Episodes Archives - CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA: Recent Episodes
Episodes Archives - CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA
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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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.
jb
Xactly | www.xactlycorp.com | San Jose, CA
The post 999: A Bias for Action | Jason Godley, CFO, Xactly appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
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
The post 997: From Reaction to Action: Capturing Insight for Growth | Daniel Bisgeier, CFO, Constellation appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
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.
The post Ep 34: From Rearview to Road Ahead appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
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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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.
jb
“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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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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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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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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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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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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Back in September 2021, Jeremy Johnson, senior vice president of finance at Ceridian (now Dayforce), decided that it was time to test his mettle—a step that would lead him to returning from a long personal journey with a leadership perspective somewhat different from what he had expected might be the case. Determined to challenge himself and expand his horizons, Johnson left the familiarity of Ceridian—where he had steadily advanced his career for the previous nine-and-a-half years, to accept a CFO position with SmartRecruiters.
Johnson’s test, however, was about to grow exponentially. At SmartRecruiters, circumstances propelled him into an even more demanding role, that of interim CEO. This unexpected turn of events was not just a mere career stint but a transformational experience—one that has has influenced his approach to finance leadership by infusing it with broader strategic insights and a nuanced understanding of the business.
Read MoreWith his return to Dayforce as CFO, it felt like the narrative was coming full-circle. “This return signifies more than just coming back—it represents the culmination of my growth, my meeting of challenges, and the broader leadership perspective that I’ve gained,” Johnson remarks. He reports that this journey, including the unforeseen stint as CEO, has endowed him with experiences and a visionary approach to the finance leadership role.
The early days: Johnson tells us that the beginning of his career was significantly shaped by his experiences at Capella University, where he built a relationship with CFO Lois Martin—who became a critical mentor. His responsibilities in SEC reporting and managing disclosure committees provided a strong foundation in financial reporting and regulatory compliance. –Jack Sweeney jb
CFOTL: Tell us about Dayforce … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Johnson: Dayforce is a global leader in technology for human capital management, or we what we call HCM. Our flagship product—which is also called Dayforce—provides our users with a full HCM suite, including functionality for human resources, payroll, benefits, workforce management, and talent intelligence. Last year, we had $1.5 billion in revenue—which was up around 21.5% year-over-year—along with $133 million in operating profit and an EBITDA-adjusted margin of around 27% margin. We have approximately 6,400 customers and had more than 6.8 million employees around the globe using the platform as of the end of last year. We have a very sticky product, with gross retention rates consistently over 97% for the past 3 years. We’re well recognized by third parties like Gartner, which for 4 straight years has named us as a leader in their Magic Quadrant for cloud HCM suites for firms with 1,000+ employees.
Read MoreDayforce the product was launched in 2013, with Dayforce and Ceridian coming together at that time. We IPO’d on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018. Just this past February, we evolved the brand further by bringing the whole company under one united brand—Dayforce—which we believe can amplify our promise to make work life better.
Permit me to get into a couple of key differentiators in who we are and what we do. We have one that is key, which is called “continuous calculation of net pay.” Look at it this way: Most payroll companies were built as payroll companies. Then they added things like workforce management—things about time clocks and time sheets and rules around shifts and overtime. More recent add-ons might be things like HCM recruiting, compensation management, and performance management. But because all of these functions were built on separate systems, you ended up with a problem around workflow and user experience.
The workflow piece meant that payroll couldn’t start running until the end of the pay period—you needed to get all of your time sheets in before you could start doing your job. You were often left with a really short amount of time in which to run payroll. A survey that we did back in 2011–12 showed that companies were running payroll when they ran out of time, not when it was ready to be run. Another challenge with this was that you frequently were creating user experience problems by requiring the user to enter their information two or three different times across different systems if it needed to change. If you had HR do it for them, you were generating manual workflows.
Consequently, at Dayforce, we built everything into one platform. It’s a single system with one record for every user that cuts across all modules—recruiting, payroll, workforce management, benefits, and on and on—the entire employee life cycle from hire to retire. Whenever a critical aspect of an employee’s record changes, the net pay is automatically changed in real time. So, if I move to a different state or local region—even just move across state lines—my net pay is automatically adjusted immediately to reflect any tax changes. If I had a child and added a dependent, my net pay would change. If this affected my withholding or 401(k) or other benefits, my net pay would adjust.
This capability allows us to do some pretty disruptive things. We have an innovative product called Dayforce Wall that enables a user to open up an app that’s separate from the payroll app to see how much money they’ve actually earned during the active pay period at any given point in time. They can see their gross-to-net calculation live. Then they can take this and maybe say, “I’d like to add $100 to my wallet.”
We also run a full payroll behind the scenes. We treat any day like it’s a paid day. We get the proper tax forms for the proper jurisdictions and can provide a fully compliant mid–pay cycle report, essentially. As I said, we also enable a pretty unique user experience through which users can change their own information in the system. In one location, it’s reflected across the entire product. These are the simple things that make a difference to an employee and allow them to focus on their jobs and not on management and the administration of their compensation. We focus on delivering quantifiable value with a true ROI, or return on investment, which has caused countless firms to switch to Dayforce. Being able to have a single solution, single database, and single continuous calculation engine helps our customers to achieve the efficiencies that they need in productivity and compliance. We call it “simplicity at scale.” jb
“It’s easy to think about the CFO position as ‘just a finance role,’ but don’t limit yourself to just finance-related activities. Without question, first and foremost, make sure that your finance backyard is in order. Beyond this, though, you have the opportunity to be very strategic and impactful across the entire organization. Use the visibility that you have—across people, GTM, operations, legal, privacy, security, risk, and product/technology—to share your insights with the entire company. Don’t be afraid or nervous about about speaking your opinion—because your perspective will have a meaningful impact on the business.” –Jeremy Johnson, CFO, Dayforce
Dayforce | www.dayforce.com | Minneapolis, MN
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This episode our Planning Aces emphasize the importance of leveraging one’s breadth of experience, stepping beyond traditional FP&A roles, and focusing on execution to bring significant value to organizations. They also emphasize the evolving nature of finance professional interactions and the idea that strategic insights can serve as catalysts for organizational change, prompting shifts in product development, market strategy, and operational execution.
This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Jeff Woolard or Velocity Global, CFO Aaron Alt of Cardinal Health and CFO Bob Houghton of Pivot Bio.
Based on Planning Ace Jeff Woolard’s comments, here are five key themes highlighted: Cross-Functional Impact of Finance:
1.Woolard emphasizes the unique position of finance to see across the entire company, identifying opportunities for creating value that might not be immediately apparent to others. This perspective enables finance to have a significant impact beyond traditional financial roles, extending into product development and strategic planning.
- Strategic Product Roadmap Insights: A pivotal moment for Woolard was realizing how finance could influence Intel’s product roadmap, particularly through identifying mismatches between how products were designed and the market’s buying trends. This led to a strategic shift in designing products that align better with customer demands and manufacturing capabilities, thereby maximizing margins.
Read More3.Understanding Market Demands: He highlights the importance of understanding distinctive buying trends, especially focusing on PCs, and recognizing that while the company and product lifecycles evolved, consumer buying behavior remained consistent. This discrepancy between what was being produced and what the market wanted was critical.
- Alignment of Product Design with Market Needs: Woolard spearheaded a change in how products were conceptualized by advocating for designs that cater to four specific cost points, reflecting both the market’s buying preferences and the company’s margin objectives. This approach required a shift from the previous product development strategy to one where products must meet these cost targets before being approved for development.
5.Strategic Insights from a Finance Perspective: The overarching theme is the value of strategic insights gained from a comprehensive understanding of the business through a finance lens. Woolard demonstrates that finance is not just about numbers but also about leveraging financial insights to guide strategic decisions that can significantly alter the company’s direction, such as product development and manufacturing processes.
From Planning Ace’s Aaron Alt’s comments, the following themes emerge:
- Challenges of International Expansion: Alt details the ambitious yet ultimately unsuccessful attempt by Target to enter the Canadian market, highlighting the logistical, pricing, and consumer dissatisfaction issues that led to empty stores and financial losses.
- Complex Decision-Making in Crisis: He describes the extensive analysis undertaken to evaluate nearly 50 different scenarios for Target’s Canadian operations, illustrating the complexity and thoroughness required in crisis management and decision-making processes.
Read More Strategic Exit and Brand Protection: Alt emphasizes the deliberate and strategic approach taken to exit the Canadian market gracefully, focusing on protecting the brand, employees, suppliers, and landlords through a Canadian bankruptcy process with support from the parent company. * Importance of Cross-Functional Teamwork: The execution of the exit strategy involved close collaboration across finance, strategy, guest experience, HR, and board discussions, showcasing the importance of cross-functional teamwork in addressing business challenges. * Learning from Failure: The experience taught Alt the critical role of finance, law, strategy, and the human element in solving business problems, underscoring that leadership involves more than just managing numbers but also engaging with and understanding various stakeholders. * Misconceptions of Leadership Power*: Alt reflects on the misconception that C-suite positions come with absolute power, highlighting instead the importance of accountability, influence, and collaboration with teams to effect change. Planning Ace Bob Houghton’s comments highlight several key points regarding his experience and insights into effective business strategy and execution:
- Upon joining the largest and most profitable division at General Mills, Houghton expected operations to be smooth but found significant opportunities for improvement, particularly in execution.
- He noted that the division lacked detailed conversations about the specific steps needed to realize the division’s vision, with strategies being too focused on desired outcomes like volume growth and margin increase without clear plans.
Read More* Houghton emphasized that outcomes are not strategies; instead, strategies should involve actionable plans that lead to desired outcomes. * His search for resources on execution led him to the book “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, which he found profoundly insightful for its emphasis on the necessity of specific action plans alongside mission and vision statements for success. * Applying the book’s concepts, Houghton organized a two-day offsite event with the finance organization to align on strategies and action plans to improve the division’s performance. * The initiatives implemented during his tenure, including the insights gained from the offsite event, resulted in a $100 million increase in the division’s profitability and a one-point gain in market share within a highly competitive category over two years. 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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In the heart of a bustling paper mill, where the scent of fresh pulp intermingled with the hum of machinery, Bob Houghton kicked off his finance career. Fresh out of college and a number of states removed from his Minnesota roots, Houghton understood the intricate dance of departments working in unison to produce everyday essentials. It was here, in the domain of plus-size machines, that he began to embrace the value of stepping beyond comfort zones for growth.
Read MoreHis journey from starting within the paper mill’s diligent production ethic to becoming finance leader at Pivot Bio is a testament to the power of diverse experiences. At a later stint at General Mills, he navigated through nine roles in 15 years, each a stepping-stone that would hone his strategic vision and leadership skills. It was a role in investor relations, however, that would mark a turning point ultimately unlocking the path to the CFO office.
Today, as the CFO of Pivot Bio, Houghton is focused on driving the company toward profitability while maintaining a sustainable business model. He emphasizes the importance of having financial acumen across the organization, allocating capital strategically, and articulating a clear value proposition to stakeholders. Meanwhile, Pivot Bio’s CFO doesn’t hesitate to blend his finance leadership with the company’s greater mission.
Says Houghton: “We’re not just providing a product—we’re providing a more profitable, predictable, safer, and sustainable solution for growers.”
CFOTL: Tell us about Pivot Bio … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Houghton: To understand Pivot Bio, it’s important to go on a little journey to understand the role that nitrogen plays in feeding the world—because not everybody knows about it. For plants to grow and thrive, they really need three primary things: sunlight, water, and nitrogen—which is by far the largest component of the air in our atmosphere, making up about 80% of it. Unfortunately, about 99% of the nitrogen that occurs naturally in the air is not usable by the plants that we grow to feed the world.
About 100 years ago, a process called Haber-Bosch was invented. Basically, through a very fossil fuel– and energy-intensive process, this extracts nitrogen out of the atmosphere and converts it to ammonia that can then be fed plants as nitrogen. Over the past 100 or so years, about 50% of the world’s population has been fed by this process.
Read MoreSynthetic fertilizer enables the production of food for about 4 billion people on this planet. This has been one of the most significant technological breakthroughs during the past 100 years because it’s basically been because of this that we’ve been able to fertilize the crops grown around the world for the past century.
The challenge with synthetic fertilizer, however, is—first of all—that about 40% to 60% of it that’s applied never actually reaches the plant. It dissipates in one of two ways. One is that it volatilizes into the air; the second is that it leaches into the groundwater. Unfortunately, when it leaches into the groundwater, this increases the level of nitrates there. This, in turn, creates all kinds of health issues, including the introduction of more than 500 ecological dead zones in our oceans. So, this whole situation has been very, very damaging to the environment.
Pivot Bio has a solution to these challenges. In the soil, there are microbes that occur naturally; in fact, quite obviously, such microbes have existed in the soil for millions of years. What these microbes quite naturally do is to shut off when they detect nitrogen. They’re an efficient organism. Like anything else, when they determine that the energy that they would have to expend to absorb something—in this case, nitrogen—is already present, they don’t perform the process. What we have done is to edit the gene sequence of these microbes such that they continue to convert nitrogen to ammonia, even in the presence of nitrogen. Our microbes are always working, even if there’s nitrogen present. This is really our first calling card.
