunity presented by a changing financial landscape. Enter Banyan, a SPAC deeply invested in the industry and eager to collaborate. Querciagrossa joined the company just as the Banyan team was finalizing their business combination agreement—which would mark a pivotal moment in Pinstripes’s trajectory. With momentum building, Querciagrossa stepped into his role as CFO during the second phase of Banyan’s road show, where discussions revolved around securing vital capital for the company’s future.

For the sake of perspective, it may be informative to note that Querciagrossa’s journey had begun at GE, where he honed his skills as a proactive finance executive amidst a culture that encouraged strategic thinking over reactive responses and prepared him well for his critical juncture with Pinstripes. His experience in navigating complex financial landscapes and fostering growth in dynamic environments would serve as a foundation for his leadership role at his new firm. Embracing the challenges presented by the SPAC route, Querciagrossa tells us, he nonetheless was fortunate to be able to achieve the the agility and foresight necessary to navigate turbulent market conditions and steer Pinstripes toward its next phase of growth.

CFOTL: Tell us about Pinstripes .… what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Querciagrossa: We’re best-in-class as what you might call an “eatertainment” destination. We lead with food and beverage, so we have a phenomenal foods kitchen with recipes from scratch and so on, but we also have timeless entertainment with activities like bowling and bocce—although we’re very much not like a bowling alley with food, but quite the opposite. We provide a very unique, high-quality experience that has been growing quite a lot.

CFOTL: What might surprise folks a little bit to know is how a one-time GE auditor came to have an entrepreneurial itch—if you will allow me to characterize it as that. But when you reflect on your career path, do you feel that it has been a little bit more adventurous than most? Or would you put this another way, if at all?

Read MoreQuerciagrossa: From a finance perspective, I have come from manufacturing and distribution, where your customers and partners are obviously B2B. Still, you always want to understand the experience of the consumer. At Pinstripes, this is on steroids. We always say that the last 10 feet is the hardest, so we are always making sure that this execution is really tight. It’s really important to us that we check through and analyze the reviews from and digital touchpoints that we have with our customers. We’re now considering launching a loyalty program, which would be another way to relate.

To me, coming out of the manufacturing and distribution world, one thing that popped out immediately was that the amount of labor in your business is fundamentally different in different places. In manufacturing, there might be a 10% to 15% load elsewhere, while here it might be 30% to 40%., depending on product. It can be much less in some cases, of course. But this is a very important dynamic around what matters, so it’s very important to have great visibility into how many people are working, and when, and coupling this insight with how to implement the most effective service.

What I quickly honed in on was that we needed to win, every day, from the perspective not only of service and delivery but also of labor efficiency. The daily management of businesses that start or reopen every day, 360 days a year, is critical—and especially from a lean perspective, which is very popular. “Lean” has so much relevance in a business like ours, so I’ve taken to deploying a lot of what I’ve learned about manufacturing, distribution, and daily management in our business. We look at just a few KPIs, as well as what has cleverly been monikered the “bowler,” a term from the manufacturing world that is an ironically good fit for us, given that we are into bowling and bocce. We look at this every day. It’s great here, and I look for our finance function to help us to become even greater. jb.

“Patience is a virtue, and less is sometimes more. Don’t be afraid to wait to let a situation or opportunity come to you. Speak your mind and be vocal, but remember to be an active listener and hear all arguments before making decisions or sharing a firm point of view.” –Tony Querciagrossa, CFO, Pinstripes

Pinstripes | www.pinstripes.com | Northbrook, IL

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Erica Gessert emphasizes the importance for CFOs to rely on the best possible data sets for making informed decisions. CFO Gessert discusses the development of AI-enabled features to enhance the connection between clients and freelancers.

1,008: Managing Change and Ensuring Stability | Erica Gessert, CFO, Upwork

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In the throes of the Great Recession, Erica Gessert faced one of her first tests of leadership. As the head of investor relations for Virgin Mobile, she found herself navigating the collapsing financial sector. Key banks that were integral to the company’s operations began to crumble, and the economic landscape was fraught with uncertainty. Keeping investor concerns top-of-mind, Gessert was able to help steady Virgin Mobile and bring into full view the path leading beyond the crisis.

In the years ahead, Gessert’s career trajectory continued upward as she transitioned into various finance leadership roles. She spent a significant portion of her career at PayPal, where she honed her skills in analytics and strategic planning. Her ability to leverage data for decision-making allowed her to emerge as a strategy-minded finance executive capable of driving business growth and profitability.

Read MoreIn May 2022, Gessert was named CFO of Upwork. At the time, the company was grappling with profitability challenges despite favorable tailwinds from the pandemic-induced shift to remote work. Drawing on her experience, Gessert initiated a series of strategic measures to stabilize the company’s finances. Within just a few quarters, she has led Upwork to a turnaround, achieving 18% EBITA margins and positive cash flow.

A key aspect of Gessert’s strategy has been leveraging technology and data analytics to enhance customer acquisition and retention. She has implemented predictive churn models and other analytical tools to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, significantly improving Upwork’s client growth.

CFOTL: Tell us about Upwork … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Gessert: Upwork is the world’s work marketplace. We are the largest online marketplace for companies seeking to find independent professionals and for professionals trying to find work. No one has our sizing scale, as we do over $4 billion on our platform every year. We serve a very large and growing client base of about 872,000 on our platform, helping all to fulfill their essential work needs.

Read MoreWe went public about 5 years ago. We raised about $360 million in convertible debt in August 2020 and have $100 million to $150 million in cash, so we have a very strong balance sheet. The other really important point to understand about our business is that when I came on about a year ago, we were actually not profitable as a business. I think that the company made decisions to invest in the benefits to the business of the shift to remote and other things like that when there were tailwinds because we were and are all about connecting businesses and professionals to get work done remotely. This was the case during the pandemic, certainly, but not necessarily so to the same extent afterward. So, with interest rates being where they are and with the kind of nervousness in the market last year, it was really important that we move to profitability—which we’ve done very, very rapidly. We gained 20 points of EBITA down margin in just three quarters last year and have just recorded 18% EBITA margins in the first quarter of this year, so now we’re cash flow–positive. We’re going to be regrowing our cash balances each and every year, and this has so far actually enabled us to buy back about $100 million worth of stock. jb

“When it comes to developing new ways of working and new ways of getting things done, full-time employees tend to be a lot slower than our talent base of active freelancers. So, we’re now very focused on making sure that our talent base is the most AI-enabled talent base in the world. With regard to advice, it’s three things: Trust your instincts. Build a great network. Hire the best.” –Erica Gessert, CFO, Upwork

Upwork | www.upwork.com | San Francisco, CA

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Ashley Johnson emphasizes that financial planning and analysis (FP&A) should empower leaders to own their budgets rather than simply dictate them. She forbids the question, “Is this in my budget?” and instead encourages leaders to consider their priorities and trade-offs.She believes in a proactive approach to budgeting, where FP&A supports leaders in thinking beyond immediate needs to consider longer-term impacts and investments. This includes conducting 18-month planning projects to align current decisions with future goals.

1,007: The Art of Financial Storytelling | Ashley Johnson, CFO, Planet

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When she was an international studies major living abroad, Ashley Johnson tells us, she met a U.S. ambassador whose unvarnished advice subsequently led her to divert her career path away from the diplomatic corps of the U.S. Foreign Service. “I had thought that I would be going into the State Department,” she recalls.

However, a weekend spent in the presence of 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 potentially catastrophic loss. “Look for those assumptions, question them again and again,” she advises, emphasizing the critical role of meticulous examination in financial decision-making. –Jack Sweeney jb

CFOTL: Tell us about Planet … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Johnson: Planet is a really interesting company. We have a massive data set of basically everything that’s going on on Earth. The founders came from NASA. They recognized the paradox of building billion-dollar satellites with 10-year development cycles in the context of a world where, for example, your cell phone is updating with new capabilities every year. You certainly wouldn’t want to be using the cell phone that you had 20 years ago.

Yet, when you think about the satellites that we were launching into space for Earth observation, you realize that many of them were 20 years old. Their design cycles were long and their useful life was very long. This basically meant that in space we were not taking advantage of everything that was going on in Silicon Valley. Our founders had this notion to basically let Moore’s Law apply to satellites by having more of them that were far less expensive.

We don’t build billion-dollar satellites. Ours cost only about $300,000 apiece, so we can launch a lot of them. By having so many, we could actually scan the whole Earth. Every single day, we can take images of Earth such that we’re scanning the entirety of its landmass in a very uniform way. Then we can process the data by using modern capabilities such as machine language. Now, of course, we also talk about employing AI to understand the changes that are happening on the planet that have to be factored into decision-making by governments as well as companies. So, this is what we do. We have over 200 satellites in orbit that are collecting this incredibly powerful data set. We sell this data to our customers to help them to make more empowered decisions. jb

“Ask questions and have the confidence to ask even more questions as follow-up. When you’re new in a role, especially as the result of an internal promotion, it’s easy to feel intimidated, be overcome by imposter syndrome, and back down. This is exactly the moment when you need to dig in more because—more likely than not—you’re probably dealing with exactly the areas where assumptions are not aligned with reality.” –Ashley Johnson, CFO, Planet

[/expand]Planet | www.planet.com l San Francisco, CA

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CFO Jorge Stevenson’s finance career journey began in Santiago, Chile, where both of his parents—leaders within the business community—instilled in him the importance of finance when it comes to achieving business success.

Stevenson’s formal business education began with an MBA from Duke University, where he honed his finance acumen. His professional journey has included stops for 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, as he worked on mergers and acquisitions across Latin America, Europe, and Africa. –Jack Sweeney jb

CFOTL: Tell us about Yuvo Health … what does this organization do?

Stevenson: Yuvo Health is a healthcare organization that helps community health centers to gain an advantage in value-based care, which is a model that prioritizes outcomes of care over quantity of services delivered. Such community health centers provide care to underserved communities who are typically blocked from succeeding in value-based care for a number of different reasons.

Yuvo Health actually helps to clear these obstacles. We try to be best-in-class in what we do. I joined 6 months ago, and I have been really impressed by how committed everyone is to the mission of the company.

We partner with FQHCs, or federally qualified health centers—which are often known as community health centers—to help them to succeed in their value-based-care journey. These centers cannot take risks due to regulation, so we take care of this for them through having agreements with both them and various health plans. jb

“Embrace every opportunity to learn and grow, whether it’s through experiences, mentorship, or formal education. Cultivate a curious mindset and never stop asking questions. Curiosity fuels innovation and discovery, driving you to seek out new information and ideas. Challenge yourself to delve deeper into complex financial topics, and don’t be afraid to explore areas outside your comfort zone.” –Jorge Stevenson, CFO, Yuvo Health

[/expand]Yuvo Health | www.yuvohealth.com | New York, NY

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Scott Henderson stresses the need to balance rapid growth with effective cost management. CFO Henderson discusses the need to focus on key metrics, such as net revenue and net dollar retention, crucial for a usage-based company. Henderson acknowledges the complexity of forecasting for a usage-based business model compared to a traditional SaaS model.

1,005: From Salesforce Playbook to Start-up Strategy | Scott Henderson, CFO, DISQO

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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.

Read MoreHenderson’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. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: What made DISQO a good match for you? Why this company?

Henderson: When I went to DISQO, one of its differentiators was that the CEO and investors were looking to bring in somebody who had a finance background but also experience in RevOps. If you look at companies that have done well, you see that it’s all about growth, so I think that they were looking to have a CFO who could partner with the CRO to really think not about profit alone but about profit plus growth. This is not to say that other firms don’t think this way. Still, I believe that was a bit of a differentiator that made me feel that with my type of background, I might be placed near the top of the deck rather than be shuffled down within it, as is often the case in such moves.

Read MoreDISQO was founded in 2015. As a brand experience platform company, we help marketers, advertisers, brands, and companies to understand their touch points with the customer. Our products are powered by our own audience, in the form of a little more than 2 million consumers who have opted in to our consumer data platform. Our client companies then tap into our audience to understand sentiment and behavior, in order to see if their campaign or whatever it is that they’re doing can actually move the needle. At the end of the day, it’s all about driving more revenue and figuring out how to best do that. This is what we help them to understand.

“As a CFO, embrace the privilege of serving the company, investors, executive team, and finance team with humility and a beginner’s mindset. Learn and understand the business thoroughly, connect with people across the organization, and challenge the status quo when needed. Develop strategic thinking habits. Regularly reflect on short-term, medium-term, and long-term impacts. Foster a culture of accountability within your team and across the company. Lead by example, set clear expectations, provide feedback, celebrate successes, and strive for continuous improvement.” –Scott Henderson, CFO, DISQO

DISQO | www.disqo.com | Glendale, CA

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Agosto shares insights on the importance of being patient and understanding the full scope of the CFO role before pushing forward aggressively. Agosto discusses initial strategic plans for property development and business outcomes, showing foresight and structured planning.

1,004: Beyond the Casino Floor: A CFO’s Ascent | Efraín Pérez Agosto, CFO, MGM National Harbor

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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 numbers. 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.

Read MoreThe 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.

CFOTL: Tell us about MGM National Harbor … what makes this resort special and sets it apart?

Agosto: We’re a fully integrated resort here at National Harbor. We opened about 7 years ago, and it’s taken an investment of about $1.4 billion to get this property built up. We’re really not like most other regional casinos. We’re more like a Vegas-type property that happens to be in National Harbor, Maryland.

Read MoreWe have over 150,000 square feet of gaming space, which hosts more than 2,000 slot machines and 150 table games. We have a huge poker room with over 40 tables, as well as a 300-plus-room hotel and a spa. Our restaurants are anchored by our Steak House, which is run in partnership with the Voltaggio brothers, who are widely known. We have a theater with about 2,900 seats that has showcased entertainers such as Bruno Mars and Mariah Carey—to name just two of the great artists who have come through. Just to give you a little idea of our scale in terms of finance, we compare very competitively with the highest-grossing commercial casinos in Las Vegas and are a very, very sizable operation in comparison to other regional casinos in the space. jb

“Be nimble with your plan as you approach a new role so as not to undermine the processes and collaboration that will be needed to achieve the desired outcomes.” –Efraín Pérez Agosto, CFO, MGM National Harbor

MGM National Harbor | www.mgmnationalharbor.mgmresorts.com | Oxon Hill, MD

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Robert Cornella emphasized the importance of understanding the needs and expectations of different stakeholders within the first 60 to 90 days of a new CFO role. CFO Cornella stresses the significance of not presupposing stakeholder expectations and investing time in understanding their values and ambitions. As a book recommendation, Cornella the submits “Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies,” which he found invaluable during his time in Coca-Cola’s M&A group.

1,003: Beyond Borders—Navigating an International Career | Robert Cornella, CFO, RNDC

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Robert Cornella’s path to the CFO office at Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC) wasn’t meticulously planned; it was shaped by pivotal moments and unexpected opportunities. A significant milestone arrived with his appointment as CFO of Coca-Cola Germany, a defining chapter in his career.

Before his tenure in Germany, Cornella had already achieved several notable accomplishments. His journey began when he boldly relocated from the United States to Europe with E&Y, setting the stage for transformative experiences.

His elevation to CFO of Coca-Cola Germany validated his previous career decisions. “I was handed the keys to the kingdom,” he recalls. Still, Cornella had some nagging doubts and wondered whether he was ready for the position.

Read MoreFor his part, Cornella had emerged as an ideal candidate for the role due to his involvement in a multibillion-dollar transaction consolidating European bottlers. In time, his deep understanding of the different bottlers and their operations, along with his growing fluency in German, would allow him to navigate the complexities of the new position with confidence.

Still, Cornella’s story neither starts nor ends there. Another opportunity arose when Coca-Cola sought to formalize its finance function, particularly with regard to concentrate operations—which were generating more than 70% of revenue. Cornella was asked to be the lead in Ireland by establishing a finance team for EMEA’s commercial product supply. This was an unexpected challenge, but one that he embraced wholeheartedly.

Reflecting on his journey, Cornella acknowledges the wisdom of those who saw his potential long before he did. Each twist and turn offered opportunities for growth and learning, shaping him into the capable leader that he is known to be today.

CFOTL: Tell us about RNDC … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Cornella: We’re one of the nation’s leading wholesale alcoholic beverage distributors. We’re actually #2 in the U.S. We specialize in wine and spirits and operate in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. What certainly sets RNDC apart from our competitors is our excellence of service and our execution in the market. This is what we are known for. We strive to bring the best of everything to all of our supplier and retail partners.

To be really forthright about it, we’re known for doing what we say we’re going to do and executing. We want to be the most valuable partner for all of our suppliers and retailers within the value chain of alcohol distribution in the United States.

Read MoreI do want to mention that we are a family-owned company. We’re private, so we invest for the long term around here. We pride ourselves on having a very strong set of core values, which include honesty, professionalism, accountability, and doing the right thing. We feel that this certainly is what sets us apart, and we believe that our supplier and retailer partners recognize this as well.

Our #1 priority right now is to continue to evolve and digitize our finance function. Second, we need to continue to build within our team a better business awareness and totally optimal financial acumen in our field. We need to always strive to be better business partners with our operators. And then, third, we just need to allow these new structures that we have been putting into place to embed—so that we can start leverage the value and benefits of our scale.

“Three thoughts that have always served me well are these: • Don’t try to boil the ocean in one go.Pace yourself. • Give yourself the time to look, listen, and learn. • Consistency of execution trumps trying to get it right 100% of the time.” – Robert Cornella, CFO, RNDC

RNDC | www.rndc-usa.com | Atlanta, GA

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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 of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), 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.

Resources for Data-Minded Finance Executives

Unilever using digital Twins Case: https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2023/unilever-sites-join-network-of-worlds-most-digitally-advanced-factories/
Unilever using AI: https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2022/using-ai-to-optimise-our-portfolio-and-fuel-growth/
Unilever using Metaverse: https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2022/unilever-and-the-metaverse-navigating-the-new-virtual-world/
Jaguar Land Rover Case: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/setting-up-data-analytics-centre-excellence-el-wakeel-mba-cma/?trackingId=wtJgLWOpT%2BSzqvDNa1Umig%3D%3D
Fatema’s publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=list_works&hl=en&hl=en&user=vx63upwAAAAJ

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Joan Hilson emphasizes the importance of a purpose-based corporate culture at Signet Jewelers, which focuses on inspiring love for people, the planet, and communities. This culture is measured through engagement surveys and has shown improvement, reflecting the company’s commitment to these values. As a book selection, CFO Hilson recommends the Alice Network, a historical fiction novel that highlights the unexpected and significant contributions of women in a male-dominated field, showcasing their intelligence, bravery, and resilience.

1,002: Transforming Retail: A Strategic Journey | Joan Hilson, CFO, Signet Jewelers

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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.

Read MoreHilson’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.

Don’t miss our first interview with CFO Joan Hilson

775: Back to the Future | Joan Hilson, CFO, Signet Jewelers Limited

“Master the art of learning—or, more precisely, the art and the skill of “learning how to learn.” No other skill will have as much of an impact on your leadership potential as this one, as leadership is fundamentally about anticipating, navigating, and leading change—which is the one constant that defines leadership.” –Joan Hilson, CFO & Chief Strategy Officer, Signet Jewelers

Signet Jewelers Limited | www.signetjewelers.com | Hamilton , Bermuda

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Julien Lafouge emphasizes the importance of understanding others’ perspectives and fostering buy-in for effective decision-making. CFO Lafouge enjoys swimming and finds it liberating, setting KPIs and defining the right ones to monitor both swimming and work as a CFO.

1001: Building Teams and Breaking Boundaries | Julien Lafouge, CFO, Spendesk

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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. This unconventional geography forced him to develop a keen sense of resilience and adaptability, traits that would become cornerstones of his career.

Read MoreLafouge’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.

CFOTL: Tell us about Spendesk … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Lafouge: Spendesk is a spend management platform. It serves businesses with typically up to 1,000 employees. Our comprehensive spend management platform is very easy to implement for the finance team. It does not require the months of consulting and massive budgets that can make other such adoptions a nightmare. It’s very quickly up and running.

There’s very high employee adoption and satisfaction because basically it eliminates the need to do expense reports. However, it serves businesses way beyond this by addressing all spend management challenges in order to allow users to manage their invoices and payments, approve workflows, and so on. You have physical and virtual cards that you can use all across the company. From our standpoint, customer service is something in which we really believe, so we keep our response time in the low minutes. We don’t want to let our customers down.

“Creating buy-in from those around you to move in the correct direction is more important than just proving that you are right. Rational arguments, numbers, and analyses are usually necessary but not enough.” –Julien Lafouge, CFO, Spendesk

Spendesk | www.spendesk.com | Paris, France

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Planful CEO Grant Halloran shares his insights on the current state of AI adoption in the enterprise, emphasizing the need to temper excitement with reality. He highlighted the importance of understanding legal and security aspects, listening to customers, and pacing AI development with their ability to use it effectively. Halloran also discussed the potential of AI to transform business processes, emphasizing the importance of a human-AI partnership and the need for customers to adapt to using the API and learn new ways to do things.

Action Items* Planful is to create an AI Innovation Council to involve early adopter customers * Planful will be releasing new AI capabilities monthly through an iterative process

Planful CFO Dan Fletcher discusses the role of finance leaders in the age of AI. CFO Fletcher emphasizes the need for data governance and security, and stresses the importance of investing in knowledge and training to mitigate risk. Fletcher highlights the significance of preparation and experience in shaping his perspectives on AI, while drawing on his investment background. referencing his past conversations on AI-related topics.

Interviews featured in this episode include:

Mike Petrauskas, Sr. Financial Analyst, Hilb Group

Sr. Financial Analyst Mike Petrauskas of the Hilb Group discusses his efforts enhance the budgeting and forecasting processes of this dynamic ownership group of more than 80 insurance agencies. Hilb Group is aiming for a 5% EBITDA forecast accuracy. Petrauskas emphasizes the importance of better predicting when they will receive payments. NOW LISTEN

James Muscat, Group Commercial Finance & FP&A Director at Ten Lifestyle Group Plc

FP&A Leader James Muscat explains how Ten Lifestyle Group underwent a digital transformation to bring finance to the forefront as a strategic partner. Muscat also shares insights on transforming finance through technology, including the evolution of the role of finance professionals and the adoption of AI. NOW LISTEN

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Tucker Marshall of The J.M. Smucker Company stresses the role of company culture in career choices and corporate strategy. His long-standing admiration for Smucker’s community involvement influenced his decision to join and stay with the company.

1000: When Culture Informs Strategy | Tucker Marshall, CFO, The J. M. Smucker Company

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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.

Read MoreTransitioning 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.

CFOTL: Tell us about The J. M. Smucker Company … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Marshall: Well, first of all—before we get too far into this—please allow me to congratulate you on hosting your 1,000th guest. This is an amazing accomplishment for CFO Thought Leader, and I couldn’t be more honored than to be talking with you today.

The J. M . Smucker Company is a world-class organization that has been in existence for over 125 years. We participate in very unique and compelling food categories that support our strategy, which is simply to lead by building iconic brands that our consumers desire and making them available wherever they shop.

Read MoreOur portfolio today is uniquely rounded out by virtue of us being in the frozen, handheld, and spreads categories. We have our iconic Uncrustables frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which is only natural because we also produce JIF peanut butter and Smucker’s jellies, jams, and preserves. We also are a leader in the at-home coffee space, with brands like Folgers, Dunkin’, and Café Bustelo. In the pet category, we have leadership positions in dog snacks with Milk-Bone and cat food with Meow Mix. We recently completed the acquisition of Hostess Brands, which provides us entry into the sweet baked snack segment. They have iconic brands of doughnuts—as well as Twinkies—which is certainly exciting. We do all of this in support of individual consumers and families because we want to bring into their lives opportunities for memorable meals and moments. This is what makes us such a special organization.

Looking forward, we’re really focused on delivering our core business. We want to realize cost and productivity savings, bolster our synergies, and use our transformation office to address stranded overhead. We also want to complete the seamless integration of our most recent acquisition, Hostess.

As we think beyond this, we do want to acknowledge a couple of things. One is that we continue to live in an inflationary environment, so we need to continue to understand and assess how consumers are being impacted by this. We want to continue to be there for consumers by offering them a full value spectrum for what they may want to consume and where they buy on any given day. I would also say that over the next 12 months, we’ll be focused not only on advancing our people development and nurturing our culture but also on building out our technology platforms and applications.

Finally, as CFO, it’s going to be very important that I continue to have active and transparent communication with all of our constituents. I need to ensure that we continue to set credible financial targets in this environment. I also want to acknowledge that we need to prioritize our capital toward the highest and best returns. As we deliver cost and productivity savings through our transformation office, we want to continue to deploy our capital or cash on a balanced basis to maximize how we’re reinvesting in the company. We’re also returning capital to shareholders and to debt investors as well. These are some of the broader macroeconomic considerations on which we’ll be focusing during the next 12 months, and we’ll also be continuing to refine our communication style and investment style as we move forward. jb

“It’s important to promote a culture wherein every member of the finance organization is focused on being a steward of financial compliance and a strategic business partner. There is a great opportunity for finance to support business growth, and it begins with how we think about our role.” –Tucker Marshall, CFO, The J. M. Smucker Company

The J.M. Smucker Co. | | XXX, OH

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Jason Godley emphasizes the importance of identifying and focusing on a few critical KPIs that can significantly influence the business’s trajectory. CFO Godley aims to transform CFO-speak into actionable insights that resonate with various stakeholders within the company, thereby making financial goals and achievements relevant and comprehensible across all levels of the organization.

999: A Bias for Action | Jason Godley, CFO, Xactly

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On a remote Wyoming cattle ranch, young Jason Godley faced a dire situation: The baler attached to his tractor had suddenly caught fire. Alone, with no immediate help and devoid of modern conveniences like a cell phones 12-year-old Godley had to think quickly and act decisively. His decision to drive to a neighbor’s house to use their hose led not only to extinguishing the fire but also to preserving the surrounding fields. This incident on the ranch, Godley tells us, instilled in him a lifelong “bias for action” and an aptitude for “independent thinking”—themes that would profoundly shape his professional ethos and success.

Read MoreGodley’s journey from the wide open spaces of Wyoming to the corporate board rooms 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 have become even more crucial as he has ascended to the role of CFO at Xactly. Here, his bias for action and independent thinking have enabled him to drive strategic initiatives, particularly in improving sales and marketing efficiency. In dissecting and refining Xactly’s operational procedures, Godley has been able to apply his ranch-learned pragmatism toward enhancing corporate performance and alignment—thus demonstrating how foundational experiences can echo throughout a career, influencing leadership style as well as business outcomes.

Jason Godley’s story exemplifies how lessons learned from childhood challenges can shape later approaches to complex problems and lay the groundwork for successful business leadership.

CFOTL: Tell us about Xactly … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Godley: We were founded in 2005, went public, and then were taken private by Vista Equity Partners. We’re in what’s called the “intelligent revenue’ platform—let me unpack what that actually is. We are at the epicenter of three interdependent things in finance: revenue, operations, and sales. But let’s zoom out a little.

A lot of people talk about how to balance growth with profitability. Much of this is going to be tied to the go-to-market momentum of the entire company. How do you make sure that you’re selling as much “stuff” as possible for the right amount of dollars? Xactly’s solution is right at the heart of this. For example, let’s assume that as a software company, you use bookings. You’re going to try to get X number of bookings next year. Well, how many? How many sales reps do you need? What should be the territories for the sales reps? What should the comp plans look like?

read MoreThis is Step #1 that our tools can be used for. We have something like 17 years and tons and tons of data to analyze and draw from to help us to best position ourselves to best help our clients. The next part is, Okay, now that I know the actual number of sales reps that I need, what about the comp plan? How do I know what comp plan to design for them—how do I make sure that we are paying them correctly? Well, we have a compensation engine that makes sure that what you plan to pay sale reps is actually what you do pay them. There’s visibility on all sides.

There’s another piece, too, in what we do. You’ve planned your go-to-market effort. You’ve set up how to pay your sales reps. Now you want to make sure that are you are actually executing against your bookings plan, right?. So, we have a forecasting tool that can be used weekly with any sales team. How are their sales calls going, right down to the rep level? What are the bookings so far for the quarter? Are things ahead or behind?

In the “end,” we have a highly successful and easy end-to-end solution. We like to think of ourselves as being able to provide a beautiful orchestration of the things that empower people to be better sellers and to make sure that they are paid well. From a CFO perspective, I need to make sure that I am balancing this equation between growth and the profitability that we can achieve through promoting our great tools, plus leveraging all of the data that we have, plus taking advantage of all of the AI stuff that’s happening. It’s all quite magical, and we are leaning forward.

Xactly | www.xactlycorp.com | San Jose, CA

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Lawrence Herman reflects on his experience during the “Bitcoin winter” when he advised against the popular opinion to sell off assets. He advocated for buying more Bitcoin as a strategy to preserve and potentially increase the company’s financial health during a market downturn. At Dwolla, Herman’s priorities include optimizing cash flow and extending financial runway by growing revenue, controlling costs, and managing accounts payable and receivable effectively.

998: Margins, Metrics, and Payments | Lawrence Herman, CFO, Dwolla

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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.

Read MoreFollowing 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.

CFOTL: Tell us about Dwolla … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Herman: As an A2A—account-to-account—payments company, Dwolla provides solutions to our clients to help them to facilitate cheaper and faster payments. While companies might traditionally use banks to transfer funds, Dwolla does the same thing faster than banks. We can do same-day ACH or real-time payments, and we’re also cheaper than credit card companies. So, we a faster and cheaper solution that companies love to use to facilitate payments.

Read MoreOne of our key differentiators is the customization of our product. We’re a low-code, no-code, point-and-click solution that companies can easily adapt for routing payments. Originating in the Midwest, we are also proud to be providing excellent customer service, which is something that you don’t always get when you deal with a larger bank. We’re really an exciting place to work.

Our priority going forward is to focus on cash flow optimization in order to extend our runway by growing revenues, controlling costs, and managing cash flow through A/P and A/R management. Our second focus will be on forecasting accuracy. We’ve been very good at this (within 3%), but as we offer new products, we’ll have to learn more about what the proper assumptions will need to be to get rigorous revenue forecasting. Our third priority will be automation and the optimization of people and processes. This could mean looking at new systems, as well as implementing AI. We just need to think hard about how to not have so many manual processes. jb

“Beyond providing transparency and insight into the numbers, the CFO is the key member of the management team who is often able the provide a compromise solution that balances priorities cross-departmentally while driving forward the long-term sustainability and success of an enterprise. Being a good listener and hearing all parties’ points of view and concerns is the first key to building consensus and driving forward progress. Balancing this with a calm demeanor, you know where everyone stands and can see the path forward as it manifests itself clearly. Also, every problem has a solution. It may not be fun or popular, but perseverance, diligence, and patience are sometimes what are required to see a company to and through an emerging crisis.” –Lawrence Herman, CFO, Dwolla

Dwolla | www.dwolla.com | Des Moines, IA

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When a leader is faced with unprecedented challenges, their true mettle is tested. Daniel Bisgeier, a seasoned CFO, exemplifies how continuous improvement and strategic decisiveness can pave the way for corporate resilience and growth. Reflecting on his career, Bisgeier notes that significant progress often comes not in bursts but through “persistent effort over time and constant refinement.”

Read MoreAn illustration of Bisgeier’s strategic agility occurred during his tenure at MediaMath, amid the tumultuous onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This 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 about not just navigating a crisis but also transforming it into an opportunity to develop more sustainable operations.

“We had to make sure that 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 has had a career journey that reveals a commitment to leadership preparedness that has enabled him to act as a leader when it counted the most.

CFOTL: Tell us about Constellation … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Bisgeier: I’ve been at Constellation since the beginning of January, and I’m really excited to be here. We focus on three main areas: content, data, and compliance. Our content platform allows us to instantly create really beautiful digital assets that are always compliant with legal and brand requirements and that our clients can deploy instantly and at scale across a bunch of different channels. We have clients that license this platform for different uses. We’re strong in automotive, healthcare, and insurance, for example—highly regulated industries that have really important requirements around any asset that is going to be deployed, whether it’s a digital ad or a brochure.

Read MoreOur software platform makes it really fast and easy for them to create assets that work in different environments and look really good. Plus, they work really well, whether for external marketing, internal use, or whatever they’re being used for. We have clients that license the platform. In some cases, we also help clients to deploy these assets through the platform.

We also have a data and analytics business through which we essentially deploy AI tools to build a data analytics platform that takes first-party data—in other words, data that our clients own—and combines it with insights from publicly available data to create an insights platform for our clients. We are using the best tools available to identify what is unique to them and their data so that they can best profit from it. Our clients license both of these as separate products, but they are complementary.

As you look down the road, you see how the purpose of a data analytics platform is really to help you to understand what’s going on in the hearts and minds of your clients and customers. The purpose of a content platform is to help in the creation and deployment of assets that reach the right people with the right messages where and how they want to be receiving messages. This is what we do. We have a dynamic founder leading a company with a lot of growth ahead of it. As I said, I’ve been here only 3 months, but I’m thrilled to be here and to be part of a really strong team. jb

“Be clear about how to measure success and be ready to drive change. An effective CFO empowers better and faster decision-making and leads with insights and recommendations.” –Daniel Bisgeier, CFO, Constellation

Constellation www.helloconstellation.com Baltimore, MD

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On our latest episode three forward looking Planning Aces shared deep insights into optimizing financial performance. The conversation highlighted the significance of predictive metrics and proactive financial planning, with a strong focus on leading indicators to guide business strategies. Detailed exploration of operational efficiencies, particularly in sales and marketing, was discussed as a method to improve organizational impact. Challenges related to maintaining pricing integrity and the innovative use of AI to enhance financial strategies were also addressed. The three leaders each highlight the importance of advanced analytics, technological integration, and strategic foresight in advancing financial practices across various sectors.

This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Jeff Bray of Semperis, CFO Jason Godley of Xactly and CFO Hilary Norris of GTreasury.

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Aaron Levine explains how he views AI as a supportive tool rather than a replacement for human jobs. He champions AI’s role in augmenting the capabilities of finance professionals, through tools like the AI-driven ‘report insights’ feature in Prophix’ platform. Levine emphasizes the critical importance of system and team integration from day one during mergers and acquisitions. His experience with cumbersome system integrations at Blackboard led him to prioritize seamless integration to maintain data integrity and operational efficiency in new acquisitions.

996: Cultivating a CFO’s Toolkit | Aaron Levine, CFO, Prophix

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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.

Read MoreAn 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.

CFOTL: Tell us about Prophix … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Levine: Well, it’s been only about 3 months since I joined Prophix, and I’m really excited to be here. Based in Toronto, we’re a leader in the financial performance management space. We’re private equity–backed by HG Capital of London. We have more than 2,500 customers around the globe. Although we’re really focused on North America, we also have business units in EMEA, APAC, and Latin America. Our offerings serve the office of the CFO—we have a product suite that spans everything from account close reconciliations to corporate consolidations and intercompany management to FP&A.

Read MoreWe have best-of-breed functionality that addresses many pain points along this sort of elongated workstream, which you realize that this really is if you stop to think about it. Starting with the controller closing the books, it goes all the way from consolidating them to going through the financial planning and analysis piece, which spits out budgets and forecasts. We have a full-suite platform that really spans this elongated, close-to-planning process. jb

“Be yourself and form relationships within the business and the external community. Business relationships are like other personal relationships, where trust is built over time.” –Aaron Levine, CFO, Prophix

Prophix | www.prophix.com | Ontario, Canada

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Dan Murphy emphasizes the importance of understanding the underlying factors behind key metrics such as net dollar retention. This involves analyzing why certain customers are buying more and why others aren’t, which can reveal insights into product or service improvements.Looking ahead, his priorities include maintaining rigorous execution, structuring the organization for growth, ensuring readiness for strategic moves such as IPOs, and not overburdening the organizational processes, thus keeping a balanced approach to scaling the business.

