CFO THOUGHT LEADER

According to Goodroot CFO Jim Harper, the best way to transform the current U.S. healthcare system is to replace its connective tissue. “It’s going to be a long slog and it’s got to be done one system at a time,” explains Harper, who uses the word “system” while referring to the individual points of connection that knit together healthcare’s patchwork of payers and providers. For Harper, connection points are where waste gathers within the larger system – and where companies often add unnecessary complexity in order to extract more dollars. “Because there is so much money flying through the systems there are a lot of organizations that have become involved here and they are greedy,” comments Harper, whose shares his opinion of the healthcare system as a preface to explaining the mission behind Goodroot. Not exactly a business incubator, and not a private equity firm, Goodroot prefers to be dubbed a “community” of businesses dedicated to improving the current state of healthcare delivery. Harper once more tells us: It's a mission that can only be achieved "one system at a time." - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021

When CFO Robert Linder highlights what distinguishes the dining experience at Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar, it’s easy to imagine him as a friendly host escorting us across a lively dining area filled with spirited patrons. “I love the hospitality industry, and I didn’t always know why—but I love to host and I love the interaction and taking care of someone and helping them to discover something new,” says Linder, whose words draw our attention to the universal splendor of dining out and its bitter absence from our lives during these past many months. From the start, we knew that our discussion would become focused on the pandemic and its impact on Lazy Dog’s business, yet we couldn’t help but want to linger as Linder listed the popular menu items from the restaurant that currently serves customers at 39 locations in seven states. In the end, we left it to Lazy Dog’s CFO to transport us back to earth with the not so enviable time of arrival being March 2020. “It’s hard not to point to something in the past year, given all of what this industry has gone through,” says Linder, when asked to share a moment of strategic insight that he’s experienced during the course of his career. Looking back, Linder recalls the first 48 hours when shelter-in-place orders were being issued in California and the full magnitude of the decisions that would need to be made began occupying the thoughts of Lazy Dog management. “We knew that our cash burn rate would be significant, and the thinking was around how we could adjust our costs as quickly as possible in order to survive,” explains Linder, who observes that survival demanded a wide and aggressive workforce reduction but Lazy Dog management remained uncertain about its response and considered whether several waves of layoffs over a period of weeks might permit the business to “buy time” and allow management to revisit the question of layoffs again in the future. “What we realized was that the outcome that would be most kind to our people was the one that would offer them a job when we came out of the other side of this thing,” comments Linder, who notes that management rejected having several waves of layoffs in favor of one large one. “This was one of the best decisions that we made because from that time forward we have only delivered good news to our people and have been able to say, ‘Hey, we’re bringing some people back” or “Hey, we’re able to restore a portion of your compensation,’” reports Linder, who adds that Lazy Dog has continued to pay health insurance for those who have been laid off. Says Linder: “For me, that 48-hour period showed why you can’t run away from a hard decision as a finance leader.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021

Years from now, when Castlight Health CFO Will Bondurant reflects back on the varied chapters of his finance career, he may title the current one “The Turnaround”—that is, if he and Castlight CEO Maeve O’Meara are able to achieve what the firm’s previous management team had not been able to: a strategy transformation. Like his CEO, Bondurant is not an outsider: After joining the firm in 2013, he was assigned a variety of strategy and financial planning duties that led to more influential product strategy and operational roles of the type that many aspiring CFOs eagerly seek out. As Bondurant shared with us his cross-functional journey, he mentioned few titles or promotions but instead drew our attention to a variety of experiences that has led us to conclude that Castlight’s future CFO first emerged as one of the company’s foremost problem-solvers. Says Bondurant: “If everything is working, you don’t always get the opportunity to fix something. The reason that I was able to have these opportunities is that we had challenges—and from where I sit now, they certainly benefited my own personal development.” Then, in 2017, came a $135 million acquisition, a transaction that management told investors would transform Castlight but instead ended up leaving a trail of merger snags and glitches that ultimately led to the formation of a new management team. At the time, Bondurant no doubt may have appeared to certain investors and outsiders to be a dark horse candidate for the firm’s CFO role. Still, it appears likely that his Castlight colleagues viewed things differently. Having spent many hours with Castlight customers before becoming CFO, Bondurant was familiar with certain external facing aspects of the role, but not all. “Investor relations was a new area for me—I had been external in my previous roles but principally with customers and partners and the like,” explains Bondurant, who recalls several unpleasant calls with investors after stepping into the CFO role. “I recall asking myself in the first week, ‘Do these people just hate me? Am I just really disliked by these people?,’” comments Bondurant, who notes that he now enjoys the calls with investors and very often views them as being more productive than his engagements with customers. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021