The second thing that we’ve done is to enhance the output of these microbes by enabling them to produce more ammonia than they would naturally produce just to self-sustain. This excess ammonia in the soil is absorbed by the root system of the plant.
We apply our product in two primary ways. The first is to apply it on seed—for example, a corn seed might be treated with a Pivot Bio product prior to being planted. The second is that we apply our product as a liquid through a furrow application. As the grower is planting their seed, our product is getting applied right at this time—and as soon as a seed germinates, our product adheres to the root system.
Our product provides numerous benefits to the grower. The first is that we’re 100% available to the plant—we don’t lose anything through volatilization. Similarly, we don’t lose anything through leaching—we’re 100% available to the plant. We spoon-feed the plant, consistently providing it with the amount of nutrients that it needs throughout the growing season. Just as important, we’re much, much less environmentally and energy-intensive to produce. Synthetic nitrogen contributes about 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions per year and is the third leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Our product is far, far more environmentally friendly. We are extremely sustainable because we don’t evaporate or leach off into the groundwater. jb
Pivot Bio | www.pivotbio.com | Berkeley, CA
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Back in 2009, with a law degree in hand along with a smattering of frontline consulting experience, Jennifer Loo swung open the door at LegalZoom—where in short order she was tasked with architecting the fast-growing company’s FP&A function from the ground up.
For Loo, the responsibilities that would quickly surface at LegalZoom did not necessarily fit any single qualification that she may have been fortunate enough to possess; instead, it was as though they all were demanding that her entire career path rise to meet her, bringing with it her education, distinct capabilities, and potential. Suddenly, her diverse background, bridging the analytical rigor of consulting with the strategic nuance of legal training, made her uniquely equipped for the challenges of shaping a nascent finance function in a fast-evolving company.
Meanwhile, Loo tells us, she benefited from a CFO mentor who demonstrated faith in her potential to spearhead such a critical undertaking. In her ascent, CFO Loo proved that when you’re ready to embrace your unique path, indeed, the road will usually rise to meet you. –Jack Sweeney jb
CFOTL: Tell us about Tala … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Loo: Early in my career, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to a business that really believed in doing good while doing well—in solving problems bigger than just the top and bottom lines. I’ve worked in four companies and four industries during the past 15 years, and the only common thread that I would say that these companies had was the fact that they were solving big problems.
As self-serving as it may seem, I will say, hands down, that I have not seen one company more audacious about this than Tala. Internally, we say that we are building the financial platform for the global majority—or, in other words, the 4 billion or so people who are consistently overlooked and underserved by existing systems. These are not the poorest of the poor, who are often served by governments and NGOs. They are not the middle-class-plus, on whom existing or traditional financial institutions typically focus. They are really this giant middle segment, whose economic power totals $10 trillion.
This is our sector. We deliver critical financial services, things that are so fundamental to most of us that sometimes we take them for granted. Our cornerstone offering is really a credit product. We provide quick, instant access, underwritten via a mobile app using machine learning—and we’ve constantly been adding to this. We’ve really been building a financial platform that includes features like savings and transaction capabilities, which just help to make our customers’ day-to-day financial lives a little easier and a little better. We are currently functioning in Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, and India, and we expect to go far beyond these. jb
“‘What got you here won’t get you there.‘ You should wake up every day looking ahead to where you want to be—either you personally, or your company, or both. It’s important to ensure that you are building the skills, networks, and perspectives necessary to climb that next mountain.” –Jennifer Loo, CFO, Tala
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Reflecting on her career choices, Erin Sawyer tells us that one pivotal point stands out—a decision that involved moving her family across the country. This step triggered not only a geographical shift but also a change in Sawyer’s professional life, when her work alongside a CEO ultimately fueled her aspirations to become a chief financial officer.
Read MoreShe had always been so captivated by numbers that by the tender age of 5 she had determined that her destiny lay in accounting. Her initial steps into the corporate world at Honeywell Aerospace as a cost accountant laid the groundwork for years of steady career advancement. Yet, it was her transition from accounting to a more dynamic role in financial planning and analysis (FP&A) that sparked her true passion—driving business forward through strategic finance.
Sawyer’s tenure in the Yellow Pages industry during its transformational phase sharpened her skills in business transformation and strategic partnership, preparing her for the challenges ahead. However, it was an opportunity at insurance software provider Vertafore that finally aligned her with a CEO mentor, whom she greatly admired. This relationship deepened her expertise in operational excellence and marked a decisive step toward achieving her eventual CFO ambitions.
CFOTL: Tell us about Certinia … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Sawyer: We support services businesses. Let me define “services work” because not everybody knows what it is: By our definition, this is any work being performed by people in direct support of a customer. This could be consulting services, customer success efforts, software implementations—just to name a few. At Certinia, we deliver mission-critical software that helps these businesses to realize value by increasing billings and revenue, optimizing resourcing, and gaining intelligence to enable more efficient delivery of their services to their customers.
Read MoreWe’ve been kind of in a period of transition. We started back in 2009, having been built on the Salesforce platform. We sort of began in that accounting space, but with a different focus, which was at the customer or account base level instead of the transactional one. We quickly came to understand that our technology worked really well for services-oriented industries, which could utilize our resources to deliver value. We then quickly pivoted into the professional services automation realm, where we are today.
Last year, we changed our name from Financial Force to Certinia. A pivotal moment for us really was bringing the word “certain” into our Certinia name. What’s important for us is making sure that we are aligning that “certain” within our customers’ minds by ensuring that they have trust in the seamless data of our products that will better help them deliver for their customers. My priorities really are to enhance this blend of financial and data and strategic insight within the business in order to continue to leverage our technology so that we can be the best in our technology class. It’s that simple. jb
“You don’t have to know everything—you just have to know how to get the information. I used to think that a CFO was the ultimate expert in all things finance. The strongest CFOs surround themselves with people who can help to bridge knowledge gaps.” –Erin Sawyer, CFO, Certinia
Certinia | www.certinia.com | Sanjose, CA
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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 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 […]
The post 931: Changing Swim Lanes | Jeff Laborde, CFO, JAGGAER appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 930: Where Leaders Are Made | Tony Boor, CFO, Blackbaud appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post Ep 26: The Quest for the Golden KR appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
Marco Torrente kicked off his finance career inside the Milan, Italy, offices of SC Johnson, the household cleaning products giant headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin.
All told, he would end up spending 7 years in various finance roles at Johnson—including that of controller—while relocating first to London and then eventually to Geneva.
Looking back, Torrente tells us that the family-owned company created a “flexible culture” that valued autonomy and direct communication—two qualities that have been instrumental in shaping his approach to finance leadership.
CFOTL: Tell us about WebBeds … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Torrente: WebBeds is a B2B company. We’re part of the Webjet group, which is an Australian public company that’s listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Its market cap is 3 billion Australian dollars, which is around 1.8 billion euros, so it’s already a very relevant company. WebBeds is a global marketplace for the travel industry that provides a powerful distribution solution. We create a connection between hotels and travel companies as a B2B service, as well as with some B2C retail travel agencies.
Read MoreOur priority in finance is to support the business properly as we continue on our already fantastic growing journey. We’re doing this particularly through the digitalization journey that we have been implementing in everything from our foundation systems to new software that uses artificial intelligence. Really key for me is to support and grow the business—which is what we want—without growing the department’s head count by the same 30% to 40% increment.
jb
WebBeds | www.webbeds.com | Dubai, United Arab Emirates
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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 more than few venture capital firms to seek out the advice of strategy executives familiar with the mathematics behind the evolving menus of fast dining establishments.
Having held a succession of top strategy roles with the likes of McDonald’s and Panera, Steven Cirulis found his budding popularity within the VC community to be little more than a rewarding satisfaction—that is, until late 2019, when he decided to put some of his VC-related activities aside to accommodate an advisory gig with publicly-held sandwich shop Potbelly.
Read More“They had been looking for a CFO at the time, but I was really enjoying my work on the venture capital side of things,” recalls Cirulis, who adds that the arrival of the pandemic changed everything.
“I ostensibly became the person whom they turned to and asked, ‘Okay, what do we do here?,’” continues Cirulis.
Within the next several weeks, he busily implemented a list of cash preservation edicts, triggered the renegotiation of bank covenants, and—along with Potbelly management—announced a pay cut, instituted an employee furlough, and applied for a PPP loan.
Along the way—perhaps not more than a month into the pandemic—Potbelly proposed to Cirulis that he join the company as CFO and chief strategy officer.
“Why would you join a restaurant business at the start of a pandemic?,” rhetorically reflects Cirulis, in highlighting but one of the queries that crossed his mind at the time.
Nevertheless, Cirulis tells us, “I jumped at it.”
Three years later, with the virus now in the rearview mirror, Cirulis makes it clear that the pandemic will never fully escape his view: “Getting forgiveness on that PPP loan was a great day in my career as a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney
CFOTL: Tell us about Potbelly … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Cirulis: Our origin story is really kind of fun. It started in 1977—really, out of an antique shop on the North Side of Chicago—when a guy by the name of Peter Hastings came to the realization that while perhaps he couldn’t move his antiques that quickly, maybe he could at least satisfy his store visitors by serving them some sandwiches. So, that’s what he did—and what ended up happening was that he started selling more sandwiches than antiques. That shop on Lincoln Avenue here in Chicago is still open. In the 1990s, a gentleman named Bryant Keil came along and happened to see the potential of this great brand. He’s really whom you might in some ways call the Ray Kroc of Potbelly, inasmuch as he took the business and built it up into the multi-hundred-unit operation that exists from coast to coast today. Right now, we’re at 372 shops, about 90% of which are company-owned.
Read MoreWhat really makes Potbelly interesting and different is that it focuses on hot sandwiches. Sandwiches are one of those categories where the barriers to entry are not great. It’s not hard to make a sandwich. It is hard to make, I think, a sandwich that people love and come back for and that becomes beloved. We toast our sandwiches, every single one of them. We don’t offer cold sandwiches. We also serve these sandwiches with a verve and a style and a service model to which we refer as “delivering good vibes.” If you go into one of our shops, it kind of feels a little bit like an antique shop. At the same time, though, it feels very unique to the environment and city that you’re in—very much like a neighborhood sandwich shop. We take this seriously, as it’s a big differentiator for us.
There are a lot of sandwich shops from which people just want to pick up something to go. We occupy this unique space in fast casual that’s both a destination and a place that makes food that people crave. Look, I’ve worked at McDonald’s, I’ve worked at Panera, I’ve worked at Gap—and Potbelly is the only place that causes people to universally say, once they find out that I work here, something nice about it, something great. “Oh, I love their sandwiches” or “Oh, I’ve been to the first shop.” Right? With McDonald’s, I would hear this, too, but also sometimes people would just remain silent. So, Potbelly, I think, is a really unique brand that has massive potential.
jb
Potbelly | www.potbelly.com | Chicago
The post 928: The Strategy Between the Slices | Steven Cirulis, CFO, Potbelly appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
No matter how many phone calls Matt Gustke receives during the span of his finance career, none will likely be more memorable or important than one he received nearly 22 years ago.
At the time, Gustke, a research analyst for a major bank, was spending his days assessing the carnage piling up in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble burst.
“The times were really weird, and uncertainty was everywhere,” comments Gustke, who despite the tech sector’s dotcom bust chapter assures us that he thoroughly enjoyed his research days—and in fact he may well have remained in research if not for a fateful phone call.
Read More“He was without a doubt my favorite executive at my favorite company,” comments Gustke, recalling the late Rajiv Dutta, who as the CFO of eBay at the time called Gustke to invite him to lunch.
“The lunch turned into a full day, which then became a dinner and a meeting with the whole team, which then a week later led to my joining eBay to build out its IR function,” recalls Gustke, who as a research analyst had already established a rapport with Dutta by having frequently queried the CFO and summoned his comments as part of his regular research coverage.
“At the time that I joined eBay, I honestly viewed it as sort of a 1- to 2-year working sabbatical during which I would get to see a company from the inside, but I eventually ended up being part of the eBay family for 12 years,” continues Gustke, who once more credits Dutta with extending his “leave” and ultimately helping to point him down the CFO path.
Gustke tells us that Dutta was often known to be generous with praise: “I guess it was a couple of years into my eBay journey when Rajiv came up to me and said, ‘You know, investors don’t want to talk to me anymore because they just want to talk to you, which is freeing up so much of my time to do other things—so I want to say thanks.’”
However, as it turned out, Dutta had more than praise in mind.
“The next thing he said was, ‘And now I need you to go into a different role—what would you think about leading FP&A for eBay International?,’” reports Gustke, who after giving Dutta an affirmative response first began serving in his new international role from California before relocating to Switzerland for additional finance responsibilities that would eventually lead to heading up eBay’s European finance team.
As he continued to grow his experience across multiple finance disciplines, Gustke became a candidate for more senior leadership positions. In 2010, he garnered what would be his first CFO appointment when he was named CFO of StubHub, the online ticket broker acquired by eBay in 2007.
Still, Gustke wants us know that one of his most important lessons wasn’t gleaned from life among finance’s rank-and-file but instead at a research team’s conference table—and perhaps the very one where he first met Dutta.