995: Embracing Change to Energize Your Career | Dan Murphy, CFO, Commercetools

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The way that Dan Murphy sees it, the CFO position demands that leaders always be kept on high alert. This is a mindset that has led him to habitually monitor updates and alerts related to key vendors, including banking institutions. And so it was, in first quarter of 2023, that he spotted a vague tweet hinting at possible financial instability at Silicon Valley Bank.

Read MoreDespite the tweet’s uncertain implications, Murphy at once became reminded of the risks inherent in relying solely on one bank. He proposed to his company’s management a dramatic strategic move: Diversify the company’s financial reserves by transferring a substantial amount of its assets to JPMorgan as a precautionary step. His decision was based not on confirmed financial trouble at Silicon Valley Bank but instead on a principle of risk management that favors caution in the face of potential financial upheaval.

The board approved his recommendation and the funds were shifted in time, thereby safeguarding his company from the financial disruption that followed when Silicon Valley Bank’s challenges 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 start-ups. The action that he took while CFO of tech company Unqork reinforced the essential finance strategy of having multiple banking relationships, a practice that Murphy feels he has always championed—and always found to have proven its worth at moments of unforeseen challenge.

CFOTL: Tell us about Commercetools … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Murphy: Commercetools is the leading composable e-commerce platform that selling to enterprise-level customers. We solve complex problems for them by allowing them to focus on how they want to engage their consumers—instead of them having to worry about how they’re going to manage this technology, run it, and get it out. We can be highly customized, or we can be set up in in a pre-opinionated structure that enables you to go live relatively quickly.

Read MoreIf you think that you require something more complex, then you can customize us as much as you want, leveraging are close to 350 different APIs. We go to where the consumer is. We can build to any platform and space, whether it’s across mobile, Web, social, or any device that you’re talking about. We solve issues related to scalability, reliability, and flexibility. In short, Commercetools has done a great job of really just focusing on the market, as we solve clients’ problems. We go up against the monolith legacy providers by providing a fully customizable solution for our end-users.

Going forward, it’s heads down and execution. We had a great 2023, and we’re gearing up for an even better 2024. We need to make sure that we have the organization structured in a way that will help us to continue to grow in the best way possible. We need to make sure that we’re acquiring the right customers through the front door. And then there’s what I call “plumbing”: making sure that the back office is ready for whatever our next step is, whether it’s an IPO or whatever. We need to make sure that we’re putting the right underpinnings in place, without squeezing the organization too high, too tight.

“Get out of your comfort zone and volunteer for additional opportunities. Know your strengths and weaknesses and be honest with yourself. Spend time networking in and out of finance circles. Learn from those around you and adopt what works for you.” –Dan Murphy, CFO, Commercetools

commercetools | www.commercetools.com | Munich, Germany

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Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Naresh Bansal emphasizes the importance of flexibility and readiness to adapt to unforeseen changes in the business environment, illustrating this with his own experiences of sudden shifts in company strategy and market conditions. He discusses how his role shifted towards more strategic capital allocation, particularly in response to changing economic conditions such as those brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the need for CFOs to be agile in their financial strategies.

994: Balancing Top-Line Growth and Bottom-Line Results | Naresh Bansal, CFO, Menlo Security

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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.

Read MoreHis 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.

CFOTL: Tell us about Menlo Security … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Bansal: At Menlo Security, our goal is to secure enterprise browsers in order to stop all of the phishing, malware, and other highly evasive adaptive threats that are out there. The Menlo Security enterprise browser helps you in three different ways: It helps you to manage the browser; it helps you to protect your users; and it helps you to get secure access to your application and thus your enterprise data—providing you zero-cost access from any browser anywhere.

Read MoreMenlo’s unique story is that we’re agnostic about which browser you want to use. Whether you want to use Chrome or Edge or something else, we can help you to secure any of these browsers. We’re not coming to the market and saying, “We have this secure Menlo browser that you have to use, and you’ll have to ditch any other existing browsers.” Instead, we’re saying not only that we’re going to enable you to be successful within your existing framework but also that at the same time we will still provide you with all sorts of extra security capabilities.

When you think about it today, we’re all spending 75% of our workday time on browsers—that is, when we’re not on Zoom calls, which themselves require a browser 100% of their usage time. And you know what? The browser is the least protected attack surface in most organizations today. This is why they have become the primary point of entry for cyber criminals to launch their attacks. In just the past 6 months alone, there has been a 200% increase in browser-based phishing attacks.

So, this is where Menlo comes in. We help you to block all of these attacks and provide you with a secure browsing experience regardless of which browser your company or your employees want to use. In terms of download activity today, we protect over 8 million active daily users and handle more than 400 billion Web sessions each year globally. We have locked down clients like some of the largest financial services firms, institutions, and government organizations. For example, even the Department of Defense—which includes the Army, the Navy, and all of the bigger national security operations—relies on Menlo to secure its users there. All of these users rely on Menlo for their browser security and more. jb

“From the beginning, it is imperative to prioritize the following three fundamental pillars: people, systems, and processes. Simultaneously, it is essential to develop a strategic mindset and establish robust relationships with other stakeholders both within and outside the organization. Given that the financial landscape is constantly evolving, it is crucial to remain updated on industry trends, regulations, and emerging technologies in order to be able to make informed decisions. Furthermore, it is advisable to seek guidance from folks who have faced similar challenges in the past. Additionally, it is important to acknowledge and celebrate both minor and significant achievements. –Naresh Bansal, CFO, Menlo Security

Menlo Security | www.menlosecurity.com | Mountain View, CA

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| Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Anisha Sood emphasizes the importance of not looking for a single solution or metric to gauge success. Her approach involves building a comprehensive portfolio of indicators, inputs, and investments to support the overall strategy, suggesting a holistic view rather than a narrow focus. Mental Breaks and Physical Activity: Anisha finds audiobooks beneficial for mental relaxation and engagement, while boxing provides her with a physical outlet that requires complete focus and helps her disconnect from work-related thoughts. |

795: The Canary in the Coal Mine | Anisha Sood, CFO, First Choice Health

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A little more than 15 years ago, Hilary Norris had landed her “dream job” at a tech company in sunny California—a perfect alignment of her 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 existing executives.

Facing a potential career setback and indeed initially marked for replacement, Norris was eventually asked to stay on to lead the finance operations of the combined entity. This twist in her career path not only tested her professional capabilities but also became a stark introduction to the challenges of navigating corporate cultures across borders—this time, within a Germany-based company that had different views on diversity and dual careers.

Read MoreDespite the hurdles, Norris saw through the integration phase with poise and strategic insight. Ultimately, though, she decided to depart due to cultural misalignments. The end of one chapter, however, led to a new beginning in a substantial role managing finance across 17 businesses in the Asia Pacific region. This move highlighted not only her resilience but also her ability to leap into new opportunities that might reshape her career path on a global scale.

Having relocated from the UK to international opportunities in Asia and the U.S., Norris doesn’t hesitate to emphasize the role of supportive personal relationships in career development. She especially cites 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, she looks back on a journey that has underscored crucial qualities in finance leadership: resilience, the ability to adapt, and the courage to embrace change—all of which define the path to success far better than the figures on any balance sheet.

CFOTL: Tell us about GTreasury … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Norris: GTreasury is a SaaS AI technology platform that’s in the office of the CFO. I like to describe it as the center of cash, which is different from what you might find in a standard ERP. It’s the center of cash for your CFO and what enables them to automate Treasury—things like financial risks, debt books, working capital, and payments operations.

So, why would you turn to something like GTreasury as a CFO? What it lets you do is optimize your earnings because you can put your cash to work more easily. It’s much easier to invest in growth when you understand where your cash is and how much you have. It allows you to kind of optimize your capital structures.

Read MoreAs I reflect on things, I realize that it’s a little bit bizarre that here I am, a CFO, and meanwhile we work with CFOs. GTreasury is a tool that helps many CFOs to lead by example in a whole bunch of areas. For instance, economic cycles go through ebbs and flows. They remain very much top-of-mind at the moment, so for many CFOs, it’s all about driving productivity in finance—which is what GTreasury empowers them to do in order to lead by example. This is a great place to be, as I find myself meeting with CFOs all the time. I believe that I understand the space that I’m in, and I’m actually a user of the product myself. jb

GTreasury | www.gtreasury.com | Buffalo Grove, Illinois

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Inside The Mentoring Round, Anomali CFO Udit Tibrewal highlights the importance of using data to uncover underlying issues rather than relying on opinions, which can be subjective and potentially misleading. CFO Tibrewal uses an earlier career chapter to explain how flashy marketing campaigns were not translating into customer engagement or lead generation because they lacked a customer focus. He stresses that solving complex business problems often requires a united C-suite and cross-functional collaboration. This approach he tells us ultimately strengthens interdepartmental relationships.

992: Unlocking Holistic Company Performance | Udit Tibrewal, CFO, Anomali

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Kicking off his career fresh out of school, Udit Tibrewal joined the audit practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers (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.

Read MoreAfter 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.

CFOTL: Tell us about Anomali … how did you happen to join the company?

Tibrewal: At Anomali, we are revolutionizing how our customers navigate the ever-changing landscape of global cyberthreats by empowering them to elevate their security operations and fortify their cyber defense capabilities. We have an AI-powered security ops platform, cloud native, that’s enhanced by an intelligent copilot that automates critical tasks, empowers SOC analysis, and provides essential risk insights to the organization. Ultimately, it boosts productivity and talent retention, which is so important in this day and age. Every company talks about AI—which has become kind of a buzzword—but I think hat this is where we truly differentiate. Our customers really become more efficient as they use our platform and the AI copilot that’s now part of it.

Read MoreDuring the evaluation or assessment process that I go through when thinking about a change, there are three questions that I ask myself. First, what industry does the company operates in? You could be the best company in the world, but if you’re in a space that’s not growing—even having the best management team possible is not going to help you. My last two roles were in cybersecurity, so I understand its landscape. This was a huge attraction for me. The second thing that I look at is the culture of the company. This is really big because when you’re working at a company, you’re spending more hours there than what you spend at home. You want to make sure that you have the right fit with the corporate culture and values. The third thing is the people who make up the management team and even the investors. For me, joining Anomali was simply a matter of checking the boxes on all three of those fronts. jb

“As you step into the CFO role, remember to balance strategic vision with attention to detail. Cultivate strong communication skills, foster collaboration across teams, and always prioritize integrity in decision-making. Stay agile, embrace challenges, and never stop learning.” –Udit Tibrewal, CFO, Anomali

Anomali | www.anomali.com | Redwood City, CA

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Inside The Mentoring Round, Semperis CFO Jeff Bray emphasizes the importance of concentrating investments on the best ideas rather than spreading resources too thinly. In his transition from an analyst to a portfolio manager, he shifted the strategy to focus on the top three to five investment ideas from each analyst, significantly enhancing portfolio performance. Looking forward, Bray tells us he is focused on enhancing financial processes, including shortening reporting and forecasting cycles to better support the company’s rapid growth. He also plans to improve budget reporting to business units and implement stronger governance structures to support scaling operations.

991: Transforming Investment Wisdom Into Management Strategy | Jeff Bray, CFO, Semperis

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Long ago, the power of focus was a lesson that Jeff Bray learned early in his career while transitioning from the role of analyst to that of portfolio manager. He recalls a strategic moment when he realized that narrowing his investments from many down to just three to five key areas would greatly amplify his success. This principle of concentrated effort not only transformed his approach to investment management but also became a guiding principle throughout his career, which includes his latest chapter as CFO of Semperis, a leading cybersecurity firm.

Read MoreAt Semperis, Bray is applying this bit of wisdom to navigate the company through a period of hypergrowth and complex challenges. Semperis has not only been expanding rapidly but also doing so with a focus on strategic areas that promise the highest returns—an approach that Bray appears to be uniquely prepared to execute, given his understanding of financial markets that has been honed over decades and now allows 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’s CFO insists on a robust framework within which sales efforts align precisely with company goals and resources are invested in segments that drive the most value. This approach is evident in his resolve to restructure the company’s pricing model in order to ensure transparency and consistency across the firm’s quickly expanding number of products.

Here again, Bray once more lets us know that his determined watch on pricing is buttressed by his experience of that one early career moment emphasizing the importance of focus and concentration—which continues to influence his own decision-making, as well as the broader trajectory of Semperis’s success.

CFOTL: Tell us about Semperis … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Bray: Semperis is a company about 10 years old that was founded in Israel and has since moved its headquarters to Hoboken, N.J. We are a cybersecurity software firm that provides solutions to help to secure your identity infrastructure. It’s a great space to be in, and we have great products. For the past 4 years, we’ve been on the Deloitte Fast 500, a listing of the fastest-growing technology companies. The reason that we’re there is that we’re solving a really tough problem for enterprises around the world.

Read MoreSo, what is this problem? The nervous system of a company is its identify infrastructure. It allows you to log on to your laptop to get onto your network. It connects to all of the devices that are part of your company’s network. Even your applications are part of your identity infrastructure. So, truly, it really represents the crown jewels of every enterprise. As a result, it’s a high-value target for hackers out there.

Semperis provides solutions that help to optimize your identity infrastructure. We provide backups, and we also provide fast, secure recovery if you’ve been breached or if something else has gone wrong with your infrastructure. The most common identity system in enterprises is Microsoft Active Directory, so that’s what we focus on optimizing, backing up, and being able to recover. We also are adept at dealing with some of the other identity systems that are out there.

There are a few things on which I’m focused this year. The first is to shorten our reporting and reforecasting cycles. We just need to get the books closed a little bit more quickly and to update our forecasts more quickly. In a high-growth business, your ability to invest is the life blood of this growth. Thus, we want to make sure that we’re handling this as optimally as possible. Somewhat related to this, we need to improve the reporting that we’re doing out to the business units and give them budgets on a more consistent cadence. Finally, my goal is to build out some more processes in some of these key areas in which we’re expanding, as well as to ensure proper governance in the same endeavors. jb

“Make sure that you understand any significant changes that have happened over the past year. If a leader or process has changed and ‘past performance may not be indicative of future results,’ then you need to prioritize understanding how this may be reflected in current forecasts.” –Jeff Bray, CFO, Semperis

Semperis | www.semperis.com | Hoboken, New Jersey

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Inside The Mentoring Round, Calendly CFO John McCauley advises startups to prioritize building their product and achieving market fit before heavily investing in a finance organization. He believes that early-stage startups should focus on creating and selling their product, as this is more crucial to their immediate success. He expresses a preference for entering companies where the finance organization lacks maturity, providing him the opportunity to develop and mature the finance function from its foundational elements.

989: The Homecoming: A Tale of Growth, Leadership, and Return | Jeremy Johnson, CFO, Dayforce

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Back in 2016, Mitch Peipert stood at a crossroads. With a career foundation deeply rooted in the precision and rigor of public accounting, he had honed his CFO leadership and operational prowess as he navigated his way through the financial landscapes of various companies. Still, 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.

Read MoreThe news allowed no small degree of uncertainty to take up residence in Peipert’s thoughts. A seasoned finance professional, he was adept at managing numbers and ensuring fiscal health, but the prospect of working side-by-side with an unknown and untested leader cast a shadow of doubt across his career landscape. Would this be the catalyst for transformation, or would it be yet another detour along the road to success that he and others were seeking to travel?

As the CEO began to unfold his vision for the company—which went far beyond the balance sheets and financial statements of Peipert’s realm—a remarkable transformation began to take place. The walls of the traditional finance role started to give way, revealing a new creative space where numbers were not just figures to be reported but tools for sculpting the future.

Together, the two embarked on an audacious journey to steer Thomas Publishing away from the quicksands of print media decline and toward 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. Not only had the CEO expanded Peipert’s strategic vision, but also he had awakened in him the spirit of the change-maker—ready to challenge the status quo and drive the organization toward success in uncharted territories. –Jack Sweeney jb

CFOTL: Your CFO years with Thomas Publishing included a transformative chapter involving a new CEO. Can you tell us about that?

Peipert: Dealing with a new CEO is an experience that a lot of CFOs have gone through or will go through. I had been working for two family members—co-CEOs—who had each been with the business for 50 years. They had started while they were in school, and the business was really all that they knew. They really didn’t know about that much outside the four walls of Thomas. And they were very kind to me, once they saw that I could do the job and was in fact doing the job.

Read MoreThey would say, “You know better than us what to do. We’re not going to micromanage you. Do what you need to do, and just let us know what you’re doing.”

This was fine until one day they told me that they were going to bring in a new CEO. My first thought was: “Oh, great. He’s going to want to bring in his own CFO. And here, after doing this terrific job for years, I could be out of a job myself. And I love this company.”

CFOTL: Well, we know that this was a success chapter and that this didn’t end up happening—but it would be interesting to hear what was going through your mind at the time …

Peipert: The cool thing was that they had him reach out to me directly before he joined. He’s a very charismatic guy—maybe the most charismatic business person I’ve ever met. We immediately formed a bond on the phone. We started talking, and I was sharing numbers and some thoughts while he was picking my brain. We realized that we were on exactly the same page. We kind of needed each other to make this change that he eventually led, but I felt like I was right there with him to support him. It became a terrific partnership. Once I started working with him, I really started enjoying myself again. We saw actual growth, and we saw profitability come back. jb

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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,” […]

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The post Creating an A.I. Framework | Jeff Laborde, CFO, JAGGAER appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

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930: Where Leaders Are Made | Tony Boor, CFO, Blackbaud

MADE POSSIBLE BY PLANFUL | Planful is the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software. The Planful platform, which helps businesses drive peak financial performance, is used around the globe to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and analytics. Planful empowers finance, accounting, and business users to plan confidently, close faster, and report accurately. www.planful.com

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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 […]

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The post Exposing the Path to Profitability | Matt Gustke, CFO, WooCommerce appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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This episode our cohost Brett Knowles suggests that every professional within an organization should have their own “golden KR” or key result that they are held accountable for. As he explains, this would create alignment and clarity throughout the organization. The Rule of 40 and Gross Margin: TreviPay CFO Joel Campbell discusses two intriguing metrics […]

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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 […]

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The post Expansion of the Potbelly Brand | Steven Cirulis, CFO, Potbelly appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Matt Gustke of WooCommerce

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Dallas Clement of Cox Enterprises

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As listeners to our podcast well know, one of our favorite queries for finance executives who have had a lengthy tenure in one place is, “What kept you there?” It may go without saying that something with the word “opportunity” in it is perhaps the most popular response. Still, for certain finance leaders—and especially those […]

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GUEST CFO: Scott Bennion of Paystand

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CFO GUEST: Rob Goldenberg, CFO, 6sense

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Jim Caci of Ave Point

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Dev Ahuja of Novelis

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Among the learnings that Dev Ahuja has gleaned from his three-decade-long, globe-hopping finance career, perhaps none has delivered a more enduring instruction than that which followed his very first hop. By his own account, after Ahuja had reached the summit of Novartis’s finance executive ranks in India, the drug giant invited him to occupy an […]

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CFO GUEST: Niki Heim of LogicSource

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Erin Colgan of Sensei Bio

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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 […]

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Novelis CFO Dev Ahuja highlights his efforts to ensure that finance plays a more prominent role in driving decisions and shaping outcomes across the organization. Ahuja explains his approach involves pushing value levers and making a tangible impact on the company’s profitability and results.

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CFO GUEST: Chris Kramer of Axonius

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Ken Bowles of WilsonACG

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Back in 2001, the new finance recruits roaming the corridors of General Electric Company prodded themselves along as they confronted the everyday challenges of orienting themselves inside GE’s hard-shell corporate culture. This was perhaps especially true for financial analyst Ken Bowles, whose cultural trial was somewhat more daunting, considering whence he had come. Turn back […]

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CFO GUEST: Joe Campbell of TreviPay CFO Campbell explains the importance of not just growing quickly, but also converting that growth into earnings efficiently. As he explains: It’s a delicate balancing act, and we shares his strategies for achieving it. Strategy Communication: Campbell emphasizes the need to articulate and demonstrate the company’s strategy to his […]

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Michael Cox of IRIS Software

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: David Parsons of Zuto

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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 Parsons, “Thirty-nine-year-old Dave is looking at mid-20s Dave and asking, ‘What are you […]

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The post Advice for New CFOs | Michael Bannon, CFO, Typeform appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

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GUEST CFO: Chuck Fisher of Turo

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Guest CFO: Jeff Noto of Zayo CFO Jeff Noto takes us back to a time when he was working in the international division of a Verizon. During an important meeting in Italy, it became clear that Verizon’s European partners were looking to Noto’s team for guidance and expertise. Noto realized that Verizon’s partners saw finance […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Chuck Fisher of Turo

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Alex Triplett of Appfire

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Rex Jackson of ChargePoint

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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 […]

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As a new leader, it’s easy to come into a role with preconceived notions about what needs to be done, but it’s crucial to take a step back and listen to those already in the trenches. That’s where conducting a listening tour comes in. By asking stakeholders, business partners, and team members what’s going well […]

The post Creating the Momentum for Your Success | John Rex, Former CFO, Microsoft, NA appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

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GUEST: Mike DePrisco, President and CEO, IMA Machine Generated Text CFOTL: Hello, we’re speaking with Mike DePrisco, President and CEO of the IMA. Mike, welcome. Michael DePrisco: Thank you, Jack. It’s good to be here. CFOTL: Thank you for making time for us at this conference. I know it’s a busy day or three for […]

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The post Franklin Chiang Shares His 12-Mo Business Priorities, IMA 2023 appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

The post 907: Leaning In to Operations | Rick Rosenthal, CFO, CLARA Analytics appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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CFO GUEST: Taryn Aronson, CFO, Tovala

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Sruthi Lanka of Publico.com

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Dayton Kellenberger of Vendavo

The post How a Price Volume Analysis Reversed a Margin Decline at Coleman | Dayton Kellenberger, CFO, Vendavo appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Even today, Dayton Kellenberger marvels at his good fortune in having landed inside the corporate finance department of Coleman Company.

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.

Read More“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

“Take time to understand the financial drivers of the organization that create value. Focus your efforts there and educate the people in your organization on their roles in delivering these results, even if they are located outside the typical finance and accounting responsibility areas.” –Dayton Kellenberger, CFO, Vendavo

CFOTL: Tell us about Vendavo … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Kellenberger: In a nutshell, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, mostly in the manufacturing and distribution spaces, to help them to optimize revenue and digitize their sales processes. This is a very broad statement, so let me give an example that may kind of help to bring home exactly what we do.

If you’re the type of large firm that becomes our customer, you have your customer relationship management system—your CRM—where you’re housing your leads, your opportunities, your customers. You also have your ERP platform, which is where you are actually billing your customers, collecting your cash, producing financial statements. But there still remains this whole segment in the middle where you need to configure a product. You need to understand the right price for selling it to your customer. You need to deliver a quote, you need to deliver a proposal. And all of this needs to happen in a digital framework.

Read MoreWhat we are talking about here is the market for CPQ—configure price quote—which is very fragmented today. From our perspective, this is really just the table stakes for digitizing your go-to-market. You need to be able to produce a quote that has a price that can turn into an executable document for your customer.

Where we really differentiate from our competition is that we focus on price optimization. For example, let’s say that you’re a company with 1,000 different SKUs that you might sell—so, 1,000 different individual products—and you sell in 30 countries globally, and you also sell in 10 verticals. Multiply these numbers together, and you have hundreds of thousands of different permeations of what price you might sell a given product at, depending on who your end user was and what country you were selling it in.

What our software does is to help customers with complexity to segment their customer base and optimize their prices. We then deliver analytics to help them to understand whether the pricing strategy that they are using is providing value to the customer. If you’re the company, you might segment your product to say, “If it’s in this country, in this vertical, I’m going to charge this price.” You need the ability to do this on a global scale with a centralized solution, and this is the product that Vendavo provides.

The great thing about our product—and the thing that really got me excited about joining the company and really has kind of kept me here—is the ROI that it delivers to our customers. Our customers get an average of about $50 million in annual value from using our solution. The way to think about how we create value is to understand that we’re all about putting the right price in front of the right customer at the right time.

Vendavo | www.vendavo.com | Denver, CO

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Are you tired of sitting through unproductive monthly meetings that turn into show-and-tell sessions? Do you want to shift your focus to key metrics that matter and move away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach?

In this episode of the Planning Aces podcast, Cohosts Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles feature the commentary and insights of three finance leaders who don’t mind displacing the status quo as they seek to optimize their business metrics and drive performance.

Episode #23 kicks off with the hosts featuring recent commentary from Dayton Kellenberger, CFO of Vendavo, who shares his experience with implementing a metrics-based approach to monthly business unit reviews. He explains that they shifted their focus to key metrics that matter and moved away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach. Dayton also discusses the importance of optimizing SAS gross margins, which is a cross-functional effort that involves finance, sales, cloud ops teams, and customer success teams.

Later in the episode, Celeste Ackert and Jason Quinn share their insights on creating cross-functional dashboards and raising the profile of metrics within an organization. Brett emphasizes the importance of using planning tools to build cross-functional dashboards, as it allows for better integration between the planning and operational cycles. He also highlights the significance of customer contribution analysis in optimizing resources and identifying areas of sub-optimization.

Jason Quinn also discusses the importance of cultural norms in achieving desired outcomes. He emphasizes the need for fairness, transparency, kindness as a service, pursuit of truth, and trust through transparency. Brett summarizes Quinn’s points into three categories of measures for FP&A professionals: the overall scoreboard, success potential (leading indicators), and experiences.

Overall, the episode aims to highlight the takeaways and provoke listeners to think about other ways of monitoring how their businesses are performing.

Read MoreBen [03:20]

Nathan, you know, he founded and exited a SAAS company. And, of course, he had a lot of lessons learned from that. So he shares that now. He has his own podcast where he interviews SAS founders, and then built a also a founder path which offers financing for SaaS companies, and then now doing the events. So had you also second time I’ve attended in New York City,

Jack [03:43]

and you were a presenter, as well as a where you are an organizer as well, are you just

Ben [03:50]

Yeah, helped. I was also the emcee on the finance stage for one of the days so just helped introduce the speakers and also presented as well. Now

Jack [03:59]

I know the conference, I think it was the week or the week following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank. Was there much buzz about that or you know, make the conference sort of gloomy I don’t know.

Ben [04:12]

I don’t I don’t say it was gloomy, but I think it did prevent some people from attending because they had to then that was their number one priority to make sure we can you know payroll function we can send payroll, we can pay our vendors so I think yeah, that that did affect quite a few companies of course. But really, honestly by that you know, of course that weekend I’m sure a lot of people were working that weekend once it hit and then that Monday Tuesday and then probably figured out alright, we can send payroll this way or that way even seeing like investors temporary loaning money so they can make payroll. So I by then it was still talk, but it seemed like people were little moved on or maybe had their situation take taken care of by them.

Jack [04:53]

Were curious what your reaction was or your initial idea as to what was going on might have been And what is your lay of the land? Now? What does it look like to you now?

Ben [05:07]

Yeah, I’m by no means a banking expert. But I think for the CFO is a bait us kind of think, again, just about our banking relationships and having redundancy there. And again, sometimes we don’t have a choice, maybe we were bought out by a PE firm, and the debt facility was through this bank. And now we’ve got to change banks to that bank. And we have no choice. I’ve been in that situation where you don’t have a choice of the banking situation, even though you’re the CFO, but then it makes you think, well, maybe I shouldn’t close that account that I was with. And also, I think, just local banking relationships, you’ll maybe go into these big national global banks. But I think also now the redundancy of having that relationship in your town with someone you can go meet and talk to, maybe you have a line of credit through them. That’s really cheap. You know, the fees are really cheap each year for that. So I think now versus just having one bank, I think definitely, because both for we’d want to consolidate, you know, all these different bank accounts, cash sitting in different counts, and let’s just consolidate right, we think that makes our life easier it does to some extent, but now I think definitely, I think CFOs learned that yeah, we need to to banking relationships.

Jack [06:12]

Well, thank you for that, Ben. And I’ll mention right now that two of our planning aces in this episode, are actually SAS CFOs. And Ben, like to kick things off with you by just asking What did you make of the three finance leaders who will be featuring?

Ben [06:29]

Yeah, it was really interesting. I think that definitely some it’s too common threads are two common threads. One, yeah, definitely finance helping with sales and sales data, in sales compensation. And then overarching, the three conversations was really data. And one of them I think, was Gary talking about business intelligence, where that sets how to make that the most effective. So I think, yeah, there’s a theme of sales and enabling sales as a finance leader, but then then the data aspect and all of these.

Jack [06:59]

Yeah, they do. They all, they all hit on data. And it’s interesting. This is a nice snapshot in time, all three of these conversations happened over the last 60 days. And you’ll see that they pick up on many of the same themes. So permit me to tee up our first planning ace who will be Gary Xyla, CFO of acid mark from Episode 877 of CFO thought leader, Gary’s Isla has been with asset mark for the last 12 years, he’s been part of a number of transactions. It was bought by private equity, this company twice in the past went public just a few years back. So there’s been a number of transaction milestones on his CFO tenure. But But the part of a conversation I wanted to share here had to do when I asked Gary about di because several times during our conversation, he brought up the business intelligent unit or group referred to it multiple times. So my question to him was simply, where is it? Where does it reside in your organization? And I thought it was kind of interesting how he explained where BI is today. This is Gary Xyla, CFO of asset mark.

Gary Zyla [08:24]

The finance team I oversee, it’s fun, and it’s broad, right? We have you have, you have business intelligence, I have investor relations, corporate development, communications and PR, are part of our finance team, which is somewhat unusual. Sometimes. We have f PNa. Of course, you have controllership. And but business intelligence is amazing. And I think in many companies, depending on the type of company you are, you can you could draw business noses in a couple of areas, it could sit in it, I wouldn’t recommend them. It could sit and it becomes very IP focused. Because we’re able to process data. It could sit in sales, because oftentimes there’s no issues. It’s so focused on predictive metrics and whatnot for sales. It could sit in a strategy group, if you had a separate Strategy Group. I think in our company and unlucky finance is very strategic. Obviously, that’s why we’re talking very, very deeply based and so it really fits well here. Our leader of Vi Qi has his wanton 1000s of beautiful balance between them with Hawk it which I cannot. So I don’t know what she’s talking about. She can talk about it and what she can also talk to business and talk with our business leader sales, etc, etc. And what they’re looking for. And you know, they they, they team now is about seven or eight of i 50. Person finance, you know, for scale, and finance things. I’ve seen a few people. The vi team itself is about seven folks and they they not only collect the data and Make sure they’re the source of truth. Like I said, they’re what goes in our 10k. Right. And here’s all our statistical numbers. They also, they also, they, they take that data, and they actually do compensation based off of it. So they may handle a compensation for our sales team. And so they’re the source of truth for our sales team for a very important thing, and that what they get paid. And, and so they are essential. And and I think, while I, my particular team in all works well together, they feed in, they take data from control ship, obviously, and they give data to the control ship for the for, like I said, our SEC filings. They work with our FPGA team who does our forecasting and modeling. And they work actually with our communications team, because I want our communications team wants to go out and talk about our company, they need that type of data for them. And of course, they work with our front end business all the time in terms of trying to find predictive metrics.

Jack [11:13]

Okay, thank you, Gary’s Isla, CFO of asset mark again, Episode 877 of CFO thought leader do get a sense. From that episode of Gary’s emotional intelligence and how he likely leads he seems very inclusive, how he explains things he seems very careful in in what’s the word I’m looking for courteous to the different parts of the organization, but more takeaways than what I’m sharing. Ben, what did you think?

Ben [11:48]

It was really interesting, because Gary worked in a public company lot of functions underneath him as the CFO, Treasury, investor relations, but he tax accounting, FP and a, and then the BI and of course, yeah, he carefully worded it where he’s like, Yeah, I don’t really recommend it under it. And of course, it as CFOs and finance were data hungry, right, we want access to data. And it makes sense that Gary recommended that the FBI Business Intelligence Team sits under him, because you can do so much with that, and also enable other organizations to do more as well with that data. So yeah, you’re really, really not a surprise.

Jack [12:23]

speaking broadly, let’s just talk about their SAS realm for a moment bi, in most SaaS companies would be under the finance umbrella. Am I Am I right about that? Or does it also appear to be other places?

Ben [12:41]

I think you’ll see multiple approaches. But I think it makes sense, right? Finance, we work with a lot of data. And usually, if there’s no BI team, F PNA, is tasked with helping with that data analysis, helping sales with their pipeline analysis, just that extra set of eyes, and then it evolves from there to say, do we need a formal BI tool within our org and then eventually, maybe we need a champion for that BI tool and a team. So finance, just naturally we work with a lot of data. So it makes sense that at least, you know, in SAS companies, that it starts with finance, and then maybe we formalize that function, I have

Jack [13:13]

to believe where there might be, let’s call them legacy bi groups or units that are attached to it that as the companies evolve, in fact, that group is is becoming increasingly part of finance are linked to finance.

Ben [13:29]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think yeah, could be industry specific to when I was in the airline industry. And it depends what role does finance play in this organization in this industry, when I was also in the airline industry, very finance centric finance was involved in everything and you had to be so financially disciplined, where maybe other industries, it’s not that way, you know, to start with, so it could be industry specific, you know, in in how they look at finance and value that and how that function interacts with all other departments.

Jack [14:00]

Back when the folks at Pay Pal acquired the company, Braintree nearly, I’d say a decade ago, the door of opportunity swung open for our next planning ace, Theodore Guna, VA CFO of next insurance. She explains she became a business unit CFO for the new entity of Braintree and Venmo. In our clip, she highlights very nicely. What the opportunity brought forth was, was in some ways, a challenge about sales compensation and a challenge about aligning sales structure. Anyway, she had some really interesting thoughts highlighting that strategic chapter that she said she learned a great deal from again, here’s Teodora gonna have a CFO of next insurance.

Teodora Gouneva [14:58]

Through my career, I spent a lot of times barring sales teams, and usually what is critical with the sales team is they respond really well to how you design compensation. And if you don’t design it the right way, you may get a different behavior that you don’t intend. So looking back at that particular example, the way we work, as we said, the company goals and we know, at the high level where we want to get to and how we get there in sales teams at PayPal play significant role of that, how are we getting to our strategic long term vision? In having the conversation with them to translate? Why would we asking from them now is different than what we asked from them last year, and how that helped the company and how, therefore they should adjust behavior was pretty important for us. And I think that happened around after PayPal had acquired Braintree we had to bring two sales team together and change how they operate. So we had to paint the vision for them of what PayPal needs. How is that new dynamic between the sales team coming together? And ultimately, what is the goal, so we had to get them strategically aligned on what is important and why. But from a finance perspective, we had to put the financial infrastructure in place or the compensation plans, plans in place that drive the right behavior. So that is, that has happened in multiple types of occasions, not just related to sales team, I think such an effective approach has to happen with any other goals and other any other alignment that you need to get for people to work towards the same strategic direction.

Jack [16:50]

So again, a nice chapter from the finance career Teodora Univa, from Episode 880, by the way, if you missed it, it’s well worth listening. But Ben, what did you make of what Teodora share?

Ben [17:05]

Yeah, I think it was really interesting with Teodor about sales or finance being involved with sales, compensation tracking, and analysis and those payouts, you know, that’s, that’s really common. And you know, and I cringe whenever I hear someone say, you know, sales was coin operated, you know, which which she did not, but, you know, the, the sales compensation plan kind of dictates the behavior and sales, which of course, makes a ton of sense, just like SAS founders trying to maximize the value of their company, they’re looking at those things that will maximize the value, same thing for sales, you know, that they’re going to maximize, maximize their, their compensation. So, you know, with compensation plans, right, they’ve got to be repeatable, they’ve got it under be understandable. You know, so everyone can understand how the plan works, how it pays out, and how it contributes to the overall objectives of the company. So very common to hear that CFOs are involved in finance involved with the sales compensation structure. And because we’ve got to eventually we’ve got to pay that out for the sales team.