When an inquisitive software analyst takes a seat across the table from TIBCO Software CFO Tom Berquist, the inquisitor may not know that TIBCO’s finance leader once sat on their side of the table and in certain ways still prefers it. From 1996 to 2006, Berquist added a distinguished equity research chapter to his career when he became a marquee analyst inside the software realm for a string of Wall Street investment houses—namely, Piper Jaffray, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup. Seated across the table from the likes of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Bill Gates (at the time, Microsoft’s CEO), and many others, Berquist asked probing questions and listened to the carefully crafted narratives designed to achieve “buy-in” on the company’s strategy from discerning analysts. “You would get pieces of information from each of the different companies, which gives you this incredibly powerful view of the market,” recalls Berquist, who even today seems to envy the analyst he once was. “The CEOs and CFOs would read your research and then come back and complain and try and explain why you are wrong by supplying you with even more data points—which is helpful because you can then create an even bigger mosaic,” continues Berquist, who ultimately exited software research when he was offered a CFO role at a newly minted company formed from a group of technologies spun out from CA Technologies that was then known as Computer Associates. “We had to build the finance function from scratch,” remembers Berquist, who quickly set about building processes and hiring finance professionals to lead the company’s different functional groups. As the finance function grew up around him, Berquist says, he observed firsthand how finance acquires its “bottom up” view of the business organizationally, whereby data is first captured and then finance projects trends according to what’s already happened. “I’ve found this in every finance function that I’ve encountered since that time, so I view it as a universal truth,” states Berquist, who set out to remedy finance’s traditional “bottom up” approach by applying some “top down” macroeconomic insights. “I put in processes to run a “top down” model after actually building it myself. I compared and contrasted it to the traditional finance model and we reached common ground, allowing us to get in front of the trends,” says Berquist, who, even today after serving in multiple CFO and CEO roles, can’t help but linger on the other side of the table. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021

It was a meeting that Planful CFO Shane Hansen tells us that he was not looking forward to. The SaaS developer’s FP&A team had discovered a “fairly large” forecasting error, and Hansen deemed it necessary to brief Planful CEO Grant Halloran on the matter. So, as planning teams are apt to do, Planful’s FP&A crew performed an extracurricular round of scenario planning—or what might more accurately be described as "CEO planning." Says Hansen: “We did our homework and put things together in order to be ready for whatever reaction Grant might come up with.” Halloran’s response: “Oh, that’s just a mistake. What can we do to improve?” Of course, whether the Planful CEO’s reaction was among those considered by the planning team in its anticipated responses is not the point. Instead, the tale of the forecasting snag allowed Hansen to bump our discussion concerning continuous planning into the continuous improvement lane. And make no mistake: Planful’s finance chief views these two realms as one and the same. Only a month away from his 1st anniversary as Planful’s CFO, Hansen leaves little doubt that his leadership voice and actions are making as important a contribution to the company’s culture as they are to Planful’s monthly forecasts. “This is about empowering our culture by saying ‘Let’s improve,’ as opposed to pointing out who is to blame,” explains Hansen, whose words are no doubt intended in part to influence finance leaders inside organizations that have struggled to embrace continuous planning and at the same time perhaps failed to realize the potential of planning tools such as those provided by Planful. Asked whether his own interactions with Planful’s planning team involve scheduled weekly or monthly meetings, Hansen observes that his arrival at the company more or less coincided with Planful opting to have its employees work remotely due to the pandemic. “I have found that the consistent interactions that we’ve had while everyone has been working from home have really helped us to band together and provided a lot more unity than there would have been otherwise if not for the circumstances,” comments Hansen, who flags greater unity as yet another underpinning of successful continuous planning. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021