Says Gustke: “Long ago I stopped worrying about asking stupid questions in meetings. I figured that if something wasn’t clear to me—and I’m at least of average intelligence—it wouldn’t be clear to someone else. It turns out that more often than not, my questions led to better conversations, new insights, and a clearer mandate as to what was to be done after the meeting.” –Jack Sweeney
CFOTL: Tell us about WooCommerce … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Gustke: WooCommerce is part of the Automattic family of businesses, and it’s actually the largest business by revenue within the Automattic family. Automattic’s best known and original business is WordPress, which I think is probably what you’re most familiar with because I believe it’s the platform that you use to power your own site. WordPress is quite broad, powering more than 43% of the Internet. Other businesses inside Automattic include Tumblr, which was an acquisition a number of years ago; Jetpack; and WordPress VIP, which is focused on enterprises. There are some other ones as well, but these are the main ones.
Read MoreAutomattic has always been a fully distributed company, with nearly 2,000 employees working from 95 countries and speaking about 120 different languages. The company itself is about 20 years old, and we’re still privately held by investors that include, among others, Tiger, Salesforce Ventures, Insight, Iconic, True Ventures, Wellington, and BlackRock. So, we have a great list of marquee investors.
WooCommerce is the leading open source e-commerce platform. We power 23% of the top million online stores, which by some measures makes Woo the number one e-commerce platform on the Internet. Woo launched as an independent company in 2011, when at the time they were a developer of themes to style your website. They were acquired by Automattic back in 2015—so, about 8 years ago—and then quickly developed to fill a need for broad e-commerce capabilities for WordPress sites. Because Woo itself is free—as are many of the extensions that merchants need—it generally provides the lowest total cost of ownership for an e-commerce platform.
We earn revenue in multiple ways. Our largest source is payments—as with most e-commerce platforms—both through revenue-sharing agreements with payment partners like Stripe and PayPal and through our own payment product, Woo Payments. We also earn revenue from strategic partners in areas like marketing and shipping, tax, and so forth, and these are generally revenue-sharing agreements as well.
We also earn money through our own marketplace, where we monetize certain paid extensions that may have been developed by us or by any of the hundreds of thousands of third-party developers who create very specific extensions to support specific use cases. We don’t really disclose a lot of specific numbers about Woo, but I’ll share that it’s a very healthy business. Our revenue growth is north of 30% year-over-year, and the business continues to be profitable, as it has been for quite some time.
jb
WooCommerce | www.woocommerce.com | San Francisco, CA
The post 927: A Phone Call from Someone Who Mattered | Matt Gustke, CFO, WooCommerce appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 926: Distinguishing the “What” from the “How” | Dallas Clement, President and CFO, Cox Enterprises appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
If Paystand CFO Scott Bennion were to break his three-decade-long finance career into different chapters, the software finance leader would likely agree that he and many of his peers have recently opened a new one. As a starting—or concluding—point, the chapter that has just ended might simply be titled “The Data Set,” in order to […]
The post 925: A.I. and the Hands of Time | Scott Bennion, CFO, Paystand appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 924: When AI is Business as Usual | Rob Goldenberg, CFO, 6sense appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 923: From Inside a Remote Address | Jim Caci, CFO, AvePoint appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 922: The Lessons We Learn | Dev Ahuja, CFO, Novelis appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 921: The Work Comes First | Niki Heim, CFO, LogicSource appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 920: When Leadership Calls | Erin Colgan, CFO, Sensei Bio appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
This episode Planning Ace CFO Dev Ahuja brings some perspective on the role finance professionals play in finance transformation. CFO Ahuja shared insights into the structure of his finance organization at Novelis. Despite being well-established, the organization needed a renewed focus on the role of finance in driving decisions and adding value. Meanwhile, one of […]
The post Ep 25: Impact of Organization Design on FP&A appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 919: Adopting a Broader View | Chris Kramer, CFO, Axonius appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 918: A Uniform Beginning | Ken Bowles, CFO, WilsonHCG appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 917: Build Your Own Personal Balance Sheet | Joel Campbell, CFO, TreviPay appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 916: Maximizing M&A Speed to Value | Michael Cox, CFO, IRIS Software Group appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 915: Where Finance Always Comes First | David Parsons, CFO, Zuto appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 914: My Side of the Valley | Michael Bannon, President and CFO, Typeform appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 913: The Rewards of “Ruthless Transparency” | Jeff Noto, CFO, Zayo appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 912: Designing Your Operating Profile | Sapna Kapur, CFO, Sensor Tower appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
This episode our cohosts Brett knowles and Jack Sweeney explore the insights and commentary from three finance leaders: CFO Michael Bennon of Typeform, CFO Chuck Fisher of Turo, and CFO Jeff Noto of Zayo. The episode discusses the importance of identifying unique and key metrics for businesses, moving beyond common knowledge. Meanwhile, the cohosts discuss […]
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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 […]
The post 911: Moving the Needle | Chuck Fisher, CFO, Turo appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 910: Getting in Close | Alex Triplett, CFO, Appfire appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 909: Get It Done | Rex Jackson, CFO, ChargePoint appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 908: Back to School | John Rex, CFO (emeritus), Microsoft NA appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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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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.
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 […]
The post 906: When Strategy and Profits Meet | Taryn Aronson, CFO, Tovala appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 905: The Future CFO Among Us | Sruthi Lanka, CFO, Public.com appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 a little more than 10 years ago, Coleman was experiencing declining gross margins across its […]
The post 904: Becoming a Catalyst for Growth | Dayton Kellenberger, CFO, Vendavo appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
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While April 2020 may forever bring to mind corporate corridors newly silenced by COVID 19’s arrival in the United States, CarParts.com CFO Ryan Lockwood will likely always remember it as the month when opportunity knocked. Having spent the previous 10 years in investment management, Lockwood, a portfolio manager for a Southern California investment house, was […]
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Of all of the places future CFOs could have been employed in the late 1990s, the printing division of RR Donnelley might seem to have been among the least likely.
However, what’s important to note is that this period predated the wide deployment of EDGAR, the database system that electronically automates the collection, validation, and acceptance of financial documents by the government’s SEC division.
Hence the printing division of marketing communications giant RR Donnelley remained one of the country’s largest hubs of activity surrounding the creation, printing, and submittal of financial documents.
Read More“For time-sensitive documents, there would be a deadline to be met each afternoon in order to enable documents to be flown and then hand-couriered to the SEC’s offices,” recalls Celeste Ackert, who tells us that in order to better accommodate any clients who might drop by, the office space that she occupied with others featured a half-door whose bottom was closed and top always open.
For Ackert, who had become an eagle-eyed project manager inside Donnelley’s printing bullpen, the endless flow of financial documents served to satisfy a growing operations appetite before morphing into a portal from which to observe future career possibilities.
“I would be flipping through these SEC documents and thinking to myself, ‘You know what?—perhaps I’d like to see myself in a prospectus someday,’” remarks Ackert, who after 6 years of serving Donnelley clients segued into a series of corporate finance jobs first by leveraging her printing operations expertise and subsequently by climbing the ranks as an FP&A all-star.
Before leaving Donnelley, Ackert—much to her credit—decided to balance her “prospectus ambitions” with some added ballast for the journey ahead: an MBA degree.
Comments Ackert: “I wasn’t really certain how I was going to get there, but these two things equipped me with some fire.” –Jack Sweeney
“Continue to operate with the key skills that got you here: incessant analytical curiosity, exceptional business partnering, and continuous process improvement. Hire and develop a diverse and tenacious team around you—and lead with unwavering authenticity.” –Celeste Ackert, CFO, Fairmarkit
CFOTL: Tell us about Fairmarkit … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Ackert: At Fairmarkit, we are on a quest to revolutionize the way that all organizations buy and sell. Fairmarkit is an intelligent sourcing platform that enables organizations to more efficiently purchase the goods and services that they need.
By equipping procurement and supply chain teams with automation and data, we promote competitive bidding while reducing the manual work within existing processes. In this challenging macroeconomic climate, enterprises across all industries are faced with harsh realities. Cost savings and supply chain continuity are front-and-center as strategic priorities. We hear this repeatedly on earnings calls.
Read MoreCFOs and CPOs are looking for efficiencies. They’re also looking to expand their global supplier ecosystems and perhaps hit some supplier diversity or ESG—environmental, social, and governance—or other goals, while at the same time mitigating risk and avoiding added unit costs. We find that today’s processes in the procurement world are outdated, cumbersome, and inefficient.
The Fairmarkit process is simpler and easier to use because it streamlines all sourcing through AI- and data analytics–based recommendations. As more and more sourcing inquiries are run on it, our platform makes intelligent recommendations that allow companies to make more informed decisions about their spend.
We find that companies that diversify their supply chains are more agile, better able to respond to changing market conditions, and ultimately able to capture more market share. What I love is that, overall, our customers on the platform not only have experienced cost savings of over 11% on purchases but also have achieved a reduction of 60% in manual efforts.
As a CFO, I have three priorities for the coming 12 months.
First, I need to continue to help to maneuver our company toward its strategic and operating goals. The two main metrics there are growth and burn—what are the trade-offs? This is really number one.
Number two is keeping on top of our cash and treasury management through the ongoing banking and interest rate moves and making sure that we’re following the best practices there.
The third centers on continuing to develop and empower my team and our extended teams as we support the business and to encourage them all to continue to make space for growth and learning opportunities.
These are the three main things that are top-of-mind for me.
jb
Fairmarkit | www.fairmarkit.com | Boston, MA
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It’s perhaps appropriate that Scott Healy’s finance career began at an airport. With a boarding pass in hand, Healy thought that he was ready for takeoff—only to have his new boss board with a mystery box under one arm.
“He was carrying a package that I thought was some sort of welcome gift for me because from the outside you could see some cookies and things to eat,” recalls Healy, who upon closer inspection discovered that while the package did indeed contain a few treats, it also held 15 prospectuses.
“He expected me to read and analyze each of them during our 6-hour flight from San Francisco to Boston,” continues Healy, who uses the story to illustrate the first of multiple lessons that he believes became invaluable to his career.
Read More“First, I learned how to critically process large amounts of information, regardless of whether it was communicated verbally or in writing,” reports Healy, who tells us that in the years ahead, the processing pace never let up as his ability to consume information became further improved by the many prospectuses that he himself would come to author.
Another lesson that became critical to Healy’s finance career was learning how to pitch clients.
“Pitching is a bit like speed dating—generally, you have 5 minutes to capture someone’s interest, and if you don’t, you will not get the transaction done,” comments Healy, who credits his ever-maturing pitching acumen with winning over one client in particular.
“I had this very detailed pitch planned, but when we sat down, the client said to me, ‘There’s absolutely no chance that you’re ever going to do one of my projects,’” remembers Healy, who adds that for the next 30 minutes, the client listed all of the specific terms that he would expect in a purchase agreement.
“I listened, I commented, and slowly I got him to agree to talk further,” remarks Healy, who notes that he countered each specific term being required by the client with a “mini pitch” designed to address each item.
In the end, the client rewarded Healy with the project, a feat that speaks highly of Healy’s ability not only to pitch, but also to negotiate—which the CFO admits may well be his greatest skillset.
Says Healy: “I’ve negotiated in 12 different countries and on four different continents. One time, I even negotiated for 76 hours straight.” –Jack Sweeney
CFOTL: Tell us about Fortera … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Healy: I should tell you that before joining Fortera in December, I undertook a pretty exhaustive search of many different industries on the renewable side. I am extremely excited about this company because I believe that fundamentally it combines a good purpose with a commercial aspect that is very attractive. Fortera is a materials technology company that’s focused on paving the way for a net-zero cement. We do this by helping our customers—who are cement manufacturers or producers and consumers—achieve their decarbonization plans.
As you probably know, cement and concrete production accounts for approximately 8% of worldwide carbon emissions. Think about this: 8%! This is a very big number that is going virtually untouched. The cement manufacturing market is a very large market that is growing. I think that it’s estimated to grow to over $500 billion by 2028.
Read MoreConcrete is the material of choice for almost all of the infrastructure and buildings that are being built—and of course there are a lot of other projects being proposed out there. Fortera has developed a patented process that has benefited from a number of things. It has more than 100,000 hours of R&D behind it, which to me is sort of a staggering number. It benefits from over a hundred existing patents and more than 10 years of real-world product demonstration. This experience ladder is really important in this industry because many of the firms that are starting up not only don’t have 10 years but also don’t have even 1 year behind them. This really distinguishes us. Fortera is based in Silicon Valley, where it’s backed by leading investors such as Khosla Ventures and Temasek.
Our first commercial manufacturing plant, which will further distinguish us, will be coming online in the second half of this year. Fortera will be fulfilling product sales by the end of the year. We’ll be producing product in commercial quantities, which will really make a big difference for us. Another part of this—which was really a fundamental reason that I came here—is Fortera’s technology, which is fundamentally economical because it optimally uses limestone feed stock. This enables us to smartly leverage existing manufacturing infrastructure by working directly with cement producers while avoiding costly transport, storage, and/or other added expenses. Fortera bolts directly onto existing facilities right at the stacks. So, when you’re talking about preventing emissions, we are right there at the stacks. This is not something that you’re doing after the fact—you’re doing it before they’re even emitted. This really excites me.
jb
Fortera | www.forterausa.com | San Jose, CA
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While chief accountant for the SEC’s investment management division, Alison Staloch reports, she found herself being greeted by a degree of inclusive enthusiasm that she had seldom encountered before.