Jack [18:03]

So let me ask you something here. Just thinking about a conference room where finance and sales has come have come together to sort out Okay, again, there’s this acquisition, there are two teams coming together that they’re trying to get some synergies from. And it’s a delicate, as any merger is there’s there’s 100 ways for things to get misunderstood. What does finance generally misunderstand about the sales team across the table? What is it that finance at times just doesn’t get?

Ben [18:41]

Well, I think finance misunderstands potentially just the day in life of sales and how hard it is and the pressure there. I think finance light likes to be very critical of sales performance every month and hitting targets, hitting quotas, that eventually end up in our revenue forecast, you know, so I think we have to understand just just that day in the life and be a little more sensitive to what’s going on in sales and really be there to help and enable and that’s finances, I think one of the major functions is to enable and to facilitate, you know, it’s not just all about the numbers sometimes. So I think, you know, not looking at the data always and just looking at what’s happening with within those sales teams, and how we can help and I think, you know, the big thing then for finances, looking at sales, compensation plans, and then of course, we understand quotas and targets and how much gets paid out, but how that then translates into the overall cost structure within a company and then hitting our go to market sales and marketing efficiency targets, you know, so, you know, connecting those two pieces can be hard, but I think it’s understanding that day in the life you know, what products they’re selling, and, and you know, how they’re being compensated on that and how that all rolls up together.

Jack [19:55]

All right. Well, speaking of connecting the pieces Our next planning ace spent a decade at LinkedIn between 2010 and 2020. He was the head of F PNa. Today well, and Chen is CFO of Grafana. Labs, we are pleased to feature him on episode 874 of CFO thought leader will and turns back the clock for us and takes us back to his LinkedIn days, figure 2010 to 2013, he had a special challenge that he’s going to share with us. And once more are planning and he puts a bright light on sales compensation and working with the sales team.

Wailun Chan [20:49]

Back in 2010 to 2013 ish timeframe at LinkedIn. The member base was about 40% us and 60% International. But the revenue was except flip. It was about 70% us and 30% International. So the key takeaway like the headline on there’s always been like, there’s a lot of whitespace. There’s a lot of commercial opportunities for LinkedIn outside of us. So the question is, what are we going to do about it? And what was really fun was like across the finance team between FPA reserves and other organization, we actually like look at data. And then eventually, we came up with a playbook that like, hey, if the members his certain threshold, like number of members, he’s doing thresholds in the market. If the engagement, his sunnah threshold, if there’s a cop company like meaning non paying companies on our website, on sort of market history and threshold, once you hit like those three threshold, create intercession, then you can go in with the inside sales team. And then eventually, you can go to enterprise sales. And pretty quickly, you can create a scale good market organizations. And so using the playbook, we open 20, plus local offices over two years. And then in the spirit of us to be able to do that to scale that, I think is a big driver of the hyper growth that LinkedIn experienced during the 2010 to 2012 timeframe. And that was one that I felt that we brought visibility on what’s going on in the market, can we try some insight, and then combined with some external data, and then to basically create a strategy on the gold market? And it plays out?

Ben [22:46]

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. You got to the whole data aspect, again, mining data, and helping teams in this case sales be more effective in their job in their process. And it’s funny, he was talking about LinkedIn back 2010 2010 2013 period that I remember received my first LinkedIn request, you know, around that time, or Oh, nine, like, what the heck is this platform, so that, you know, going, going way back, but he talked about the user base, where the revenue was coming from it was kind of flipped us versus International, and really digging into that data to provide data that then can help those inside sales teams, you know, reach the right customers, and with the right data to in, you know, to help, I think it was even up, you know, how they were, you know, the user base was engaging and, you know, spending dollars on LinkedIn is platform.

Jack [23:36]

So just within that short span of years, they they opened up 20 locations pretty, pretty amazing abroad. And I liked how he explained about the thresholds and about how, you know, indirect, the indirect sales teams sort of pass it as it up to the enterprise sales team. Eventually, as the thresholds are met, and, and opportunities came forward, well, probably for

Ben [23:59]

some of these larger firms where they have, you know, regions defined, but then sometimes you have these enterprise teams that are over several regions and more like relationship managers that make it involved in different regions regions to kind of bring that story together. So I think that could be a function of a larger company, or even a high growth company, that you have different layers of sales. And then those teams are interacting with each other to to better close deals

Jack [24:26]

been since you’ve joined us here. I feel compelled to ask this question. Chief Revenue Officer is the title that the SAS realm really coined. True, or that’s my read on it.

Ben [24:44]

That’s funny CRO. Yeah. Could be because, honestly, we don’t know when I hear CRO. Is it their VP of sales? Is that their VP of bargaining? Is that a role that’s both VP of Sales and Marketing and we’re giving them the C title. So we are really common in SAS now and maybe Again, a function of larger orgs, where you hire, you’re building out your sales team, you have a VP of sales and maybe eventually you promote he or she into that CRO position. But yeah, yeah, super common in SAS to hear that, but usually, you got to ask a few questions, what function? What departments? Are they actually overseeing?

Jack [25:19]

Well, again, I think it’s a title that we see in SAS companies along with the jargon go to market along with customer success along with a lot of the customer centric metric names. Yeah, for

Ben [25:33]

some, for some industries, you can be like, What are you talking about a go to market motion team, just like when I was in the airline industry, we’re not calling up, you know, people to say, hey, buy our tickets, right? We’re running ads, of course. But then you come into SAS, right, you, you have that go to market motion team. And it’s can be so complex. There’s so much investment in sales and marketing to drive revenue to drive expansion, revenue, and also so much data trapped in there trapped in our lead funnel, our pipeline funnel. So it’s a huge responsibility. And if not done, right, it can just suck up a bunch of cash and really lead to really poor results, of course, so it’s it’s a huge role within SAS companies that does deserve that that C title.

Jack [26:17]

So then, just one more SAS question for you then wondering how the SAS metrics you feel they performed in this sort of odd period were in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, in the last venture money available in layoffs, really a tech recession underway? are they performing the way they are? Are they serving the companies the way they should? And visibility into cash? Of course,

Ben [26:49]

I think the metrics didn’t serve them well, when they had no metrics in place. And now everyone’s scared scrambling to put metrics in place I attended event recently in Denver, where a PE firm an investment bank, presented on just the latest in software m&a trends in the market. And the P for mentioned, it’s 2023 is all about unit economics all about SAS metrics, understanding all those dials, what’s working, what’s not working, because financial statements, although very important, SAS only take us so far. And it’s like that iceberg the tip of the iceberg, we got to look underneath the waterline to really understand what’s happening in our business. So I think now everybody’s probably trying to scramble Of course, we know cash runway, cash, runway, cash runway, but now what what impacts our cash runway, right, we’ve got to look at growth, retention, our margin profile, our financial profile, and that’s where those unit economics come into play, and now scrambling to put those in place.

Jack [27:45]

I lied, I’ll serve up another SAS question for you, you know, SAS companies, when it comes to measuring the customer experience customer success, they are leading edge when it comes to managing their cash, are they are they as cash savvy as they are customer savvy?

Ben [28:03]

I think I think I like to say financial discipline ever goes out of style, you know, in good markets when cash is free and plentiful. Right? We, we lose some of our discipline. You know, if we know we’ve got a lot of cash in the bank, we know if we can get more cash down the road. You I see that companies lose that financial discipline. And then when things get tough, man, things go off the rails really fast. You know, so whether good markets or bad we’ve got to have that financial discipline in place, and it’s hurting those folks who didn’t have visibility into that runway. And it comes back to just fundamental financial discipline, having a forecast model in place forecasting your financial financials forecasting your cash runway, and just those basics that the finance function should be doing. Or if SAS founders if they’re too early yet, you know, again, that’s where fractional roles come into place to help them if they can’t afford a full time CFO. But, you know, for me, it just comes back to the fundamentals.

Jack [28:59]

Nice. That’s the perfect place to end this episode. Ben, thank you for those final comments. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Planning Aces.

About Our Guest Host: 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

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CFO GUEST: John McCauley of Calendly EPISODE: 870: When Preparation Matters

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CFO Guest: Gary Zyla of AssetMark EPISODE: 877: The Transformative Transaction

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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.

Read More 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 there was a path forward.” –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Zepz … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Mitchell: Zepz is a global cross-border payments company. We operate two brands in the market, WorldRemit and Sendwave. Our mission is to promote “a world that celebrates migrants’ impact on prosperity, at home and abroad.” We pursue this by offering a digital remittance service. If you’re a migrant worker in, say, the U.S., the UK, Canada, or Australia, you’re able to send money back home to markets where we typically operate on the receive side, such as Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Nigeria, or the Philippines.

Read More We do some business in Latin America as well. Just as with a Western Union, almost, you’re able to send money back home. WorldRemit runs through our Web or mobile experience—some way that’s just mobile. Our pricing point is very competitive and typically lower than at Western Union. We’re easy to use, and people are able to have full transparency around the fees and pricing that they are paying.

Zepz was founded as WorldRemit some 12 or 13 years ago. It’s grown quite a bit, mainly in its UK base. We became a worldwide brand when we acquired the Sendwave in early 2021. We are still a privately held, VC-backed company—what you would probably call a late-stage fintech firm. We had tried to start an IPO process back in early 2022, but, as you know, the market conditions really started pulling back, so the management team at the time decided not to go through with it. The company was still probably somewhat too immature at the time, from an operational standpoint, to become a publicly traded company anyway. We’re still private today, but we’re well capitalized as well as profitable.

Zepz | www.zepzpay.com | London, UK

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Ward: I actually think it might be more unique given my background to talk about a Strategic Finance moment that related to a position I was in when I was in, in actually Investment Management, which relates to those scenarios I was talking about. So while I was working in mass, Mutual’s Investment Management subsidiary, now called bearings, I was asked by our MassMutual CEO at the time, just as the very beginning of the financial crisis, if I would think about and lead whatever group I wanted to put together an A study of adverse scenarios that would help us to learn and be better prepared to manage through any of a number of different scenarios that might affect MassMutual, more so than than another company, so that again, we’d be better prepared. And he said, Don’t come back in a couple of weeks. So I want you to really kind of dig into this adverse scenario analysis. I loved the project, I loved having the freedom to define the scenarios, to define who was working on it. And to be free to look at these scenarios, not just for asset management and the asset portfolio, but to look at it for MassMutual as a whole.

Read More So indeed, what I did was go out and work with the risk management department, the investment management department, the actuarial department, the finance department, and looked at what sort of risks we saw how we would go about modeling them, and then looked at how they would affect MassMutual. But then I also needed to bring it needed to bring in the competitor angle to and how it would how we thought we would compare such that we then what, what would we do next, what was the recommendation about what we needed to do next to better protect ourselves. And indeed, what I what I looked at were concentrations in some parts of our asset portfolio concentrations in our insurance, product and protection portfolio, as well as potential external factors and what that that would do. It was great fun. I also showed what the accounting impact would be because I was working with with finance, I then presented this information and after four months of work on it with the team presented it to senior management. And they had said, this is exactly the kind of analysis we want to see. And as a result of that, I did more of that when I was in risk management. But I’ve done more of that. And I brought it more of that analysis, the data driven analysis we were talking about to finance, because while in risk, you’re very much focusing on these tail risks. In corporate finance, I believe it’s very important to look at, where do you think the company is going around the baseline scenario? So don’t don’t look for the crazy tail risks, focus on what are the different things that can happen now. And as a result of doing that scenario analysis and showing how I like to do it, as well as how I thought it should and could be done. We do that regularly and have done it. For example, in the COVID crisis. What might happen if this is a pandemic, like, like 98 team, what happens? What else might it costs, we did some of that scenario analysis at the beginning of COVID. And I would argue that we were better prepared because of some of the work I’ve done in my past, bringing that finance moment into into now.

CFO GUEST: Betsy Ward of MassMutual EPISODE: 884: Understanding Your Business Thesis

The first Collaborative Accounts Receivable Network. Our AR automation solutions and next-generation B2B payments network make billing and payments easier for enterprises, increasing efficiencies, accelerating cash flow, and dramatically improving the customer experience. Visit us at www.versapay.com/cfo

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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 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.

Read More “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

“Keep developing yourself with that external view and intellectual curiosity that has supported you all along, keeping as many ‘doors’ open as you can as long as they interest you.” –Betsy Ward, CFO, MassMutual

CFOTL: Tell us about MassMutual … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Ward: MassMutual was founded in 1851. In fact, even though the interior of the building that I’m in is quite contemporary, we’ve been here in Springfield, Massachusetts, since the very beginning. We’re proud of our long-term presence, just as we’re really proud of focusing on delivering long-term value to our policyholders.

I guess a number of companies may say this, but—as a mutual life insurance company—when we focus on our policyholders, we’re in fact focusing on our owners because our participating policy holders are the owners of the company. There are no shareholders, so we’re very aligned with our policyholders.

Read More This does set us apart, as well as allows us—in fact, encourages us—to focus on the long term. We need to be financially strong to support our long-term promises to our policyholders because most participating whole-life policyholders own their policy for decades. In fact, some even buy policies for infants, which means that they’ll have the policy for over 100 years. This long-term promise is unique. These days, many public firms are so focused on short-term stability that they aren’t very interested in setting up reserves for long-term promises in the same way that a company like MassMutual is.

Another way that we separate and define ourselves is that by focusing on the long term, we’re also focusing on the economic return that we’ll be delivering over that period because participating policyholders share in the upside with MassMutual. We’re looking to make sure that we’re providing as competitive a dividend as makes sense over a long period of time, which is also rather different. It’s not just, “Hey, how high a dividend can we pay this year? And we’ll just have to see what happens next year.” We’re always looking for the appropriate amount to pay at any given point in time. We want to make sure that we’re not adding volatility to our policyowners’ lives but instead providing them with the protection that they looked for when they turned to a financially strong company like MassMutual.

MassMutual | www.massmutual.com | Springfield Ma

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Brett & Jack discuss how the hiring function is expected to become the sweet spot for Chat GPT and other AI offerings as the technology emerges as a powerful tool for finding and qualifying talent for organizations.

This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Jonathan Carr of Armis, CFO Céline Dufétel of Checkout.com, and CFO Dan Fletcher of Planful. Our discussion highlights:

More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees.

The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations.

Your Hosts | Brett Knowles & Jack Sweeney

About Brett Knowles

Made Possible By

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GUEST CFO: Celine Dufetel of Checkout.com EPISODE: 856: Understanding What’s in Your Control and What’s Not

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Echave: But very early in the pandemic, we realize that actually, we’re going to survive, because we have a robust organization, we have a strong balance sheet. We have responsible shareholders, we have fantastic creditors, that actually supported us through the worst moment of times, but we realize that as important as protecting the business through the crisis was to win the recovery. But also making sure that while the pandemic was happening, we’re not dropping the ball of fundamental, long term trends like decarbonisation. So we put in plan, you will put in place a plan that success for us was over a longer period of time.

Read More So just going through these three phases, protect the business when the recovery and build back better, and realizing when was the right time to hold the blocks in terms of protecting your losses, protecting your liquidity, etc, etc. But what was the time to really start recruiting back because the recovery was going to be very, very fast. So defining success over a period of time, I think it’s a fundamental thing that we did, wisely, in my view. The second thing is success, to whom it’s not just success to shareholders, is not just success to creditors, but he’s also success to your own employees. We are living wage employer ID the sponsor the organization to become a living wage employer. And one of the things that we realize very quickly is that it’s in times of crisis, where you have to deliver your commitments is very easy to become a living wage employer when you have abundance and you are making profits and you are paying dividends. But the relationships with your own employees rely that when you are facing difficult times, you are also making those commitments. So we made the commitment that we were not going to abandon our living wage employer. With hindsight, one of the decisions we made why because of has allow us to attract talent back rapidly when the demand has come back. Also, we decided not to abandon our commitments to the prom payment code, making sure that we were paying our small and medium enterprises on time. Because if as a big organization, we were struggling with liquidity or worry about liquidity, we’re not struggling. We’re worried about liquidity. Imagine a smaller organization. So we made the decision that we were not going to change the terms of payments to our small and medium enterprises. So defining success not only for few stakeholders, but actually through the entire ecosystem was a fundamental part of of the success. So, if I have to really flag one of the things that we really did well was, first of all, is making sure that the foundation’s in terms of team culture, purpose, personal resilience, all these things were ready as soon as possible, because you never know when the next crisis is going to hit was really important. The second thing is designing a plan that was answering very clearly a very difficult question, which is how do you define success, over which time horizon and success to whom. And I think being able to address all the different stakeholders over a longer period of time has been, for us the biggest financial strategic moment that actually now we are celebrating, but at the time, it took a hell of a lot of effort.

CFO GUEST: Javier Echave of Heathrow EPISODE: 883: The Confidence That Experience Brings

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When Heathrow CFO Javier Echave tells us that one of his greatest career lessons was learned from being passed over for the giant 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.

Read More “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

CFOTL: Tell us about Heathrow Airport … what sets it apart from other global hubs?

Echave: Well, Heathrow is really the only hub airport in the largest aviation market in the world. For a number of reasons, London is the largest aviation market in the world. It’s 20% bigger than the second market, New York. This is because of a number of factors. One is its geopolitical situation halfway between the U.S. and Europe and and Middle East. It has been a major financial hub for many, many years. But it’s also a destination in and of itself. London is an extraordinary city.

We are the gateway of the UK to global growth, which takes on increased importance when you realize that the UK economy is the fifth largest in the world. This is not because the UK has huge commodities or oil or intellectual property but very much because of its trading power. Heathrow is the largest port in the UK, with 40% of the country’s exports traveling in the belly of an aircraft.

Read More Just a few inches below you – you are traveling with everything from Salman diamonds, horses, and cars to farm goods, ventilators, masks, vaccines, and just about everything that you can think of. I think that this is one of the things that makes us so special. We are literally the gateway connecting the UK with global growth.

Operationally, we operate the two busiest runways in the world. That (volume) has forced us to become extremely competitive and extremely optimized operationally. We are the home of the three largest airline alliances, and their self-catering operations themselves make up almost a small city. We have 400 companies and 75,000 people. We are the owner of the largest private road network work in Europe and one of the largest electricity networks in Europe as well.

At the end of the day, all of this is for a single purpose, which is to give passengers the best airport service in the world. Our success is about the service that we can bring you. Perhaps you’ve seen this absolutely fantastic movie Love Actually, which is about the hero being involved in special magic moments in the Arrivals lounge at our terminals. When you see families being reunited, when you see businesses taking off, when you see people experiencing and going out on an adventure, this is really what the hero is all about. Because of this, people will see the airport as the hero—which actually we are not, as we are a service company.

I think that this is not only one of our airport’s fundamental challenges but also one of its great opportunities. We are a service business through which services are provided by people for people. Therefore, delivering this culture of of service, this culture of collaboration, is critical for us. Our joint success with our airline partners and ground handlers is about delivering this service every day. When you go into the airport, you go through different processes: You check your bags, you go through security, you experience our fantastic retail services, maybe you jump into a bus before walking down a jetway into an aircraft. When you return, you reunite with all of these processes. All of these services that you experience are provided across 400 companies.

So, culturally, if you are a service provider, you might have a very narrow view of your own role. You take care of the areas for which you’re explicitly responsible. But when you really ask consumers who is helping them, they actually don’t know—and often they don’t even care about how or with whom they are interacting. I think that what they do care about is that they want to group together fantastic end-to-end experiences. I think it was Maya Angelou who said something like, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The long-lasting memory that you get when you travel through Heathrow is very important. You might have had a bad day with one of our critical airline partners. Security might not have been performing well. Immigration, which is provided by the government Home Office might have had a terrible queue or a meltdown of systems. Maybe even the surface-access transportation getting you into the airport might have been on strike or simply delayed. But the reality is that after a few weeks, what you will remember is whether you had a good or bad experience at Heathrow. This is really what it counts, and it’s really what will influence your decision about where to travel.

Obviously, if you are an American passenger traveling to Dubai, you have choices: You can commute via Heathrow, but also you can commute via Fraport or you can commute via Madrid or you can commute via other routes. At the end of the day, your overall experience over time is really what will cause you to choose one airport over another. So, the culture and the experience at Heathrow are really the things that are so vital and so special.

Heathrow | www.heathrow.com | Longford TW6, United Kingdom

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Young: First off, it’s interesting because talent to me is the most… I don’t know. I think it’s the fun part of the job. It’s the hardest part, but it’s the fun part of the job. I don’t just think about it for finance, I probably think about the whole organization. I get to interact with all the groups. It’s a fairly quantitative business. I’m constantly evaluating what we have. We have remarkably talented people and so my first thought is retention of our really good people, and retention is really critical. We can talk about attracting attention, but retention is… Sorry, attracting talent. But that retention piece is incredible.

Read More So recognizing who the hypos are, the high performers and high potentials in my organization and other organizations is what I sort of immediately do day one. Start maintaining that list, making sure I’m getting lots of exposure to those folks and from other organizations making sure that A, I’m learning from them. They feel like they’ve got multiple connection points in the organization, always with an eye towards maybe they want a career in finance as well. I wouldn’t be afraid to offer them as well. So I think that’s really critical.

Then I also think about myself as one of the people facing members of the team. I get lots of airtime and all the rest. So every interaction I have, I think about my ability to engage, encourage, speak truth to our teams. So I think all leaders have to do that. But I realize I get a fair amount of time at the mic and it’s really incumbent upon me to think more broadly about my scope and specifically to people. That’s what matters. I think if I do my job well, I can help our other leaders sort of galvanize the talent part, which helps with retention and obviously recruitment.

CFO GUEST: Jim Young of Coalition EPISODE: 876: Exposing Where Business Value Resides

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Gerber: I think one one term, even if CFOs have different roles that resonates with everyone, and isn’t everyone’s area of responsibility is the annual operating plan, or the AOP, as we all affectionately call it. When I was at Mattel and corporate FP&A. I participated in that and helped lead it for three years, and I saw three different approaches, the tops down the bottoms up, and let’s call it a bit of a hybrid with driving some alignment across the brand and the commercial teams up front. Now, in my experience, neither is perfect, neither tops down, nor bottoms up, they both fall short. On one hand, you risk creating unrealistic expectations, people don’t feel bought in, they don’t feel like they’ve had an opportunity to have a voice, you know, in their what they need as resources and investments in planning.

Read More And on the other, you know, you see submissions that may have a bit more cushion might not be as efficient. And also people are submitting a bid in silos without that unifying vision. And so that leads to you know, wasteful planning and misalignment. So that shaped my approach it chromadex And I tend to take a hybrid approach tops down bottoms up, it also suits my asking powerful questions, like I mentioned earlier, and, you know, powerful questions. I when someone said that to me, I said, what is that? What do they mean by that, that I ask powerful questions? Well, it’s according to one definition, they’re open ended, they empower the person responding to choose the direction they take. They create possibilities, encouraged discovery, deeper understanding and new insights. They’re curious and non judgmental.

They seek further learning and connection. I love that. So I really bring that to the AOP process, before I became CFO and continuing as CFO. A couple of finance strategic moments that build on each other and that one is, I came to realize that the ALP was new to Chromadex. Unlike Mattel, where they’ve been doing it for years, leaders were accustomed it was new to us. And it had become a tool to drive prioritization of resources, which was not efficient LED to churn that lead to reduce and rework and it just wasn’t a good experience for people even if we got to a good result at the end. So in partnership with the CEO and our head of HR and the leadership team, we dialed in our goals for the year and building to the next year in objectives and key results and then ensure that the ALP submissions just very much laddered up and aligned to those. So that was a important step. And it got us closer. That clarity was good, but it wasn’t the whole puzzle. So when One aha moment, aha moment or finance strategic insight was decided to take the numbers present scenarios, and actually translate the numbers into words. What are these scenarios telling us? What do you need to believe? What’s included? What’s not included, you know, just basically translated into the story, if you will. And that story telling was my finance strategic moment, because I realized, of course, I know the numbers, I would think every CFO knows the numbers, their teams know the numbers, you can speak to them, and you’re accurate. But it’s really that storytelling that you can get people to buy in to what they mean. And do they agree with them? Do they not? Are we missing something. And so that was really my finance strategic moment that I thought was very successful of taking that approach. And I look forward to building on that in the future.

-This Transcript has been Machine Generated.-

CFO GUEST: Brianna Gerber EPISODE: 882: The Chronic Door Opener

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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 at 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 roamed Mattel’s corridors for nearly five years, after having spent 10 years as an equity research executive.

Read More 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

“Listen and analyze, then lead decisively. Ask open-ended questions to gain deeper understanding of an issue or insight into a strategic decision, based on different stakeholder perspectives. Build strong teams, empower, and hold them accountable. Inspire creativity by fostering a culture where it is safe to take prudent risks and learn from mistakes.” –Brianna Gerber, CFO, ChromaDex

CFOTL: Tell us about ChromaDex … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Gerber: Have you ever heard about something called NAD, or nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. I hadn’t before I decided to research this company. NAD is in all of your 37 trillion cells, and it’s vital to life as we know it. My major was business, not biology, but I’ve learned about a compound called ATP, about cellular energy, about cellular repair—and NAD is vital to all of these things. Without NAD, cells die. It begins to decline at age 30, and by age 70, you have 65% of the levels that you had at age 30.

It’s constantly being consumed by everyday stressors like being out in the sun, overeating, alcohol consumption, lack of sleep—even exercising can be a stressor on your muscles. All of these things. There are also various disease states that deplete NAD. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that cells under metabolic stress are consuming NAD.

Read More We produce a supplement whose main ingredient is nicotinamide riboside—which we have trademarked as Niagen—that elevates levels of NAD by 40% to 50%. After 2 weeks, it’s dose-dependent, but you’re elevating those levels of NAD.

We have a suite of products. We’re bioscience company dedicated to science-based solutions for healthy aging. Around NAD, we have a lot of what are called NAD precursors that elevate NAD. But our core ingredient today is Niagen. Our brand is TRU Niagen, which has done about $60 million in sales. This was done primarily through e-commerce, but we’re also sold in Hong Kong, Macau, China, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe.

This was for 2021. We haven’t yet reported on this past year, 2022, but we had projected growth for the total company. We built this brand and its $60 million in sales in only 5 years—from 2017 to 2021—which I think is a pretty exciting thing. We’re obviously looking to continue to build it.

ChromaDex | www.chromadex.com | Los Angeles, CA

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CFO GUEST: Keith Taylor EPISODE: 881: The Firm of Many Lives

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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.

Read More 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

“Be professionally inquisitive and work to fully understand the output of your decisions, including the interdependencies across functions and various interested parties. Work to be a good leader at all levels of the organization, including by surrounding yourself with people who complement your skills and style. Always give constructive feedback.” –Keith Taylor, CFO, Equinix

CFOTL: Tell us about Equinix … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Taylor: I think of us as a digital infrastructure company, but are we a services business with data centers or a data center company with services? We think of ourselves as a services company, and the best way to narrow this down is to describe us as a digital infrastructure. We have 2,000-plus networks that reside inside our facilities. We have 3,000-plus cloud and IT services companies. We’re effectively the On and Off ramps for the Internet and the cloud. We’re independent. We built this geographically dispersed platform that allows the ecosystems of over 10,000 customers to thrive. What you might call the “Who’s Who” of the Internet reside in our facilities, where we are their On and Off ramps to the cloud, which is very relevant today.

Read More It’s sometimes said that all things digital have to come through Equinix at some point. Whether it’s autonomous driving, artificial intelligence, gaming, electronic trading—we run the full gamut, including things that are really important. Hospitals need us to help manage things like the records of their communications. Police departments use us. We have water departments, such as one in the Netherlands that employs our infrastructure to share data and move it around. We create what I think is the best manifestation of a digital infrastructure company that’s growing and scaling with its customers.

One of the things on my radar screen is in some ways the result of some criticism from the outside markets. As a CFO, you have to realize that although you have different constituencies always presenting different points of view, you have to do what you think is best. What I’m referring to is that we carry a lot of cash on our balance sheet. Everybody thinks that cash is good, but when you’re an investor, cash is a stranded asset that generates sub-acceptable returns.

I’ve kept more liquidity on our balance sheet and maintained access to it because I think that despite at times getting the feeling that things are good, I also sometimes get the feeling that they’re bad. Inflation feels like it’s still going to be there, so interest rates are going to be higher for longer. Thus you have occasional ups, but you also have the challenges of economic downturns. I think that having flexibility around liquidity is going to be really important. Don’t spend it before you earn it is another thing that comes to the top of my mind. We’re going to be very disciplined about how we manage our cash flow.

Equinix | www.equinix.com | Redwood City, CA

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CFO GUEST: Dan Fletcher of Planful

EPISODE: #872: Opportunities Along the xP&A Frontier

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CFO GUEST: Teodora Gouneva

EPISODE: #880: When Success Begets Risk

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Teodora Gouneva was enjoying one of the more satisfying chapters of a 17-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.

Read More “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

“Take more risks early in your career. Explore different areas to find out what you really love to do and what you are really good at. Excel at all work projects that you take on because that is how you build your brand and get selected for the most high-profile assignments.” –Teodora Gouneva, CFO, NEXT Insurance

CFOTL: Tell us about NEXT Insurance … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Gouneva: NEXT Insurance aims to help entrepreneurs thrive by providing one-stop-shopping insurance for small businesses. We are the only company that provides “full stack” insurance, which means that we own the customer from acquisition through underwriting, through servicing, through claims. Think about the whole life cycle. If a customer experiences a claim, we own the full experience.

We provide instant, affordable, tailored insurance. What this means is that if a potential customer wants to buy insurance, they can go online for only a few minutes—from beginning to end—and answer a few questions and get a quote. They can purchase immediately online. This is a very seamless way to provide an immediate digital experience.

Read More When you think about small business insurance, for example, it helps to think about personal insurance—which is usually very simple. You probably need home insurance and car insurance. For the most part, these are pretty standard. When you’re a small business, it’s a lot more complex. You are not sure what type of insurance you need for your business, what levels of coverage—and the complexity goes on and on and on. When you’re not a sophisticated insurance buyer, you need advice, which is why, historically, a lot of small businesses go to an agent to get an explanation of what they need.

What NEXT has simplified is a solution for people who prefer a pure digital experience. If you tell us what you do, we can actually recommend very tailored insurance for you and your business. This takes away the complexity and mystery of insurance so that you actually know exactly what you need, particularly for your own business. This is why we call it “tailored.”

What makes us very different is that we have superior underwriting. It uses a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning methodology to price each customer based on their own specific risk. We know exactly where to price companies, we know which businesses are attractive to us, and we know which types we are not able to underwrite. This is a very sophisticated approach. Additionally, we rely on automation technology to improve not just our cost efficiency but also the customer experience. A lot of people prefer to just log in and get certain information rather than be on a long call and wait for somebody to respond to their needs. We definitely are automating this.

One other thing that’s unique for us is that we distribute pretty much to where the customer is. If they are looking online and want an immediate digital call, NEXT Insurance is there. For the customer who still prefers the agent touch, we also work through external agents. We’re embedded in a lot of small business platforms. If you are a small business or want to set one up and you go to a general website or a specific one such as for payroll, you’ll find that NEXT Insurance is integrated with them. We’re integrated with Intuit and Amazon, for instance. We are always there for small businesses that need to onboard insurance in a digital, real-time way.

NEXT Insurance | www.nextinsurance.com | Palo Alto, CA

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Carr: I think I’ve long been a believer even prior to the CFO role that talent is super important. And by that I mean making sure that you find the right people for your organization and somebody who was great. Another organization may not be the right one for this one. And I think that that is important. And from a financial perspective, I’m also a believer that you find the right talent, that you reward your top performers, whether that’s sales or finance or whatever the role may be. At the same time, if things aren’t working, I’m a believer that you need to be open, you need to be transparent, you need to give that feedback, give people the opportunity to adjust or course correct.

And then if it’s not working, then you make the decision to move on and try something new. I would say what has evolved mostly is I think more about kind of world-class metrics around compensation a little bit more dynamically.

Read More And an example of that, for a salesperson, I might say, “Hey, for enterprise SaaS, I want commissions as a percentage bookings to be X percent. I know that’s world-class, I know that’s where I want to be.” But I think since being in the seat, there’s a bit of a balance. And I think it’s really going into one, what does my business tell me about what I can get out of that? And by that, I mean, I might be okay paying a high CAC if I’ve got excellent retention, I’ve got expansion potential, and I can get that return over time. And more importantly, I might be okay doing that today. I may not be okay doing that in two years from now. And so really thinking about where is your business today? Of your investors, what do they care about? Do they want their return in two years, three years, five years? Are they after the hundred-year company? Really understanding what matters and what stage you’re in, to me influences just how aggressively I’m willing to compensate for certain activities, and that’s going to evolve. So I guess that’s new to me as I really view this seat as super important, super strategic, and when I say yes or no, it has the ability to influence the outcome of the company’s success pretty meaningfully.

CFO Guest: Jonathan Carr | Episode: 852: Thriving in the Deep End

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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 licensing 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.

Read More “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

“Soak in all of the perspectives, experiences, opinions of fellow executive team members, finance team members, other senior leaders in the company, investors and industry experts. The destination, and more importantly the path to get there will become crystal clear.” – Bas Brukx, CFO, Allego

CFOTL: Tell us about Allego … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Brukx: Allego helps companies to make their sales reps more effective and efficient. We do this by offering an AI-based platform that not only helps to train, mentor, and coach sales reps but also enables them to engage with their customers by finding the right content at the right time and distributing it to their prospects and current customers at the right time and through the right medium. We really automate these processes by helping with recommendations on both coaching and content for about 750,000 daily users in 65 countries.

Read More Our customer base runs across many different industry verticals. For example, we have five of the 10 largest banks as customers, three of the top five pharmaceutical companies, and many tech companies, from small to large. It’s a really exciting space in which to be as we help our customers to really leverage and optimize their sales reps on the the platform that we provide for doing it all. One platform to do all of this.

There’s a little bit of uncertainty in the market, as we all know. We still really have to define this and see what the impacts will be on business in general and our business in particular. The key will be scalability. Allego is a great company, a great platform. It has great customers, so we kind of have the basis for building a very successful company. We need to simplify things and organize the company in a way that will create the predictability and repeatability that will allow us to remain one of the leaders in the field. We want to grow this company to over $100 million in revenue over the next few years. These are our initiatives: To really, really simplify and to create scalability and repeatability. We’re at a typical transition point for company of our size, and fortunately I have been at it before with other firms where I have worked.

Allego | www.allego.com | Waltham, MA

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CFO GUEST: Don Bassell of ARKO Corp

EPISODE: 878: When the Path Rises to Meet You

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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.

Read More 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

CFOTL: Tell us about ARKO and GPM Investments … what realms do these firms operate in today?

Bassell: Well, GPM Investments is the operating company, and ARKO Corp. is the public company that essentially owns it. We have about 1,400 convenience stores and roughly 1,600 wholesale sites. When I say “wholesale site,” I’m basically referring to a dealer who operates a convenience store.

If we operate the convenience store, it’s our site—we’re running it. If a dealer is operating the convenience store, it’s their site. We’re selling fuel to them, so they’re a wholesale customer. We have a big wholesale population and a big convenience population. We have also recently acquired a fleet fueling operation, which is not really where over-the-road rigs would pull in to fuel up but instead where vehicles like landscaping trucks, FedEx, whatever, can come in to fill up quickly. This is mostly fast-fill diesel.

Read More We continue to grow. As a side note: I was fortunate enough to experience the same type of thing back when I was with MACS—Mid-Atlantic Convenience Stores—which was an investment owned by L Catterton, a great private equity firm with which to work. So, I’ve seen a lot.

At ARKO, we have now gone through 22 acquisitions over the past 8 years. There has been a lot to do. We operate under 18 banners across the country. We’re primarily a convenience retailer, but we also have these great revenue engines. We have this great wholesale engine and this great fleet fueling engine that both provide steady cash flow that gives us opportunities. We’re the sixth largest convenience store chain in the country, but people wouldn’t know this because we operate under so many brands.

