CFO THOUGHT LEADER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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