“People would say, ‘Great, the accountants are here!,’” recalls Staloch, who tells us that accountants at divisional meetings were sometimes sparse in comparison to the number of agency attorneys seated at the table.
“Coming from a place where everyone was an accountant, this was new to me,” continues Staloch, who tells us that the commission’s high regard for her expertise and the accounting discipline in general helped to make her 5-1/2-year tenure there a satisfying career chapter.
Read MoreHaving joined the organization as part of the SEC Fellows Program, Staloch found that her experience there seemed to grant her a healthy dose of professional activation—something that she admits that her early career had not always provided in large supply.
“I wavered a lot early in my career—I took the MCAT but didn’t go to medical school, and I took the LSAT but didn’t go to law school,” remarks Staloch, who as a seasoned KPMG auditor found herself similarly vexed with regard to possible next opportunities behind the doors at that firm.
The SEC Fellows Program, however, was different. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow!—this is just a great way to become ingrained with an understanding of how regulations impact the accounting standards that companies operate under,’” remarks Staloch, who eventually exited the SEC in Spring 2021 to step into the CFO role at Fundrise, a software company that gives investors access to commercial and residential real estate deals by pooling their assets through an investment platform.
Self-dubbed as the largest “direct-to-consumer alternative asset manager,” Fundrise has future investor-related ambitions that no doubt made Staloch’s resume—rich with regulatory smarts and investment management intuition—an attractive match.
Says Staloch: “At the time, I still had thoughts about going back to public accounting. I do have a deep respect for that profession, but this came up somewhat serendipitously after I met Fundrise’s CEO through my network. He was very visionary and inspiring as he explained Fundrise’s mission, and it became very appealing to me.” –Jack Sweeney
“Embrace uncertainty, don’t fear it! This may be easier said than done, but it has been my experience that being comfortable with ambiguity and taking calculated risks leads to more innovative solutions and better opportunities. So, this means that you need to remain open to different perspectives and stay agile in the face of changing circumstances.” –Alison Staloch, CFO, Fundrise
CFOTL: Tell us about Fundrise … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Staloch: Fundrise is a technology company. We’re America’s largest direct-to-consumer alternative investment manager. Very broadly, our mission is to build a better financial system for the individual. Our goal is to grow and preserve our investors’ capital in really any economic environment, including ones like the challenging one in which we’re sitting today. We do this by building software that enables us to deliver institutional-quality investments in asset classes like real estate, private equity, private credit, and growth-stage venture capital.
Read MoreFundrise has existed for about 10 years. Initially, like a lot of start-ups, we were bootstrapped by the founders. Ultimately, early on, we brought in one strategic investor who capitalized the company in its early stages of growth. Since then, we have really wanted to avoid having the trappings of a venture capital investor on our cap table, so to tell the full story, I need to back up a little bit and go into our products.
We started out as a real estate investment manager and intended to do this for unaccredited investors. In order to do so, we had to utilize a rather esoteric part of the securities laws called Regulation A, which allows you to raise up to $75 million a year from unaccredited investors. Hence, Fundrise launched vehicles to raise capital under this structure. Although early in our growth this approach provided a lot of runway, over time the capacity provided has proven to be insufficient, so we’ve had to move into the 1940 Act for these investment vehicles. In the meantime, though, we were able to get really good at the regulatory compliance and rigor required by Regulation A.
jb
Fundrise | www.fundrise.com | Washington, DC
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Gray-haired late-night fans may remember when David Letterman sought to ingratiate himself with his network’s new owner, General Electric Corp., by hand-delivering a bowl of fruit to GE’s executive brass.
Nearly 20 years later, Simone Nardi became a benefactor of GE’s media aspirations when he traded a senior manager position on GE’s audit team for a unit CFO role inside GE’s plus-size media holdings enterprise, NBCUniversal.
Read More“While a member of GE’s audit team, I had had the opportunity to work with the head of GE’s audit staff, so when she was named CFO of NBCUniversal, she called me when she had an opening there,” recalls Nardi, while referring to GE colleague Lynn Calpeter, who stepped into the CFO role at NBCUniversal in 2003 and then later returned to GE in 2011 upon the sale of the company to Comcast.
That very same year, Nardi was able to take advantage of a new CFO opportunity that surfaced inside NBCUniversal Networks International’s TV Production business, which allowed the unit CFO to open his first post-GE career chapter without having to change jobs.
In the years that followed, Nardi tells us, he stepped into CFO roles at a number of different companies, one of which (fuboTV) he helped to take public.
Still, few chapters have been as formative for the finance leader as his years at GE, which seemed to achieve a familiar rhythm over time.
Says Nardi: “The approach involved different businesses, different projects, and different teams globally. We’d connect locally, map out the project, deliver it, and go on to the next one.” –Jack Sweeney
“Finance is so much more than a back-office function. A new CFO must gather as much experience and insight as possible across every aspect of a business. These relationships and this intelligence will power better decision-making, create stronger integration, and motivate the drive necessary to fulfill a company’s vision. –Simone Nardi, CFO, G-P
CFOTL: Tell us about G-P … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Nardi: In summary, our tagline is, “G-P democratizes access to opportunities.” What does this mean? We provide global expansion and employment technology to companies that want to increase their presence and increase and expand their workforce globally—but don’t know what to do and don’t want to go through a very expansive process. They may want to, but they just don’t know how to. But as soon as they realize that they can do it much more simply, efficiently, and effectively through G-P, they clearly start to come to us.
Read MoreG-P is actually the pioneer and recognized leader in this global employment industry through our platform EOR, or Employer of Record. Starting back around 2012, we basically began creating this industry that more recently during the COVID years has started to become more and more relevant as employees and employers realized the potential for working remotely on a global basis, without the need for people having to sit next to each other at their desks in the same office space.
With our international EOR, G-P delivers a full-stack platform of services from an HCM standpoint that provides three measurable benefits to our customer. One is the speed to execution. If a U.S. company wants to hire a person in Italy or Australia or Japan, they come to us in a matter of days. We can bring their employee identity on board. We actually hire the employee on behalf of the customer, but adequately, concretely, an employee works for the customer. So, we provide that speed of execution so that the company doesn’t need to set up their own entity, open bank accounts, get their CFO to sign all of the necessary documents, and get a payroll registration number in some countries, all to ultimately hire the person only to then have to figure out what is needed to manage a global workforce in each one of these countries. We provide that quick, out-of-the-book, off-the-shelf solution.
Our platform also serves as a single pane of glass that can serve as a window to allow the global employees of a company, as well as the firm itself, to analyze and understand each other and to connect with one another on a global basis through one solution—without having to figure out every different solution in every single location.
We also have extensive expertise and experience in finance, legal, tax, and HR, too. We manage human capital. It’s not like just sourcing a part of a microchip or something—it’s providing the ability to hire a person without having to go through the complication and complexity that are often required in other regulatory environments. G-P takes care of all that.
My thinking is that this opportunity is so helpful and valuable that the ability to build something very material and interesting here is quite compelling.
jb
GP | www.globalization-partners.com | Boston , MA
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By the time Russell Lester landed inside Intuit’s department of analysis in 2009, the unremarkable career path on which he had first set out nearly 10 years earlier had become brimming with possibilities.
Back in the early 2000s, Lester tells us, he was hired by the company Harland Clarke (now Vericast) as an analyst specializing in customer information and insights.
“This was not traditional finance, and I was sort of tiptoeing around what we would broadly call ‘analytics’ today,” remembers Lester, who notes that his adeptness with data analysis eventually resulted in his assignment to a role responsible for pioneering the company’s performance management discipline, which subsequently helped to open the door to Harland’s financial planning and analysis function.
Read MoreAt the time when a recruiter for Intuit called, Lester was responsible for overseeing Harland’s FP&A discipline. It seemed that one of Intuit’s divisional presidents was seeking to hire a senior finance executive with a distinguished data insight and analysis resume.
“I had the FP&A background, and at the same time it was clear that I had been involved with things that touch the customer as well as the go-to-market team,” recalls Lester, whose career at Intuit is notable in part for his inclusion on the due diligence team involved in the headline-grabbing sale of Intuit’s financial services data insight division to private equity firm Thoma Bravo for more than $1 billion.
No longer an anomaly, Lester’s customer-centric, data insight resume was now capable of opening doors to both senior finance and operational roles.
In 2017, Lester accepted a VP of marketing operations position with Keap, a CRM applications vendor that immediately tasked him with establishing a single source of truth for data across the organization. It wasn’t long before Lester’s world was once again intersecting with the finance function, a development that eventually led to broader planning and analysis responsibilities across both operations and finance.
A couple of years later, Keap found itself in search of a new finance leader—a development that Lester was monitoring somewhat passively until a mentor challenged him to throw his hat in the ring.
“He told me that he thought that I was already ‘doing the work’ and that I should have a conversation with board—so I did,” explains Lester, who would be named CFO of Keap in early 2020.
Reflecting on the career path behind him, Lester can’t help but draw our attention to the quarries of customer information that he once mined daily.
Says Lester: “We all perhaps have heard the advice ‘Connect yourself to numbers, and you will always have a job.’ Well, someone once told me: ‘Connect yourself to the customer, and you will never go hungry.’” –Jack Sweeney
“Explore opportunities to bolster your operational experience. Don’t be afraid to take a nontraditional path to get as close as you can to the customers and those who support them. Asking the right questions is key to effective leadership. View finance as a teaching part of the organization and empower others to be inquisitive about the data.” –Russell Lester, CFO, Versapay
CFOTL: Tell us about Versapay … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Lester: Versapay is the leader in collaborative accounts receivable. Our collaborative A/R network is the first solution that empowers what we call “the genius of teams.” This means that we bridge the gap that exists between supplier and buyer. If you think about the way that the purchasing process works, you realize that between the A/P side and the A/R side, there’s this gap that exists. Our focus is on creating a shared digital experience to facilitate the flow of funds between two functions. Great Hill Partners, our owners, are indeed great partners. From our offices in Toronto, Atlanta, and Miami, we serve over 9,000 clients and the more than a million buyers engaged on our network.
Read MoreWhat guides me here is our mission, which is to be achieving our vision of being proactively persuasive. We are getting closer to reaching this gold standard because we are continuing our focus on providing timeliness, accuracy, and now relevance, which is the next step in this progression. We’re working on presenting relevant data that helps teams to make the decisions that they need to make.
We’re just on the beginning edge of being proactively persuasive. Getting there will be powered not only by employing data science but also by building strong partnerships. We need to be able to better anticipate the needs of the business. My hope is that by a year from now we will have automated a lot of our pipelines so that they’re not so difficult to transport. After all, in the payments world, our unique competitive advantage means that we have hundreds of data pipelines that we analyze. Our goal is to get these automated, get them integrated, and get them democratized in a way such that all of our stakeholders across the company can consume and self-serve the data in them in a reliable and secure manner.
Still, as much as I will enjoy seeing how our team has moved this strategy toward success 12 months from now, I really think that what is equally important if not more so is what you might call the “tactical stuff.” I want people to see finance as a thought partner and strategic advisor and to look at us as not being here just to say “no” or just to give a report. I want people to think, “I have something that I need help on—I’m going to call finance.”
jb
Versapay | www.versapay.com | British Columbia, Canada
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GUEST: Grant Halloran, CEO, Planful
Regarding Performance Management Being an Enabler
Grant Halloran: Finance has often been seen as a gatekeeper or they have the keys to the kingdom. At the end of the day, they can restrict or unconstrained spending and all those sorts of things. The analogy I used or the comparison I used was when I asked the audience, is managing people in a company, in an organization, a HR function, and of course no one would say, it is. It’s management, it’s part of what we do as a company. It’s a corporate wide capability, and great companies spend huge amounts of time and effort trying to make that a awesome capability in the business. HR is there as an enabler, as a service provider to provide programs and training and learning development and recruit the right people and all those sorts of things. So they’re more doing strategic programs, but the actual managing and leading of people is a company-wide process.
So, the encouragement I was giving the finance audience that we have here is think about that in a similar way. Financial performance management, how do you drive peak financial performance in a company is something that you need to think about as being an enabler of. All of the folks that control the budgets, control, revenue, responsibility, whether it’s in CapEx, many whatever it is, those people need their IQ elevated around finances. And so that’s what we’re seeing actually the best companies doing is they’re actually seeing these processes as company-wide and they want to enable and improve the financial IQ of their business people that they partner with.
Concerning the Uncertain Economy
Halloran: As it pertains to our software category, the uncertainty, it doesn’t really matter. If you go back every year for the last 30 years, there were always wars that came along. Wars aren’t usually preannounced, they happen, there’s supply chain disruptions.