My biggest priority right now is helping to implement the integration of two more acquisitions that we have recently announced. After this, my biggest goal is really to focus on how to make life easier for everybody. Let’s look at the things that are creating challenges for people. Let’s take the waste out. Things like that.

I really believe in creating and maintaining a good work/life balance. This is very, very important to me. I don’t want people having to work endlessly. Obviously, if you’re an accountant, you know that you’re going to run into your quarterly and end-of-year reports—they are just part of what you sign up for. But I want to make processes a lot more efficient, and I want to make sure that when I leave this place, I can feel confident that I have done everything that I could, from all perspectives, to make us not just more efficient but also more productive. This is really, really my highest priority.

ARKO Corp. | www.arkocorp.com | Richmond, VA

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GUEST CFO: Gary Zyla of AssetMark

EPISODE: 877: The Transformative Transaction

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Episode #876 Jim Young, CFO, Coalition

Episode #875 Eliron Glazer, CFO, Monday

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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.

Read More “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 it was selling 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 chapter at AssetMark includes 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.

Says Zyla: “I was given an opportunity and then other opportunities found me.” –Jack Sweeney

“As CFO, you are the CEO’s key strategic partner, and your core team is, first and foremost, the executive team of the company. Do not underestimate the power of a strategic finance team in making a difference and propelling a great company to even greater heights.” –Gary Zyla, CFO, AssetMark

CFOTL: Tell us about AssetMark … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Zyla: AssetMark is a service provider to financial advisors in the country. About 35% of Americans use a financial advisor to help them to manage their money. There are about 300,000 financial advisors in this country, and every single one of them needs, basically, a platform for investing their clients’ money. Some of them are in enclosed shops, such as Edward Jones, but many, many of them are what we call “independent,” and they get to choose what platform they use. They can use a big name like Fidelity or Charles Schwab, or they can use a smaller name like AssetMark.

Read More Our strength is that we can provide three really important things for independent financial advisors. First, we provide an open architecture technology that gives them a lot of flexibility in their investment choices. Second, we provide them with an excellent curated investment portfolio that basically helps them to narrow down the complicated world of where to put money. We do this curating of investment solutions. Third, we provide white glove service to these financial advisors.

All of these financial advisors with whom we work are basically small businesses, so we’re a B2B. We’re the larger B that works with these smaller Bs, these small financial advisor offices, these “mom and pop” shops with maybe three or four advisors in the office. Maybe the nephew’s working the front desk and the niece is handling the calls—whatever, right?

Imagine a small office. They need support. They need support in building websites. They need support in taking calls from clients about account changes. They need support for their technology and for their marketing and customer segmentation. We provide all of these services to the financial advisor with one goal—our one mission—which is to make a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in the lives of the investor.

We have about 8,000 advisors who work with our platform, which right now is handling just a little bit shy of $100 billion in assets. We believe that we’ve had a winning formula for many, many years, with our firm having been founded about 25 years ago by a few guys out of Berkeley. Now we’re a publicly traded company that’s going to be targeting more than $600 million in revenue this year. jb

AssetMark | www.assetmark.com | Concord, CA

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CFO GUEST: Jim Young of Coalition, Inc.

EPISODE: 876: Exposing Where Business Value Resides

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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.

Read More “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 jb

“No one expects you to have all of the answers, and, importantly, neither should you assume that your more tenured colleagues do either. You are at your best when you are asking lots of questions. Be sure to invest time in building relationships with the rest of your leadership team.” –Jim Young, CFO, Coalition

CFOTL: Tell us about Coalition … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Young: Well, first off, at the end of the day we’re a cybersecurity company, and our first and core offering is an active insurance product. And that’s unusual, right? You don’t hear active insurance. And that’s because our mission, we wake up to every day, is to protect the unprotected. And we begin with by marrying technology and a financial product insurance. And so, we are able to help small, medium size, and even larger enterprises protect themselves from the inevitability of security attacks on their infrastructure. And we are very powerful in doing that and help both on the mitigation as well as the risk transfer piece, which is so essential to just about every business in the world today. So, there’s our mission and technology that we bring to bare.

Read More This company has been a rock star from Day One. It began with our founder, Joshua Amada, whose track record of being with intelligence agencies and Goldman Sachs as well as starting a great cybersecurity company enabled him to build up quite a reputation.

This company was built up through some very well-known venture capitalists and some somewhat traditional capital raises. The groups and names involved have been really impressive and included traditional VCs, later-stage folks like General Atlantic and Valor Equity Partners, really important crossover investors like Durable Capital Partners and T. Rowe Price, and even big strategics like Allianz, one of the largest insurance companies in the world. This effort has been very deliberate and very thoughtful in bringing together what I would consider to be a really blue-chip list of names.

Our current priorities are in a couple of buckets. One is scale. I really want to demonstrate that we can scale as a finance function with a company that’s growing quickly, and I want us to have the scale of processes and capabilities that a public company would have. That’s one bucket.

Decision support is another. We have a fascinating, quantitative data–driven business, and we need an FP&A organization that is up to this task. We have the talent, so now it’s just making sure that we grow into this as a group. I need to continue to try to provide good mentoring and leadership around this, as I want us to be outstanding on this front.

I also want to have a really good blueprint of our value creation approach. We know that we create a ton of value. We’ve made shareholders very happy. We know that we’re going to be a very valuable company. I want to have a really intimate understanding of the levers and narratives that create the most value and then make sure that we’re following the blueprint as we map out our strategies to achieve our business objectives.

Coalition | www.coalitioninc.com | San Francisco, CA

The post 876: Exposing Where Business Value Resides | Jim Young, CFO, Coalition appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 revenue expansion opportunities. Guest Host Ben Murray and Jack Sweeney discuss the cross functional 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 Hargerty.

Machine Generated Transcript (unedited)
This podcast is made possible by Vena.

Jack : Hi, it’s Jack. Welcome to Planning ACEs. I’m here with Ben Murray. If you don’t know who Ben Murray is, and I imagine many of you do. Ben has had multiple CFO chapters on his finance leadership resume. His most recent was as CFO of Cartegraph, where he occupied the office for more than seven years. And oh, by the way, along the way, this is interesting. He began a podcast. That’s right. He entered this realm. His podcast is known as the SaaS CFO. Maybe, it occurs to you now you’ve heard of Ben. And of course that’s where I first learned about Ben as did so many others.

Jack (2m 55s):
I was excited when he accepted our invitation to join me today as guest host Ben, welcome.

Ben (3m 2s):
Thanks. Great to be here.

Read More Jack (3m 4s):
And I should also mention that you climbed really the fp and a ladder, and I should mention you served in multiple fp and a leadership roles prior to entering the C F O office, you know, well, clearly the long hours, so many fp and a rolls demand. So as is our approach, I went ahead and shared with you some of the comments of the three planning ACEs we selected for this episode. And we always look for a, a common thread that we can sort of pull out as a unifying theme.

Jack (3m 43s):
I’m wondering if anything came to mind for you as you reviewed the clips or one thing that these planning ACEs and finance leaders might have in common.

Ben (3m 55s):
Yeah, definitely. I think one thing looking at the semetrics, looking at unit economics and looking at metrics in aggregate and then segmenting based on how you manage your business. So I saw a couple common themes within those discussions.

Jack (4m 13s):
Well, it perhaps says a lot that I think our first planning ace actually touches on everything you just highlighted. Our first planning ace will be Jonathan Carr, CFO F of cybersecurity firm Armes. Jonathan is the former head of fp and a for Survey Monkey. Back on episode 8 5 2 of CFO thought leader. Jonathan shared a story with us how back in 2008, he was only 18 months out of college when he became assigned the accounting and finance lead for a major software implementation for Stryker down in Puerto Rico.

Jack (4m 54s):
So he relocated down there for a number of years. Great kickoff story for us for that episode. And what you’re about to hear is Jonathan providing us with sort of a download of his thinking on fp and a and metrics. Here’s Jonathan Carr.

3 (5m 16s):
Yeah, I think that the numbers and the metrics that I primarily focus on are first and foremost gonna be related to growth. And that was true the day that I came in. I think throughout all of my years, one of the things that has been clear to me, growth, certainly at this stage and in particular for us in cyber, when the market is evolving so rapidly, that is the number one thing. And so, so how do I, how do I get a pulse on that? Obviously from a lagging indicator, looking at the business we close in any given period is great, but what I look to indicate, you know, should I be adding more fuel to the investment fire or not? I spent a lot of time really looking at among our tenured sales reps, what does their productivity look like?

3 (5m 56s):
Does it look like I’m getting the right return for the investment that we’re making? And in a high growth environment that’s often muddied when you look at things in, in the aggregate picture, right? When you layer in all these new regions or all these new folks that you’re adding in it, it’s really hard to see the productivity. And so you really gotta double down into the things that are gonna prove out the unit economic model for my reps gonna be productive enough. Am I getting the gross margins on the deals that are gonna suggest that I’m gonna have that path to profitability down the road? And in the beginning, those were the, the, the two main things that I looked at was how do we ensure we’re on the right growth path, and how do I ensure that we’re getting the transactions that are coming in at that, the right gross margin? You have those two things, you know that over time you can get to your, your path to profitability that you need to.

3 (6m 41s):
And certainly in the environment we’re in today, there’s a lot more focus on path to profitability. And I think as I’ve spent time with investors and as I think about how our team is really thinking about operating this business, it’s, it’s not so much, how do I get to a point where I’m cash break given tomorrow? That’s wonderful. That’s great. I think that’s coming. But what’s more important is how do I make sure that I’m growing at unit economics that suggest if I’m putting a dollar in, I’m getting four back. And in a market that’s evolving and growing rapidly, I see no reason to shy away from our ability to do that and get that kind of return. And I think that’s, that’s consistent with what investors are telling us.

Jack (7m 21s):
Is there some number related to that, to the unit economics that you realized you need to expose earlier in the process so people can correct the ship or,

3 (7m 31s):
Yeah, I think early on, especially, you know, you joined small organizations that the data with which you have to kind of make a lot of these decisions can be muddy. So you start with some of the aggregated things in the belief system. And, and I’m a big believer you don’t wait for perfection to drive decision making. You, you come up with the things that you know, you want to ultimately measure and you start working towards that and you make decisions and you learn along the way. I think one of my early mentors used to say, I reserve the right to get smarter. I’m a huge believer in that I make a decision today, next week if I learn something new, fine, I’ll make a new decision that that’s okay by me. And so I, I think really just, we onboarded reps, for example. We looked at a handful of things. What are the, the regions for the business that are, are seeing success where there’s a customer need and a willingness to buy?

3 (8m 17s):
And in the first six to nine months, am I seeing the activities that suggest this person might be successful? Obviously an enterprise sales, regardless of the industry you’re in those, those sales cycles and time rises, they, they take time. So early on you’re going in with an investment thesis and then you’re looking for the things they’re gonna prove that out that you can.

Ben (8m 47s):
Jonathan covered a lot of ground and it was great ground. I mean, he talked about growth me metrics. He talked about sales rep productivity and those success factors to know that your sales rep team is, is ramping successfully. Of course in 2023 you talked about the path to profitability and how important that is a c v size on new customers coming in. So there was a lot of great information in in that clip.

Jack (9m 10s):
I found it interesting that he really didn’t waste any time before going right there, right there in terms of sales productivity are my reps, he asks, being productive enough, am I getting the gross margin on the deals that keep us on the path to profitability? I jotted down just now listening, what about that? What about sales rep productivity w being measured today? What are, how are organizations taking this on? And are they, are they getting to the nitty gritty? Are they really getting the visibility they need?

Ben (9m 45s):
Of course, CFOs and sas, we like to look at our SaaS metrics, our unit economics and you know, we work CFOs work so closely, closely with the sales and marketing team and you know, we like to push on them, fair or not, but really maybe they don’t know. We do look at sales rep productivity in aggregate and also at the rep level, just like John Jonathan mentioned, I had a slide on sales rep pro productivity, where they are, where’s their pipeline? Is it increasing since the last time we reported? So knowing the nuances at the individual level, if, if doable, depending on the or size of your organization. We’re also looking at the details, the mechanics of our go-to-market engine as a C F O to make sure we understand the health of that.

Jack (10m 28s):
And that slide that you have has been around five years. Do you think most SaaS organizations have that kind of visibility? Where are they? Are they, are they there? Have they

Ben (10m 39s):
Been there? I think if you’re above 10 million arr, most likely you have that visibility or maybe 20 million and above. You probably should have that visibility at the sales rep level, less than 10 million early stage. Still you’re seeing founders, right? They’re doing the sales and then they’re transitioning to their first go to market team. So they’re just learning that repeatable process as far as far as their GT motion. So maybe not there yet that we just want sales and somewhat effective sales, but above 10, 20 million. I think that’s a pretty standard slide.

Jack (11m 12s):
I enjoyed his comments towards the end there. That data can be muddy in the early days, but don’t wait for perfection. You gotta learn along the way.

Ben (11m 23s):
Yeah. Oh, oh, love it. You know, so yeah, I’m looking at my notes here and I wrote that down, like small organs, the data is muddy early on and really with, we have to have the right metrics at the right stage of our business. And first it’s always the accounting foundation, right? We need the proper chart of accounts, we need the right p and l structure for our industry. And so it starts with that foundation and then we build upon that, you know, if we’re early stage LTV to C for example, for sas, not gonna mean too much. It’s gonna be just, just too volatile of a number. We need enough volume of data moving through our business to make it meaningful. But yes, I, I work with a lot of early stage test companies and the data is always a bit volatile, a bit muddy, and we work with what we can and make meaning out of the numbers that again, are the right, the right numbers, metrics for our stage of the business.

Jack (12m 13s):
Let’s stay on sales finance collaboration for the moment, but step beyond SaaS and SaaS companies to other industries where this go-to-market conference table just is not yet engineered the same way as and, and or enjoy all the visibility that SaaS companies today enjoy. I’m sure there’s many CFOs who would tell us, I wish I had that slide in my deck. It’s just not there quite yet.

Ben (12m 49s):
Yeah, definitely. I was in the airline industry and then got on the software and it depends on the industry, right? In the airline industry, you’re not calling up customers to say, Hey, book a ticket today. You know, maybe those corporate clients, you know, so the go to market motion SAS can be so foreign, I think to other industries and yeah, go to the go to market motion working with those sales and marketing teams. There’s so much data trapped in SaaS companies that we have to leverage, especially in sales and marketing, all this lead data. Everyone who’s hitting our site, downloading white papers, submitting their email for the newsletter, and all this data starts growing and it’s, it’s hard. It’s really hard. And it, it does take a framework and experience to manipulate and use that data, you know, and, and so I think a lot of departments face this, just a lot of data and we don’t know what to do it.

Ben (13m 37s):
So it, it definitely takes time to perfect the data and how we use it within the go-to-market motion.

Jack (13m 45s):
I just keep having this image of a, a newly hired C F O coming into focus that has joined a mid-size company that was perhaps privately held for since it was founded so many decades ago. And the CEO is thinking to themselves, I finally have my strategic C F O little does that CEO know, or that C F O perhaps has an inkling if he’s going to become more operations minded, if he’s going to play this role that he’s gonna have to really assert himself with the department heads and get them cooperating.

Jack (14m 27s):
I mean, I think that’s a scenario that’s still playing out in real time today for that C F O. It’s all about trying to establish the visibility, creating that type of visibility by having other senior executives understand that it’s a data driven world today. And while I’ve never had my C F O step into my office and ask for those numbers before, it’s time to hand them over.

Ben (14m 55s):
Yeah, I mean that CFO sales and marketing relationship is so important and CFOs are so operational today, really, I can’t do my job effectively if I don’t understand the operations of the business and the operations of the departments within my business. And out of all the departments within, say, a SaaS company, the folks I talked to the most were sales and marketing because we’re investing so much in the go-to-market engine there. So we have to understand, we unfortunately have to be a bit nosy, and that relationship has to exist between the CFO and the cro or the VP of sales or the chief marketing officer that we have to understand what’s happening in their business so we can be effective and provide some guidance because CFOs are here to enable and facilitate and also push back when necessary.

Ben (15m 36s):
So it’s an important relationship. And if you think yes, SASS really wasn’t sass even maybe 20 years ago, maybe it was the as p days that now maybe that relationship wasn’t there, but now we have so much data, you know, that we have to get involved, we have to help them with all the data that’s running through their organization. So really, you know, that relationship has to be open that I need to explain to my marketing sales leader why ICAC is important, why payback is important, and also why I need to understand their lead flow and how that flows into their pipeline and opportunities. And close one

Jack (16m 13s):
Well said, and thank you, Ben, for taking a deeper dive on that with us. We are gonna tee up our next planning ace, who is Kevin Rubin, CFO of Al Alter X. And just in short, short intro for him, the implosion of the.com bubble, the collapse of Arthur Anderson in the September 11th terror tax each in their own way contributed to the future trajectory of Kevin Rubin’s finance career. It was a convergence of events and circumstances that even today Kevin Rubin finds difficult to untangle. You won’t want to miss episode eight 60 of C F O thought leader and allow Kevin to share his story with you right now.

Jack (16m 58s):
We just wanna have him share some of his thinking around the metrics right now. We’re going to share some of his thinking regarding the metrics and planning approaches we feature on this podcast each month. This is Kevin Rubin, c f o of Al Alteryx.

CFO Rubin (17m 18s):
The number, the number in depth. I, I guess the, the sheer number of metrics and the depth of those metrics have extended pretty significantly over the seven years. You know, when I joined we were barely measuring, you know, basic semetrics, but the ones that we did measure, as I mentioned, were were pretty incredible. You know, we were looking at, at, at things like net expansion and we, we didn’t focus as much on a R at the time, although, you know, you know, we were a subscription business and always have been. So, you know, billings is, is a reasonable proxy, but all of our metrics that we focused on early on were either customer dynamic metrics, as I mentioned.

4 (18m 5s):
You know, things like net expansion. You know, we did look at ltv TOC internally, you know, we looked at a lot of productivity metrics. We didn’t have as much telemetry insight as we do today. So how are customers using the product? Where are they deploying? What type of use cases? So we’ve really increased the sophistication over the years on really that intelligence around how customers are using us, where they’re using us. We don’t get to see any of the, the data or, or, or aspects of, of what they’re doing in that sense, but we really do get to understand how they’re using the product, which capabilities the product are most interesting.

4 (18m 46s):
And then we, we’ve stood up in recent years, a specific organization whose entire mandate is working with customers and prospects and defining the ROI they’re getting from using Alteryx. And so we get a lot of insight from that. That’s our value engineering group, and we get a lot of insight there. So I would say the depth and maturity of the analysis that we’re able to do today is significantly greater. The segmentation, the way that we can truly drill into a specific cohort of customers and understand behaviors, whether that’s, you know, regionally or you know, vertically, however you want to kind of slice it.

4 (19m 25s):
We have a, we have an amazing ability to go in and we also have the good fortune of being able to use altrix to do, to do a lot of this work. You know,

Jack (19m 36s):
You mentioned the value engineering group. Are these data science? Who are these people? Who,

4 (19m 41s):
Who is? No, this is a, this is a customer facing organization. It sits within our go-to-market group. And it’s, again, as I said, it’s so mandated, is really to work with organizations that our current customers are looking to be customers and help them define for a given anticipated use, what do we think the, the return on, on the investment would be from Alteryx. So there’s certainly analytic minded, but it, it’s not necessarily a data science team. We do have data, quite a bit of data scientists in the organization that help out in a variety of ways. But the value engineering group is really tasked with, you know, pulling together in a, in a very understandable way, this is your investment, Alteryx, these are the sets of use cases and ways in which you’re using Alteryx and this is the benefit in the ROI that you’re receiving from them.

Jack (20m 39s):
Okay, well done. Kevin Rubin, c f o of Alx touched on a good deal once, once more. Ben, I have a few items I’m hoping to talk to you about that Kevin touched on, but I don’t want to influence your, your opening thoughts or what you, what your takeaways were.

Ben (20m 58s):
Yeah, it was great. He talked about some course SAS metrics. He talked about net revenue retention, L T V to C, just those core metrics that really every SAS company at scale should be measuring. And then I thought was really interesting talking about sophistication around customer product usage, you know, and that’s so important. We have to also understand what makes our customers successful as they progress in the, through our product. You know, what actions are they taking, what triggers, you know, what influences do we have on that from tech support, from customer success. So not just talking those core financial metrics, but also the usage of the product and that sophistication. And then he talked about segmentation and cohort analysis, so of course talking core metrics, but I thought the product usage was really interesting.

Jack (21m 42s):
It’s about, he of course, used this phrase, which I do ask him about the value engineering group. It’s a customer facing group that sits and go to market, but I, I did ask him when it began, and apparently it’s not, it’s only a few years old. Something that got put in place and it doesn’t report to him, but it’s a sort of an organization, a similar group would we find in most SaaS organizations today. And again, I guess it’s part of the go to market, but a little more sophisticated,

Ben (22m 13s):
Definitely if he has a department or team dedicated to customer and prospect roi, how are they gonna use that product, that use case, and what ROI they’ll get out of it. I think definitely more of a larger org function, you know, earlier SaaS companies maybe don’t have the luxury of the budget for a team like that. And that could be for earlier SaaS, like a product marketer, you know, that we’re looking for so they can understand what we’re doing in engineering, how that translates to the customer and translating all that technical stuff into a value proposition for our customers, you know, so I think the, that’s probably the luxury of, of later stage sales

Jack (22m 50s):
Sis. Okay. I just wanna increase our intelligence around how customers are using us. And again, okay, you, you’ve been mentioning customer usage, customer usage, is this like the frontier where, where finance leaders are seeking to extend their lines of sight as quickly as possible? There’s like a land rush. What, what would you tell us?

Ben (23m 10s):
I think, you know, we could talk about an hour just about this. I think product usage and embedding those, the analytics in our product, the frontier was probably five years ago when that really became popular. Now of course, we know plg product led growth motion. We have to understand product usage. How are customer progressing through our product and where are those gates, where, what can we unlock? What are those expansion opportunities as the customer progresses in our product? So now you could say the frontier with PLG and product usage and understanding customer’s actions and intent to push that expansion revenue into net dollar, net revenue retention revenue that everybody’s talking about with the PLG motion. So I’d say, yeah, the frontier right now, PLG plus product usage and how we can really leverage that customer data.

Jack (23m 56s):
Okay, I’m gonna repeat that as my takeaway. PLG plus product usage. Thank you Kevin Rubin for highlighting that for us, Ben, we’re gonna move to our next planning ace. It was only last September that Patrick McClean having served earlier c f o tours of duty at Sotheby’s and IMAX stepped into the C F O office at Haggerty, an automotive enthusiast brand that first took route as an insurance agency for collector automobiles, but today serves the auto enthusiast realm using a, a menu of membership programs and experiences.

Jack (24m 40s):
Now, when it comes to entering the C F O office, Patrick Mcle tells us he likes to arrive in August or September, but no later we’ll have him explain, here’s his clip,

5 (25m 5s):
The, this role I started in September, which is right around the kickoff of the planning season, right, for the next year, which is great. You, you certainly don’t wanna show up after that, you know, maybe you wanna show up a little bit before that to get your feet wet. But what I focused on, part of it’s just understanding the team, the, the finance organization and you know, trying to meet with people, understand the scope, understand the role of what works, what doesn’t work. So there’s sort of that, you know, diagnostic around the core finance function. And then I try to invest heavily in building those relationships with my peers on the leadership team. You at Haggard, the way that works is we have presidents who run our insurance business, our marketplace business and our membership media and entertainment business, and they’re driving the outcomes, right?

5 (25m 57s):
And my job is to make sure they’ve got the right resources. And I can’t do that until I understand their business and their challenges, their opportunities. So try to aggressively invest in building those relationships so I can kind of get up the learning curve. And then for me, it was using the planning process as a learning process for me, which was great for me, and maybe it’s more challenging for other folks, but when you’re going through the planning, you, you get to be in that room with everybody and go through in detail and ask all those questions. And so I really just try to invest heavily in, all right, how do I learn? But at the same time, what are my quick intuitions and my, my quick reactions, what do we need to change, right?

5 (26m 39s):
This is the opportunity. If, if we don’t agree what we’re doing next year now it’ll be be much harder. You have to change on the fly. And so that was sort of the balance. I tried to strike learn, but also influence quickly. I, I go back to my time at imax, and so when I was hired at imax, the company was coming off of two very strong years. In the midst of a third, they had just taken their Chinese business public in Hong Kong. And that had produced a bunch of capital and the mandate for the new CFO and why they found me attractive, it was going to be external. It was, you look at ways to drive growth ad legs to the stool, acquisitions, partnerships, those kind of things.

5 (27m 19s):
In my first handful of months I did the, you know, sort of normal onboarding and diagnostic. I also joined that in August. And so went through a planning process, which was helpful. And then early in my second year, so I was sort of, you know, five months in or something myself, along with the c e o Rich Gal fund. We kind of were looking at the numbers and, you know, noticed that, you know, some of the trends were moving against us. And I went back, did a bunch of work on it, and came back and sat down with him and, and said, look, I know the mandate was X, but I’m concerned, how do we think about, you know, sort of an early warning system?

5 (27m 59s):
Like what do we use to make a decision? Are we still headed in the direction we we wanted to be? Or are we pivoting here? And you know, rich had been there forever and tremendous intuition on the business. And so he kind of agreed where I was coming from and said, okay, look, let’s look at the next three titles that are coming out and we’ll monitor our performance on those. And if, if we find that we’re in a position where, you know, we’re not on track, then let’s have a real conversation. And he said, but go get ready for that real conversation now. Like, if we end up in a spot where we need to pivot, let’s start working on it. And for me, it was sort of the moment was, okay, I was hired to do one thing feels different, and always remember the numbers don’t lie, right?

5 (28m 50s):
Like, and that was the framework that I, that rich and I came up with is, okay, look, let’s just create a little scorecard, a short term scorecard, and we’ll hold ourselves accountable to it. And if the numbers tell us to do something, we’re gonna do it. And I, the moment was sort of, especially coming from banking, right? If banking all numbers go up into the right, right? And look, we all have sort of these strategies and narratives and we’re all biased to believe that, you know, wonderful things will happen. And you know, in the finance situation, like always remember the numbers don’t lie. And ask your peers on a leadership team, like, okay, if that’s true, whatever it is, if it’s true, is it in our numbers now, when will it be in our numbers?

5 (29m 32s):
And look, it’s not about, look, there’s a very constructive way to have those conversations, right? It’s just about the, the initiative and, and sort of remembering that, ask those challenging questions. You help people recognize that Sands can shift underneath us pretty quickly. And then from the CFO slot, like you can’t just ask the question, you’ve gotta be willing to roll up your sleeves, dive in with your business partners and help them figure it out. Like, what is the pivot we need to make and how do we get at it? So that was the one for me, like that, that recognition that, huh, this is a, this can move pretty quickly. And you’ve gotta make sure that you’ve got the, the resolve to ask the tough question and then the follow through to build sort of buy-in to what the solution is.

Jack (30m 29s):
Okay. Patrick Mcle, C f O of Haggerty from episode 8 62, c f o fault leader, anytime we have a finance leader, shed a little light on the ceo, CFO, F O relationship. I always think it’s always worthy to highlight somehow. It’s pretty rare, to be honest. This notion of a early warning system, sort of a, an agreement with the ceo, I was compelled to make it part of an episode. That’s good planning right there. What did you make of what Patrick shared?

Ben (31m 4s):
Yeah, the, the early wording system, right? And I wrote down in my notes, he said, numbers don’t lie. You know, he had intuition with the numbers that they were moving a certain way and just saw some red flags coming up that he shared with his CS C ceo and they went back to his team to do some homework. So once you’re in the seat long enough, you just have that intuition, you see cycles, you see seasonality, that just helps you interpret those numbers even better. And that’s what he was explaining. Like he, he was looking at the numbers, numbers don’t lie and they’re not saying the right thing. We’ve gotta go back and do a little bit more homework.

Jack (31m 36s):
You know, I, I thought it was interesting, like the planning season is the learning season for him. And I’m wondering if you think organizations could use planning more effectively to train not just their C F O, but others, and maybe it’s done all the time, but in your experience, looking back, you know, planning’s planning, but at the same time it does offer you an opportunity each year to really look under the hood. Do companies use planning? You know, are there different ways they could be using it to benefit the organization?

Ben (32m 13s):
Yeah. And, and his comments about planning season really resonated because I felt the same way where he had liked to start, right? He, he doesn’t wanna miss planning season and start as a C F O or as an fp and a professional right after they bake the budget because there’s so much learning. You learn all the nuts and bolts, all the, everything that’s under the hood as far as what’s going on in the organization. And of course they’re lovers and haters of the budget, but planning and budgeting done right, I think is really effective. And I always felt budgeting really tests the operational knowledge of your leaders. Do they really understand their business, their departments? Where are the businesses going? What resources do they need to support those corporate objectives, those business unit objectives.

Ben (32m 53s):
So in, in his clip, right, just talking like core C f o FP and a technique and experience.

Jack (33m 2s):
So when I hear the expression planning season, I just think of this, this one conference room that is just a succession of meetings after meetings, after meetings, after different functional heads and different parts of the organization come in to discuss their budgets. And the finance people are sort of staring across the table waiting for the next one to enter. I’m sure it’s done electronically. I’m sure there’s better ways of doing it though. It seems like we all know meetings aren’t always the best, most efficient way of educating each other.

Ben (33m 37s):
Yeah. Early stage, it could be more of a, I’m dictating what the budget is as the founder ceo, but later stage I’ve done planning and budgeting at large public companies and it is, it’s gotta be a collaborative process. Now it does start with high level guidance. You know, here are the high level targets that we’re, we wanna hit and we, we disseminate that out to our department leaders so they can understand where we’re trying to go as an organization. And then, right, we, you pass the templates out or maybe our fp and a system together all their input that comes back to the fp and a team. We create the first draft of the budget. And then I always like to meet with those department leaders. Why do you have this in here? Let me make sure I understand the resources that you need.

Ben (34m 19s):
What works, what doesn’t work that I can see from your inputs? So it does have to be a collabo collaborative process it or a process with those department leaders.

Jack (34m 28s):
Department leaders who you used to meet with. And no, I’m just imagining there were, there was a conference room during a certain time of year that you’d occupy frequently and try to have book the department heads to come in and sit down and talk.

Ben (34m 42s):
I think for some people, yeah, it is like going to the dentist. I think, you know, in SAS sometimes they under, they do understand the process of what we’re trying to achieve when I was in the airline industry. It’s also an education process. Yeah. They didn’t wanna sit down with me and, and, and look at their p and l and look at their budget because they may be operational rock stars, but it did make them nervous. They just didn’t have that fundamental financial education to feel comfortable around talking about the numbers and what numbers do they need to put in the budget. So part of that fp and a process, there’s a lot of education of those department leaders really helping them through the finance and budgeting process, which

Jack (35m 18s):
Brings us back in my mind anyway, to finance, sales, collaboration. And before we go, I was hoping, Ben, we might just pick your, your brain a little more on that, the significance of that collaboration today between sales and finance. When does it work? What are the challenges? Any, anything, any closing words. I’ll put you on the spot as we end here.

Ben (35m 50s):
Yeah. I think CFOs, they have to understand the sales process, the, you know, the, the stages that the sales leader wants to take the process through or the prospect through. Now, you know, if they have a certain sales technique, am I going to really dive into that? Maybe not, but I wanna understand how they’re going to take a sales qualified lead and move it through their pipeline and the pipeline hygiene. So we have to, I think as CFOs understand that process and sales and marketing leaders have learned from different orgs and different experiences on how they want to do that. So I think CFOs have to understand our go-to-market motion, right? Is that, is it the traditional outbound motion? Do we have an inbound motion? Do we have a PLG motion?

Ben (36m 30s):
So, so again, CFOs I think really have to understand the process. Are we telling them what to do? Absolutely not. But we have to understand how their sales engine is working.

Jack (36m 41s):
Okay. Ben Murray, the SAS CFO is the name of the podcast. Ben, thank you for being our guest host this episode. Very much appreciate it.

Ben (36m 52s):
Great to be here. Have a good weekend.

About our Guest Host: Ben Murray

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CFO GUEST Eliran Glazer of Monday.com

EPISODE: 875: Connecting People and Processes

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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.

Read 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

“You have to focus on being a trusted partner to your stakeholders, inclusive of the executive team, investors, the board, and beyond—meaning that you always strive to provide added value based on more traditional accounting alongside business strategy.” –Eliran Glazer, CFO, Monday.com

CFOTL: Tell us about monday.com … what does this company do, and what are its offering today?

Glazer: Monday is a work operating system, or what we call a “work OS.” With it, an organization of any size can create the tools and processes that they need in order to manage every aspect of their work. We have more than 150,000 customers, 70% of which are non-tech. We crossed $500 million in revenue in 2022. In our last guidance, we said that we’re going to do around $510 million. We have more than 1,500 employees. We are headquartered in Israel, but we also have very big offices in New York, in London, in Australia. About 65% of our employees are in Israel, with another 20% in the U.S. and the rest in other offices around the world. Monday has a great culture in which to work. We are developing people and making sure that we invest in employees because innovation is at the heart of Monday and one of its main growth engines.

Read More Of course, we have competitors across our various business verticals. Because we operate as a platform, we have many use cases that we can serve. There are different players out there in our industry—in our space—that can compete with us in different verticals, but everything is still a greenfield opportunity for us. If you take the case of COVID, for example, whether you work remotely or are coming in to the office to work, our collaboration software allows you to work not only with people on your team and in your division but also with other groups within the organization. This, of course, is something that is really useful these days because COVID has brought about the digitization and technology transformation of a lot of organizations. They bought a lot of software, and now they need to implement it. Monday allows them to consolidate a lot of their software to enable collaboration between internal employees as well as integration with other organizations. This is the mission of Monday.

monday.com | www.monday.com | Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

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GUEST CFO: Wailun Chan

EPIOSDE: 874: Completing Your Visibility to Predictability Framework

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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.

Read More 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

“Over time, you will develop your own financial management philosophy. Along the way, there will be external factors that may distract you. Develop an investment philosophy that you believe in and don’t let the noise sway you from your guiding principles. Intelligent growth is a philosophy that I have always believed in. As a data visualization company, we use data to inform our strategy in all departments across the entire company. I believe that data doesn’t lie, and in fact it can offer early indicators of what the future holds. Even in the last few years, when many businesses were growing at all costs, we stuck with our growth framework that is guided by rule of 40 and LTV/CAC ratio. You can imagine how challenging it was in 2021, but by believing in our plan, we are well positioned for the future, despite the uncertainties of these economic times. . I can’t predict the future, and the reality is that we may need to alter our path from our original plans due to things that are out of our control, but hopefully our philosophy helps to minimize the swing.” –Wailun Chan, CFO, Grafana Labs

CFOTL: Tell us about Grafana Labs … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Chan: Grafana Labs is an infrastructure enterprise software company. We are an “open source first” company, which means that we have multiple open source products out there that people can use for free. Then, on top of each of these will be an enterprise version that our paying customers can use to basically get additional features that the open source product does not include.

There are many use cases for Grafana. We have a pretty good representation within the banking and financial industries. For example, Wells Fargo, JPMC, and Citibank use Grafana for their websites and the mobile apps that their consumers use.

Read More We essentially provide the monitoring of these and the capability for online observability of the performance of the app or the website or any products that their customers use to interact with them. If there are any hiccups or a slowdown, Grafana can help them to identify what the cause might be.

Grafana Labs has continued to do really well despite the macroeconomic situation. Still, it’s my job to worry about everything. I keep looking over my shoulder and asking myself, “Hey, how’s the macro going to impact us?” I can’t forecast what the macro is going to look like. I can’t forecast whether there’s going to be a recession or when any recession is going to end—but what I can do is to help us to prepare ourselves for different scenarios and try to come up with plans for what we’re going to do in each one.