If we were asked to boil down our discussion with CFO Gary Golden to a single word, our answer would be: “judgment.” It perhaps goes without saying that having good judgment is a prerequisite for every finance leader, and the quality frequently tops the list of reasons that CEOs give when asked to describe what sets apart one CFO candidate from another. Still, the word comes to mind not because Golden uses it—which he does multiple times—but because he routinely draws our attention to the “decision-making” central to every CFO position and the experiences that have helped to shape the judgment that he uses to make sound business decisions. Golden’s professional life began as a lawyer in a Dallas law firm, where his goal was to become a top mergers and acquisitions attorney, but along the way he jumped to American Airlines. “One of the reasons I left private practice for American is that they had a reputation for moving lawyers onto the business side of things,” explains Golden, who says that attorneys frequently found finance to be a convenient door-of-entry at American. “Interestingly, at American, my mentors were not really attorneys, but I found mentors inside the finance organization,” remarks Golden, who says that his legal experience has served him well as he has taken on a number of different CFO roles. “When you start training as a lawyer, you have a very detailed ‘what can go wrong?’ orientation that I have found to be very helpful to me as a CFO because you’re always thinking about what can blow up and you want to have this orientation that forces you to anticipate next steps,” comments Golden. “Many times, you find yourself making judgments on things, and you decide not to do things even though you would really very much like to,” remarks Golden, who frequently uses the word “judgment” interchangeably or alongside “deciding” or “decision-making”—as in the sentence “As a CFO, your decision-making judgment is critical.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021

We seldom hear a finance leader tell us that they took a pass on a promotion early in their careers, so when CFO Ozan Pamir told us that as a 25-year-old associate he had turned down a vice president position with Echelon Wealth Partners, a Canadian investment banking firm that he had been with for only 2 years, we felt obliged to ask: “Why?” “I’d like to think that I’m a relatively self-aware person, and at the time I just did not feel ready—I thought that I had a little more room to grow and things to learn,” says Pamir, who had joined the banking firm as an IV analyst and was promoted in short order to associate—at which time he began managing other analysts. “A year later, they offered me a vice president role again, and I accepted it at that time,” continues Pamir, who believes that the extra year as a “senior associate” served him well. “It gave me more time to learn how to better manage the analysts and how to take on responsibility when it came to managing certain deals,” explains Pamir, who notes that 12 months later he was able to more confidently accept the firm’s promotion to VP, a rank that positioned him to head up the firm’s small and midcap financing deals. “Smaller deals are usually harder to complete—they are riskier and require a lot more due diligence and legwork to get done,” comments Pamir, who today views his development of a team of analysts for the firm as one of his most valuable experiences when it came to his own preparation for a CFO role. “I advocated for their compensation increases, fought for their bonuses, put in place their career trajectories, recommended them for promotions, and mentored them,” says Pamir, who in 2018 left Echelon to step into the CFO role at 180 Life Sciences, a biotech firm specializing in the treatment of inflammation. Having raised over $400 million in capital and helped to lead 30 financing transactions at Echelon, Pamir tells us that this time he felt more than ready. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021