Read MoreWe’ve gone through all sorts of… That is really the reality of running a business today. The exogenous factors are so prominent and so unpredictable that you just have to navigate a business in that uncertainty is a general rule, regardless. I think it’ll be the same in five years, 10 years, maybe different factors, but they’re all things you can’t predict and control. So, the amount of demand that we have in our space I think is dramatically increased.
I think coming out of the pandemic, there was an amplification of the need because the frequency at which they needed to do scenario modeling and understand the what ifs and what’s going to happen to our liquidity, what will happen to our supply chain if this happens, what if those stores have to close, what’s going to happen? That really heightened for a lot of finance teams that they didn’t have resilient systems that enable that to happen. So this type of economy actually seems to be lending itself to increasing demand for us.
And then the broader thing that’s happening is the office of CFO or back office technology areas are actually being modernized at a pretty dramatic pace.
Regarding Planful’s acquisition of Plannuh and whether we can expect similar “Tuck In” Acquisitions:
Halloran: Yes, I think so there are opportunities in IT sales, operational areas, manufacturers-
CFOTL: So it would be sales planning, it would be sales, manufacturing-
Halloran: It could be some specific type. So it’s interesting. Within our platform, there are a lot of sales use cases done. So, we have a dynamic modeling engine that enables you to build a lot of skew level sales planning, for instance. Doing sensitivity analysis around detailed granular sales data, that is already happening in the system. A lot of our customers do their IT, CapEx and OPEX planning and variance analysis inside the system as well.
I think the thread that needs to run through it is the level of how complex the data model is. Like, how different is the data model from the corporate finance data models and obviously marketing, it is the dimensionality in which you plan and account for your spend in marketing is very different to the way the finance team thinks about it. Workforce, you need to do it at the individual level. Finance cares about the roll ups, right? So, that then leads to different experiences and different features and functions that those specific departmental teams need.
I think supply chain to some extent, we have sales and operations planning being done inside our system, so there may be opportunities for us to explore where we may tuck in some other acquisitions in those sorts of areas, if not necessarily a plan of ours, but it’s definitely a possibility.
Perform23: Showcase
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Last October, when it was announced that Bobby Leibrock would become the next CFO of IBM subsidiary Red Hat, finance team members no doubt understood that the open-source developer was coronating not just any IBM veteran but a strategic finance executive who for years had been entrenched along the front lines of IBM’s software acquisition activities.
Leibrock’s M&A resume began around 2006, when IBM acquired content management software developer FileNet for $1.6 billion.
“They asked me to be what was known as a ‘product pricer,’ a role that involved figuring out how to merge FileNet’s portfolio into ours from a pricing standpoint,” explains Leibrock, who notes that along the way he would frequently find himself seated across the table from the acquired company’s management while he stared down at a list of pricing-related questions.
Read MoreFast-forward to IBM’s acquisition of security intelligence software developer Q1 Labs in 2011 and Leibrock’s appointment as CFO of the new security software unit that IBM established to house its newly acquired security offerings.
“IBM would buy some 12 to 15 software companies a year, and while the security software sector wasn’t the biggest involved, it was strategic in that it connected IBM’s identity security with its data security portfolio,” recalls Leibrock, who adds that his 19 years at IBM remained largely inside the software lane and seldom if ever crossed over into the tech company’s hardware or professional services businesses.
Thus Leibrock’s call to leadership wasn’t immediate, and his career appetite seems to have been driven perhaps not so much by titles as by challenges.
Still, as he advanced upward within IBM, the CFO path began to come more into focus.
Reports Leibrock: “I wasn’t always planning to be a CFO, but from having had the opportunity to sit across from CFOs, I sort of learned what I wanted to be as a leader through observing both the good and the bad.” –Jack Sweeney
“Although I started my career with a finance degree and in an entry position in finance, I didn’t really set my sights on the role of CFO. I actually looked for challenges at each step that allowed me to have greater influence on the businesses I was part of—and, eventually, my interest grew toward the impact that a CFO can make.” –Bobby Leibrock, CFO, Red Hat
CFOTL: Tell us about Red Hat … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Leibrock: For about 3 years, I was able to work at arm’s length with Red Hat as I helped IBM to decide on the acquisition and then make its synergies successful on the IBM side. I have just been very intrigued with a number of dimensions. One is the people and the culture here. Then you have the portfolio of market-leading products itself. And then there’s where we’re going, which is very exciting, too.
Read MoreOn the people and culture side of it, Red Hat has just celebrated its 30th birthday, but we’re that 30-year-old who still feels like a kid. We have that start-up mentality, that flare, that open organization. Anyone can send any senior leader an opinion about anything without any consequence—and they do so regularly. When I joined, I got many emails asking me this question or that question from all parts of the 20,000-person team.
Back before the acquisition, Red Hat’s financials showed growth in the teens that produced a billion dollars in cash a year—so it was high-growth and profitable. We’ve really maintained this high-growth, high-value potential, and now we’re executing against it. This is why I was excited to come in.
We have three main industry-leading platforms. Our flagship offering is our Linux product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Think about this as the software that sat next to a win against the Windows Operating Systems for years. Really, for the public cloud, the hyperscalers, the Amazons, the Microsoft of choice is Linux. Red Hat is at the top of this market with our Linux operating system.
The other two are more emerging parts of the portfolio. One is our Kubernetes product, OpenShift, and the other is our automation product, Ansible. All of these are open-source—that’s the unique part about this. They’re open-source products for which we provide the subscription and run support at an enterprise level. The Ansible product is a great product that automates tasks around the data center. OpenShift, our Kubernetes platform, has just hit a billion dollars, which is a very important milestone for any product. This is really key to where we’re headed as we go forward.
jb
Red Hat | www.redhat.com | Raleigh, NC
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Back in 2010, when the flow of hiring by investment banks had been reduced to a meager trickle of new faces in the wake of the economic downturn, Aneal Vallurupalli walked through the doors of San Francisco’s Union Square Advisors.
For Vallurupalli—a recent graduate of a Bay Area college not necessarily known as a feeder school for investment banks—the job offer from Union Square seemed to validate the notion that banking was meant to be his career lane.
Still, Vallurupalli tells us that from his early banking days forward, he always viewed investment banking as a place to learn but not necessarily his ultimate career destination: “Investment banking, to me, was kind of like a physician’s residency—it put the foundation in place.”
Read MoreAt the same time, the firm’s unmitigated drive to serve its clients provided him with many “learning moments,” including one client assignment that remains particularly salient.
According to Vallurupalli, a private equity client with an appetite for leveraged buyouts asked Union Square to provide a rundown on 30 different companies and brief its investment committee on the results when it met 4 days later.
“Over those 4 days, we literally did not go home—I slept under my desk for a total of 2 hours and worked straight through in order to try to meet this deadline,” recalls Vallurupalli, who after 2-1/2 years with Union Square joined Guidewire Software to start up the developer’s post-IPO corporate development team.
Along the way, Vallurupalli became increasingly interested in the day-to-day operations of the company and began to seek out opportunities beyond corporate development in order to ease his growing operations itch.
Says Vallurupalli: “I’ve never thought about titles, to be honest. I always asked myself: ‘Where could I go next? What would be interesting? How do I take my prior experience to the next opportunity and allow it to be leveraged?'” –Jack Sweeney
“You’re going to learn something every day in this role, and a natural curiosity and ability to solve problems will be the difference between just doing a job on the one hand and growing/de-risking a company on the other.” –Aneal Vallurupalli, CFO, Airbase
CFOTL: Tell us about Airbase … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Vallurupalli: As finance professionals in the midmarket—which is often thought of as firms with anywhere from 50 to 100 to 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 employees, we have been underserved. There have been good general ERP solutions like NetSuite and Intacct that could be used by the midmarket segment, but beyond those there hadn’t been a lot of tooling. Hence on the FP&A side along came tools like Adaptive Insights and Pigment that can help with planning. But the controller in the accounting side of the house has been pretty much underserved.
I began to become interested in filling this gap a number of years ago, but my experience has always been at software firms and I’ve never worked for a company other than a software company. Eighty percent of the deals that I did in investment banking were for software companies. Obviously, I’m biased toward software—whether you call it “lending solutions” or something else— and not so much oriented toward the “fin” side of fintech.
Read MoreSo, Airbase was coming at this challenge from a software perspective: “You’re going to get value out of our software because you’re going to save a bunch of money using it.” What does it do? Airbase consolidates all of a company’s nonpayable spend into a single software solution.
Companies spend money in four ways: payroll—how you pay your employees every other week; accounts payable—how you pay your vendors; expense reimbursements—how you reimburse employees for dollars they spend on company’s behalf; and corporate cards—your American Express, your wallet, the card that you have in your wallet.
Airbase takes all of the nonpay spend and consolidates it—the accounts payable automation software, the expense reimbursement software, the software for the physical and virtual cards. They’re all integrated into a single software solution.
We also have recently announced a really cool product called Guided Procurement, which enables every employee at a company to log into Airbase and say, “I want to spend some company money.” They just click on a tab and submit what they want to spend money on, and Guided Procurement will automatically bring in the legal team to review legal terms, the IT InfoSec team to review SOC 2 compliance or any other details in that regard, the accounting team to look at payment terms, and finance’s FP&A team to approve budget for it.
Another way of looking at the benefits and success of our offerings is to realize that even though we are highly integrated with the leading midmarket solutions, accounting and finance professionals in firms with Airbase now spend about 80% of their time in an Airbase solution versus in an ERP solution.
jb
Airbase | www.airbase.com | San Francisco, CA
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Back in 2006, when Paul Sheriff had only recently been named group financial director for a midsize banking business based in the United Kingdom, his team noticed that the profit margins of a certain banking product were experiencing a steady decline.
What’s more, the customers being drawn to the product were deemed to be at “higher risk” than the bank’s other customers.
While Sheriff tells us that he helped to put an end to the product’s life, he also wants us to know that the numbers behind the problematic product appeared to be hidden in the bank’s overall financial statements.
Read More“The numbers from the backward-looking book of customers were dwarfing those of new customers such that everything looked okay,” explains Sheriff, who notes that an effort to study the bank’s new customer data separately was what suddenly flagged the troubling trend.
Sheriff relates that once the numbers made clear that the product was not sustainable for the business in the long run, canceling the product ultimately prevented the bank from suffering significant losses when the financial crisis arrived 18 months later.
“The real takeaway for me was to always delve into the details behind the data,” he observes. “The overall position may look good, but there will likely be nuggets that look not so good and signal something else.”
When asked about how he was able to put the brakes on the product line, Sheriff emphasizes the importance of taking people on the journey and building consensus. He advises not to make snap decisions and to allow time for reflection and consensus-building.
Sheriff first began acquiring consensus-building skills early in his career when he managed different teams. He started with a small team of three people and then gradually progressed to managing a team of 300. He emphasizes that the tools and techniques that he developed while managing bigger teams have helped him in his current role as CFO of NewDay.
“Managing upward is a key skill for inspiring confidence at all stages of your career.” –Paul Sheriff, CFO, NewDay
CFOTL: Tell us about NewDay … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Sheriff: NewDay is a UK consumer credit company that provides products to around 5 million customers with access to credit. Our broader credit offering spans credit cards; installment finance; zero-percent finance; buy now, pay later; and digital revolving credit. We take these to market through a number of direct-to-consumer products and brands and a range of credit programs. We certainly have some of the most popular brands in the UK.
Last year we started taking on the John Lewis program, which folks in the UK will definitely recognize as a large loyalty rewards operation, and we also provide consumer credit services for one of the UK’s largest electrical and appliance retailers, AO.com.
Read MoreNewDay is very much a digital-first business. Our customer interactions are all predominantly mobile-based, and these are all underpinned by a great deal of digital investment and development and an innovative culture. Over the 7 years or so that I’ve been here, we’ve pretty much tripled any of the measures that you could care to mention.
In summary, we’re an inclusive lender in the UK that is striving to help customers to responsibly make the most of the credit offerings that we give them as the overall credit situation hopefully improves toward some point in the second half of this year.
jb
NewDay | www.newday.co.uk | London
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By the time the general manager of Intel’s data center chipset business parted ways with the company, Julie Swinney had already advanced into one of their coveted business unit CFO positions.
To Swinney—who had already served in a series of senior finance roles—the GM’s departure seemed to leave a startling void in a business that served as a key enabler for Intel’s server business at large.
The unexpected opening prompted Swinney to raise her hand and issue what perhaps was a bold proposal to be coming from an executive who had thus far resided within Intel’s career ropes—the functional restraints that gingerly guide the chip maker’s finance career builders.
Read MoreTo jump beyond finance, Swinney tells us, with little hesitation she put forth her solution to the challenge at hand: “We absolutely need a GM. We don’t have one, and I want to step in and run this business.”
It perhaps goes without saying that Intel management accepted Swinney’s bid, allowing her to establish a career point for comparison with the finance roles that she had previously played.
“You don’t always appreciate the gravity of responsibility that a GM experiences when their territory spans from sales and supply chain management to people and culture,” remarks Swinney, who in turn promoted one of her finance team members into the business unit CFO role that she had been required to vacate.
For Swinney, the GM position became just the latest twist in a career that had not always featured traditional moves. In the past, for example, while many of her finance peers had set their sights on Intel’s larger business units, Swinney had opted for a CFO role in Intel’s Software-as-a-Service start-up group.