Our focus is going to continue to be, “We want to invest for the long term, but at the same time we need to bear in mind that this is a balancing act and we don’t want to overextend ourselves.” This means that on an ongoing basis, on a monthly basis, we continue to forecast. We use data to drive decision-making based on whether we’re getting any signals, and we continuously adjust our plan as we move forward. So, the balancing act of continuously investing for the long term while not overextending ourselves is something that is top-of-mind for us for this year.

Grafana Labs | www.grafana.com | New York, NY

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More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees.

The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations.

Your Hosts | Brett Knowles & Jack Sweeney

About Brett Knowles

Made Possible By

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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.

Read More 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

CFOTL: Tell us about Meow Wolf …what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Kopelman: The first thing to know about Meow Wolf is that it is a deeply creative place. It was started by artists who really wanted a vehicle for sharing their vision with the world. They ended up creating an interactive, immersive art experience. We do physical locations. We have three of them today—one in Santa Fe, one in Denver, and one in Vegas. We recently announced that we’re going to be opening our next one in Grapevine and Dallas–Fort Worth this summer, and we have more in the works. The thing that’s really unusual and special about the Meow Wolf experience is that the whole purpose is not only to have a vehicle for artists but also to inspire creativity and thoughtfulness in our visitors. So, when people come into our space, there’s an underlying narrative.

Read More There are different worlds that you can explore, but there’s no map. We don’t tell people how to experience it. What we want them to do is to start to realize that there can be many layers to everything. For example, if you go to Omega Mart, which is our location in Vegas, you start in a grocery store and what feels like a grocery store. But when you start inspecting a little bit more closely, you realize that it’s not quite what you think it is. That milk carton has a handle on it. That vegetable that you think is a root vegetable is really a plushy. Then you open the freezer door, and it’s not a freezer at all—it’s a door into another universe. You walk through, and you’re in a totally different space. You’re no longer in a grocery store.

The whole ethos is, How do we get people to think differently? To think differently about the world? How do we create this transformative journey for them to take them out of their day-to-day lives and get them to think about other possibilities? How do we inspire creativity and the art of thinking about the possible in the world? It’s just such a wonderful vision. Personally, when I walk into one of our spaces—when there’s that moment when I walk from one world into the next before going back—I always find that moment magical. The other thing for us, of course, is that you really get up close and personal with art.

As you can see, these are large-scale experiences, but they’re not mass-manufactured. These are hand-crafted experiences that are built by our artists, which you can see and feel. You can see their handiwork. You can see the hand of the artist, and you can really feel the connection. I also have had the privilege of going to our facility in Santa Fe and seeing all of the passion that is put into everything. I see the creativity, and then I see how this translates into our exhibits and our mission of spreading and inspiring creativity throughout the world.

Meow Wolf | www.meowwolf.com | Santa Fe, NM

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CFO GUEST: Dan Fletcher of Planful

EPISODE: 872: Opportunities Along the xP&A Frontier

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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 inside an interim management role as a private equity advisor he was the former investor turned operator.

For its part, Fletcher’s early career journey is a standout not just for its navigation of the finance triad: auditor, investor, operator – but for the speed at which he was able to pivot from one to the next.

Read More “I did not look like everyone else,” comments Fletcher, who doesn’t try to cloak the burdens of his first pivot from auditor to investor.

Remarks Fletcher: “These are two totally different disciplines, where from an auditor’s perspective you’re viewing the business from the outside in, and trying to mainly validate the financial statements, whereas from the investor perspective you’re mainly concerned with returns.”

Meanwhile, Fletcher makes clear his ability to pivot was dependent on regular outreach along the way.

“It required a lot of careful fostering of relationships to have people place a bet on me,” comments Fletcher, who tells us his pivot to the operations side involved both individual initiative as well as a rigorous future employer.

“It took a lot of vetting. I think I interviewed with probably 20 different people and I would complete a lot of research on my own,” comments Fletcher.

Reflecting on his research Fletcher adds: “Thanks to the Internet there was no shortage of material out there as far as how to thrive in different roles – both from the hardskills and softskills point of view.”

Still, one career pivot Fletcher put in motion had more to do with narrowing his lens rather than widening it. Nearly a decade into his career, Fletcher’s 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 older industries.” – Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Planful today … what sets apart this company? …and what sets apart its offerings?

Fletcher: I’ll take all the time you’ll give me. I’m quite the evangelist for the product. I’m a user of the product myself, obviously, and very excited about the trajectory the company has taken and continues to ride. And so fundamentally, what does Planful do? Planful helps you plan, organization-wise, helps you plan in an automated and agile fashion. It helps you close the books faster with functionality that our audience here on the CFO THOUGHT LEADER will understand as consolidation and financial close, and then it helps you report. Report in gap financials, report in management reporting, report operationally, KPIs, dashboards, whatever you want.

And so it’s the soup to nuts platform for finance and accounting, and increasingly for other departments, including marketing, HR or people, teams, depending on who you ask, and IT, because everybody plans.

Read More And this is not news to you, Jack, but the category that we operate in, this sort of FP&A software category, has increasingly become more cross-functional and sell to all the C-suite, different operational leaders throughout the business, because, I’ll say it one more time, everybody does planning, but not everybody has the right tools to do it.

Earlier, I mentioned that we might find room to talk about that acquisition that Planful did in September of 2022, and this strikes me as a very good strategic moment for your audience. I have as a CFO, and like many of our listeners, do not only finance and accounting, but some other responsibilities. And this is nothing new for CFOs now over the past decade or two, that they’ve become more multidisciplinary, more cross-functional, and I love it for the role of CFO. I own also legal and also corporate development, and corporate development is the group in many companies, and certainly our company, that assesses the product in partnership with product marketing and the actual product management group, and begins to develop a sense of where we have gaps that we could fill to better serve our customers, and also of course to grow our own business and create value for our shareholders.

And so that is a strategic function for me. I work cross-functionally to develop a market map and understand the trends historical and emerging in FP&A. One of those trends of course is xP&A, or planning outside of the office of finance, planning other than in general ledger codes, and that is inclusive of things like what I mentioned about the SDR team. They plan in number of dials needed to get a connect and how long they’re on a phone call and they resource their group around those metrics. And one of the areas that struck us as very, very ripe for an elevated amount of tooling and education around planning was marketing.

Marketing, traditionally one of the biggest cost centers, and I think many finance people will nod their heads when I say a bit of a black box, takes a lot of investment, and there’s not a great way, at least historically, to understand the return on that investment. Sure, you can measure things like revenue and amount of dollars spent on marketing per dollar of revenue you get, but those are just two total disconnected. One is at the very tip and one is at the very end, and there’s a whole bunch of metrics in between there that can be understood and planned around. And so what does marketing do when they get on an annual basis… Let me step back. On an annual basis, you run the financial planning, the budget process, and if finance is good at what they do, they’re partnering with each of the departments, including marketing, to develop what marketing thinks they need to spend on things like programs and humans that year, and events, et cetera.

But then, traditionally they lock in on a number and then they hand it, they being financed, hands it over to marketing. The board approve, you have $10 million to spend on programs. But then it’s a black box to finance, and what marketing will do, well, they will take that $10 million and they will cascade that out into campaigns, and they’ll resource those campaigns with people, with PR resources, with ad spend, with content, content creation and content management. If there are any CMOs listening, I’m doing my best on what you guys do. It’s that campaign-level planning, but they don’t even have the ability to completely link the outcomes of those campaigns. How much did that event, that webinar we did, generate for us in terms of lead flow? There are swim lane issues, and et cetera. So, this just screams for technology.

It’s 2023, we have the technology to be able to link the finance plan, cascade that into campaigns, and then link the ROI from things like the CRM and the ad networks. And what we found when we went out, my core dev function and I into the market, was that a company called Plannuh, P-L-A-N-N-U-H, a Boston company, some of you will get that joke, Planner, Plannuh, and they were doing this. They were a relatively early stage startup, but they had built the perfect mouse trap to take what finance gives a marketer, plan it out the way marketers actually run their business, and track the ROI. And it was an aha moment, a finance strategic moment that the founder and I both saw the synergies between what FP&A planning platforms do and what that marketing performance management platform did, and we said, “This is one plus one equals five. It’s not even one plus one equals three.”

It will closely interlink finance and marketing for maybe the first time in the history of business, and it’s been very successful so far. So, that deal closed in September and it’s been off to the races. We’ve now got a couple common customers selling into Planful’s relatively large customer base, and certainly have been out in the market pounding the table saying that every finance and marketing team should be wanting this to help improve their alignment and help them speak the same language.

Planful | www.planful.com | Redwood City, CA

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CFO GUEST: Jared Poff of Designer Brands

EPISODE: 871: Keeping in Stride in a High-Pressure Economy

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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.

Read More 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

“Strong finances are the outcome of strong businesses. Be aggressively curious about the drivers of the business and understanding the organizational and expense structures. Think beyond finance.” –Jared Poff, CFO, Designer Brands

CFOTL: What part of Designer Brands’ strategy is data-driven today?

Poff: As we have become a brand builder, having access to data around the consumer is massively important. For us, this is data unlike that of most other brands that we compete with from a brand standpoint. We have the luxury of having 30 million VIP program members inside our DSW shop who can feed us all kinds of data we use for product development on our brand side. Most brands don’t have the huge retail and consumer component that we do, but for the brands that we distribute besides DSW, we are always looking for more and more consumer data. What’s changing? Where are they shopping? Are they still going to Macy’s? Where are they going? Is it now Anthropologie, somewhere like that? This is the type of information that we can’t get enough of, and we’re building as many data lakes and pipes as we can to constantly get this data so that we can access it.

Read More Our business is in a highly discretionary industry. Every indication is telling us that there is going to be very high pressure on the consumer, in a high-pressure economy. Maybe not potentially a recession, but certainly people are pulling back, not extending. Our biggest focus during the next 12 months will be on becoming as efficient as possible. How do we make sure that we control expenses aggressively while not getting upside down on investments around planned sales that may not happen? So, we will be all about not making huge investments in inventory, not overstretching teams around new projects and capex, and really just focusing on the next 12 months. We think that there’s some pressure coming—and especially pressure on consumer discretionary spending

Designer Brands | www.designerbrands.com | Columbus, OH

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CFO GUEST: John McCauley of Calendly

EPISODE: #870: When Preparation Matters

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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.

Read More 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.

Another pivotal moment for McCauley 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 may have something in common.

Says McCauley: “At the last four Olympics, there’s been someone from my high school on our team.” –Jack Sweeney

“Become a key corporate storyteller. It’s your job to make the complicated and boring approachable and interesting. Master dissent and commit: Have a well-reasoned take, then get behind the final decision. Balance the serious with the fun and have a passion for what you do.” –John McCauley, CFO, Calendly

CFOTL: Tell us about Calendly … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

McCauley: Let’s start with the problem, which I think will resonate with just about everybody. You need to get a meeting scheduled. Let’s say that there are going to be two or three or maybe four people in this meeting. We’ve all done the email jockeying for things such as this where we end up emailing each other four or five times with messages like “Oh, Jack can meet at 4 o’clock, but Sarah can meet only at 2 o’clock.” It all ends up being like this giant vortex of emails.

Calendly provides a very simple tool for horizontal external meeting scheduling, with which you can provide different ways of setting up a meeting.

Read More It can be as easy as a link. It can be, “Hey, Jack, here are the times when I’m available—you schedule the time that works best for you.” We even have round-robin technology, or poll technology, which you could use if you were thinking “Hey, I don’t know what time works for these four people but let me send out a poll and find out which one everybody can meet at.” And then it automatically books the meeting for you.

We take the pain out of booking meetings, which I think is a very horizontal problem that resonates with everybody. We have well over 10 million people on our software today in more than 150 countries. We have tremendous brand equity, in that a lot of people have either been sent a Calendly link or are actually on the platform already. The business has a beautiful viral coefficient. Given that we provide so much value to our customers, each customer leads to more customers, which leads to more customers. So, Calendly has really great unit economics when it comes to how we expand over time.

As we move into the future and look at what’s next on the horizon for Calendly, we see ourselves getting involved in more complex scheduling use cases. For example, we recently acquired a company called Prelude, which has solutions very specific to HR departments that are going through recruiting and scheduling in more complex scenarios. Once somebody gets past the first interview, how do we get this panel interview set up with these five different individuals? This can be a very complex thing. You can imagine the back-and-forths and meeting cancellations that recruiting coordinators often face. Prelude is specifically built for that use case.

In the future, you’ll see Calendly launching additional products that support areas like sales, marketing, and customer support by really helping our end customers schedule meetings more quickly. The benefit of scheduling meetings more quickly is interesting in and of itself, but to me, it’s the benefit of benefits, which you see when you drill down. If you’re a seller, it’s closing more deals. If you’re a recruiter, it’s getting more people through the funnel and into positions. The benefits of Calendly are everywhere.

When you drill down into it, we’re all about creating better success and more efficiency in individuals’ careers.

Calendly | www.calendly.com | Atlanta, GA

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CFO GUEST: Ravi Narula, CFO, FinancialForce

EPISODE: 869: Sharpening its Customer Focus

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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.

Read More 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.

Adds Narula: “If I’m not meeting with different people in person, it becomes a little more difficult to understand with which individuals I need to be investing my time.” –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about FinancialForce … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Narula: FinancialForce is a private software company headquartered in San Francisco. Just to give some perspective to help people understand, let me talk about some of our big product areas. Back in the early 2000s, for example, I was using Excel to keep track of some major SOC project management. Now, we have better solutions. One of FinancialForce’s is called Professional Services Automation. If somebody has a professional services organization or customer service organization, they want to optimize everything. For all of the professional services, time is money. Every hour that is spent in determining whether to bill or not bill someone—and how much—has an impact on the top line.

Read More We are able to provide PSA, Professional Services Automation, to take away all of the manual processes, as well as to help to reduce a firm’s revenue leakage. We can tell them which projects are on time and what’s happening in processes and utilization rates for lots of our customers. All of our professional services organizations see their margins go up. Basically, we use automation to help them to save time and improve productivity. This is one of the key solutions for us.

Second, we sell ERP accounting and planning systems through which you can record all of your GL accounting, bank reconciliations, and so on. It’s your in-house accounting system.

We have not only professional services automation and an ERP solution, but now also additional products that get into planning and analysis. Whether it’s financial planning analysis or some other type, you can use FinancialForce for it. We also are expanding into the services industry a lot more, with products involving things like the customer service cloud and a services CPQ.

We are in 10-plus countries around the world and have more than 1,000 customers. Lots of these customers are in the top of the Fortune 100, but we range from the top customers all the way down to medium-size businesses, too. So, we’re a very diversified company. jb

FinancialForce | www.financialforce.com | San Francisco, CA

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CFO GUEST: Tom Fennimore of Luminar Technologies

EPISODE: #868: Armed and Sheltered From the Storm

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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.”

Read More 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

“Life in general is a marathon, not a sprint, with a lot of obstacles along the way. Staying the course is very important!” –Tom Fennimore, CFO, Luminar Technologies

CFOTL: Tell us about Luminar Technologies … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Fennimore: We make these products called LIDARs, whose name comes from “Light Detection and Ranging.” I describe this to my two young boys by saying that basically we shoot lasers out of vehicles to do real-time 3-D mapping of the world around them. This makes it possible for a car to be driven more safely because precisely where everything is in front of it is known. It will also enable better autonomy when the technology is ultimately ready for true autonomy.

In addition to the LIDAR hardware, we also make the software associated with it, as well as certain products that our LIDAR enables, such as 3-D mapping products—which are something that we’ve recently announced.

Read More We already have products on the road, as we launched with our initial OEM late last year. We’re preparing to launch with Volvo later this year. Soon, every one of Volvo’s flagship SUV—their fully electric EX90—that is sold will have our technology on it because it substantially improves the safety of the vehicle. Volvo is the brand name most synonymous with safety, so this was a very important win for us.

We’re also on vehicles from other makers, like Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Polestar. We have technology partners, such as NVIDIA and Mobiliance, and commercial trucking clients, like Daimler Truck. There’s going to be rapid adoption of the technology. Luminar has by far the most wins in the industry in terms of number of automakers planning to put such technology on their vehicles.

I knew from covering the automotive industry that LIDAR was going to be big. As with any new technology, I would meet with a lot of these start-up companies. All of them would come in and pitch me with PowerPoint presentations proving that their technology was the best in the world. To me, the biggest differentiator that I used as a banker to determine whether a company was real was to ask a question like, “Are automakers making a conscious decision to buy that technology and put it on their vehicles?”

A company’s view of their technology is important and a third-party view of that technology is important, but all of it is irrelevant if none of the customers is ultimately going to choose to use that technology. The automakers were ultimately going to select a winner. When I heard through the industry grapevine that Luminar had won Volvo, this was an important indicator to me of the company’s potential for future success. A brand name like Volvo is the perfect first launch customer for a company like Luminar because we are really all about making products that make vehicles much safer.

We raised a little over $600 million in December 2021 with a convertible note that has an interest rate that’s a little over 1%. This brought us a lot of cash and by far the strongest balance sheet in the industry. We now find ourselves in the position of having built not only a storm shelter in advance of this market storm that we’re all currently in but also a strong balance sheet that can be an offensive weapon as well as a major competitive strength. jb

Luminar Technologies | www.luminartech.com | Orlando, FL

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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.

“The way I think about it is that FP&A really needs to design the questions we’re trying to answer. The data analytics team needs to be able to write the queries to answer those questions. And our data and engineering team has to put the data in a structure that we can query and get value out of it.”

—John McCauley, CFO, Calendly.

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.

The Collaborating Departments:

Marketing – for data on customer acquisition costs, customer behavior and spending patterns, product mix and market trends.
Sales – for data on customer purchase history and patterns, customer feedback, and cross-selling opportunities.
Customer Service – for data on customer complaints, customer satisfaction, and customer retention.
Finance – for data on costs and revenue, discount rates, and discount structures.
Data Science/Analytics – for data analysis, modeling, and validation of CLV calculations.

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

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CFO GUEST: Donald Alvarez of Cyngn

EPISODE: 867: Energizing Your Data Relations

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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.

Read More 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

CFOTL: Tell us about Cyngn … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Alvarez: Cyngn is a software company that provides autonomous vehicle solutions for industrial uses. So, think robotaxis, think Tesla-level autonomous driving, but in an industrial setting where speeds are low, environments are controlled, and very specific routes are driven. These are just much more simplified environments, but still, we are able to provide for them a very, very sophisticated, robotaxi-like, advanced technology, which is very disruptive.

Read More We’re basically addressing three very significant challenges that are being faced by commercial and industrial organizations today. Certainly, one is labor expense, the increasing cost of which is first and foremost one of the things that we address.

Another, though, which is increasingly even more significant, is the labor shortages that exist today that we read about constantly. These shortages are predicted to be costing the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion by 2030, which is only 7 years away.

Finally, there is the challenge of losses due to human error, which represent $200 billion worth of expense in U.S. businesses today. This is a very significant issue that our technology helps to address.

For me, it’s incredible to be a part of this organization and be able to make the impact on industrial organizations that we make. jb

“Build a broad and deep network of internal relationships so that you have real-time access to different insights and a support system when you need one.” –Donald Alvarez, CFO, Cyngn

Cyngn | www.cyngn.com | Menlo Park, CA

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CFO GUEST: Jeremy Klaperman of Rho

EPISODE: #866 Metrics for the Masses

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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.

Read More 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.” –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Rho … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Klaperman: Rho is an automated finance platform that provides a variety of financial services as well as software services to small and medium-size businesses. We provide commercial banking services, credit cards, accounts payable automation for easy payment of bills, and expense management software, all on one easy-to-use, holistic, integrated platform.

Instead of having multiple providers of financial services—like a bank, a credit card company, an accounts payable platform, and an expense management platform—all working independently and not being integrated, which causes errors and inefficiency and necessitates lots of manual processes, our clients use Rho to unify all of these into one.

Read More We automate them and remove all of their manual processes and inefficiency. We save a ton of time. We allow CFOs to have better control over their finances, increase the quality of their work, and really focus on value-added tasks like growing the business, saving money, and so on.

Going forward, we’re going to be all about not just continuing the work that we are doing to integrate finance and data, to be on the leading edge, and to push the boundaries of measuring and understanding everything that we’re doing but also sharing these findings with all appropriate stakeholders. Integrating data and driving forward the scope and thus value of measurement have already created so much value for us and really are making a difference for us in what we’re doing for ourselves and for our clients. We’re giving them more information to make their companies better and make their lives easier—and to give their employees a better experience. We really will just be continuing to build this out and push the leading edge. We want to continue to be the thought leader in this field. jb

Rho | www.rho.co | NY, New York

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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.

Our discussion highlights:

Recruiting and hiring: AI-powered recruiting and hiring systems can help companies identify and select the best candidates for open positions by analyzing resumes, conducting initial interviews, and even evaluating candidates’ work samples.

Employee engagement: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can be used to provide employees with quick and easy access to important information and resources, such as company policies, procedures and benefits.

Predictive analytics: AI can be used to predict employee turnover, job satisfaction, and other key metrics, allowing managers to take proactive steps to improve employee engagement and retention.

More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees.

The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations.

Your Hosts | Brett Knowles & Jack Sweeney

About Brett Knowles

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CFO GUEST: Anup Singh of Illumio

EPISODE: #865: Achieving A Strategic Alignment

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It’s perhaps no surprise that the late 1990s came to mind for Anup Singh when we 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.

Read More 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

CFOTL: Tell us how Illumio has grown since the last time we caught up with you …

Singh: I think that the last time that you and I chatted was about 3 years ago. I had been CFO of Illumio for about a year at that time. Now, I’ve been in the seat for a number of years, having just celebrated my 4-year anniversary.

The company has grown fantastically well over the past 3 years. We are a late-stage security software company that addresses the containment of breaches, stopping the spread of ransomware, and preventing other bad things from happening. Slightly over a year ago, in 2021, we did our Series F, with which we raised about $225 million at a valuation of $2.75 billion. The valuation of the company has grown, and this obviously has been aligned with growth in revenue and the number of customers using our products.

Read More Alongside the executive team, I’ve really tried to help to drive the expansion of the company. For one thing, we’ve expanded our number of geographies—international users, as an example, now account for about a third of our customers. We have expanded the portfolio of the products that we sell. A couple years ago, we sold a single solution—now, we’re a multi-product organization. We’re expanding the platform, if you will, so now we are much more of an end-to-end solution. We are the leader in what’s called zero-trust segmentation.

In today’s environment, security is a really interesting industry to be in. We’re solving, in our minds, very important problems, and I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to bring our solution to many more end users. We provide security in ways that are cheaper, easier, and better. We’re really just all about trying to resolve issues that are very important to our customers. jb

Illumio | www.illumio.com | Sunnyvale, CA

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CFO GUEST: Steven Mitchell of Redgate Software

EPISODE: #864: Excelling Beyond Your Comfort Zone

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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.

Read More “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

CFOTL: Tell us about Redgate Software … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Mitchell: I won’t get too technical, because I’m not a technical guy myself. When you’re making changes to your systems internally—if you think about the finance system, for example—you’re dealing with a set of fields with a ton of data in them. If you want to add a new field or a bunch of new data or you’re going to make some sort of change, the IT team is going to do that. They don’t just go in and deploy a change. They have a test environment, and they test everything. They probably get you in to do the UAT and make sure that everything works, and then they deploy the change into production, after which you can actually use it in your business.

We make sure that the risk is low and that they can use what tends to get called DevOps these days to make small changes rapidly while at the same time keeping the business agile. This is the bulk of what our software does. There are other bits as well, but this is really the key thing.

I’m perhaps oversimplifying a little, but we help businesses with their agility in deploying such changes.

Read More I’m broadly cautious about the next 12 months in terms of the economy and the market, especially in the UK and Europe and maybe a little bit less so in the U.S. As CFO, I try to keep in mind Jack Reacher’s motto in one of my favorite novels: Hope for the best and plan for the worst. My main priority as CFO right now is to help our business to take advantage of the great financial position that we’re in. We have no debt, and we have cash in the bank. Therefore, in a measured way, we can make investments even through what is a fairly turbulent time.

So, I’m all about supporting the rest of the business in executing well on such investments and, obviously, tracking the return on them before, hopefully, making even more investments. This is where the priorities lie for me. I feel pretty lucky to be in the business that I’m in and to be able to think fairly expansively about things rather than have to prioritize refinancing or cost-cutting. Not that we’re not looking to be efficient, but I feel pretty privileged to be in a firm in a position like ours, with the team that I get to work with. jb

“Ensuring your management team are A-players will hugely impact the positive influence of your team across the business, your ability to be a broad business leader and your enjoyment in the CFO role. Talk directly to customers – regularly. Reading the Board paper on customer satisfaction or NPS isn’t enough.” – Steve Mitchell, CFO, Redgate Software

Redgate Software | www.red-gate.com | Cambridge, UK

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CFO GUEST: Keith Stauffer of TerrAscend

EPISODE: #863: A Career’s Continental Span

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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.

Read More 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

CFOTL: Tell us about TerrAscend … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Stauffer: We’re what most people in the cannabis industry would call a multistate operator. We would be a Top 7 or so or certainly a Top 10 multistate operator. TerrAscend operates in five states—Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Michigan, California. We originally started the company in Canada, so we have the Canada business, as well. There are maybe a few more that are publicly traded, and there are more private companies that are multistate operators. What the term means is exactly what it says.

What differentiates TerrAscend—and we very much believe in this strategy, this path that we’re on—is that we’re deeper into fewer states, which means that we can really penetrate, run a vertically integrated operation, and not spread ourselves too thin in what is a very capital-intensive effort.

Read More This allows us to go deeper, to become more profitable over time, to gain a larger market share within each of the states in which we’re operating, and to build our brands. While this may not completely differentiate us, I believe that this is one of the key differentiators of TerrAscend relative to some of our peers.

This continues to be a consolidating industry, so M&A continues to play a prominent role. This is very squarely on our radar, and I play a key role in this process. Targeting our M&A strategy is a big priority for me. We also need to fully operationalize our SOX program because this will be the first year in which we are subject to that. This means focusing on more nuts and bolts on the core accounting side of things to really ensure that the company is on stable footing and that the teams across all of the businesses know what they need to do to maintain a safe controls environment. Another priority—which is the lifeblood of any company—is continuing to drive gross margin, so a major initiative for us will be to continue lots of the work already under way around reducing operating expenses and right-sizing the components of the company. Now that these processes are in place, the next frontier will be to really drive gross margin in order to be able to give ourselves the fuel to invest more fully. jb

TerrAscend | www.terrascend.com | Mississauga, Ontario

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CFO GUEST: Patrick McClymont of Hagerty

EPISODE: #862: The Numbers Don’t Lie

Machine Generated Transcript

CFOTL: Does anything comes to mind when we ask for a finance strategic moment of insight?

McClymont: The thing about this one, I go back to my time at IMAX, and so when I was hired at IMAX, the company was coming off of two very strong years, in the midst of the third. They had just taken their Chinese business public in Hong Kong, and that had produced a bunch of capital. And the mandate for the new CFO and why they found me attractive, it was going to be external. It was, you look at ways to drive growth, add legs to the stool, acquisitions, partnerships, those kind of things. In my first handful of months, I did the sort of normal onboarding and diagnostic. I also joined that in August, and so went through a planning process, which was helpful.

Read More And then early in my second year, so I was sort of five months in or something myself, along with the CEO Rich Gelfond, we kind of were looking at the numbers and noticed that some of the trends were moving against us. And I went back, did a bunch of work on it and came back and sat down with him and said, look, I know the mandate was X, but I’m concerned. How do we think about sort of an early warning system? What do we use to make a decision? Are we still headed in the direction we wanted to be or are we pivoting here? And Richard had been there forever and tremendous intuition on the business. And so he kind of agreed where I was coming from and said, okay, look, let’s look at the next three titles that are coming out and we’ll monitor our performance on those. And if we find that we’re in a position where we’re not on track, then let’s have a real conversation.

And he said, but go get ready for that real conversation now. If we end up in a spot where we need to pivot, let’s start working on it. And for me, it was sort of the moment was, okay, I was hired to do one thing, feels different, and always remember the numbers don’t lie. And that was the framework that Rich and I came up with is, okay, look, let’s just create a little scorecard, a short term scorecard, and we’ll hold ourselves accountable to it. And if the numbers tell us to do something, we’re going to do it. And the moment was sort of, especially coming from banking, banking all numbers go up into the right. And look, we all have these strategies and narratives and we’re all biased to believe that wonderful things will happen. And in the finance situation, always remember the numbers don’t lie.

And ask your peers on a leadership team, okay, if that’s true, whatever it is, if it’s true, is it in our numbers now? When will it be in our numbers? And it look, there’s a very constructive way to have those conversations. It’s just about the initiative and remembering that … Ask those challenging questions, help people recognize that the sands can shift underneath us pretty quickly. And then from the CFO slot, you can’t just ask the question. You’ve got to be willing to roll up your sleeves, dive in with your business partners and help them figure it out. What is the pivot we need to make and how do we get at it?

So that was the one for me, that recognition that this can move pretty quickly and you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got the resolve to ask the tough question, and then the follow through to build, sort of buy-in to what the solution is.

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August is very likely 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.

Read More 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 chapter.

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

CFOTL: Tell us about Hagerty … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

McClymont: We think of Hagerty as an ecosystem for the automotive enthusiast. Insurance for collectible cars, for enthusiast cars, would be kind of broadly described as being at the core of this ecosystem, but in addition to this, we’ve also created a membership model through which we’re offering additional value to our members. This includes things like roadside assistance for their vehicles; a best-in-class, award-winning magazine; and, obviously, tons of media content that we produce. We also own and operate events around the car-collecting hobby. Unlike other insurance businesses that add value only through risk transfer, we offer much more, and all of this together is at the core of our business. Plus, we’re doing this for folks who are deeply passionate about automobiles and car culture.

Read More When we’re asked about our long-term purpose, the answer is easy: It’s to save the car-driving culture. The long-term reason that we are around is to make sure that for decades to come, people can still enjoy all of the wonderful aspects of the car culture that we’ have developed.

In order to accomplish this mission, we’ve developed a business model that generates the funds to allow us to help to preserve car culture. It creates value for our customers in various ways, value for our shareholders, and a compelling place for folks to work. It all goes back though, to adding value for people who are deeply passionate about cars.

Our plans are really centered on where the company is going. We’ve come through a period of heavy investment in growth, so what we’ve communicated is that 2023 will be an important transitional year. We’re going to focus not just on top-line and customer growth but also on driving profitable growth on a go-forward basis. We have full alignment around this.

Another priority will be to continue to develop the new marketplace business that we established in 2022, which is a huge opportunity. The value of collectible cars in the world is north of a trillion dollars, and the domestic market is huge. Thus far, we’ve been really small in terms of helping customers through these transactions. We’re great on the insurance side of it, but now we’re building this platform that will also help them from a transaction standpoint. We have the brand, we have the expertise—now we just really need to put some muscle behind aggressively growing this business. So, this is a big push for us as well. jb

“Build a broad and deep network of internal relationships so that you have real-time access to different insights and a support system when it comes time to implement change.” –Patrick McClymont, CFO, Hagerty

Hagerty | www.hagerty.com | Traverse City, MI

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CFO GUEST: David Quinn

EPISODE: 861: Putting Your Plan in Motion

The following is a machine generated transcript

CFOTL: You built your career in large banking institutions … at Bluevine are you enjoying some sort of greater influence over how the organization is absorbing information or data?

Quinn: No, it’s such an insightful point there, Jack. Yeah. I love what I do. And moving from a large organization to a small organization, somebody said it to me, a friend who made a similar transition. He said, “When you think you’re moving fast, you’re not.” And that is really, really clear. We move at a phenomenal pace, and the speed of decision making, like, “Hey, I want to see this metric. Okay, done.” They get on dashboard. There’s no big lengthy discussion around it, and that I think is critical. There’s just less bureaucracy, less discussion around things. It’s all focused on the execution part. It was specifically to those metrics, one of the things that we did was set up a risk committee, right? So, as a subset of the audit committee, we have a risk committee. Within that risk committee, we monitor certain metrics. So, we created a risk appetite.

Read More And so, there’s a whole bunch of new metrics that we weren’t looking at previously that we’re now looking at. And the ability to do that in a short space of time, two, three months, is pretty phenomenal. It would’ve taken a much longer time in a larger organization, one, to source the data, agree to definitions, run it by all the different levels. Here, you have less complexity and you have certainly a lot less politics around things. And so, it’s more test and learn, test and learn, continuous iteration.

And the staff and the executives are supportive of that process, and you can see the bigger picture. I would say one of the, let’s say, challenges, or things to be aware of, that I’m always checking myself is, moving from a large corporation to a smaller corporation, is making sure that you are not over-building, right? And so, fit for purpose is something that I try and live by all the time. What is good enough, right? This doesn’t have to be world class. We’re still evolving. But what is fit for purpose, fit for this size of organization? What can we consume with the resources that we have?

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Things were going downhill for David Quinn when he met his future wife—or such might be the familiar punchline to follow 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 European leaders into upper management roles. However, regardless of the degree status of its targets, Citigroup’s leadership development effort suddenly lost its spring.

Read More “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 impressive 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

CFOTL: Tell us about Bluevine … what sets this fintech apart, and what are its offerings today?

Quinn: Bluevine, which launched in 2013, effectively saves small business owners time so that they can focus on what’s important, which is running their business. We work to enable a better financial future for about 450,000 small businesses with our simple, innovative solutions around banking, bill management, and credit, three things that are critical for small businesses. We really are targeting SMBs—think companies with 20 or fewer people. These could be a small restaurant, a pizza shop, a flower shop—anyone who has revenues and a few employees and has needs above and beyond basic banking. We have an online checking account. We’re 100% digital. We have the access to credit, so we have lines of credit. We have a bill pay solution that can pay bills, manage bills, and integrate with QuickBooks. We can solve a lot of the headaches that small businesses have.

Read More One of the things that most attracted me about this offering was that no one else was really doing it. If you read the statistics, you know that so many small businesses are underserved by the traditional banks. This is an area that is just not profitable for them at the scales at which they operate. They’re not building for them, they’re not building solutions. Banks tend to build for the larger-revenue clients—think $5 million plus in revenue. The SMBs are largely underserved, and if they do apply for credit, they have about an 80% chance of being rejected. That’s really a small chance for success. We’re passionate about our mission at Bluevine to serve small businesses specifically, given that they’re the backbone of the U.S. economy.

In 18 months’ time, 2 years’ time, if I were to look back, what would I see that I had done? What would “good” look like? I think that this is the type of framework that we try to apply. We’re sort of at a critical point. For us, it’s all about managing through the recession, continuing to scale, focusing on our operational efficiency and path to profitability, and then delivering against our budget, which this year again is going to be dynamic. We need to make sure that we understand where we can flex it and what our options are. jb

“You cannot passively manage your career. Intelligence, hard work, and dedication will get you only so far. To reach your full potential, you need to share your ideas, opinions, and aspirations and set a plan in motion to achieve them. Creating a strong network and seeking a mentor will only accelerate the attainment of your plan.” –David Quinn, CFO, Bluevine

Bluevine | www.bluevine.com | Redwood City, CA

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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.

More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees.

The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations.

Your Hosts | Brett Knowles & Jack Sweeney

About Brett Knowles

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CFO GUEST: Kevin Rubin of Alteryx

EPISODE: 860: Opportunities From Life’s Cauldron

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businesses to more than 50% of the Fortune 500.
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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.

Read More “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

CFOTL: Tell us about Alteryx … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Rubin: At the highest level, Alteryx makes it super easy for anyone in an organization to use data, discover insights, and make better decisions. We have this terminology that describes us as providing “analytics for all” or the “democratization of analytics.”