It was roughly 12 months ago that Jason Eustace was named CFO of CuriosityStream, an upstart streaming media company launched in 2015 by Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks. For Eustace, CuriosityStream represents something of a flashback career chapter, arguably having more in common with the first 10 years of his finance career than the past ten. Turn back the clock 20 years, and Eustace could be found in the accounting department of the National Geographic Channel, which at the time was a newly formed joint venture between the National Geographic Society and Fox Cable Networks. “Nat Geo wanted to marry up their content with the distribution of the cable world, so it was a perfect marriage,” explains Eustace, who saw his responsibilities grow over a 6-year stint that ultimately landed him in a controller role. Controllership credentials in hand, Eustace then joined Discovery Communications, where he would serve in a variety of finance leadership roles over another period of 6 years. However, it was his experience at Nat Geo and the more entrepreneurial nature of the business that Eustace uses a point of comparison with his current stint at CuriosityStream. “National Geographic had been around forever—they had great stories, and it was the ability to put these stories on a more widely distributed platform that really propelled Nat Geo to become a media company,” observes Eustace, whose latest CFO role puts him once more inside a media company determined to open new avenues for distributed content. Says Eustace: “I always wanted to get back into media. I really loved D.C., but there are limited CFO roles inside the metro area, so when this opportunity came up, I jumped at it.” - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021

The mid-December conference call was 45 minutes old, CFO Brad Kinnish says, when he began to feel edgy. One of the company’s biggest deals of the year had yet to close, and the specifics behind its commission structure (or lack thereof) had led a number of the call’s participants to begin to flag potential snags. As time passed and commissions continued to dominate the discussion, Kinnish found he could no longer remain on the sidelines. “Hey, look, team—I think we’re spending time on the wrong thing here. I think we need to be spending time on closing this deal and getting it done. I need you to trust me that we’re going to pay a commission that’s fair to the sales leaders, fair to the sales reps, and fair to the company” are the words that Kinnish recalls saying as he charged the group to not begin waving red flags outside of the mechanics of the specific deal and to put their trust in him. “I needed to rely on the fact that I had built relationships with these people and had built trust and could get them to refocus on what needed to get done in order to win the deal and close the quarter,” recalls Kinnish, who uses his story about “the mid-December call” to help close the loop on a CFO leadership journey that began with a job rejection. Years earlier, Kinnish remembers, when he was interviewing for his first CFO role, he scored well during his management interviews only to receive a thumbs-down from the company’s board. Later, a board member confided to Kinnish that he focused too much on his accounting and analytics experience. “In my mind, what she was telling me was that finance and accounting knowledge is foundational—that the question that you needed to answer was how else you could influence and lead,” explains Kinnish, who believes that the board was looking for indications that he was ready to muster the type of leadership that he so confidently summoned forward on the mid-December call. As for the call’s outcome, Kinnish reports: “It worked. We went back and focused on the deal. Won the deal. Closed the quarter. Made our number and paid the commission on the back end.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM Signup for our Newsletter

It’s a phrase that has historically never roamed far beyond the corridors of pharmaceutical companies, but now—thanks to COVID 19—the term “clinical trials” has entered the vocabulary of the public at large. Perhaps at no time in history have the “trials” that pharma companies use to generate data on the safety of a particular drug, vaccine, or treatment been as heavily scrutinized—and at no previous time has CFO Manmeet Soni of Reata Pharmaceuticals believed that the processes and approaches that govern Reata’s “trial design” have been more ripe for innovation. “Our learnings from the past 9 months are going to influence how we operate for the next 90 years,” explains Soni, who says that these learnings were put into motion last spring as COVID’s arrival shut down trials and began curtailing Reata’s data flows. “That’s when we began asking: ‘Why can’t we do trials in a way similar to how home health services are provided? Why don’t we deliver the drug to the patient’s home?’” recalls Soni, who says that serving the company as both CFO as well COO allowed him to be more hands-on when it came time to tweak Reata’s “trial design” and the daily activities performed to keep trials on track. “There will always be certain trials that will have to be completed at the lab, but the pandemic has allowed us to regularly consider how things can be done differently,” adds Soni, who believes that today’s impulse to regularly reconsider current methods and approaches is the biggest change to yesterday’s business as usual. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM Signup for our Newsletter