“I was told by several of my peers that it was not the obvious choice for me,” she recalls, “but that experience turned out to be foundational to building my Software-as-a-Service knowledge.”
Similarly, Swinney tells us that her career chapter as a GM added an indelible lesson to her CFO leadership skillset that she regularly seeks to teach to her finance team members and reports:
“Ultimately, what that experience cemented for me was the enterprise mind-set: Firm over function. It was important that I step into a different role because that is what the company needed of me at that point in time.” –Jack Sweeney
“Intellectual curiosity is the spark that ignites innovation. Lean into learning, inside and outside the company walls. Deploy that learning to connect strategy to execution with an enterprise mind-set and on-the-field execution. Always bring it back to people and culture. They are the foundation that enables success.” –Julie Swinney, CFO, Zendesk
CFOTL: Tell us about Zendesk … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Swinney: Zendesk powers the customer experience for some of the most transformative companies out there. If you’re a customer of a company like Shopify, Instacart, Stanley, Black and Decker, or Four Seasons—to name a few—you’re actually a Zendesk customer as well. You may not know this, but we’re powering these customer experiences. Globally, we have nearly 1 million customer service agents using Zendesk for a total of some 4 billion tickets per year, so we have a massive scale.
Read MoreWhat sets us apart and really drew me here, though, was our unique combination of offerings: powerful, powerful solutions and platforms that are at the same time easy to use and personalized for each digital service experience. We also have an excellent ROI—one of my favorites as CFO—as well as a low total cost of ownership, fast time to value, speed, agility, and scalability. This is rather unique, as it’s not easy to have this combination of powerful, easy-to-use products and a wonderful ROI—which Zendesk really has in spades.
We are now on this profitable growth journey and accelerating to make sure that it continues. Setting a course for this will mean that I will need to have a tremendous focus on prioritization and a trade-off mentality as important parts of my job. I will be enlisting, exciting, and motivating the finance function as well as the broader organization to seize the opportunities that lie ahead.
We all know that the tech sector and industry in general are in rough waters, and tech particularly so. This won’t be an easy path for us to travel and there will be bumps along the way, but if we can help everyone to see the opportunities that lie ahead and are within our grasp and understand the actions that we need to take to get on the right trajectory to achieve them, we will get there. This is really the core focus for us. We are going to realize this increased success by working with our customers to make sure not only that we are always creating value for them but also that we continue to be an innovation engine that causes them to always choose Zendesk.
jb
Zendesk | www.zendesk.com | San Francisco, CA
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Among the keepsakes that Craig Conti collected during the more than two decades of his finance career, the item to which he refers simply as “the list” remains one of his most prized career souvenirs.
Having graduated from General Electric’s Financial Management program in 2001, the 20-something Conti had only recently been assigned to GE’s corporate audit staff when he was dispatched overseas for a 5-year tour of duty.
It was during the first 12 months of Conti’s years abroad that he received a job review from a manager who asked him to create a list of the skills and experiences that he expected to accrue during his years abroad.
Read MoreRecalls Conti: “The manager was literally my own age, but he was very forward-looking.”
For the next 5 years, Conti’s geography was in regular rotation from Brazil to Mexico to Eastern Europe, and, as his location changed, he would add to his list of experiences.
“All of the skills that I had originally put down were definitely realized, but the experience was a lot richer than that and the list was whole lot longer when I came back,” continues Conti, who notes that over time the list of items evolved from being mainly one of hard skills to becoming a chronicle of business insights that would ultimately reshape his view of business.
“I learned how to operate and think globally, and I discovered there were other ways to solve problems,” remarks Conti, who tells us that he once augmented his problem-solving acumen by observing how a broken blade was replaced on a factory floor near Florence, Italy.
“The fact is that you don’t have a prayer of understanding the complex level of accounting behind something like that without going out and physically seeing what’s taking place,” Conti comments.
Still, it was perhaps the developing world that left the most lasting impression on Conti, who believes that American employers who have yet to move overseas should not underestimate the quality of job candidates currently available in the developing world.
Says Conti: “If you’re going international, remember that talent resides in the places that you’re going to—and what matters most may not necessarily be the talent back home.” –Jack Sweeney
CFOTL: Tell us about Verra Mobility … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Conti: Verra Mobility is the global leader in smart mobility technology that makes transportation smarter, safer, and more connected. We’re about a $750 million company—our top line was just shy of that in 2022. We’ve grown 9% organically on a CAGR basis since 2019, with 46% margins and 50% free cash flow conversion. This is a very different challenge for me personally than I’ve seen in the past, as it is about effective capital allocation and a growing profitable business that generates a lot of cash. We have about 1,600 employees globally and 2,400 customers.
We’re #1 in the three markets that we serve today.
Read MoreWe’re the #1 provider globally of tolling and violation management for rental cars and corporate fleets. This is a very profitable $325 million business with margins in the mid-60th percentile and high-single-digit organic growth projected out for the next 5 years. We process about 220 million items per year, including about 1.4 million violations, 1 million vehicle titles, and 1.5 million vehicle registrations. If you see a corporate fleet or a rental car in the United States of America or some parts of Europe, there’s a very, very, very good chance that Verra Mobility has been part of its journey.
We’re also the #1 provider of road safety cameras in the world. These are things like red light cameras, speed cameras, busing cameras, school bus stop arm cameras, and so on. This is about a $340 million business with 35% or so margins and mid–single digit recurring revenue growth projected out through the next 5 years. To give you an idea of its scale, about 11 billion vehicles pass our cameras globally every year, and we process about 110,000 events per day. Road safety is a big part of what we do and a big part of our safety journey.
And then we have the newest addition to our family, which has made us the #1 provider of parking solutions to universities in North America. Parking solutions is hardware and software. We don’t own parking lots or anything like that. This is an $80 million business with margins in the high teens to low 20th percentile and high-single-digit organic growth projected over the near term. We have 2,000 customers in North America and annually process about $2.5 billion of parking commerce.
jb
Verra Mobility | www.verramobility.com | Meza, AZ
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When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American finance executives being deployed by digital disrupter SMB printer Vistaprint of Boston, Mass.
For the next 5 years, Quinn would be involved in a string of business acquisitions that would grow the digital printer’s European revenues from nothing to more than $500 million annually.
Based in Barcelona, Quinn spent roughly 3 weeks of every month traveling to other parts of Europe to evaluate the operations of different businesses as he and other executives sought to determine whether there was a solid business case for acquiring a company.
Read More“I had the luxury of seeing into firms at both the executive and middle management levels, so I was able to acquire an understanding of how the executive team was operating and how the decisions that they would make would trickle down within the operation,” explains Quinn, who adds that as deal activity grew, Vistaprint ended up deploying a corporate development team from Paris to complete some of the initial due diligence.
As the number of acquisition candidates grew, Quinn was tasked with taking a deeper dive into a target company’s operations, so he would often spend a number of days with company’s leadership team in order to better assess whether there could be a cultural fit.
“’Can this be one plus one equals three?’ would usually be the question that you were trying to answer,” continues Quinn, who points out that the answer to this hypothetical query was also dependent on whether his team believed that the acquisition candidate would succeed post-merger under a flat management model.
“We believed that flatter was better and that this was really an efficient way to grow,” comments Quinn, who notes that along the way he acquired a deeper understanding of manufacturing logistics as well as the pre- and post-sale dynamics of go-to-market strategies for both B2B and B2C companies.
However, his central role would always center on supplying the answer to the question of whether there was a strong business case for advancing a potential deal.
“When they brought something to the table through the pipeline, I would vet the business case first from our ability to execute it and then from a cultural perspective,” recalls Quinn, who stresses the significance of understanding and respecting cultural norms as well as local competitors.
Says Quinn: “If you’re going to go international, you must go all in and be prepared to make the investments to win in local markets because you’ll be facing local competition within their own primary market.” –Jack Sweeney
CFOTL: Tell us about Vendr … what type of company is this, and what does it do?
Quinn: We are concerned with functions that are at the core of mission-critical companies, with disrupting how things are in the norms that you see today, and with enabling changes for the better. What Vendr is trying to do is to fix sales, and particularly software sales. Sales is where we’re starting. Today, you as a consumer can go buy a house—the major purchase in your life—faster than a company can buy the right software to fit its needs. Vendr wants to bring transparency to this overall market for procurement professionals, for the users or requesters of the spend who want to acquire the software, and for the sellers, too. We want to enable full transparency with regard to what’s going on, what software works, and what doesn’t work. We especially would like to help buyers of software—particularly procurement—to find, buy, and manage their technology stack.
Read MoreI was a two-time customer of Vendr after they first started up as a negotiation-as-a-service firm. They would sort of say, “What kind of software would you like to buy?,” and then they would go off and try to find it. They understood that by working with suppliers over and over and over again, they would better understand how these suppliers worked. They became able to navigate these suppliers very quickly through their sales cycle, to help buyers navigate their own procurement cycle, and to speed up the whole cycle time—while also reducing the price. So, you were saving time and you were saving money.
I think that one of the brilliant things that Vendr did—which was very innovative, because most things that you buy don’t have a straight ROI—was to offer a guaranteed savings. If you didn’t achieve the guaranteed savings by using their service, they would give you your money back. By the way, out of the hundreds and hundreds of companies that we have served since I’ve been here, only five have requested their investment back.
When I first got here, collecting data was all done manually as a managed service. Our next phase began when our CEO, Ryan Neu, worked with us to go out and buy Blissfully, which is an SAP management platform that allows you to see all of the software within your company. This became a core piece of our platform and product, as now we can combine—and look at—all of our related data, knowledge, and expertise, as well as that of our SaaS consultants and procurement professionals.
So, now we have a platform, we have data, and we have expertise. This all provides for a much more scalable way to help companies—and particularly their procurement teams—to get strategic. They can automate their processes—in a platform to which users actually want to contribute—to find, buy, and manage their software. They’re able to have transparency into pricing, into commercial terms, and into what other people in the community are doing and getting. This enables them not only to feel a lot more comfortable in moving forward but also to move forward relatively quickly.
The last piece is that buyers can do this all on their own with Vendr, or they can call us and do it with help. This aspect has been pretty powerful because it makes them the hero, not some outside software or managed service.
jb
Vendr | www.vendr.com | Boston, MA
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FP&A expert and Planning Ace’s guest host Brett Knowles tells us GPT can be used as an “extra member” at the planning table, providing a catalyst for exploring ideas and expanding horizons. By generating scenarios and validating strategies against them, planners can identify environmental and situational factors that need to be true for a strategy to work.
But the true power of GPT lies in its ability to test a plan through the eyes of different stakeholders, such as investors, regulators, competitors, and employees, before presenting it to the executive committee. This allows planners to pretest their plan against a vast knowledge base, beyond the limited experience of the leadership team.
Brett emphasizes the importance of feeding GPT with the right inputs to generate accurate outputs. While the wisdom of the executive committee is crucial, it is still limited to their industry or function, and they may have forgotten some of their experience. In contrast, GPT does not forget anything and has access to a huge knowledge base.
This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Chris Halpin of IAC, CFO Ben Chrnelich of Symphony, and CFO Betsy Ward of MassMutual
Machine Generated Transcript (unedited)
Your Hosts | Brett Knowles & Jack Sweeney
About Brett Knowles
Brett is a long-time thought leader in the performance measurement space. His clients have been profiled in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and Forbes. There are over 20 business school cases covering the success of his clients. Share a comment or two with our resident thought leader. Brett@pm2consulting.com
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Back in 2008, when Jim Cox was controller for investment management software company Advent Software, he was invited by that firm’s founder and CEO, Stephanie DiMarco, to accompany her to an investor meeting.
“I just sat there smiling and hoped that nobody would ask me a question,” comments Cox, recalling one of a number of experiences that he credits with helping him to step beyond his accounting career roots.
The meeting’s biggest take-away, Cox tells us, was about repetition.
He explains: “Guess what? All 20 investors asked six of the same questions and two questions that were unique to them.”
Read MoreLooking back, Cox believes that DiMarco was providing him with an opportunity to not only develop a rapport with investors but also polish his communication skills.
“When Stephanie brought me along, I think she was like, ‘Let’s try this out,'” continues Cox, who stepped into Advent’s CFO office in 2009, only 3 years after joining the company.
Cox had been recruited to Advent by a VP of finance who had formerly been a client of Cox’s when he was an accountant at Pricewaterhouse.
“Be good to your clients,” advises Cox, who credits yet another client executive with encouraging PwC to relocate him to New Zealand for a 2-year stint.
Asked about his early career’s lengthy tenures at PwC (10 years) and Advent (9), Cox reports that he doesn’t think that he missed out by not changing jobs more frequently.
“You can stay at the same company, but it’s about doing different things,” he comments.
Today, having served in multiple CFO roles, Cox likes to measure his stint as Advent’s CFO differently since its was publicly held: “I like to say that I was a public company CFO for 22 quarters—because when you’re a public CFO, you live one quarter at a time.” –Jack Sweeney
“Join a team you love. Your relationships with the CEO and other executives are the keys to success. Every business has both good days and less good days. When you have strong relationships among the team, problem solving is more fun and wins are more fulfilling.” -Jim Cox, CFO, Clearwater Analytics
CFOTL: What are your priorities over the next 12 months as CFO of Clearwater Analytics?