Just think about any organization. You have people throughout it—let’s call them unsung heroes—who have operational roles. They’re challenged day in and day out to make decisions based on analyzing the information available to them, but they don’t have the tools and the ability to do this.

Read More They certainly don’t have the ability to operate at a higher skill level than their training. We have this saying: “You can’t teach a data scientist how to be an accountant, but—through Alteryx—you can certainly enable an accounting person to behave and operate like a data scientist.”

At the end of the day, we’re an analytic platform. We focus on business analysts sitting in the line of business and really giving them an opportunity to upskill. If you talk to some of the largest companies in the world today, you find that the biggest challenge that they have is that they can’t find enough skilled data workers. There aren’t enough data scientists in the world to be able to solve all of the problems that need to be addressed, and the ones who are already here are engaged in solving the world’s most difficult ones. If you’re trying to solve basic business challenges, whether in good markets or bad markets, there are just not enough people out there who can work with the data fast enough to make decisions.

Our whole goal is to be able to upskill a workforce. We really want to enable everybody in an organization to be comfortable when working with data and be able to use it to make better business decisions and drive real outcomes for their business.

Don’t be afraid to push into areas of unknown and stretch yourself. Challenging yourself breeds success and you learn the most in the most challenging experiences. Finally, continue to surround yourself with the best talent and don’t be threatened by smart people – they will make you better. – Kevin Rubin, CFO, Alteryx

Alteryx | www.alteryx.com | Irvine, CA

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CFO GUEST: Rajat Bahri of Icertis

EPISODE: 859: The Everyday, Conscious Effort to Add Value

Machine Generated Transcript

CFOTL: As you look to influence the workforce. And I’m wondering if you do it any differently than you did maybe 10 years ago. These tools are allowing you to do that, supposedly.

Rajat Bahri: Couple of things I would say to that. What I’ve seen is lot of automation and tools have come in place and data governance structures have come into place that you get information real time. I’m a strong believer in getting information real time because if you don’t know where you are, it’s impossible to course correct. And if you’re always like, no. So as a finance person, you really need to know at any particular moment where the business is. You need the pulse on the business. So then you can guide, I can see it on the corner saying, “Okay, this is the problem I’m seeing now. How do I work with this function or this place to course correct it?” So it really starts with knowing where you are very precisely. And then you can course correct things in a timely fashion. That’s one thing that I pay a lot of attention on.

Read More The second is you need to make sure that you have a buy-in because you can’t do it alone. You really need a buy-in from all the function heads. And typically in a SaaS, what I have done and what started doing here is benchmarks. Benchmarks are available for best of class SaaS companies. They’re available on what was Salesforce like when they were our scale, what was Workday like when they were our scale, so we have best of class. And then you compare, “Hey, this is where we are and this is what best of class is. And obviously we want to be best of class. In some places we are there in some places we clearly are not. And then this is the data. It’s publicly available. I’m not making it up. And we want to be best of class, so let’s talk about how to do it.”

So that’s how you bring the whole team together. People will challenge data. Make sure your data is solid. And once people get comfortable with data and this is what it is, then you see strong alignment, then it comes into how you’re going to get there. So that’s kind of the things I’m doing in the company.

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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.

Read More 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

CFOTL: Tell us about Icertis … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Bahri: Basically, Icertis is a company that digitizes contracts—and contracts are the foundation of commerce. They are in every transaction. Whether you’re doing sales, doing procurement, doing legal, hiring people—everything is memorialized in a contract. So, how do you extract all of this information that exists in contracts, digitize it, provide intelligence around it, and integrate it into different systems?

This is the first company that has been able to do this on a very broad scale. As we’ve discussed, I’ve been a CFO for a number of years. When I heard about Icertis, I was like, Where is this? I could have realized so much value if I had had something like this in my toolkit all along.

Read More This is what’s exciting about us … it’s the things that we can do. We do the whole contract lifecycle management from beginning to the end. We digitize contracts and can provide insights into them, and we also make sure that what was promised in a contract is delivered. This is what we do.

We have a lot of growth ahead of us. We are a category leader. To grow the company in the most efficient manner possible is my goal, as well as to set us up as a company to go public at some point, whenever the markets open up. As we are experiencing this great, efficient growth, we need to have our infrastructure ready to go public, so that at least we have this as an option.

Implementing efficient growth, supporting it, and putting in place the infrastructure to take the company public—these are my priorities for the next 12 months.

Icertis | www.icertis.com | Bellevue, WA

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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 found himself reporting 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.

Read More “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

CFOTL: Tell us about Zelis … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Gladden: Zelis is a leading healthcare payments company. As everybody who deals with healthcare and has to deal with their own personal dynamics knows, there’s a broken healthcare financial system. If you’ve ever tried to reconcile your bill from the doctor with a statement from the insurer, you know that it’s a mess. It’s massively inefficient and painful for everyone. There’s a lot of wasted expense and energy in the U.S. healthcare system, and a bunch of this has to do with the payments process.

Read More One of the things that’s core to our business is a platform that bridges the gaps in the financial system by aligning the interests of the payers, the providers, and the healthcare consumer. What our business does, on an annualized basis, is to help our clients, who are the payers. We process about $110 billion of healthcare claims. We make about $200 billion worth of healthcare payments per year. We work with consumers. About 100 million consumers work with our tools to navigate healthcare and make the right decisions, to get help in making better financial decisions for better outcomes.

We’re a broad, payments-oriented business that helps across the financial systems that are part of the healthcare system in the U.S, so we’re a pretty scaled business. We’re at over a billion dollars of revenue now, with 2,000 people, and we’re highly focused on technology. We’re really a technology company that helps out the healthcare industry.

We’re just now in the process of starting to build our goals and objectives for 2023. There are three things that I’m prioritizing. One is to continue working on talent and building out a career development framework for our company. I’m 2 years into Zelis, and we’re a small team. We have to think creatively around how we build out the kinds of programs that are going to develop the next generation of talent and make sure that we have successors inside the company in the finance function and more broadly. This is number one among our priorities.

Number two, we’re doing more M&A, so I’ve been tasked with building out an integration management office. We’ll need to hire some talent that will focus on M&A integration. I’ve just made an offer to someone who’s going to start soon and build out that office. We’ve done three acquisitions in the past year, and we’re now deep into the integration process. Number three, we need to get really good at this so that we can get the kinds of returns on these investments that we need to.

Zelis | www.zelis.com | Bedminster, NJ

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CFO GUEST: Brian Gladden of Zelis

EPISODE: #858

Machine Generated Transcript:

CFOTL: When you look back on your career, can you share with our audience a moment of insight you experienced as a finance leader?

Gladden: I’ll talk in general and then maybe offer a couple examples. I mean, I find as I’ve done this for a long time, Jack, I mean, the toughest part of being a CFO is trying to find middle ground as a partner to the CEO and to the board and play that role. You have to be tough and drive the business to deliver on expectations, holding the team accountable for meeting commitments. And sometimes you really have to be the tough guy that beats people up and makes for some tough conversations. That’s part of your job.

Read More The other part is that you want to be seen as a partner and you want to have a relationship that’s collaborative with your peers and the staff. You want to be one of the gang and you want to have a relationship that they’ll confide in you, they’ll ask for help and see you as a real partner. So that’s the real. I’ve gotten myself stuck in between that. And sometimes if the business requires it, you’re the tough person for a long time and you forget about the other side. So I think that’s the hardest thing that we do, is developing that skill. And I find myself having to think about that a lot.

And then also as I develop the next generation, teaching them about this, how do you do this? How do you make it work? How do you play that tough role? And you have to adapt your style with each leader and figure out what makes them tick and learn how to understand their personality. And you can be friendly with them and help them. But then when it comes time to deliver a tough message, you do that. So, as I’ve stepped into some roles, I mean, you get backwards and sideways and you struggle how to do that, and you find yourself being super tough, especially when times are tough and you’re trying to deliver results and your business is struggling.

So that’s, for me, I think, the biggest sort of aha learning of a career of doing this is that you really do have to perfect that skill and you have to become almost a little bit of an executive coach and build a mental model for how you’re going to fit in.

I’ve gotten myself stuck into some situations where I’ve been much too difficult and nobody wants to deal with me, and I’m not invited to any meetings anymore, and they see me as just someone who’s too demanding. And then at other times, I’ve gotten myself to the point where we’re building these great relationships, but I forget we’ve got to deliver. So that’s a little bit of the awkward times that, especially as I’ve stepped into new jobs and tried to build those relationships, it’s tough to strike that balance.

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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.

Read More 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

CFOTL: Tell us about FloQast …what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Jallow: I was so excited to find FloQast. I couldn’t believe that it was real. In some ways, it is your standard B2B SaaS software. We focus on working on an accounting operations platform. What this means is that we generally sell to the close. Every single company in the world that has an accounting team goes through some kind of monthly or quarterly close. This is often a very hectic and chaotic process. A lot of times, people are coordinating just by stand-up meetings, by emails, by Slacks. They might have some Excel checklists on what they’re doing. Not only was this not a very good solution before, but also, especially as more teams went remote, this ad hoc stand-up communication style got less and less scalable. I personally believe that the finance tech stack is far behind the go-to-market tech stack.

Read More Go-to-market teams have many, many solutions to help them across workflows and lots of automations to help them be as efficient as possible. The G&A finance tech stacks are still catching up. FloQast is a unique solution that comes in and works with your existing processes, works with your file servers or your Excel. It’s not a 1-year implementation. It’s a very quick implementation that allows people to get back to what they really want to be doing—the more intellectual value-add activities, the more operational and strategic activities—rather than the actions involved in manually trying to figure out what’s going on in the close and what everyone’s status is.

I would say that the biggest thing for us is that on top of an absolutely fantastic core offering—our close product—we now have over a year under our belt with our second major solution in FloQast ops. We also recently announced our latest product, which addresses SOX compliance for controls. These are really providing a comprehensive solution across three common problem areas for our customers. The biggest challenge for us a year from now will be making sure that we can reach as many customers as we can.

From a finance perspective, this will mean figuring out how to stand up sales and marketing offices in new geographies to reach more customers. How do we continue to be the best in class with all of our new products as we have been with our core products? How do we enable the company to continue to go fast? We’ve gotten a lot bigger over the past couple of years, going from fewer than 200 employees to nearly 600 in the blink of an eye. We now also need to understand how to continue to provide the right tools and training for every person so that they can do their best work. jb

“Operate as a business leader first. Make sure to engage in as many areas of the business as you can in order to keep learning and understanding the business unit beyond financials. Focus on being a strategic, value-added business partner.” –Razzak Jallow, CFO, FloQast

FloQast | www.floqast.com | Los Angeles, CA

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CFO GUEST: Céline Dufétel of Checkout.com

EPISODE: #856: Understanding What’s in Your Control and What’s Not

Machine Generated Transcript

CFOTL: … your background again, strategy and finance. Is there some way you’ve organized your your FP&A team or people that you count on that in light of how you want to marry finance and strategy more closely. I don’t know how you might achieve that. Is there something you did do to achieve that?

Dufétel: Yeah, so I’ve adopted a model for Sytyro and now at Checkout where I have a single leader in charge of FP&A, strategy, and pricing as well as investor relations. And I think those things go very well together in terms of how do you set the direction for the organization through strategy? How do you translate that into numbers, resources, an FP&A plan that aligns to that? How do you communicate that story externally?

Read More And then how do you actually measure it and measure that it’s having the impact that you really want to have? And one of the things that I think is incredibly important for a finance organization is to connect business metrics with financial outcomes. Because that’s how you really can then talk to the organization and get the organization in motion. An operations organization understands their operational metrics. A commercial organization understands their commercial metrics. How do you take these sets of metrics, directly connect them to financial metrics, and help people understand why are you giving a certain amount of budget? Why are you driving in a certain direction? Why is your pricing structures influencing how you’re driving the commercial org? And so for me, that’s been really successful to have those teams collaborate closely together and bring the accounting talent closer to the strategy talent and vice versa and cross pollinate each other in terms of what they’re teaching each other.

CFOTL: Great. Is there a way the visibility into data those different groups have, do they share a common, whether it’s a dashboard or it’s just some access that they have to certain numbers or metrics? Is that preexisting before you arrived? Or is there something you’ve done to enhance how they’re accessing and sharing information?

Dufétel: Yes, so one of the things I really like to do is make sure that everybody is using the exact same definitions. Sometimes you’ll walk into an organization, they’ll say, “Well that’s finance definition of a client going live, or that’s operations definition.” There really shouldn’t be that, right? The whole organization needs to talk about data, talk about metrics in the same way, and use the same definitions and then ultimately the same numbers. Because if we don’t talk the same language, I don’t know how we can all drive towards the same outcome that we’re trying to drive to. So one of the things that I’ve worked on here, but I’ve worked on in my other roles as well, is making sure that we’re all aligned, we’re all looking at the same data. Whatever is the sales pipeline is also the pipeline that finance uses. Whatever is our view of our win rates, whatever is our view of our profitability per client, whatever is our view of share of wallet, whatever is our view of any kind of critical commercial metric, the time it takes for a client to go live. It’s the same that we look across so that we can align on what are the right OKRs, what are the right goals for the organization? And then we can measure those outcomes, right? ‘Cause if you’re not measuring, you’re much less likely to be making progress, obviously.

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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 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.”

Read More 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

CFOTL: Tell us about Checkout.com … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Dufétel: We’re a global fintech. We’re focused on digital payments. Our mission is to enable businesses and their communities to thrive in the digital economy. How do we this? We provide access to global payments to a variety of different segments. We work with fintechs, we work with e-commerce, we work in services as well. We primarily focus on enterprise clients for whom we abstract the complexity of payments. It’s all about the simplicity of integrating with us, our access to many geographies, and then, of course, the performance of our solutions. In payments, it’s about giving great acceptance rates for those payments to our clients. We also are very focused on providing best-in-class service and having true partnerships with our clients.

Read More We work with very sophisticated organizations, large enterprise organizations, and we’re here to solve their problems. We compete with some incumbent organizations such as Worldpay and banks, as well as with the new generation of players such as Adia. As a CFO myself, I like to help CFOs and their payments organization drive bottom-line impact and drive growth in their organization by giving them opportunities to expand to new geographies, accept new payment methods, and have great performance of their payments, which ultimately impacts their bottom line. Of course, we also try to give them great access to data for their own processes.

I’ve brought quite a few leaders into the organization. In joining Guillaume Pousaz, our founder and CEO, on this adventure, my role in many ways has been to help the organization to mature and be ready to take on the kind of scale and complexity that we’re now taking on. The organization has grown incredibly fast. I like to remind all of my colleagues who think of us as a tech organization that we’re a fintech and also in financial services, so there’s a lot of regulation, a lot of complexity. There are things like FX risk. Essentially, as a finance organization, we’re very much part of the product because we move money around the world in many currencies and millions and millions of transactions. My role is to help to create the right set of controls and processes and right structure to help us to scale these products for our clients. I have brought additional talent into the organization to help me to achieve this. jb

“Focus on building trust and relationships to accelerate your ability to influence the business and drive change.”

– Céline Dufétel, CFO & COO, Checkout.com

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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.

Read More 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

CFOTL: Tell us about Ciena … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Moylan: Ciena is a technology company. We produce and sell hardware, software, and services to companies like AT&T, Verizon, Google, Facebook, and Amazon that own and operate information networks. Our products attach to the network fiber and create and manage the flow of information. We use lasers and software to create information, and because light is the medium of information in a fiber network, we are known as an optical company. I would say that if you think about Porter and his sort of pillars of generic strategies, the thing that we do best is technology. We have leading optical technologies. We’ve been the first to market and the best in market with all of the succeeding generations of optical technology for the past 10 years. I believe that this will probably continue for the foreseeable future.

Read More When I joined Ciena in 2007, we were still a very young company. We have matured greatly over the last 15 years. We did make a transformative acquisition in 2010, which doubled our size, quadrupled our complexity, and gave us an opportunity really to become a leader in the industry. As a result of all that, and by the way, we were below break even at the time we did the deal, we were losing money. We were barely generating cash, but we were still hanging in there, and we still had a heavy debt load.

We began to focus much more on profitability metrics, gross margin, operating margin during those early years. And we showed tremendous progress in all of our profitability measures. As we became more profitable and our balance sheet began to improve metrics like free cash flow, cash balance, leverage ratios became critical metrics, and we developed a cash allocation policy and a model. Now, we’re poised, it’s not going to happen this year or next year, but we’re poised to become the biggest company in our business. So market share is now the highlighted metric.

Ciena | www.ciena.com | Hanover, MD

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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.

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.

Our Hosts: Jack Sweeney & Glenn Hopper

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.

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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.

Read More “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 twenty years beyond her Andersen days 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

CFOTL: Tell us about PharmChem … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Veale: I first came on as the controller at PharmChem, where we have a drug testing sweat patch that we sell. We are mainly in the criminal justice arena, so we do probation, pretrial, and so on. We work with a lot of judges to have the person who needs to be monitored wear the patch on their arm for 7 to 10 days before it’s then removed and sent to a lab for testing. The testing pulls out all of the molecules that are in the pad and checks for any drugs that may have been used during that time period.

Read More I’ve been here for a little over 5 years now. My move to the CFO role kind of came about in August of 2021, when we got a whole new board and I was promoted into the position. So now I have the CFO role and oversee the finance function. I see everything from the input to the financial reports at the end of the month, which I also put together.

On January 1 of this year, we switched to NetSuite. We made an investment in order to see better into the organization and work and respond to some of the KPIs going forward. This has allowed to be more responsive to the board and others. Going from QuickBooks to NetSuite helped with all of this.

At the board’s request, we started to provide weekly KPIs. We work with the board to ask, “Okay, what is it that you find important?” We know what we find important and we know what we look at, but maybe these are not things with which they are concerned. It took kind of a back-and-forth and trial-and-error approach for a couple months to figure out what information they needed and what would be helpful for them. Then we needed to figure out, “Okay, how can we pull this data?” It was all about learning. Before, we weren’t pulling KPIs because we didn’t have the system to do it. Our previous board was very much involved in day-to-day operations and performance, so they already knew the numbers. This new board was asking for different things, so we had to figure out just what they wanted and then how to use the new system to provide it.

PharmChem LLC | www.pharmchek.com | Fort Worth, TX

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CFO GUEST: Evan Goldstein of Seismic

EPISODE: #848 The People, the Mission & the Innovation

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CFO GUEST: Chip Zint of Deluxe

EPISODE: #853: When the Fire Burns Brightest

MADE POSSIBLE BY PLANFUL

Planful is the pioneer of end-to-end financial close, consolidation, and financial planning & analysis (FP&A) cloud software. The Planful platform is used by the Office of the CFO around the globe to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and visual analytics. More than 1000 customers, including Boston Red Sox, Del Monte, TGI Friday’s, and 23andMe, rely on Planful to accelerate cycle times, increase productivity, and improve accuracy across the end-to-end FP&A process. Planful is a private company backed by Vector Capital, a leading global private equity firm. Learn more at www.planful.com

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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.

Read More “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

CFOTL: Tell us about Deluxe … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Zint: Let me start by explaining where we are going. We are heading toward being a payments and data company that helps businesses to pay, to get paid, and to grow. This is what we’re moving toward. You’re probably going like, “Well, I don’t really know what that means,” so let me rewind the tape here for a second. You probably know who Deluxe is. We are the original check company. We’re 107 years old and best known for written checks, the personal check, the business check—that’s who Deluxe was. This is still a good piece of us.

Read More We started out as a check company, and over the years, we became a very big printing organization and even expanded into other printing avenues. We still have a big check-printing business. We also have what we call our “promo” business, which is really business forms and business essentials. These are things that businesses consume in the natural course of doing business, which means all sorts of print and paper products.

This is what Deluxe was for 90 years, and by the way, those businesses are in decline. No surprise. The physical paper check business—just like you in your life—went from paper to digital, so this began to be a declining area. Then, in the mid-2000s, Deluxe couldn’t grow anymore, so it went on a journey. Actually, it went on about a 10-year journey of acquiring about 50 different businesses, all for the sake of good multiples, providing some revenue growth, and allowing us to expand—but none of these firms really had any strategic connections with each other.

This was where we found ourselves when Barry McCarthy, who’s the new CEO, joined about 4 years ago. We had a great set of assets and a great brand with fantastic customers, but we had no connectivity and were not really going to the market as one provider. After Barry got announced as the new CEO, at his first customer meeting a client said, “Great to meet you. Which CEO are you? Are the CEO of [this product]? … [that product]? … ?” And Barry replied something like, “I’m pretty sure that I got hired to be the CEO of the whole thing.” We immediately had to go to work in sort of rebuilding the whole structure. We call it the “One Deluxe” model. We needed to bring it all together to leverage its value, which comes from individual customers and our 4,000 bank partners.

We have an incredible brand. Most people know what Deluxe is. They may think of it in the way that we now want them to, but at least they know who we are. We have Incredible sales distribution and a great sales organization. We have all sorts of bank partners, plus there are reseller capabilities and e-commerce capabilities out there. We had all of these assets that were untapped, so we’re now in the middle of a transformation. Another reason that I came here was precisely because NCR had been going through a transformation, and I had professionally grown up in that world, in watching change unfold.

Deluxe was 5 or so years behind them on their journey, so I thought that I could come in and provide a lot of strategic value. We’re on a transformation to really integrate all of these assets into one, to simplify the portfolio, to really figure out what we want to be going forward, to invest in the right things, to modernize the infrastructure, to get the org structure right, and to turn into a payments and data business that helps businesses to pay and get paid. This is the journey that we’re on here today at Deluxe. jb

“Taking risks and failing from time to time are parts of the journey. As long as you strive to be the best at the job that you are currently in, your next career opportunity will come—and you’ll be ready for it.” –Chip Zint, CFO, Deluxe

Deluxe | www.deluxe.com | Minneapolis, MN

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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 […]

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When Jonathan Carr first walked through the doors of the Stryker 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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Tony Tiscornia of Coupa EPISODE: #851: The Day After Your Transaction

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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 […]

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Evan Goldstein of Seismic EPISODE: #848 The People, the Mission, and the Innovation

The post Experiencing a Planning Inflection Point at Salesforce | Evan Goldstein, CFO, Seismic appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

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When consultant Steve Player died last week 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 […]

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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 […]

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Planning Aces, Episode #16 Steve on matching Metrics & Strategy A Tribute to Steve Player Dragon Slayer of the Budgeting World | Steve Player (1958-2022)

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CFO GUEST: Jim Morgan of CallRail EPISODE: #786 When Minding the Business Is a Cultural Mandate Machine Generated Transcript (unedited) CFOTL: Any moments of strategic moments of insight that you can share with us along the way that our listeners might enjoy? MORGAN: Yes, I’ll share one that’s got a corollary to it, but in […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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GUEST: Tom Lang, Executive Vice President, Treasury Management, Product and Operations, PNC HOST: Jack Sweeney of CFO Thought Leader Machine Generated Transcript (unedited) CFOTL: Hi, it’s Jack Sweeney with the CFO Thought Leader Podcast, and we’ve caught up with Tom Lang, executive vice president, head of Treasury Management Product and Operations at PNC.Tom is attending […]

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Gillian Sheeran of Pricefx EPISODE: 844: Work, Sleep, and Success

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: Adil Syed EPISODE: #843: Making Finance Part of the Business’s Operating Fabric

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The post Chris Craig, Chief Accounting Officer, S&P Global, Discussing S&P’s Mega Merger at CloudWorld appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

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GUEST CFO: Ross Muken of Sophia Genetics EPISODE: #842: Realizing the Potential of Data at Scale

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Inside the world of trade associations, the135-year-old American Coatings Association’s has never wavered in its dedication to answering 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 […]

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CFO Guest: Bryan Morris of Demandbase Episode: #840 Putting a Spin on Your Talent Pinwheel

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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 […]

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CFO GUEST: David Bedell of Lendio EPISODE: #818: Breaking Finance’s “Glass Wall”

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CFO Guest: Mike Taylor of Gusto Episode: #838 The Unseen Levers of Customer Impact

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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, the sense of accomplishment that he exudes never falters even when he eventually confides: “In the end, I was the last employee there.” […]

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CFO Guest: Mike Taylor of Gusto Episode: #838 The Unseen Levers of Customer Impact

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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 […]

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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 […]

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The post Craig O’Neill, CEO, Versapay Shares his Views on the Economy, Talent & AI | SUITEWORLD 2022 appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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, […]

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Guest CFO: Anna King of Mesh Payments Episode: #836: Building Consensus to Go Real-Time

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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 […]

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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 […]

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CFO Guest: Tracy Curley of ISpecimen Episode: #834: Where Paths Converge and Leaders Emerge

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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 […]

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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 […]

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CFO Guest: Kate Bueker, HupSpot Episode: #832 Achieving a Holistic View

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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 […]

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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 […]

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CFO Guest: Chuck Triano, Xalud Therapeutics Episode: #831 Building Your Credibility

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Guest CFO: Sandra Rowland, Xylem Episode: #830: Riding the Technology Convergence Winds | Sandra Rowland, CFO, Xylem Made Possible by Planful The Planful platform is used by the Office of the CFO around the globe to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and visual analytics. Planful empowers users to plan confidently, close faster, and report […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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CFO Guest: Claire Bramley of Teradata Episode: #828: When Finance Talks to the Business

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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 […]

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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.

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The post The One Question (more than any other) that Reveals Strategic Leadership appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 rivalry’s most anticipated […]

The post 827: The Leap Beyond Tax | Debbie Schleicher, CFO, EasyKnock appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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CFO Guest: Pat Dillon of Flock Freight Episode: #826: Along the CFO Continuum | Pat Dillon, CFO, Flock

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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 […]

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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 […]

The post 825: With the Intent to Help Others | Bona Allen, CFO, KBD Group appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

The post 824: An Appetite for Change | Rajesh Gupta, CFO, OakNorth Bank appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

The post 823: Courtside with a CFO All-Star | Larry Angelilli, CFO, MoneyGram appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Guest CFO: Peter Walker Episode: #822: The CFO Trifecta: Finance, Strategy, Leadership | Peter Walker, CFO, Sterling

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The post The Quarterly | Summer, 2022 appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 […]

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Guest: : Adam Swiecicki, CFO, Brex EPISODE: 820: Establishing Milestones for the Stakeholder Ecosystem | Adam Swiecicki, CFO, Brex

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Guest: Michael Sumruld Episode: 821: When Leaders Want More | Michael Sumruld, CFO, Parker Wellbore

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About ProphixProphix helps mid-market companies achieve their goals more successfully with innovative, cloud-based Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software. With Prophix, finance leaders improve profitability and minimize risk by automating budgeting, forecasting, and reporting and puts the focus back on what matters most – uncovering business opportunities. www.prophix.com

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Michael Sumruld recalls that after investing 10 of his 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 […]

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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. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Adam Swiecicky, of Brex, CFO Manish Sarin of Spinklr, CFO Jason Keen […]

The post Ep 20: Keeping Leadership in Step with Workforce Priorities | A Workplace Champions Episode appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Guest: Adam Swiecicki, CFO, Brex Episode: #820: Establishing Milestones for the Stakeholder Ecosystem | Adam Swiecicki, CFO, Brex

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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 […]

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The post Inflation Fuels Rail Opportunity | Mark George, CFO, Norfolk Southern appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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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 post 819: Set Your Data Free! | Glenn Hopper, CFO, Sandline Global appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Seven CFOs reveal how people development and collaboration top their list of planning priorities. Download the eBook

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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 […]

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The post Planning Aces – July Preview | Mike Milotich, CFO, Marqeta appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Guest CFO: David Bedell Company: Lendio Episode: 818: Breaking Finance’s “Glass Wall”

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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 […]

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CONTRIBUTORSEditor: Jack Sweeney | Copy Desk: Jack Burnett | Layout & Design: John Herr MADE POSSIBLE BY WORKDAY Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources,helping customers adapt and thrive in a changing world. Workday applications for financialmanagement, human resources, planning, spend management, and analytics have been adoptedby thousands […]

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The post Finance & the Roots of Leadership | Kabir Shakir, CFO, Tata Communications appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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When Kabir Shakir first arrived inside the CFO office at Tata Communications, the former Microsoft India CFO quickly determined that there was one person above all others who held sway over the company’s maturing transformation plans. “The person who is actually giving pricing to our customers needs to know how much cash we make on […]

The post 817: Fit to Compete, Fit to Grow | Kabir Shakir, CFO, Tata Communications appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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It was the type of assignment that Mike Milotich had been awaiting for most of his career. An innovative product team at American Express had just launched a promising new offering, and Milotich had been assigned to the group to help “optimize its day-to-day decision making”. “I arrived when it had been live for only […]

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This transcript has been machine generated CFOTL:Hello, we’re pleased to catch up with Bill Fink, Executive Vice President and Head of Middle Market Banking for TD Bank. Bill, welcome. Bill Fink:Jack, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to chat. CFOTL:Yeah, Bill. So it was only last month really that I […]

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The post The Path to Margin Expansion | Jeff Shepherd, CFO, Advance Auto Parts appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Last winter, when China ordered tens of millions of people back into a pandemic lockdown, executives inside the $170 billion automotive aftermarket parts industry took a deep breath. Jeff Shepherd, CFO of aftermarket giant Advance Auto Parts, says that the possibility of another China shutdown had just not been part of Advance’s procurement calculus. Still, […]

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Brett & Jack discuss how employee teams may hold the key to improving employee morale and retention, and why the growing popularity of remote hiring is likely to lead many more managers to leverage the powers behind objectives and key results (OKRs). Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Ryan Van Hatten of Prophix, CFO […]

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The post Pursuing Data-Driven Visibility| Manish Sarin, CFO, Sprinklr appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Even after serving in multiple CFO roles and spending 10 years on Wall Street, Manish Sarin still marvels at the plus-size experience that he acquired in the mid-1990s when he worked for Price Waterhouse as a financial advisor in its Nairobi office in Kenya, East Africa. At the time, Sarin recalls, an abundance of available […]

The post 814: Why Swim Lanes No Longer Matter | Manish Sarin, CFO, Sprinklr appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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When Mark George first joined Otis Elevator’s accounting team back in the late 1980s, he found fixed asset accounting to be different from what he expected. Says George: ”We had to run around the company and put barcodes on any new piece of furniture that the company had purchased.” What’s more, George tells us, he […]

The post 813: A Mandate to Improve | Mark George, CFO, Norfolk Southern Corporation appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Looking back on her career as a corporate finance executive, Angela Pierce says that the call of leadership arrived at a moment of unvarnished frustration. Sixteen years ago, when the management of Level 3 Communications was expressing a keen interest in acquiring Pierce’s then-company, Broadwing Corporation, it was not the first time that Pierce found […]

The post 812: When Leadership Came Calling | Angela Pierce, CFO, Anaconda appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Among the career milestones that CFOs prefer to highlight for us during our discussions, there’s little question that examples of driving business growth are an ongoing favorite. However, for Jason Keen, who built his finance career inside midsize construction firms, management’s growth goals have always needed to be mindful of a company’s organizational culture. Inside […]

The post 811: Satisfying a Cultural Itch With Smart Growth | Jason Keen, CFO, Mills & Nebraska appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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

The post Ep 12: Achieving a More Agile Finance Function | A Planning Aces Episode appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Generally, when legendary CEO Roger Enrico wasn’t happy, just about every PepsiCo executive from junior grades on up knew about it. So it was that when David Barnes was told he would be presenting to Enrico on a subject known to inflame the CEO’s ire, he knew that his presentation—one way or the other—would be […]

The post 810: Following the Data Trail | David Barnes, CFO, Trimble appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Among the many strategic changes that finance leader Danielle Murcray has helped to put in motion during her multi-chapter CFO career, perhaps none better reveals her mantle as a strategic leader than the move by cybersecurity firm AttackIQ to adopt a 100 percent–remote U.S. workforce. With the arrival of the pandemic, Murcray—like many of […]

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When Komal Misra, a software engineer turned asset manager, decided that it was time once again to make a career change, she found herself staring at a computer screen filled with stocks from various portfolios that were being traded based not on business fundamentals but larger macro-driven trends. “It got me to thinking: Here I […]

The post 808: Trading Up to a Macro-Driven Career | Komal Misra, CFO, Starry, Inc. appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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A dozen years ago, if you had told Ryan Gwillim that within the next decade he would be named CFO of the Brunswick Corporation, he may have laughed. At the time, he was an associate with law firm Baker & McKenzie who was spending his days traveling the globe to advise legal clients as an […]

The post 807: All Things in Common | Ryan Gwillim, CFO, Brunswick Corporation appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Among the many acquisitions with which Marc Levine became involved during his 25 years at Hewlett-Packard Co., it may surprise few of his former colleagues that he counts HP’s purchase of Compaq Computer as one of the tech giant’s most unusual marriages. However, Levine doesn’t single out HP’s purchase of Compaq due to the […]

The post 806: Being Ready for the Unexpected | Marc Levine, CFO, Tanium appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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It was not long after Chris Greiner became CFO of IBM’s fast-growing Analytics Division that the gravitational pull that IBM had maintained on Greiner’s finance career-building began to give way. While his new divisional CFO title more than validated his 7-year career investment with the company, Greiner—like many divisional finance chiefs—discovered the next rung of […]

The post 805: When the Flywheel Begins to Spin | Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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The post ON LOCATION with FP&A Leader Michael Zambetti of National DCP | Planful Perform 2022, ARIA, Las Vegas, NV appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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When Al Farrell tells us that finance leaders must never lose sight of the value of a business asset, as well as acquire a strong understanding of how to optimize the returns on it, we sense his frustration. This is not because he’s relating a situation in which management failed both to properly value an […]

The post 804: Optimizing the Returns on a Business Asset | Al Farrell, CFO, Transaction Data Systems appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Back in April of 2020, as the consequences of COVID’s arrival in the U.S. sent financial markets reeling, Paychex CFO Efrain Rivera had the temptation “to say nothing.” As the company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts quickly approached, Rivera explains, a number of management team members had gathered in conference to debate the idea of […]

The post 803: Sharing in a Moment That Mattered | Efrain Rivera, CFO, Paychex appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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

The post Ep 11: Getting a Read on the World’s New Realities appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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When Mike Catelani seeks to identify the objectives and career milestones that have helped to advance him into the ranks of Bay Area biotech CFOs, he mentions that although he had a deep interest in biology during his high school years, upon entering college he decided to swap out a biology curriculum for an accounting […]

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Perhaps few CFO career paths better reveal the advantages a founder-led firm may offer career-minded executives than that of Prophix CFO Ryan Van Hatten. Back in 2016—when the firm’s previous CFO exited the company—Prophix’s founder and CEO, the late Paul Barber, asked Van Hatten, an 11-year company veteran, to step into the CFO office until […]

The post 801: The Founder and the Future | Ryan Van Hatten, CFO, Prophix Software appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Brett & Jack discuss how growing numbers of businesses are facing an employee retention crisis as they battle escalating workforce attrition and struggle to fill job vacancies. As the crisis grows in certain industries, more finance leaders are sounding the alarm on escalating business risk and dedicating more time to solving the current talent equation. […]

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Had the opportunity to work in the treasury department at American Express arrived 6 months earlier, there’s a chance that John Herman may never have landed in a CFO office. “Treasury was an area that I was fascinated by,” remembers Herman, who—after having spent a decade at American Express—was given a “package” in 2009 when […]

The post 800: When the Road Rises to Meet You | John Herman, CFO, Movable Ink appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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When Adam Ante first arrived at Paycor in 2017, the seasoned finance executive was tasked with prodding Paycor management to begin monitoring daily performance metrics. “At first, it was about building the relationship with the executive team so that they understood how important it was to understand how the company was performing on a daily […]

The post 799: When Metrics Do the Talking | Adam Ante, CFO, Paycor appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is gaining traction across the U.S. mortgage industry as demands for end-to-end automation are more robust than ever, spurred by rising home sales and a collective push toward greater use of technology for the sake of efficiency, cost savings and compliance requirements for all parties involved. Join us as CEO and […]

The post How AI is Behind Document Processing’s Next Great Wave appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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It was in the late 1990s when public accountant, savvy networker and future CFO April Downing decided that it was time to leave Dallas. “I had cultivated my network there really early—there was a group of friends from PwC whom I regularly attended a book club with, and later we would all go on to […]

The post 798: A CFO Links Past to Present | April Downing, CFO, Khoros appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Back in early 2014, the management of Paydiant, a 4-year-old mobile payments start-up, believed that it was still several years away from engaging with acquisition-minded bankers. Nevertheless, when PayPal came calling, the Paydiant team decided that they were worth a listen. “Even though it was still an early stage for us to be in […]

The post 797: Achieving a More Perfect Exit | Melinda Smith, CFO, ChaosSearch appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Steve and Jack discuss how successful financial planning teams are always looking to “get in deeper” and help their organization’s extend their lines of sight. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Adriana Carpenter of Emburse, CFO Kent Kelley of Unanet and CFO Brandon Maultasch of Moloco. Kent Kelley—a 15-year Oracle veteran whose […]

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

The post Ep 17: Employers Dropping Degree Demands appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Having grown accustomed to charting the careers of our finance leader guests from their early professional days up through their entry into the CFO office, we did not change course for Elaine Sun, an accomplished investment banker turned finance leader who last month stepped into her third successive finance chief position at Mammoth Biosciences of […]

The post 796: Gene Editing’s Next Frontier | Elaine Sun, CFO, Mammoth Biosciences appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Back in 2001, as the dotcom bubble imploded and the U.S. economy took a downward spiral, Anisha Sood, a recently hired consultant for Accenture, felt fortunate. “There were rounds of layoffs happening and Accenture was trying to manage it well, but I got lucky because I was in healthcare,” explains Sood, who reports that other […]

The post 795: The Canary in the Coal Mine | Anisha Sood, CFO, First Choice Health appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.

