CFO THOUGHT LEADER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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