Cox: We have to continue to deliver every quarter, every month, every day. But if you look ahead a little, you realize that one of the most important strategic imperatives that we have and need to accomplish together—and that I need to lead—is really transforming us from a single-product company into a multi-product one. The financial expression of this will be that we see our net revenue retention grow to 115 or beyond. Honestly, this may take more than 12 months, but I’m fully into it.
Read MoreAnother goal has to do with scorecards, as [CEO] Sandeep [Sahai] loads us up with lots of them. One element of mine has to do with artificial intelligence. I have a small product team and a few developers who are trying to pull insights out of our product. I’m not going to say that we’re running artificial intelligence yet, but we’re working on this idea and building the frameworks and laying the groundwork for it. With the $6 trillion in assets that we have on our platform, this could revolutionize investment management for everyone—for you, for me, for everyone. This would happen far more than 12 months out, but I hope that someday I can come back to talk with you about it. Right now, I don’t even know what might be.
jb
Clearwater Analytics | www.clearwateranalytics.com | Boise, Idaho
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In 2011, after Chris Halpin had rejoined his colleagues back at Providence Equity Partners’ New York offices at the completion of a 3-year stint in Hong Kong, he found himself being confronted by something he had rarely experienced before: boredom.
“I had this kind of existential angst—that I didn’t want to die and have my obituary say that I had worked 40 years at Providence Equity,” recalls Halpin, who notes that it was at this point that he began to think about different operating roles in business and the possibility of landing a CFO position.
Read MoreStill, Halpin tells us that he reviewed and pretty much rejected the different introductions and job opportunities that quickly surfaced: “I was like, ‘No, I really don’t want to do this’—and then I almost joined another private equity firm, but that would have been just changing politics for politics.”
Then, October 2012, Halpin added to his calendar an entry that seemed to all but eclipse previous possibilities and instantly loomed large on his autumn agenda: “Coffee with Roger Goodell.”
Goodell, the much-revered National Football League commissioner, no doubt usually prefers to honor the prescribed time limits of his appointments, but, as it turned out, his 30-minute coffee talk with Halpin ended up going on for more than hour before Goodell ended it with an offer to introduce Halpin to a number of his lead deputies.
“Roger makes no promises, that’s for sure,” remarks Halpin, who adds that prominent Providence alum and former Comcast CFO Michael Angelakis helped him snag the initial meeting with Goodell.
In June 2013, Halpin accepted a position with the NFL that kicked off an 8-year career chapter inside the league’s business operations. Along the way, he served in a succession of strategy-oriented roles before being named executive vice president and chief strategy and growth officer in 2018.
Looking back, Halpin tells us that he originally pitched Goodell for a bigger initial role with the league.
“Roger told me, ‘No, that’s the wrong way to come into the NFL—I’ll bring you in and have you get grounding, and then we’ll move you around to give you different experiences,” reports Halpin, who points out that his decision at the time was not an easy one, in part due to his prospective NFL compensation being a drastic reduction from his Providence pay.
“In April or May of 2013, I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t do this, I was going to regret it—so I decided to make the jump,” comments Halpin, whose 8-year tenure with the NFL ended in January 2022 when he was named CFO of IAC, the media holding company headed by media executive and dealmaker Barry Diller.
Today, having landed in a more traditional finance leadership role, Halpin says that his years with the NFL will always likely trigger conversations that allow him to continue to reflect on past decisions.
It seems that career decisions have seldom been easy for Halpin—even when they’ve involved the opening of a door at the NFL.
Says Halpin: “This was not some sort of courageous jump into the breach without any reservations.” –Jack Sweeney
“When you come in as CFO, ask questions, be direct and be consistent. Learn the priorities, processes and culture, but also put new eyes on the strategy and resource allocation. Constructively challenge the inertia and common wisdom in the organization.” – Chris Halpin, CFO, IAC
[20:54] What attracted him to IAC?[39:42] Generative AI and how it will disrupt the existing search and consumer pathways.CFOTL: How is IAC structured, and how does the finance function within a holding company operate?
Halpin: Structurally, IAC at the holding company level has about 170 employees. Roughly 70% of these are under the CFO—classic functions like accounting, tax, treasury, and so forth. We also have about 10 M&A companies, each of which has its own CFO or its own VP of Finance, if it’s smaller. We tend to do the accounting work for these, except in the case of Angie, which is a standalone public company, or in the case of a minority investment like MGM. Through our functions, we are service providers to the company CFOs, who are dotted-line to me, in the same way that all of the CEOs are straight-line to Joey Levin, our CEO.
Read MoreI really put an emphasis of information-sharing. We have a monthly CFO meeting that they’re all on, where I’ll give board and/or audit committee updates, as well as what we’re seeing from a macro or competitive perspective and/or what we’re hearing from investors on investor relations. I also want them to talk about their businesses—what they’re seeing in consumer demand and/or trends; what’s happening with high, medium, and lower incomes; what they’re seeing in terms of service provider behaviors and corporate side trends, like payment and default rates, bad debt, things like that. We also want to talk about digital marketing, both SEO and paid, as well as TV for consumer brands. What’s going on with ad rates? What are you seeing with regard to performance, Google updates, all of these activities?
Then, on a sort of a bilateral basis, if something comes up, I get them together with finance leads who I know have dealt with relevant issues previously. We are sort of the anti-conglomerate conglomerate. We’re not going to force everyone to have the same exact operating system or to centralize all of the AWS contracts under a single one. We always try to optimize, but we grant flexibility at the same time. We do want that knowledge-share, though, just so that everyone has the best information when they’re making decisions about resource allocation or strategy.
jb
IAC | www.iac.com | New York, NY
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When Ben Chrnelich tells us that the banking sector’s recent unrest is the third period of disruption that he’s “cycled through” during his finance career, we can’t help but wonder about the other two.
Of course, they are hardly a secret. As did that of many of his CFO peers, Chrnelich’s early career appears to have weathered no shortage of economic hijinks, thanks to the dotcom bubble (2002) and Wall Street’s subprime mortgage crisis (2008).
“The opportunity to be sort of at the epicenter of these events really allowed me to form my risk assessment as a CFO and be able to better assess where we are on any given business cycle,” comments Chrnelich, who was working for Lehman Brothers when the investment house collapsed in 2008.
Read MoreUnlike many of his Lehman colleagues, Chrnelich was able to find a silver lining in Wall Street’s economic turmoil—in his case, this took the form of employment as CFO of a technology business created by NYSE to serve Wall Street clients.
Known as NYSE Technologies, the business was established to target revenue opportunities for a number of software technologies that NYSE had developed in-house, as well as a number that had been acquired by NYSE.
“For me, it was an opportunity to transition into a CFO role with a company that had lots of capital already invested and the support of NYSE,” recalls Chrnelich, who served as CFO of the company for roughly 6 years.
In February of 2020, Chrnelich was named CFO of Symphony, which offers secure messaging and other collaboration tools for bankers and those who work with them. Three years and a number of acquisitions later, Symphony has powered up its AI strategy as it pursues its goal of providing more actionable insights to portfolio managers.
Reports Chrnelich: “We know specifically what they need, and we’re getting more face time and consideration by buyers than ever before.” –Jack Sweeney
CFOTL: Tell us about Symphony … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Chrnelich: Symphony is a collaboration platform that can connect participants across capital markets in a secure and encrypted environment in any of a number of channels of communication—video, Zoom, Teams, chat, one-toone conversations, group rooms, file sharing, and so on. We have about 600,000 users on Symphony, across all of the investment banks, institutional money management firms, exchanges, market infrastructure platforms—all of the people who are part of the capital markets.
Read MoreMany of the people in the broader financial services community use Symphony as their communication and collaboration platform. If you’re a trader at Goldman Sachs and you want to talk to your counterpart on the leveraged finance desk at Barclays, you can use Symphony to communicate directly with them in a secure, verified-identity, and encrypted manner. It’s just your firm and their firm.
In comparison to the trading pits of many years ago, where everyone was together, or to your email or some other kind of low-latency communication mechanism, Symphony has allowed people to communicate instantaneously but in a secure and compliant environment that regulators and internal compliance functions recognize as the proper way to communicate and record everything from an archival standpoint.
The company was started in 2014 by a group of the Wall Street technologists and investors who came together and decided that the capital markets needed their own communication platform. People were using AOL, Yahoo, and other instant messaging services, and I think that everyone realized that relying on this nonregulated, nonstructured, noncompliant technology was not a good way to go about communications in a trading environment.
Over the past several years, we’ve grown through a number of acquisitions. The intent of Symphony is to continue to build out our front-office collaboration stack so that if you’re anyone who’s involved in capital markets, you have an easy way to communicate with your community—which could be the 10 people with whom you work every day, the thousands and thousands of people to whom you’re publishing your research, or the counterparties with whom you want to exchange trade information. It could also be just for trading data as part of your daily process. You can usually accomplish all of this over Symphony, where there are also content and applications on the same platform.
jb
Symphony | www.symphony.com | New York, NY
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Paolo Poma is uncertain how many times he met with bankers and investors during the first 6 months of 2009.
The steady string of phone calls and conference rooms that once demanded the management of Ducati Motors Holding’s rapt attention, Poma tells us, have now blurred into a single, heart-pumping conversation.
“I had to go in front of them and calculate for how long we were going be able to service the debt and comply with covenants without breaking any rules—despite the plummeting markets,” explains Poma, who had joined Ducati 2 years earlier as finance director.
Read MoreAn Italian motorcycle manufacturer, the firm had been acquired by a private equity investor in 2008 as part of a leveraged buyout on the eve of the banking sector’s 2008 financial crisis.
Reports Poma: “The debt had been negotiated before Lehman’s collapse and now had to be serviced during this very challenging time.”
On one side of the table, Ducati’s investors were expressing their eagerness to keep things moving forward, while on the other, their bankers were continuing to urge caution.
“At first, the banks were worried about getting their money back, but then it became kind of a strange situation in which they saw Ducati’s KPIs improving despite the circumstances, so they became no longer in such a hurry to get their money back,” recalls Poma, who was named deputy CFO later in 2009 upon the resignation of Ducati’s CFO, who was Poma’s then-boss. Poma would serve two years in the deputy capacity before being named Ducati CFO in 2011.
In 2015, when Volkswagen’s Audi division announced that it was buying Ducati, Poma was asked to serve as CFO of Volkswagen Group Italia, an indication that he had made a positive impression on Ducati’s new owner.
For Poma, no matter what the next career chapter may be, the lessons from 2009 will always linger.
He comments: “Many times, I thought, ‘Why not quit?!’—but after looking back, I would now tell myself, ‘Stay where you are! You are in a place where you are really going to grow a lot.’” –Jack Sweeney
“Dedicate your efforts to understanding the business and always act as a business partner. Focus on your people; they have expectations and you have to support their development. This is the best way to raise the standing of finance inside the company and it will allow you to deliver results,” – Paolo Poma, CFO, Lamborghini
CFOTL: Tell us about Lamborghini … what sets this automaker apart?
Poma: While Lamborghini is really a unique brand and company, our heritage has had a number of chapters, each one born from an entrepreneurial initiative that resulted in one entrepreneur selling the company to other entrepreneurs. Thus the company moved every 7 to 10 years, from one financial transaction to the next. It went from an Italian founder to Swiss entrepreneurs to French entrepreneurs, and then on to Chrysler, American entrepreneurs, and Indonesian interests. Finally, it was sold to Germans, a change of control that happened back in back in 1998. All of this is important to know because although our brand has been represented by only a few exotic cars, it still represents a milestone in the story of the industry. The theme of our heritage has been innovation.
Read MoreOf course, this last stage of our evolution began when we became part of the Volkswagen Group, which is now our long-term industrial shareholder. During the past 20 years, the Group has developed and provided stability to our processes and new products. We had just one car line 20 years ago, but they implemented a second one and then a third one 5 years ago. So, it’s been all about building and giving credibility to the brand and the product and the processes. They have built the platform.
During the past 5 years, we have also been leveraging this platform to deliver financial performance as we have continued to work on supporting business development and improving product margins in our business. Our product development lasts from 18 months to 5 years, with a life cycle of another 9 years. That’s a quite a long period of time, so it’s crucial that we work in a timely manner on product marginality at time of delivery because afterward we cannot.
Ten years ago, we were a 200 million euro company. Last year, we broke the threshold of 2 billion, with almost 2.4 billion euros in business, which is amazing. This is 10 times growth in the top line, but it was even more in terms of profitability. It was crucial during this period of time to control our growth, and while we indeed did grow the structure, we did so in a sustainable way and at a sustainable rate.
jb
Lamborghini | www.lamborghini.com | Sant’Agata Bolognese, Italy
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After Galit Yaakobovitz relocated from Israel to the United States back in the mid-2000s, there was little question that the move had given her career a boost.
Still, it was the next relocation—the one that would move her and her husband from New Jersey to California—that ultimately allowed her to place both feet on a finance career path.