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Will Johnson can still hear the question that momentarily muted a management dinner and prodded the gathering’s executive diners to thoughtfully dispatch an answer. “’If you weren’t in your current role, which one—held by a peer at this table—would you assume?,’” recalls Johnson, echoing the inquisitor’s words. “There were some really surprising answers,” he […]

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Emily Villatte’s finance career first got rolling along dusty country roads in the Australian bush. With a dual-track master’s degree in engineering and finance, she had been hired by British multinational JLT Group to provide risk management and insurance services to a cluster of accounts residing in Australia’s outback.

Along the way, Villatte says, she was frequently greeted by the question, “What the heck brings you here?”

It’s a greeting that Villatte is just as apt to hear today as she was back then. However, this time the road has taken Villatte into the world of podcasting, where today she is the CFO of Acast, a Swedish-founded company that provides hosting services for both podcast creators and advertisers.

Read More “Experience is what you get when you do something that you haven’t done before,” reports Villatte, who within 2 years of her arrival in Acast’s CFO office took the company public on the NASDAQ Stockholm exchange.

According to Villatte, the finance team was more than ready.

“We had taken the prep work as far as we could, so when the board made the decision to do an IPO, we had about 14 to 16 weeks to execute,” recalls Villatte, who characterizes Acast’s IPO as a milestone not only for the company but also for podcasting as a medium.

“My job was to make certain that we had the options all set for an IPO and would be ready if the board decided to go down that road,” comments Villatte, who no doubt viewed that route forward as not very different from others that she been down before. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Acast … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Villatte: Acast is an audio tech company that was founded in Sweden. We are really on a mission to become the world’s largest marketplace for podcast monetization. We do this by connecting our podcast creators, advertisers, and listeners through our technology platform. We’re an independent player working behind the scenes, supplying podcast content directly to hundreds of listening apps and generating more than 1 billion listens a quarter. If you’re listening to an Acast-connected podcast–anything done by the FT, The Economist, or Vice Media, for example–and you hear an ad, we’re delivering that through our behind-the-scenes ad tech and we’re sharing the revenue with the podcast creator.

Read More What sets us apart is that we doggedly champion our creators’ independence and their choices to manage and monetize their shows in the ways that are right for them. Everything we do, all of the products that we build, all of the tech that we have–all of it is toward the purpose of being the most creator-centric podcasting platform out there.

As CFO of a newly listed business, of course, I’ll spend a lot of my time working with my external stakeholders, the financial markets, and analysts on conveying our story and our journey to dominate the global world of podcast monetization. At the same time, though, as we’re speaking, there’s a lot of turbulence and many difficulties in Europe that are impacting some of our staff, so it’s a challenging time there from a macro perspective. My role as a general leader in Acast is to help our CEO and our leadership team to carry our organization through times like these that from an external perspective are challenging when you look at the news and so forth. This is also when podcasting is such a wonderful place to be as a listener. If we want to get information and stay up to date, sometimes watching TV can be quite heavy, so I highly recommend also actually listening to some of these news flows in podcast format to stay informed in what might be called a softer way.

“Get up close and personal with the whole of the business to understand what makes it tick–being stuck in the numbers is not enough. If you do this with a sense of purpose and curiosity and bring your team along on the journey, not only will you learn an immense amount but also you’ll have fun along the way.” –Emily Villatte, CFO, Acast

Acast | www.acast.com | Stockholm, Sweden

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Looking back on his first CFO role, Steve Vintz recalls waking up one morning and thinking that he might not have a job.

The night before, Vintz had told his company’s CEO that he was having second thoughts about a deck of slides highlighting the virtues of a proposed acquisition.

“It just hit me: This is a deal we can’t do—this is not our deal,” recalls Vintz, recollecting the moment of insight that he experienced and the subsequent butterflies set free.

Read More The company’s board was expecting to meet later in the week, and the “board deck” was the anticipated precursor to a presentation that Vintz and his CEO were preparing to give about a promising acquisition target.

Vintz continues: “Good news travels fast and bad news travels faster, but I caught this a little late in the process. I wish I had felt this way earlier on, but it was a reality. CFOs must have conviction, and conviction is all about doing the right thing.”

The courage of Vintz’s convictions were quickly put to the test when he told his CEO about his reservations concerning the deal—an acquisition that had already received strong support and enthusiasm from the firm’s management team.

“The conversation did not go well. The next day, I called our CMO and asked if I should even come back into the office,” comments Vintz, who adds that the CMO encouraged him to return and speak further with the CEO, who appeared to have begun to digest some of what he had heard the night before.

Days later, when the company’s board members gathered, the CFO was once more in the hot seat.

Says Vintz: “The board wanted to understand why we were having second thoughts, and as we talked, it became clear to the CEO and management team why that was not the time to do this deal.”

In the end, the company’s board ultimately praised the management team for bringing forth its concerns, and a few of its members even repeated the business maxim about how sometimes the best deals are the ones that you don’t do.

Reflecting on his moment of insight, Vintz observes: “I could have very easily sent out the board deck and told myself, ‘I don’t want to look bad, and maybe it will be okay’—but as CFO, you have to listen to your inner self.” –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Tenable … what does this company do and what are its offerings today?

Vintz: Tenable helps companies to understand and reduce their cyber risk. At a basic level, we answer the customer question, “How secure are we?” Companies today have an attack surface that looks very different than it did a few years ago. They have embraced digital transformation and there are more assets and devices coming online, and so it’s no longer just about securing servers, desktops, and laptops. The IT environment is much more complex. It includes Web applications, containers, and operational technology, and it’s really hard for companies to understand their true exposure to determine how to best manage risk.

Read More At Tenable, we discover all of a firm’s assets and connected devices and assess them for vulnerabilities across a wide range of the attack surface. We help companies to manage and prioritize their risk and to take remediation steps to reduce it.

One of my main priorities right is digital transformation—making sure that we’re looking ahead of the power curve and are prepared for continued growth and scale. This will necessitate investments in terms of process and systems. Another is to continue to get balanced growth with profitability. We’re not a grow-at-all-cost kind of company. Market dynamics can change on a moment’s notice, and it’s important to make sure that you’re able to run the business in a very agile way so that you can invest more or invest less, depending on the circumstances.

This may sound a little strange for a CFO to say, but my last priority is that I want to travel a little more. There are a lot of things that we can do remotely—and we’re in a work-from-home world—but meeting face-to-face with some of our key stakeholders, getting in front of employees in different offices around the world, attending investor conferences to be face-to-face with investors, and meeting customers are things that I really want to do. I think that you walk away a little smarter when you do do this, and it’s something that I’m going to set out to do this year.

“Start with the end in mind. At the onset, think about how the company will create returns for shareholders: aggressive growth, balanced growth, or margin expansion. This will determine how you set goals and deploy capital for years to come.” –Steve Vintz, CFO, Tenable

Tenable | www.tenable.com | Columbia, MD

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

Your Hosts | Steve Player & Jack Sweeney

About Steve Player |

Steve Player serves as the Managing Director of Future Ready Finance. He also leads the Beyond Budgeting Round Table North America (BBRTNA) working with companies to implement continuous planning processes. Steve has over 30 years experience improving performance management. He is the co-author of Future Ready: How to Master Business Forecasting and Beyond Performance Management as well as five other books on cost and performance management. Working with the CFOThoughtLeader.com website, Steve cohosts the Planning Aces podcast which features innovative planning approaches.

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Hilary Maxson’s path to the CFO office of French multinational and energy automation behemoth Schneider Electric began at a kitchen table in upstate New York. Or at least that’s what comes to mind for us when she tells us about her “purpose-driven” parents, including a father who is a professor of agronomy at Cornell University.

“We didn’t live internationally, but my parents are very tied to what can be achieved internationally and I think that this is how I got that mind-set,” reports Maxson, as we search for answers that might better expose how within a span of 12 years she pursued and realized gainful career experiences in places as far-flung as Douala, Cameroon (3 years), the Philippines (3), Hong Kong (2), and Paris (4).

Read More Says Maxson: “I really believe that doing good business is the key to changing the world, and by ‘good’ business I mean that you can still make profits, still do right by your employees, and still do right by your country—this is how we can bring about change.”

Turn back the clock to 2003, and even as Maxson was exiting a 4-year banking career in New York City to get an MBA from Cornell— a familiar gateway for ambitious bankers—she was already looking past Wall Street.

Comments Maxson: “One of the reasons I wanted to change was that I also wanted to build things—not just in the U.S., but internationally.”

Sometimes building things necessitated some banking diplomacy. For instance, while living in Cameroon as CFO (Africa) for electric power giant AES Corporation, Maxson became charged with leading negotiations to help AES restructure €300 million in debt between AES, eight multilateral lenders, and the Cameroon government.

She would eventually join Schneider Electric in Hong Kong before transferring to SE’s Paris headquarters, where she assumed the role of group CFO in May of 2020.

Maxson’s CFO tenure now falls during a transformational chapter for Schneider, as the company has made no secret of its plans to double down on its commitment to sustainability initiatives and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles.

“ESG is not just something companies do—it is a real value driver in terms of both mitigating risk and reporting actuals, so you really want to embed your ESG thinking into your financial planning,” explains Maxson, who—despite her years abroad—appears to not have ventured very far from the kitchen table. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Schneider Electric … what sets this company apart from its energy management rivals?

Maxson: Very simply, we’re a hardware and software company—or really a hybrid—that provides the power and industrial automation backbone for customers across a number of end markets: buildings, which encompass technical buildings like hospitals and office buildings; homes, including multi- and single-family residences; data and IT centers, so cloud data centers, enterprise data centers, and all of the hardware and software around this industry; and manufacturing, particularly process manufacturing like mining and oil and gas, as well as more hybrid and discrete manufacturing operations like pharmaceutical, warehousing, and logistics.

Read More We also support infrastructure, which for us is primarily utilities. We’re the largest energy management firm in the world. I define our space as the power backbone—all of the stuff that sort of keeps the power on and with the right quality. Then we have a very complementary portfolio for industrial automation. These are really the same customers for whom we’re adding the IoT layer or digitalization of all of this across what we call life cycle asset management—from designing to building to operating facilities such as the factories that are making all of this stuff for these end markets.

I actually joined Schneider because I thought that this view made the most sense to customers. You need power and you need automation and you want digitalization of all of these assets. Plus, Schneider is really aligned with the big megatrends that we have today that are tied to the world’s energy transition: more electrification, more digitization, more sustainability. Even as I joined 5 years ago, I was thinking that Schneider was very well positioned with its portfolio and its strategy to address many of the future scenarios where these major world transitions would be going. I think that this is probably only more true today.

Schneider is a company that’s also really been driven by its own stance on ESG matters for more than 15 years. In 2005, we first adopted a barometer that we now call the Schneider Sustainability Index, which spans all of the UN’s sustainable development goals—so, it’s more than just carbon and our own carbon pledge. I think that we’ve been working with ESG more and more as part of our corporate culture and DNA since then. I’ve always believed in pretty much all of the aspects of ESG, including things like diversity in the workforce. Certainly, everything environmental is really a key to driving value over the medium and long term for all companies. It makes a huge difference for our employees, obviously, plus we have credibility with our customers who want to get there themselves through their own sustainability journey. This was another reason that I liked and wanted to move to Schneider: It really has everything across ESG as part of its cultural DNA and everyday actions.

Schneider Electric | www.se.com | Rueil-Malmaison, France

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When Vanessa Kanu is asked to provide some professional advice to her younger self she responds quickly and without hesitation: “Be more patient.”

It’s advice Kanu says she frequently summons even today as she passes the 18th month mark of her CFO tenure with technology services company Telus International.

“I’m perpetually impatient and I drive myself bananas,” says Kanu, who stepped into her first CFO role at Mitel Networks Corporation, after a steady 15-year climb inside the company she first joined as a financial reporting manager.

Read More “As the company grew, it gave me an opportunity to learn and stretch myself through various roles. Whether it was external reporting, complex technical accounting, FP&A, or M&A and other planning functions, all these things combined kept me with the organization,” says Kanu, whose 15-year climb spanned a period during which Mitel grew from $400 million to $1.3 billion.

“I had a great mentor at Mitel, who was our previous CFO Steve Spooner,” comments Kanu, who would join Mitel’s reporting team shortly after Spooner was appointed CFO and would ultimately succeed him as Mitel’s finance chief 15 years later.

Along the way, Mitel management would execute an IPO and multiple strategic acquisitions before transitioning back to a private company.

“My thinking was as long as I’m learning and growing, there was no need to leave and that’s what culminated in a 16-year (career) tenure at that organization.” says Kanu, whose CFO appointment by Telus in 2020 upended her 18-month CFO tenure at Mitel – a chapter shortened perhaps by the same appetite for learning and stretching she has always relied on to propel herself forward. – Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Telus International … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Kanu: So Telus International, what we do is we design, build and deliver next generation digital solutions, including AI, artificial intelligence and content moderation, and that’s all to enhance the customer experience for global and disruptive brands. So what we do as we look at our customer set, we’ve got 600 global clients. They tend to over index towards fast-growth technology companies. The verticals we serve are primarily tech and games, e-commerce, and FinTech, hospitality. We also serve media and communications as well, so we really do cover the gamut.

Read More Telus International is also primarily owned actually by Telus Corporation, which is a very large telco, the largest telco actually in Canada. We became publicly traded last year, so we were listed for the first time on the NYSE as well as the TSX and became, and still are to this point, actually, the biggest technology IPO on the Canadian TSX listing.

Continuing to drive our evolution in our still somewhat new public life is a key priority. But really for me, it’s helping to support and amplify the company’s growth strategy, including its M&A strategy. So we are on record as being a very acquisitive company, and we grow both organically, but also inorganically. For me, as CFO, it’s my role in supporting the CEO and the broader executive leadership team at the company to drive those ambitions forward. We’ve also just talked about automation, not just in finance, but also across the organization to not only drive efficiencies, but also drive more value in our work similar to what we talked about, the finance function specifically. We’re a week away from International Women’s Day. Telus International is a company actually that, for us, diversity, equity and inclusion are very much top of mind and have always been priorities, not just recently, but have certainly been in the history and the DNA of the organization, but also helping, my role in helping to drive that forward as well as we also want to continue to evolve in that regard.

“If we have really smart people putting together information manually, then we’re not actually leveraging our people as we should be. For me, automation is not only about improving efficiency and helping the organization grow faster and better, but it’s a key to improving team member engagement.”

– Vanessa Kanu, CFO, Telus International

Telus International | www.telusinternational.com | Vancouver, Canada

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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.”

Read More “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 want to help our 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 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

CFOTL: Tell us about MOLOCO … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Maultasch: MOLOCO is a machine learning company in the ad tech or advertising tech space. Our founder, Ikkjin Ahn, is a machine learning pioneer. He was one of the earliest machine learning engineers at YouTube shortly after it was acquired by Google. He built the first machine learning products at YouTube and then created the monetization stack, which was the way in which they sold and optimized ads via machine learning. Then he was an early employee at Android, at Google Shift over there, where he built their entire data infrastructure. So, he really had an early view on the power of machine learning to drive digital advertising.

Read More Fast-forward, and the reality is that Google and Facebook won digital advertising. Those two companies combined take more than 50% of the digital ad dollars, and part of this is the wonderful owned and operated properties they have. But this explains only about half of their scale. The machine learning optimization that they built to target the right customers—to put products in front of people that turn into transactions—that’s the difference. If you look at Facebook’s RPU—revenue per user, or the revenue that they’re getting from each customer on their platform—you see that it is about five times higher than that of Pinterest and three times higher than Snap’s. This differential on a per-user basis comes from the power of machine learning.

Ikkjin founded this business to take this wonderful technology that nobody else was going to have the skills or the capital to build and put it in the public cloud so that other businesses could build on top of it and use their first-party data to optimize their ad buys and ultimately their ad businesses. So, in the reductive form that I sometimes use to explain it to investment bankers, we’re like The Trade Desk for performance advertisers, and our long-term vision is to be more like a Twilio for machine learning–based ad optimization.

Moloco | www.moloco.com | Redwood City, CA

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It was 2018, and shortly after payables start-up Tipalti had raised its Series C funding round, Sara Spoja recalls, she sat down with Tipalti CEO and cofounder Chen Amit.

Having spent the previous 8 years as a senior operating executive for private equity firm KKR Capstone, Spoja was known for asking C-suite management tough questions, and she was no less probing when it came to reviewing Tipalti’s Series C model.

Read More “I tore that thing apart and asked questions about every assumption,” comments Spoja, who recollects a 4-hour-long meeting with Amit, who encouraged her to grill him on every aspect of the business.

During the meeting, Spoja no doubt turned over as many rocks as any of Tipalti’s Series C investors had, but Amit wasn’t looking for an investment from KKR.

Indeed, he wanted an investment from Spoja—but not in dollars. Tipalti had achieved the requisite number of start-up milestones that normally precipitate the hiring of a chief financial officer, and it turned out that Spoja had quickly advanced as the tech firm’s leading candidate.

“I had hit a patch at KKR where I wasn’t as excited as I might have been about what my next role was going to be,” remembers Spoja, whose seat on KKR’s operating executive talent bench had in the past propelled her into a rotating variety of portfolio company operational roles—each with an expiration date.

“I decided that it was time to go and take my first real job at a company,” reports Spoja, who would join Tipalti as CFO in August of 2018. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Tipalti … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Spoja: Tipalti is a global payables product that helps finance executives to streamline their payables process. This means making global partner payments—maybe to their ecosystem of partners—as well as the more traditional global accounts payable. It’s paying your rent, paying your software licenses, paying to put food in the fridge, whatever else you’re doing. It truly focuses on this B2B payments space, focusing on global partner payments and A/P, and then we also have a number of offshoots from this.

Read More We also recently acquired a company called Approve, which is a procurement platform. With the Approve product and Tipalti integrated together, you have a full-suite procure-to-pay product that does everything from the upfront PO requisition and subsequent approvals to the supplier onboarding of and collection of all tax and compliance information for a new vendor to processing the payment information on invoices. They get OCR, so everything is pulled into the platform in an automated fashion. We use machine learning and AI to route these invoices around your company in an email-based platform, so your approvers don’t need to use any platform outside of the email that they’re already using every day for their invoice approvals processes. We also provide payment scheduling and payment execution services to 190 countries in 120 currencies across multiple different payment types in each of these countries.

Tipalti really just automates what is today the longest lead item within a closed process, which is accounts payable. It takes on one of the riskiest financial operations processes that executives or finance executives perform today, which is payments. Payout is significantly riskier than pay in. We take that payout process and help you to mitigate that risk, to control that risk, to have the right approvals in place to ensure that you’re paying out successfully and correctly.

“Make sure that you are passionate about the product and market that you are serving and speak knowledgeably about why the company will be successful. Having a tangible connection to our product as a power user inspires me in my role as a partner to marketing, product, sales, and operations.” –Sarah Spoja, CFO, Tipalti

Tipalti | www.tipalti.com | San Mateo, CA

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

The following is a machine-generated transcript produced by podscribe.ai

More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees.

The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations.

Your Hosts | Brett Knowles & Jack Sweeney

About Brett Knowles

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To those well familiar with the career milestones that typically mark the path to the CFO office, Lou Arcudi’s resume at first may appear to be upside down.

Or at least it could be said that the same operational projects and roles that frequently populate the tops of the resumes of aspiring CFOs are instead found at the bottom of Arcudi’s.

To put it another way: Arcudi acquired his operations experience early.

Read More Arcudi spent his college summers working at a General Motors chemical plant in Framingham, Mass., where he was encouraged to apply to a training program offered by the General Motors Institute of Technology (now Kettering University). The school accepted Arcudi’s application, and after 6 months of training, the young recruit was offered a position at one GM’s many plants.

“It was kind of like the military, where you usually get to choose your posting and specialty, so I picked the Framingham plant and manufacturing accounting and inventory control as my discipline,” recalls Arcudi, whose GM experience soon helped to advance him into a divisional controllership role at chemical company Millipore.

At the time, Arcudi was responsible for consolidating the financials for two chemical plants within the United States and two others in Japan and Ireland.

“The role helped me to understand what really happens out in the field—it wasn’t about keeping a balance sheet but about being P&L-driven, and it became foundational for my career,” observes Arcudi, as he flags the origins of an operations mind-set that would help to propel him upward and accompany him as he served in a subsequent succession of CFO roles. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Amolyt Pharma … what does this company do, and what are its offerings?

Arcudi: Amolyt is a clinical-stage biotechnology company that’s focused on rare endocrinology diseases. Our mission is really to transform the lives of patients who are suffering from these rare diseases and thereby the lives of their caregivers, too. We have a really deep, diverse pipeline, as well as a lot of initiative to actually bring new programs in. Right now, we have two programs.

One is for a product called AZP-3601, which is a long-acting PTH analog with a potential use as a treatment for a disease called hypoparathyroidism. Usually, you have your thyroid, and behind it, you have these parathyroids. When these are missing through surgery—and you thus have hypoparathyroidism—basically what happens is that your body is not able to produce the PTH hormone.

Read More This hormone is important because it actually drives or acts like a thermometer in our system. When our calcium levels go below a certain level, this particular hormone, this particular check and balance, drives our calcium levels back up. But if it’s missing, if this parathyroid is missing, it can’t do that. You end up missing calcium in your body and trying to get it in other ways. So, this is an analog replacement to give the body not natural PTH but an analog of the PTH hormone in order to get rid of some of the disease symptoms that these people would have.

Our other program is a growth hormone receptor—again in the endocrinology space—for a disease called acromegalia, which causes people to be very large in stature. They actually have this overgrowth hormone that just makes their body grow larger and larger, which ultimately creates issues. This is actually near and dear to me, as my father actually suffered from this. We’re trying to build a pipeline through our internal programs that we’re doing, as well as have an ongoing licensing activities.

So, this is really what our company does. When you think about our firm, you see that it checks all of the boxes when it comes to the fundamentals. We have a very experienced team with know-how in all of these disciplines. We know how to take companies from a private to a public state. We know how to take portfolio assets all the way through registration, and we have the expertise to actually taking these products into commercialization. The board is strong—it’s knowledgeable and skillful. We have a strong financial position, with a very supportive, high-quality set of private investors, and strong IP with partnerships. And, again, we’re private. Our goal is ultimately to try to become a publicly traded company on either NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange.

“Enter a field that is exciting to you and one you feel passionate about. Be patient and be willing to take a lateral move when entering that field. Make everyday a learning journey and be willing to be part of the team. I am extremely passionate about helping patients and their caregivers, therefore being part of the biotech community I view as a privilege.” – Lou Arcudi, CFO Amolyt Pharma

Amolyt Pharma | www.amolytpharma.com | Cambridge, MA

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If you were to casually meet CyberArk CFO Josh Siegel for the first time at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), you might quickly assume that he has spent the balance of his career-building years in nearby Silicon Valley. Certainly, on paper his resume lists the requisite number of finance job titles and entrepreneurial milestones that you might expect the bio of an accomplished Silicon Valley CFO to itemize.

Later, as you reflect on the mild-mannered “Cyber CFO” whom you briefly encountered, you make one last entry in your mental manifest: CFO Siegel was queuing up for a flight to Tel Aviv.

In the end, it’s this entry that’s most telling. Or at least it’s the mental note that perhaps exposes the most about Siegel’s present as well as his past.

Read More The fact is that Siegel first began frequenting Tel Aviv departure and arrival gates back in the mid-1990s, when he felt compelled to divert his finance career-building into a more entrepreneurial lane. However, instead of zigging to Silicon Valley, Siegel zagged to Israel—a move that he executed while brandishing a resume with modest accounting feats but deep treasury experience.

“When I first got to Israel in the mid-1990s, they were really Old School, and the fact that I was not an accountant meant that I would never be hired as a controller,” comments Siegel, who prior to moving to Israel had held the position of director of capital markets at Sallie Mae, the erstwhile government-sponsored lending enterprise.

As Siegel acquired different finance experiences and titles over time, he says, Israel-based businesses and the country’s widening entrepreneurial corridor recast their notions of finance leadership.

“Today, the ideas around what makes a strategic finance executive in Israel have really changed,” reports Siegel, echoing a view widely shared among his Silicon Valley peers.

Still, more than departure gates today expose differences in Siegel’s finance leadership upbringing.

As he says, “A goal that I have shared with our CEO is answering the question of how to scale up this company with profitable growth—and that’s just not the standard modus operandi of a lot of Silicon Valley companies.” –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about CyberArk … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Siegel: CyberArk has been in business now for more than 20 years, having been founded in 2000. I say this up front because “cyber” was part of the name even back then. I don’t think that many people used the word “cyber” back in the year 2000, and now it’s an everyday word that everybody is using—even our parents and grandparents. We are the second largest cybersecurity company in Israel in terms of sales, and we basically sell privileged-access management. This is a big part of where identity security is today because if you think about where cybersecurity has come from over the past several years, it’s been all about keeping the bad guys out.

Read More How do you keep the bad actors out? You would build a very strong perimeter. Now, the identity is the new perimeter because you assume that the bad guys are getting into your network. There’s the old adage that either you’ve been breached or you don’t know that you’ve been breached. We’re essentially all around not necessarily preventing the attacker from getting on the inside of your network but around securing the controls of and identities within the network to ensure that the attacker can’t laterally move within it, escalate privileges, and eventually be able to get to a position where a credential is compromised such that personal identifiable information or credit card information or IP addresses can be stolen. The end goal may even be to embarrass, as it was Sony, or to breach for geopolitical purposes as we’re now seeing in the news more and more. Our role is to guard against all of this.

“Within your organization, it’s about the people. When you begin your journey, find the places where you will get the most out of your manager professionally, which is much more valuable than compensation. As you develop your own teams, surround yourself with high-quality individuals, lead by example, be nice to them, and appreciate and recognize their contributions. For your own career development, try to become the Go-To Person—usually this will mean that you don’t limit yourself to your own role but engage with what the company does strategically, get into the details, and continually show that you are personally committed to its success and fully accountable all the time—even or especially for mistakes. If you are offered the chance to advance, take it, even if you have doubt that you can manage the new situation.” –Josh Siegel, CFO, CyberArk

CyberArk | www.cyberark.com | Newton, Mass.

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Back in early 2020, Gina Mastantuono had only recently stepped into the CFO role at ServiceNow when the subject of intangible assets surfaced during a company board meeting. For months, growing numbers of the company’s investors had been signaling their advocacy for the company to amplify its collective conscientiousness when it came to social and environmental concerns.

Traditionally, the company had relied on its marketing and communications teams to project its corporate mind-set when it came to such issues, but a number of events during the previous 12 months had led investors and board members—as well as company CEO Bill McDermott—to conclude that a more codified approach had now become necessary.

Read More “This was a pretty significant change for both me and the organization,” explains Mastantuono, who notes that her list of priorities for her first 12 months as CFO suddenly began to shift in real time as the magnitude of adopting ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles became increasingly evident.

“It enabled me to make necessary changes not only within finance but also across the enterprise and externally,” comments Mastantuono, who relates that the impact that she could have as a leader became clear to her when the company’s vice president of treasury pitched to her the idea of ServiceNow forming a racial equity fund to help underserved communities.

Recalls Mastantuono: “I was really able to drive this throughout the organization, and now we have put a $100 million fund that was fully funded into the communities that need it most.”

However, what’s perhaps more revealing when it comes to Mastantuono’s finance leadership has been the addition of an outward-facing pitch that she regularly makes to ServiceNow customers—and particularly to those attracted to similar ESG-oriented opportunities.

“Our products can help our customers in their ESG journeys in a way that those of many other companies just can’t. We have the ability to differentiate from a product perspective and from an ecosystem,” says Mastantuono, who seldom ignores an opening to amplify ESG’s growing influence.

“It is just this incredible opportunity that has allowed us to really punch quite a bit above our weight class,” adds Mastantuono, who leaves us wondering whether she’s speaking on behalf of the company or for CFOs at large. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about ServiceNow … what sets this company apart today?

Mastantuono: Behind every business outcome is a process that drives experiences. ServiceNow digitizes these siloed processes, connecting and automating them, so that work flows throughout an organization. In doing so, we dramatically add value and improve experiences for our customers and their stakeholders. At the end of the day, how I talk about it is to say that we optimize processes so that people can do their best work every day, connect silos for these seamless experiences, and create new value. I like to think about it as creating a consumer-like, frictionless experience at work that really helps to drive these incredible employee and customer experiences.

Read More From a value and competition perspective, we’re a platform company first and foremost. The benefit of being a platform company is that we have no one competitor that can provide the end-to-end functionality that we do across the enterprise. Whether it’s your IT organization, your HR organization, or your customer service organization that needs help, we’re the only cross-functional platform that can sit on top of any systems of record to really enable workflows across the enterprise. If you think about it, you realize that we’re a system of actions that make employees more productive and really help to improve both the employee and the customer experiences across the enterprise.

First and foremost, we are a high-growth company. When people ask me about my priorities, I tell them that it’s all about growth and profitability. We are unique not only in the fact that we’ve gotten to $5.5 billion in annual revenue—and now in 2022 will get to $7 billion—all organically but also in that we’ve done this with really strong free cash flow and profitability margins. For me, it’s all about growth and profitability as priority #1.

Second, it’s about talent and people. I’m looking to make sure that ServiceNow’s finance organization is a premier unit to which people can come to live their best lives and build inspiring careers by dreaming bigger than ever. It’s all about talent development. I spend a lot of time really focused on how can we make ServiceNow the absolute best place to work.

Third, I’ll go back to ESG. My other top priority from both a personal and professional standpoint is ESG. I’m so proud of the fact that we’ve really been able to embed environmental, social, and governance initiatives into the DNA of our organization. As CFO, I get the greatest lift from seeing this in action. I would say that these are probably three of my top priorities.

“I like to ask the question: ‘How can we be better? How can I really evolve this finance organization and bring the best new ideas into the organization, while developing the people who’ve been here for a while?’ That’s when you hit the sweet spot and you have people who can help each other and teach each other and develop together.” – Gina Mastantuono, CFO, ServiceNow

ServiceNow | www.servicenow.com | Santa Clara, CA

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Back in 2017, Casey Woo took a vow to move beyond early-stage companies.

“What I like to tell people is that as an operator you will be characterized and judged by the stage of your businesses,” remarks Woo, who from 2011 to 2017 had served in a succession of finance leadership roles at a number of early-stage “A-B-C series”–funded companies.

“At that point, I had three A-B-Cs under my belt, and for me, the concern was that if I took a fourth, I’d be labeled a ‘Van Wilder,’” recalls Woo, naming the Ryan Reynolds character whose seventh year of college served as the backdrop for a National Lampoon movie.

Read More “I understood what hypergrowth and product market fit were, but I was not able to say that I had seen ‘scale,’” Woo reports, as he explains what led him to nab the position that he now credits with having opened his next CFO chapter—and enabled him to add “scale” to the list of descriptors in his professional portfolio.

The role to which Woo refers was noteworthy as much for its transformative effect on Woo’s future as it was for the company itself: WeWork.

“They needed a regional CFO, but this was a huge step up for me, as the size of my P&L on Day 1 was 10 times greater than that of any other business I had ever been a part of,” reports Woo, who from 2017 to 2019 oversaw finance and operations for the flexible workspace company’s U.S. western region and Canada.

At the same time, Woo’s timing placed him inside the headline-grabbing WeWork saga that would ultimately lead to the ouster of the firm’s founder and CEO, Adam Neumann, and withdrawal of the company’s IPO.

“We were asked by some of the biggest investors in the company to go fast, so in a weird way we were doing what we were told … and following orders,” comments Woo, whose tour of duty at WeWork gave his real estate credentials the boost needed to allow him to soon thereafter step into the CFO office at Landing, a company specializing in flexible-lease apartments.

Asked what lessons he may have gleaned from his days at WeWork, Woo observes: “After Adam left, everything changed—the culture went from ‘Go, go, go!’ and ‘We’re top of the world!’ to the reverse and layoffs.”

It sounds like Van Wilder may have finally graduated. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Landing … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Woo: Landing is the leader in flexible living. Said another way: There is no consumer brand in apartment renting. It’s made up of a highly fragmented market of landlords and properties. We all know the renting experience. It’s probably second to the DMV experience. It is not fun. It lacks innovation. On top of this, if you think about it, renting has not changed for a very long time. It’s a 12-month lease, unfurnished. This is how it works—we all know that. You go to Craigslist or Apartments.com. But what happens if you think about other industries? There are some undeniable secular trends. Number one is flexibility. Two is on-demand. Three is brand, people being drawn to brands. Number four is digital. I’ll give you some examples: In transportation, Uber; in vacation rentals, Airbnb; in grocery delivery, Instacart and shipped. On and on and on, you can do this.

Read More Then you get to apartments, where we have Craigslist and the sound of crickets. The sector is ripe for disruption. I ask people, “Don’t you think that apartments are going to change in the way that they’re rented just like transportation has changed and food delivery has changed and so on?” The answer is “Absolutely!” And this is what’s happening. So, COVID—funny enough: call it being in the right time, the right place—pulled the future forward. We were all going to be on Zoom anyway, but COVID just made this happen 7 years faster.

It is undeniable now that there will be a large portion of the population that will live flexibly. But what does “flexibly” mean? For one thing, turnkey living, so that you don’t have to drag around your furniture. Why do you have to drag around your furniture when you go from Austin to New York all the time? Second, why just a 12-month lease? Why can’t it be 5½ months? Get up and go. COVID has changed our mind-sets, too: You can work from a lot of places. On top of this, you have a generation for whom this whole thing about being at a company for 25 years just doesn’t work anymore. Two years, 1 year, 3 years. “I want to have experiences, I want to see Austin, I want to see Miami.” Flexible living is going to be the next wave, and what Landing wants to do is enable this.

“A CFO’s job, among many others, is like that of ‘Google Translate’—it’s a cross-functional role that aims to bring together a diverse ‘breed’ of stakeholders to speak ‘one language.'” –Casey Woo, CFO, Landing

Landing | www.hellolanding.com | Birmingham, AL

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Looking back on the 28 years that he spent inside IBM’s finance function, Russ Porter notes that his career climb paralleled the evolution of FP&A inside the giant technology provider.

Turn back the clock to the early to mid-1990s and, Porter tells us, many of IBM’s FP&A professionals were more or less serving as budget managers for the company’s many business units.

However, in the years that followed, they began being tasked with broader, more operational duties.

Read More “FP&A became the gearbox for the financial and operational management of each division,” explains Porter, who describes the role of IBM’s FP&A professionals as becoming more “navigational” over time.

“Each week, I sat down with my general managers—we would go through all of our sales performance numbers and review which contracts were coming on and which ones were coming off,” reports Porter, recalling the routine.

Along the way, Porter recalls, FP&A professionals seeking advancement within the company would need to demonstrate that they could do more than drop red flags when problems surfaced.

“FP&A would very often be the centerpiece of conducting troubled contract reviews,” remarks Porter, who adds that finance professionals were expected to not only make recommendations regarding what actions might be required to remedy a struggling contract but also follow up to determine whether the prescribed actions were being taken.

For Porter, who eventually oversaw FP&A for IBM’s $30 billion global technology services division, the troubleshooting experiences gleaned during contract review sessions became even more valuable as his growing leadership responsibilities no longer permitted him to sit in on them.

Says Porter: “I knew what was going on at the ground level in terms of how the team reviewed a contract, so I was able to say, ‘Here are the questions that we should now be asking in order to get the answers that we need to better manage the broader portfolio.’” –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Many of our audience members know the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), but for those who have yet to attend an IMA event or class, would you please tell us about the IMA’s mission and how it serves the finance community today?

Porter: The Institute of Management Accountants, or IMA, is a little over 100 years old now. One of our big things, specifically, is certifying, educating around, and advancing professional management accounting. Sometimes people aren’t exactly sure what this term means. Management accounting is the use of basically all of the financial skills that virtually every accountant and financial professional can use. We don’t specialize in the areas of CPAs, external assurance, and personal tax, but the rest of the skills that we are advocating for and trying to bring out in the profession are all useful by almost every other financial discipline in companies and organizations around the world. A lot of people think “management accountant” and think that this is just about cost accounting, but it’s also FP&A, it’s internal audit, it’s prediction.

Read More There are elements of M&A in it. A lot of what IMA and the CMA—our Certified Management Accountant designation—is all about is making sure that we have the right financial skills to help our organizations.

The CMA is our signature product—it’s a certification that we’ve been doing for 50 years. This requires an examination and continuing professional education that help to identify to employers that a CMA holder knows what they’re doing. They’ve got the education, they’ve got at least 2 years of work experience, and they’ve passed a fairly rigorous exam that tests their knowledge of a variety of skills across financial disciplines, including those needed for controls, technology, economics, financial accounting, cost accounting, and more. The examination really runs the gamut of skills that are needed by today’s management accountants.

…My number one priority is to grow our profession. I want to grow the membership here at IMA. I want to do so by having our team create some great education and making the CMA the most desirable accounting certification that anybody can have. That’s the big-picture goal of what we want to do, but underlying this is the fact that I want to inspire people to be really happy in their profession—because there’s a lot of pride in the profession today. I want to get people excited about it again.

The last couple of years, in the pandemic, have been rough. As finance professionals, a lot of us have been able to work remotely really effectively, but it’s that personal touch, the connections in the office, that many companies are not back into yet. As we do all come back into the office, I want to make sure to generate a lot more enthusiasm about what our profession adds to the world, about how we can make change in the world, about how what we’re doing is important, and about the potential to add incremental value throughout our careers is ever increasing.

“Act with urgency, but don’t try to change everything at once. The organization evolved in the way it did for a reason, and understanding those reasons and the underlying culture are critical to advance any necessary changes.” -Russ Porter, CFO, IMA

Institute of Management Accountants | www.imanet.org | Montvale, N.J

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After spending 16 years as an equity analyst (the last nine of which at Goldman Sachs), Isaac Ro could not escape the fact that he was busy and bored.

The same work that had once challenged his every faculty had become more or less an exercise in pattern recognition.

“Good management teams are good, and bad ones are bad,” observes Ro, recalling the cynical mind-set that had been stalking his professional life inside the medical technology sector for nearly 2 years.

Still, Ro didn’t leave.

Read More “I loved working at Goldman, and I believed that if ever I were going to leave, I wanted to be running to something and not from something,” explains Ro, who admits that he had a self-imposed “high hurdle” to jump if he were to consider future opportunities.

To Ro, the classic equity analyst segue to corporate investor relations chief would be “just a different version of the same gig.”

“I needed to spread my wings wider and do something sufficiently different,” he remembers, “but I needed someone to sponsor me.”

Ro leaves little doubt that he had a CFO role in mind and that he had concluded that the best route for distinguishing himself from his IR-destined peers was through his existing relationships with successful management teams.

One such relationship that Ro had kept in place over time was with the management of a medical technology company that he had helped to take public in 2013.

“I had sort of mentioned to them over the previous several years that if an opportunity for me with them were to arise, I would appreciate a call,” reports Ro, who goes on to say that in early 2019, he received calls from a number of this firm’s management team members, who outlined how they were ready to launch yet another new medical technology company that they characterized as “similar but bigger.”

“The founders knew what I had to offer and wanted exactly that, and you really need this combination to have a chance,” comments Ro, who would step into the CFO office at newly formed Thrive, Inc., in June of 2019 and help to drive the sale of the company—less than 2 years later—to Exact Sciences for $2.15 billion.

Still, despite having helped the Thrive management to achieve an impressive exit, Ro’s job satisfaction wavered.

“It just felt like I had a lot of unfinished business as a CFO,” recollects Ro, who adds that he determined that the best way to broaden his CFO resume was to move beyond start-ups.

Taking the advice of a Thrive board member, Ro says, he then purposely focused on opportunities within firms that were already generating “significant revenue” and that had aspirations to go public.

It was this prescription that led Ro in early 2021 to enter the CFO office of Sema4—a company with 900-plus employees that was generating roughly $200 million in annual revenue.

“Sema4 is a very natural progression for me when it comes to keeping the learning curve steep,” notes Ro, who happily observes that he seldom gets bored these days. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Sema4 … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Ro: Sema4 is a health intelligence company. We are harnessing some cutting-edge technologies—specifically, DNA sequencing and artificial intelligence—and we’re marrying these in partnership with healthcare systems. Doing so allows us to help physicians make better decisions to improve patient outcomes, and eventually it will help to accelerate the development of new drugs. This means that at our core we are a data company. We have a world-class lab that helps us to generate these analytics.

This makes us very different. If you zoom out for a second and ask, “Who else is sort of in this sphere?,” what you typically find are companies at either end of a spectrum: Some have incredible genetic testing labs but are still trying to figure out what to do with the data, while others are software companies that are trying to figure out how to get access to data so that they can crunch it for the betterment of patients. We really started with a fully vertically integrated capability across both of these disciplines. I think that we are the only company that has world-class expertise in both of these areas.

Read More Sema4 has a couple of things going on that I think bear mentioning. One is that we recently announced the acquisition of a company called GeneDx for just over $600 million, which for us is a significant, transformative deal. It’s going to make us bigger, faster, and more profitable, which is awesome and brings with it a great team. So, we’re going to have an enormous amount of change to go through this year after having gone through the go-public process last year. There’s a lot of integration work to do, assuming that the deal closes in Q2 as expected, so this is really Mission #1.

Equal to this is just managing through what is clearly a very new and different equity market backdrop. We’re obviously dealing with seismic shifts in the economy, including everything going on with the interest rate environment, inflation, and the Fed. I mean, these are really seismic things that affect small public companies. It’s important for me to be in close partnership with the board to make sure that we navigate through these times very carefully and at the same time plan for the long term.

These two things are really top-of-mind for me, and I feel really good about the plans that we have in place. All of this comes right on the heels of going public, so we’ve been busy and we’ll continue to remain busy.

“Don’t be afraid to take risks in your career, especially in industries that are rapidly growing and evolving. Recognize that there are a lot of factors outside your control that will determine success, so you need to do the homework on every opportunity but solve for people first, timing second, and strategy third.” –Isaac Ro, CFO, Sema4

Sema4 | www.sema4.com | Stamford, CT

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

Your Hosts | Steve Player & Jack Sweeney

About Steve Player |

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It was a moment of insight that Heather Dixon remembers having not once but twice during the untold number of hours she has spent in examining how divisional numbers were being “rolled up” to be reported.

In the process of rolling up certain numbers, Dixon noted that parts of a division’s business would be exhibiting outstanding performance, but when the division reported its results, the parts were frequently hidden.

Observes Dixon: “These divisions were really doing a lot better than how things appeared on the page.”

Read More For Dixon, whose resume includes chief accounting officer stints at both Aetna and Walgreens, the reported numbers were frequently not the problem—instead, it was how the companies were accustomed to explaining their results.

As Dixon explains it, a moment of divisional insight at different companies prompted finance to mobilize a company-wide effort “to tell the story better.”

Says Dixon: “We went through a recalibration internally when we said, ‘Let’s look at all of the things that we do as a company and pull them apart and figure out how to put them together in the right way.”

According to Dixon, “the right way” is an approach that helps investors to better understand the company.

“If the market understands what you’re doing and they understand the pieces of your company, they can give you a multiple that values each division of your company separately—and they can really expand these multiples for the segments that exhibit performance that deserves higher numbers,” she notes.

What began as an examination of how one division rolled up its numbers ultimately became a wake-up call for the company’s reporting at large:

“What I have twice seen in my experience is that we were able to take the multiple for the overall company up. Again, same company, same building blocks, higher multiple—all because we decided to report the information in a little bit of a different way.” –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Everside Health … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Dixon: We effectively help companies to manage the total cost of care for their employees. Many employers are self-insured for the health insurance benefits that they provide to their employees and the dependents of their employees. Over 100 million Americans get their insurance through these types of arrangements. These employers are on the hook, so to speak, for the cost of healthcare for their employees. These healthcare costs are going up—so up and to the right, to use finance terms—in a very significant way. They go up, on average, around 6%, 7%, maybe 8% per year. If you’re a CFO and you’re looking at costs that are coming through your P&L, you’re seeing something that just keeps going up every year—so you need to look at ways to manage this. What we do is to come in and really help to manage these costs for the employers by providing primary care to their employee base and their dependents as well, as the front door to doing it all.

Read More We typically save employers 17% by Year 3, about 31% by Year 5. These are big numbers. When you think of the cost of healthcare in this country, you realize that these are really big numbers, numbers that are achieved just by engaging early and often and providing really good care—starting with primary care—to their employee and dependent base. This has also made a huge difference in the lives of the employees. It keeps them happy at work. It keeps them at work, certainly, in these days when we especially need to keep people healthy, but it also really does help companies to manage their total cost of care and keep their employees healthy all the time.

We are a high-growth company. I want to make sure that I support the growth in the business. I’m always there to support us when we have great opportunities, so this would really be my first priority. The second would be to really help to drive the business through usable, real-time, very quick insights. Gone are the days of saying, “Gosh, we’ll get you the financial results in 20 days or 15 days.” Today, we need to be nimble, and I would say that finance people aren’t generally known for being agile and nimble. They’re pretty fixed, usually reliable, usually predictable—but we need to move outside of this comfort zone and really become a real-time partner to the business and be able to provide real-time insights at the right level, so that as a business we can make the right decisions in a timely manner.

Be aware of your own brand. It will help people understand who you are and how you think. Let them know what’s important to you as a person and as a financial leader. Let them in and lead by example. Motivate your team by showing what can be accomplished together.

– Heather Dixon, CFO, Everside Health

Everside Health | www.eversidehealth.com | Denver, Colorado.

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For many organizations, capturing real-time data is no longer a goal but now a reality. However, for those firms determined to accumulate these real-time bits and digital details, the old adage about house guests and fish seems to apply: After 3 days, the former begin to smell like the latter.

This is an aroma that has become particularly unsettling to CFOs who find themselves increasingly being tasked with untangling the organizational snags that frequently stall business meetings and slow the flow of real-time data insights to key decision-makers within the organization.

To help us to better understand the efforts afoot to liberate the flow of data and remove this foul scent, we were pleased to once more catch up with Darrell Cox, CFO of Vena, who never hesitates to expose the complexity of the organizational collaboration required for Vena to empower its decision-makers with the data on which they rely to scale correctly and look beyond the next quarter. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: How does a finance leader know when his or her team is serving the organization correctly?

Cox: It begins with answering a few questions. What are you doing as a finance team or as finance leader to support your organization? Are you slowing things down? Are you getting in the way? Are you critical and cynical and always coming up with a negative and telling people what to do when you’re really not the person who’s supposed to know? You’re not the pro? This is not your role. Are you approaching things like that? I mean, this really boils down to a communication’s skill, right? The value you’re delivering, is it timely? Is it aligned with the team’s objectives? Are you empathetic? Do you understand the different team members around the table and what their objectives are, and are you kind of helping them to succeed? Are you providing them what can help them, a benefit? Are you communicating and providing the information that you are able to deliver in the most effective way? I guess this what things boil down to.

Read More You might show up new to an organization and find a sales or marketing organization that’s not collecting this data or perhaps is doing it manually. Here’s an opportunity to improve your company and maybe a teammate’s performance by assisting them through the collection and analysis of data, which is right in finance’s wheelhouse. Ideally, if you communicated about this situation in the right way, it should foster a better relationship and improve the performance of your organization and allow everyone to be more successful.

There’s definitely politics and there are definitely silos and boundaries and all of this stuff to deal with, so things can be complicated, but I think that in the big picture, if you are delivering value in a constructive, team-like, and empathetic way—in which everyone’s goals are aligned so that everyone is going to do better—you should have some success. Your efforts should be impactful for the organization and yourself. Even if you’re in an organization that already has all of this, getting ahold of these concepts and participating in the processes in the right way will help you as a finance person, too. It will help you to deliver a better plan. It will help the organization to be more agile. It will help you to be more successful overall. Regardless of whether a firm has good real-time data practices, I think that finance definitely can be a better business partner by getting involved with this. It can help the company with data in so many different ways, as well as help its own team and finance processes at the same time.

“How do you influence and lead others without friction? You put yourself in their position and begin by assisting them. If you can make their job easier and make them more successful, they will start coming to you.” –Darrell Cox, CFO, Vena

Vena | www.venasolutions.com | Toronto, ON

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Asked to highlight his experience in mergers and acquisitions, Andy Watts doesn’t need to weigh and measure the many deals that he has helped to execute over his three-decade-long finance career. Instead, Watts quickly points to the 2000s, when, as CFO of a division of Thomson Reuters, he sold off businesses responsible for nearly half of his division’s $120 million in annual revenues—a respectable feat that is perhaps even more impressive in light of the four new businesses that his division acquired during this same 12-month period.

Read More “I got a really good frontline view of how to do M&As, and while I stubbed my toe on a number of them in the process, in the end we had them running like a Swiss watch and knew exactly how we were going to get the value out of them,” remembers Watts, whose 12-year career at Thomson included something of a surprise chapter that he now credits with having helped to open the door to an operations role.

“I was sitting in a business review, and I began ‘barking on’ about how we were treating our customers—so the division president turned to me and said, ‘Okay, why don’t you go fix it?,'” recalls Watts, who notes that his initial his response was to try to step on the career break.

Says Watts: “I said, ‘No, wait!’ But then she responded, ‘There is no one else who has expressed that level of passion about our customers and the experience that they deserve.’”

Over the coming years, Watts would oversee the company’s customer onboarding processes and the relationship management interactions that governed Thomson’s customer experience. Looking back at the role that afforded him the title of Global Head of Customer Administration, Thomson Reuters, Watts realizes that this experience allowed him to complete his eventual trek to the CFO office. In 2014, he would leave Thomson and step into the CFO office at Brown & Brown, where a transformative acquisition was in short order added to the menu. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: What type of business is this … what does it do, and what are its offerings?

Watts: Brown & Brown is a large, diversified, insurance broker and risk advisor that does a number of things. We help to place coverage on behalf of companies or individuals for property and casualty coverage or employee benefits. We also run a wholesale business, which is for placement of high risk, such as high steel erection—yep, this is risky because if you’re climbing around up there, things can happen. Or take a condo sitting down in Miami—the normal, traditional, insurance markets won’t ensure that, so we have a division that will do all of these placements. We also have a business that we call National Programs, which is all about managing general agencies. The best way to think about this is to see us as a virtual insurance company. We just don’t hold any risk on our balance sheet.

Read More We’re the largest writer of flood insurance in the country. We’re the largest writer of earthquake insurance on the West Coast, behind the California earthquake authority. We write somewhere around 30% to 35% of the professional liability for all of the dentists in the United States. We run these programs and distribute them out to other retail agents. We also have a services division.

We’ve been in operation for 82 years. We started here in Daytona Beach, and now we’re the fifth largest insurance broker in the U.S. and sixth largest in the world. We’ve got operations in 43 different states. We’re over in Ireland, in the UK, up in Canada, and in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. We have just been continuing to grow the business not only through a tremendous amount of M&A over the years, but also organically. Great, great business—wonderful culture.

“Build a great network, have mentor, get tons of varied experiences within many industries and functions, learn the business, be inquisitive, be a learner, have fun on the journey, and—most important—build great teams.” –Andy Watts, CFO, Brown & Brown

Brown & Brown | www.bbinsurance.com | Daytona Beach, FL

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Twenty-four hours after Brian Kinion’s first earnings call as a CFO of a publicly-traded frim, his aspirations as a finance chief quickly became deflated as Vista Equity Partners made clear its intent to buy the company, a developer of marketing automation software known as Marketo.

“Mine became a very different role than what I had anticipated—almost all of the executives with whom I had worked left, but I stuck around for another 6 months to help the team take it from public to private,” remembers Kinion, who nevertheless views his Marketo career chapter as one of the most formative steps along his vocational path.

Read More To Kinion, who had joined the company several years earlier as vice president of finance, his Marketo sojourn was important because it allowed him to check the “CFO” box, thus guaranteeing him a coveted edge when it came to future CFO appointments.

What’s more, Kinion says, Marketo was where the full breadth of his past experiences could finally be put to use and where he finally came to “own the financial model”—a leadership leap made possible by then-CFO Fred Ball, who Kinion says made no secret of his mission to develop others.

Ball had led the company through Marketo’s successful IPO in May 2013 and occupied its CFO office as annual revenue at the firm grew from $14 million in 2010 to $210 million 5 years later.

“He told me, ‘Come in and take my job, and even if you don’t end up taking it, I’m still going to train you to be a CFO somewhere else,’” explains Kinion, who in 2017 would exit Marketo to accept a CFO position at Upwork, where once more he became the CFO of a publicly traded company when the private firm had its IPO the following year. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about MX … what does this company do and what are its offerings today?

Kinion: MX is a leading digital platform for the financial world. We’re built on the belief that financial data should be accessible and actionable for all. We’re one of the fastest-growing fintech innovators, powering more than 2,000 financial institutions and 43 of the top 50 digital banking providers to improve the financial lives of more than 40 million people.

We have about 150 million unique financial accounts, and we process over a billion monthly financial transactions on the platform. The company’s been around about 12 years. We were founded in 2010 in Lehi, Utah, and have raised about $475 million to date. Series A was led by USAA; Series B, by Battery; and Series C, by TPG. Most recently, we raised money about a year ago at a $1.9 billion valuation.

Read More Our customers include US Bank, Sonoma, M&T Bank, and BECU, just to kind of give you some names. Technology has rapidly accelerated the pace of change in almost every industry, financial services is no exception. More and more of our daily activities have moved online. Consumers have come to expect personalized, comprehensive digital tools that enable them to efficiently manage their full financial lives. An almost countless bunch of fintech businesses have been created to address this need. From 2020 to 2021, there was about a 50% growth rate in people using fintech providers.

In order to thrive, these firms require access to both customer financial data and the banking tools necessary to underpin their products and services. For years, financial data aggregators such as MX have played a key role in this evolution by collecting this customer data from financial institutions, creating efficient tools, and sharing the data with authorized third parties. There has been a little bit of a global trend toward open banking—or, more broadly, open finance—which has improved the transparency and portability of this financial data.

We use what’s called modern connectivity, which means employing more direct tokenized authorizations to access data. We have access to something like 16,000 different data sources. We are able to provide our customers—our fintechs, financial institutions, banks, and credit unions—with access to this modern connectivity. We’re then able to take it through what we call our Three Cs of data cleansing, which are the world-class ways in which we can cleanse, classify, and categorize it. We basically provide our customers with an opportunity, a value proposition, to increase their revenue, to upgrade their share of the wallet, to reduce their costs around fraud—to make a myriad of improvements like these—and thus to provide their end users with amazing experiences. We help to power this digital experience.

We provide aggregation, enhancement, identity verification, money management, and mobile banking. In a nutshell, that’s what we do.

“Hire a strong, diverse team with experts in various areas. Scale your organization through process and systems and eliminate the manual work that leads to errors. Understand the core metrics/drivers of your organization and be able to communicate them effectively inside and outside your organization. Be forward-looking and embrace change.” –Brian Kinion, CFO, MX

MX | www.MX.com | Lehi, UT

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

More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees.

The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations.

Your Hosts | Brett Knowles & Jack Sweeney

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Ride the tailwinds, and go straight at the headwinds with earnestness. – Nitesh Sharan, CFO, SoundHound, Inc.

When Nitesh Sharan exited Hewlett-Packard after 15 years of diligent career-building, he assumed—like many seasoned finance executives have done—that his finance skill set would be applicable to just about any industry or company.

However, Sharan recalls that when he stepped into a senior IR and treasury role at athletic footwear titan Nike, Inc., this assumption was tested.

Read More “I had to relearn finance in a way because it was not just about the science or about your gross margins, profits, and cash—it was about the art and the science together,” observes Sharan.

“At Nike, the IR function was a very strong partner with communications and the brand, which was a wholly different element of IR that I came to appreciate,” comments Sharan, who back in 2016 executed the intrepid career segue from HP, a company known for its engineering and maniacal focus on product, to Nike, a company known for its marketing and maniacal focus on brand.

Still, Sharan says, the two companies shared something very much in common: iconic founders and the cultures that they had built.

“At HP, we had a founder’s culture in which Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were embedded in everything. Even with the mergers and divestitures that the company has seen, HP is still the iconic founders’ company of the Valley,” remarks Sharan, who adds that Nike founder Phil Knight’s imprint is similarly part of the company’s culture today.

“When I went to Nike, I felt one step closer because Phil Knight’s footprint is still so deep there—so much of the founder’s culture has been embedded,” notes Sharon, who reports that his experience in working at the two founder-led companies has influenced his thinking when it comes to businesses at large.

“I really believe that the most dominant companies are founder-led—you can see it in the markets,” explains Sharan, who last year opened his latest career chapter by stepping into the CFO role at founder-led SoundHound, Inc.

Concludes Sharan: “I just became attracted to the founder’s culture, and, in a way, this is what catalyzed my transition to SoundHound.” –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about SoundHound … what does this company do, and what are its offerings?

Sharan: Let me first describe the company, which has been around since 2005, 2006, led by three Stanford graduates. It’s a conversational voice AI leader and really an innovator, a disrupter, in really what is creating the next horizon of human computer interfaces. If we back up a little and consider just the history of technology, we think of the ’80s, when PCs became prominent and Microsoft really disrupted the incumbents. Then you think of the ’90s and the Internet revolution and how this created all of these iconic companies. Then came the mobile revolution. We believe that voice and conversational interaction are going to be the next horizon of how humans interact. We’ve seen bits of it, but the technology really hasn’t gotten to a place where it could be more mass-adopted. It’s about natural language conversation.

Read More I’m learning a lot of this as I go along, by the way. It’s part of my education, and I’m diving in. This is definitely not my deep background, but I’m coming to appreciate that this is a hard AI problem. Natural language processing and understanding is difficult work. Not coincidentally, two of the cofounders have PhDs in electrical engineering and the other has a bachelor’s in computer science, all from Stanford. So, SoundHound has really been about bringing together electrical engineering and computer science to develop technology that works and advance the research. Keyvan Mohajer, the cofounder CEO, started this journey at Stanford. He did his PhD in machine learning and speech recognition, which really was ahead of the curve.

They built differentiated tech that’s more accurate, faster, and better than what you might be used to in some of your smart speakers at home. This AI allows you to do complex compound queries so that you don’t have to say, “What’s the weather?,” “When’s the next ‘whatever’?” It allows you to talk in a way more natural to how we speak. It allows for negation, for example. If you ask for Asian restaurants, excluding Chinese, most of the existing products will answer you with Chinese restaurants. We have technology that enables comprehension of a natural conversation—just as you and I are having—and this is really the essence of it. For 10 years, in stealth, this company built amazing technology. This is hard to do in the Valley, by the way—to have capital that sticks with you for that long in the venture community, but we were able to do it.

Along the way, we actually got a bit of notoriety out of a music recognition app, SoundHound, which was ahead of the curve because you could get a song identified by humming it rather than by putting it in front of a radio, as you had to do with other products. We were able to commoditize this and attract over 300 million users, so we proved that we could build a great product that worked—but the long-term vision was always this voice AI space. So, we spent 10 years of really harnessing the tech. This is part of what attracted me to SoundHound. There are a lot of companies out there that do a lot of great things without a great tech foundation, but I really believe that what catalyzes opportunities for generational change is indeed having one. I saw this at HP, which was able to generate decades of success from a great foundation of solid engineering, and this is what we are built on, too.

In 2016, we launched our Houndify platform, which is the voice AI platform that brands can work off of to build their own conversational voice interfaces. We started launching this back then, and now we’re in major enterprises like automakers Hyundai, Kia, Stellantis, and Mercedes-Benz. We’re partnering with MasterCard, Deutsche Telekom, and Vizio smart TVs, as well as on apps like Pandora and Snap. We’re now at a place where we have proven technology and proven adoption, and we’re now scaling. I was excited when I learned that they were looking for a CFO. For me, this was just a perfect opportunity to come in and help this company to scale to the next level. It’s really built on a tremendous foundation, and we’re seeing great momentum. It was just a very attractive opportunity to be with a great team, a great set of leaders, a great foundation of technology, and now a market adoption that’s happening very quickly.

SoundHound, Inc. | www.soundhound.com | Santa Clara, CA

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When Herald Chen was growing up in a small town not far from Pittsburg, he dreamed of someday running the 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.

Read More 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 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

CFOTL: Tell us about AppLovin … what does it do, and what are its offerings today?

Chen: AppLovin is a leading marketing and monetization software platform company focused on the mobile app ecosystem. So, we’re in a space that’s actually only 10 years old, if you think about it, and just has a tremendous amount of growth potential. We also own a portfolio of mobile apps that provide first-party data to feed the machine-learning engine.

Very simplistically, three things drew me to AppLovin.

One was that the size of the opportunity in the company was tremendous. There have been some companies in which I have been able to invest that were niche in size; you would get them to a reasonable scale and then sell. This was an opportunity to really build a large platform company.

The second was just the technology that they had and the speed with which they were developing the technology—a pace that I had never seen before. Third was that the combination of these two factors, along with the presence of the then-CEO and -CTO—who are fantastic executives—just said that here was an opportunity that if done right could actually enable the building of a very large platform company. Such conditions and opportunities just don’t come up that often.

Read More Another side of it is that I like to build businesses. At KKR, I had the opportunity to help to build the technology media telecom business over the past decade. I felt that there were maybe a couple more years to go there in building it out but that the biggest impact that I could have had on that business had already been made. There were some amazing people who worked for me who are now running that group and doing extremely well without me, and it was great to see them take that over.

Inside AppLovin, we’ve moved tremendously quickly to be able to go public and to do the acquisitions that we’ve done. I think that if we execute well and have a little luck, we’re on a trajectory to build a very large platform company. I’ve learned a tremendous amount along the way, too, which is always invigorating.

Applovin | www.applovin.com | Palo Alto, CA

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

Your Hosts | Steve Player & Jack Sweeney

About Steve Player |

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Back in 2012, when Michael High was heading up corporate planning across 30 countries for Shell, the energy company’s CFO made it known that it was time for Shell’s business leaders to reconsider their ritual of renegotiating annual business targets.

To that end, Shell’s finance leader let it be known that the business units could skip the company’s corporate planning process in the coming year, as an affirmation of their commitment to the targets they had agreed to the year before.

Read More “I actually think that this was the right insight at the time, but it generated a ton of knock-on consequences over time,” explains High, who commends the finance leader’s willingness to take head on what’s recognized in business at large as one of the budgeting process’s greatest vulnerabilities: target renegotiation.

Still, the consequences were real.

“When we went to turn on the planning system in 2014, most people didn’t remember how it worked. There was a series of intricate steps—something like 146 steps and different jobs required to get the IT application to do everything that it was supposed to. And, of course, if you do it only once a year, nobody remembers all the right steps,” comments High, who notes that the circumstances also exposed how IT talent often factors into corporate planning.

“If you think about the FP&A community and the IT community that supports FP&A, you realize that these tend to be high-turnover roles. They tend to be career-developing roles. So, you’d put people in them for maybe 2 to 3 years, typically. Well, by the time we got around to doing business planning in 2014, 80 percent of the organization that either had facilitated the planning process or controlled the IT systems had turned over,” recalls High.

Today, High views as a painful lesson the subsequent late nights and weekends required to get Shell’s corporate planning process back on track—times when many members of Shell’s FP&A team paid a high price. “I was accountable for the process, so it was a leadership failure on my part,” he states.

However, High observes that something more did arise from this consequential episode. Over the next few years, High says, he began to note how a shift was under way inside organizations as the ability to easily customize cloud application tools made them an attractive alternative to traditional ERP systems. Meanwhile, when it came to corporate planning, he became focused on how the talent demands of certain IT systems had traditionally put the planning process at a higher risk.

According to High, he was determined to “de-risk” technology in planning and eliminate IT complexity.

To better evaluate some of the new cloud applications, High began attending different conferences, including the annual gathering of the Association of Financial Professionals (AFP)—where the cloud vendors always highlighted how they were zeroing-in on corporate planning’s pain points.

This helped High to see how the adroitness with which certain cloud applications can access, correlate, and display company data could once and for all put an end to certain planning rituals such as the renegotiation of targets.

Concludes High: “What you have the potential to do today is to really change the nature of the performance conversation and the results discussion. You can go from having a static set of numbers produced outside of the room to a discussion during which you can pull up live data and talk about it and actually seek answers to questions on the spot.” –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Deep Water Gulf and how it fits into the world of Shell …

High: What the Gulf of Mexico unit entails physically, geographically, is a series of assets that stretch from the Mexico-Texas border and go about 400 miles east, almost all the way over to the Alabama-Mississippi-Louisiana border of the Gulf Coast. So, it’s about 400 miles across. Across this, we have eight major assets, producing assets, that are there, and we have a number of projects that are under way. These can come in two flavors. One would be building an outright brand-new facility. You could think of this as like putting up another factory, if you will, out in the Gulf of Mexico. The other option that we have is to actually develop a number of wells nearby an existing asset or factory, if you want to use that analogy, and simply tie them in via pipelines and other equipment to be able to produce from these through an existing asset. Over time, the industry has been shifting a bit more toward the second option, what we call subsea tiebacks, where there tend to be quicker cycle times to be able to produce and not nearly as much capital investment required.

Read More We have had a lot of crises to deal with as a business, particularly with the ups and downs of commodity prices for our industry, with obviously COVID, and—I’m on the Gulf Coast, of course—with things like hurricanes. My attention has been mostly on the business, and I probably haven’t paid enough attention to my finance organization over this past year. So, this will be a priority for me going forward. For me, I think 2022 needs to be about re-creating a deep sense of belonging for our people and of helping others to understand their “why?,” especially in an industry that’s been going through a lot of change.

Eliminating extraneous work is important, so that what remains is meaningful. This means more digital transformation. The last piece is what I would call rejuvenating our business opportunity and transformation funnels. The world is going to to be uncertain. It’s important to have things in your toolkit that you’re ready to be able to trigger if things go up or if things go down. Having this on the shelf ready to go is pretty important, I think, as we go into what’s going to be an up-and-down world.

Deep Water Gulf of Mexico – Shell | Visit Deep Water Gulf

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Bill Zerella’s path to the CFO office began at a company whose customers largely belonged to a bygone era. At the time, Simplicity Patterns was the largest pattern company in the world, and its most devout customers were sewing machine owners across the United States and Canada who enjoyed making clothes for themselves and their families.

For Zerella, a 20-something-year-old auditor, the critical career decision to join Simplicity was a no-brainer not because of the business opportunity being presented or the position being offered but because of the source of the proffer. The company had recently hired a former Fortune 500 finance leader by the name of Bill Lewis, who was looking to throttle up the company’s business model. Zerella was ready to climb on board.

Read More “I probably learned more from him during the 5 years I was with that company than I’ve learned in the past 25 years,” comments Zerella, who today is a seasoned tech finance leader who has served in a string of CFO roles, including one with Fitbit, where in 2015 he oversaw the company’s $841 million initial public offering (IPO).

Still, when asked about the consequential experiences that allowed him to advance upward, Zerella is drawn back to his years at Simplicity.

“It was a low-tech company that basically just printed sewing patterns—which might not sound interesting to most—but it was incredibly lucrative and probably one of the most profitable firms that I’ve ever been part of,” reports Zerella, who started in an auditing role but quickly found himself reassigned to FP&A as CFO Lewis looked to beef up the company’s performance measurements. However, Zerella’s arrival in the FP&A planning realm coincided with Simplicity’s adoption of one of the desktop computing era’s most disruptive technologies, spreadsheet application Lotus 1-2-3.

In the months ahead, Zerella’s mastery of the tool would allow the former auditor to move the Simplicity finance team beyond calculators and pencils as he led the automation of the company’s entire planning process—and received multiple promotions.

In fact, the former auditor held the position of treasurer at the time of his departure to accept his first CFO appointment—only 5 years after his arrival.

“Looking back, I probably got there too soon—I probably could have used a little more training,” recalls Zerella, whose Simplicity career was also notable for having permitted him to witness firsthand the transformational power of tech—which itself would lead to his relocation only a few years later to a locale he will now likely always call home, Silicon Valley. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about ACV … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Zerella: ACV is driving the digital transformation of the wholesale automotive industry. At our core, we’re a data company. To explain this a little more, historically, let’s say that you have a Honda Accord and you want to trade up to a Mercedes. Thus, you go to a Mercedes dealer and you trade in your Honda. Most likely, because of the demographics that this Mercedes dealer serves, it will sell this car in the wholesale market to another dealer for whom this car is more appropriate. This could be a Honda dealer, a used car dealer, whatever.

This wholesale market and this industry, which have been around for decades, have traditionally transacted through physical auctions. In our example, the Honda would be driven to a physical auction. There would be buyers and bidders for the car. Someone would buy it and transact. This is the way that this industry has been for decades. There are roughly 20 million cars transacted annually in the dealer-to-dealer wholesale market, which also includes commercial vehicles such as those that come off a lease and get traded as well. This feeds into the consumer market, which is the roughly 40 million units a year that consumers buy and sell. So, this is a very large market, and in units it’s actually bigger than the new car market. And that’s just the U.S.

Read More What ACV endeavored to do was to move to an online marketplace, leveraging data and essentially putting together a data set on what is a very complex asset: the used car. We did this by using technology to enable our roughly 800 inspectors around the country who will actually physically inspect a car. They will do things like scan the undercarriage, run algorithms that listen to the engine, plug in to the meters, and put together, on average, about 130 data points on a vehicle. This enables that vehicle to be sold online because the buyer can basically understand the condition of the asset without ever having seen it.

As a result, ACV has created the largest online marketplace for transacting used cars through the wholesale market. This year, we’ll handle about 550,000 cars—and mind you, the company was founded only 6 years ago. The firm has grown really, really rapidly, but—frankly—this is just one more example of how digital transformation can change an industry.

ACV Auctions | wwwacvauctions.com | Buffalo, NY

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