Back in 2006, Yaakobovitz was a technology implementation consultant living in Israel when she was hired by M-Systems to oversee the implementation of an ERP system for its finance function around the world. However, within 12 months, M-Systems was sold to its flash memory rival SanDisk—which left Yaakobovitz to wonder whether she would have a future at the newly merged firm.
Read MoreIn short order, the management of SanDisk eased her concerns by offering her a spot on the global implementation team for the company’s finance organization, an appointment that required her to relocate to SanDisk’s New Jersey offices.
“At the time, different geographies had their own requirements, so it was very challenging to design a system that would serve everyone globally,” recalls Yaakobovitz, who within 2 years was recruited by SanDisk’s chief accounting officer to spearhead a new revenue recognition systems project at the firm’s Milpitas, California, headquarters.
Upon completion of the systems project, Yaakobovitz received an invitation to join the finance team, which meant severing ties with her technology implementation roots. What’s more, she was moved to the FP&A team rather than the accounting department, where she had spent most of her systems implementation days.
“This was a huge leap for me as far as understanding the business through data analysis and other aspects went,” observes Yaakobovitz, who—after 7 years with SanDisk—next sought to slow things down for a year or two as her young family grew by joining an M&A consultancy promising more manageable hours.
Nevertheless, when a recruiter called her roughly a year later and briefed the veteran FP&A executive not about an IT implementation role but about a senior finance position at an early-stage biotech company, Yaakobovitz was all ears. –Jack Sweeney
“Operate with an open mind and flexibility to enable quick reaction to unexpected situations that will often arise throughout your career. Every challenge is also an opportunity. Don’t hesitate to step into new roles or challenging domains and to take up new responsibilities. Your past experience will always come into play.” –Galit Yaakobovitz, CFO, AmyriAD
Bold Moments
[18:44] Moving to the US and working with international teams.[38:55] Adopting a Career-Journey Mindset.[48:06] Working with mentors.CFOTL: Tell us about AmyriAD … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Yaakobovitz: When I first heard from the recruiter for AmyriAD, he told me that it was developing a drug for Alzheimer. I didn’t really know much about the Alzheimer market, but after I had spoken to people and learned more about it, I came to understand that our offering is basically a Phase 3 asset, which we are ready to execute. The drug itself helps the Alzheimer patient to relieve the symptoms of Alzheimer disease. So, we’re not changing the disease or modifying it. We’re helping patients to have a better quality of life and extend their memory and their ability to function in such a way that they have few more months or maybe few more years with better functioning. This is a huge relief not only to the patients, but also to their families.
Read MoreThere are two domains in the Alzheimer drug industry. One is composed of the disease-modifying drugs that are trying to remove the plaque from the brain and modify or maybe stop the disease. Years and years of experiments and clinical trials with this have unfortunately failed. This year, though, we received good news about the approval of such a drug that has been developed by Eisai and Biogen. This is great news for the industry, but many years of failures and billions of dollars have been spent on the disease-modifying side of AD drug development.
AmyriAD is focused on the other side, the other domain, which is symptom management. The disease will keep progressing, unfortunately, but we can delay the bad symptoms to a later time or phase. This is all done in a combination therapy, with the existing standard of care, so we’re not depriving patients of getting what’s already available. We’re adding to it.
Our Phase 1 and Phase2 clinical trials have shown that there is an additive improvement with all of these patients. We’re up-regulating the neurotransmission in their brain and improving their memory and cognition and function. This is where we are focused. AmyriAD’s tagline is actually “Memories Are Worth Fighting For.” After all, who are we all as people? We are what we remember, and what we know, and what we want to do. When people can’t remember, it’s really like losing a huge part of their personality. This is what we believe. We want to help people to have better memories and we want to fight for this. This is our mission.
jb
AmyriAD | amyriadtherapeutics.com | Los Angeles, CA.
The post 887: From Tech to Biotech: Enjoying Today’s Journey | Galit Yaakobovitz, CFO, AmyriAD appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
One key takeaway from Gainsight CFO Alka Tandan’s career journey is the importance of being open to new opportunities and pivoting when necessary.
Tandan started in investment banking, transitioned to media, and then vectored again to the SaaS industry.
Looking back on the first move of her career, Tandan says that she “came to a decision” and quickly became focused on the best way to execute it. “Investment banking gave me incredible exposure to a range of business models and industries, but after 5 years, I realized that I really wanted to be on a company’s journey, so business school became the tool that I used to transition to industry,” Tandan reports.
Read MoreTo better highlight her industry career-building years, Tandan discusses with us the 4.5 years that she spent with IGN Entertainment, an Internet media company that at the time was operating as a division of News Corp. “I came in as they were separating IGN’s finance organization from News Corp., which required us to build the finance function from the ground up,” recalls Tandan, who adds that in the years that followed, IGN’s finance team became involved in six different M&A transactions.
Other career chapters that Tandan highlights for us include her experience as interim CFO (2021–2022) for Gainsight, the SaaS software developer that pioneered the customer experience realm known as “customer success.” Tandan tells us that her year as interim CFO allowed her to “test out the role” before assuming the position.
There’s little doubt that fortunate timing contributed to what became Tandan’s ultimate door-opener for the CFO office. Having first joined Gainsight in May 2019 as vice president of finance, Tandan had already logged 18 months with Gainsight when Vista Equity Partners acquired the firm for $1.5 billion in November 2020. Tandan would assume her interim CFO role only 3 months later.
Overall, CFO Tandan’s story is a reminder that career paths are rarely linear and that being adaptable and open to new experiences can lead to unexpected opportunities.
Asked how Gainsight’s finance team has worked to better educate the organization when it comes to achieving more profitable growth in the current economic environment, Tandan responds: “Luckily, since we were already with Vista, we were on the right path, so I wouldn’t say that there has been any huge shift for us in terms of educating the organization.” –Jack Sweeney
CFOTL: Tell us about Gainsight … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Tandan: For those who don’t know about customer success offerings, I’ll start by explaining that our company defines “customer success” as essentially everything post-sales. As you know, there’s a lot of really great popular software, such as Salesforce, to sort of track customers in their pre-sales journey. When you think about it, though, your customers are probably the most important part of your company. Our founders started Gainsight because they realized that there was not really any good software out there for managing customers once you had them.
For our customers, it’s basically a one-stop shop. One database houses all of your customer information. We really help managers and the entire customer success group to keep guard over customers to ensure that they are happy.
Read MoreFor example, we have a health score on the software that in one number basically looks at things like time spent, adoption, and all sorts of other metrics. You can actually look at this to see the “health” of a customer and track their entire journey—from onboarding to maturity—to make sure that they’re hitting all of their milestones at the appropriate time. All of this is very customized to each customer.
At the end of the day, all of this matters because you want to keep your customers not only just happy but also continuing to grow. The goal of our software is really to increase customer lifetime value, as well as to ensure a healthy gross renewal rate, which is one our North Star metrics, along with net revenue retention. All three of these metrics are very important in today’s world, when a lot of companies aren’t able to easily grow their new customer base, just given the contraction in the markets and lower budgets.
The most efficient way to grow your customers or revenue is to do so from your current customers. A lot of our companies are really focused on their current customers right now, and we’ve heard this focus a lot from investors as well. I just did a bunch of investor conferences where I had so many investors come up to me and say, “Hey, will you guys add your best practices for customer success to our portfolio?” We’re hearing this a lot now, not just from customer success functions but also from CEOs and boards.
As far as where we are in the industry goes, we’re actually the category creator. We have the vast majority of users in terms of market share, which is usually around 75% to 80%, depending on the year.
jb
Gainsight | www.gainsight.com | San Francisco, CA
The post 886: When SaaS Became the Destination | Alka Tandan, CFO, Gainsight appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
In this Planning Aces episode, host Jack Sweeney and guest host Ben Murray discuss the collaborative organizational effort behind generating business intelligence (BI) and the different places BI resources may reside within a business, with reference to an episode featuring Gary Zyla, CFO of AssetMark. The hosts also discuss the role of finance in enabling sales, the challenges faced by sales teams, and the importance of financial discipline and visibility in a company’s financials, regardless of market conditions. The episode features insights from other finance leaders, including Teodora Gouneva, CFO of Next Insurance, and Wailun Chan, CFO of Grafana Labs.
Machine Generated Transcript
Jack: Hi It’s Jack Sweeney, and I’m here with Ben Murray. Once again. Ben has joined us, but Ben, you’ve been out in traveling at least I wasn’t able to connect with you earlier in the month. We’re glad we’re catching up with you. Now, where have you been? What have you been up to?
Ben [02:34]
Yeah, I’ve had some travel lately, of course, Spring Break recently, but was in New York City for Nathan Latka SAS open, which was a lot of fun. So he brings in SAS founders into that and have the founders present on the stage. And so you’re really actionable advice, trying to shine to share their advice and what they’ve learned and building their SaaS companies. So this year, they expanded it into a couple different tracks. So there was a, like a CTO track a finance talent track. So I helped out with the finance track and also presented on fundraising lessons
Jack [03:05]
For those among our listeners who might not be knee deep in the SAS world. Tell us a little more about Nathan. I’ve heard of him and know of his conference, but tell us give us the scoop on him. What’s he about?
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
The post Ep 21: When Sales is at the Table appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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.
jb
Zepz | www.zepzpay.com | London, UK
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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.
jb
Read More
MassMutual | www.massmutual.com | Springfield Ma
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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.
jb
Heathrow | www.heathrow.com | Longford TW6, United Kingdom
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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.
jb
ChromaDex | www.chromadex.com | Los Angeles, CA
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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.
jb
Equinix | www.equinix.com | Redwood City, CA
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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.
jb
NEXT Insurance | www.nextinsurance.com | Palo Alto, CA
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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.
jb
Allego | www.allego.com | Waltham, MA
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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.
jb
ARKO Corp. | www.arkocorp.com | Richmond, VA
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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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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.
jb
Coalition | www.coalitioninc.com | San Francisco, CA
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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
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
The post Ep 20: Planning’s New Math: PLG + Product Usage appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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.
jb
monday.com | www.monday.com | Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
The post 875: Connecting People and Processes | Eliran Glazer, CFO, Monday.com appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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.
jb
Grafana Labs | www.grafana.com | New York, NY
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Back in 2022, only three years after its acquisition of Warner Media, AT&T decided to leave the entertainment business and announced plans to relinquish its ownership of the giant media company.
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 communications 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.
jb
Meow Wolf | www.meowwolf.com | Santa Fe, NM
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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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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
jb
Designer Brands | www.designerbrands.com | Columbus, OH
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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.
jb
Calendly | www.calendly.com | Atlanta, GA
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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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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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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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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
Brett is a long-time thought leader in the performance measurement space. His clients have been profiled in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and Forbes. There are over 20 business school cases covering the success of his clients. Share a comment or two with our resident thought leader. Brett@pm2consulting.com
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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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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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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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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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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
The post 861: Putting Your Plan in Motion | David Quinn, CFO, Bluevine appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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
Brett is a long-time thought leader in the performance measurement space. His clients have been profiled in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and Forbes. There are over 20 business school cases covering the success of his clients. Share a comment or two with our resident thought leader. Brett@pm2consulting.com
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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.
jb
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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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.
jb
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.
jb
Zelis | www.zelis.com | Bedminster, NJ
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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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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.
jb
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.
jb
PharmChem LLC | www.pharmchek.com | Fort Worth, TX
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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
The post 853: When the Fire Burns Brightest | Chip Zint, CFO, Deluxe appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 852: Thriving in the Deep End | Jonathan Carr, CFO, Armis appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 850: A CFO’s Ultimate COVID Test | Anat Ashkenazi, CFO, Eli Lilly appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 848: The People, the Mission, and the Innovation | Evan Goldstein, CFO, Seismic appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
With a prospect of a recession ever more present, Steve says its time to keep the 7 P’s top of mind, or as Navistar’s CEO Mark Hernandez explains Proper prior planning prevents piss-poor performance (the 7 P’s). Steve says Hernandez is spot on when it comes to what FP&A professionals must keep in mind as they […]
The post Ep16: When FP&A Takes Rosaline’s View appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 847: When Minding the Business Is a Cultural Mandate | Jim Morgan, CFO, CallRail appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 846: Influencing Your Operating Inputs | Ambereen Toubassy, CFO, Airtable appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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.” […]
The post 839: Landing on Both Feet | JJ Pace, CFO, Service Pros Installation Group appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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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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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Several years ago, when CFO Anna King first began to champion the benefits of real-time data, she recalls that 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 […]
The post 836: Building Consensus to Go Real-Time | Anna King, CFO, Mesh Payments appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 835: Understanding Your Business | Andrew Gehrlein, CFO, Park Place Technologies appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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 […]
The post 834: Where Paths Converge and Leaders Emerge | Tracy Curley, CFO, iSpecimen, Inc. appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.
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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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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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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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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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.
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 […]
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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.
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 […]
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When Peter Walker looks back on his career, he doesn’t hesitate 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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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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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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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 […]
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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 […]
The post 818: Breaking Finance’s “Glass Wall” | David Bedell, CFO, Lendio appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER, CFO, Finance, Leadership, CPA.