Among the experiences that Rob Barnhart credits with having prepared him for a CFO role was an executive training program in which he participated when he served as director of FP&A for defense contractor BAE Systems. Known as LEAD, or Leadership Enhancement Accelerated Development, the program put a spotlight not on technical knowledge or management best practices but on each participant’s soft skills, Barnhart recalls. “There were literally clinical psychologists sitting in on meetings who would later reflect on your behavior and give you advice on how you could have been a more effective communicator,” says Barnhart, who also credits one of his own earlier talent development efforts with helping him to advance down the CFO path. At the time, Barnhart was heading FP&A at Fanatics, a company specializing in sports merchandising, “The question became: How can I make sure that I don’t have to level up or bring new people in and put them over people as the challenges get more daunting?,” explains Barnhart, who notes that at the time, Fanatics was evolving from a single e-commerce site to a multichannel global business. “There were people whom I brought in as analysts who today are directors and VPs in the business—this happened during my tenure, so I’m really happy about that,” remarks Barnhart. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM Signup for our Newsletter

Back in 2015, when Gary Swidler was a candidate for a CFO position at Match Group, the seasoned banking executive recalls being told by company management: “On paper, you are definitely not the most qualified person for the job.” The gap on Swidler’s resume was due to the fact that he had never held a CFO position—a void that frustrates many first-time CFO candidates who routinely find themselves second in line to candidates whose resumes list previous CFO appointments. Perhaps frustrated CFO candidates might find some comfort in the notion that Match, a company whose online offerings excel at achieving “matches”—albeit romantic ones—chose to discard industry’s traditional CFO matching criteria. According to Swidler, the CEO remarked: “‘You’ve never done this before, but I’ve known you for a long time and you have very good judgment. You’re a smart person with high integrity, so don’t prove me wrong.” Swidler’s comments expose the roles that intuition and instincts often play when it comes to CFO hiring. They also draw our attention to the type of partner that Match management was seeking: not a blind follower or “yes man,” but someone upon whose counsel the CEO and a board could rely. Meanwhile, as a banker, Swidler’s relationship with his future company had gone back not months but years, giving him an edge over veteran CFOs who were less familiar with Match as well as IAC, the holding company that at the time owned 100 percent of the online dating company. However, within 2 months of Swidler’s arrival in Match’s CFO office, IAC sold 15 percent of its shares to the public, allowing Match to raise a little more than $400 million and giving the company a market cap of around $3 billion. In the coming months and years, more IAC shares were expected to be sold to the public, which would allow Match Group to becoming increasingly unfettered from its largest investor. Still, IAC was evidently not yet ready to part with its 85 percent and opted to hold on to its shares until this past June, when it completed a spinoff of Match Group by selling its shares to IAC’s existing shareholders and thereby giving Match a market cap of $30 billion. “We had such a good business, and we were doing so well—IAC enjoyed owning us and didn’t want to give us up,” says Swidler, who would likely not hesitate to tell us that when it comes to large investors, breaking up is hard to do. – Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM Signup for our Newsletter

We have been speaking with Hoang Vuong for little more than a minute when he mentions the CFO mentor whom he credits with having influenced his early career decisions. “Hey, what do you really want to do when you grow up?” was the question that Vuong remembers being asked by the CFO, who had gotten to know Vuong personally while the young techie had served as an IT troubleshooter for his company’s ambitious SAP implementation. Fast-forward a few years, and the same CFO introduces Vuong to the management of an early-stage Internet search firm in the travel space, known as SideStep. Vuong joins the young company and subsequently focuses his troubleshooting skills on the firm’s mounting growth obstacles. “I had started reading a bunch of blogs where I began learning about this little company called Google and the interesting things that they did,” recalls Vuong, who says that he quickly began to grasp how Google offerings could help SideStep to address some of its nagging growth challenges. In fact, Vuong was so convinced that Google offerings would unlock new growth for SideStep that he ignored the doubts being flung about by his management peers, negotiated a contract with Google’s bus dev team, and presented it to SideStep’s CEO. Vuong says that the CEO responded by asking: “Are you so sure about this decision that you would risk your career on it?” At the time, Vuong says, he felt that careerwise he had little to lose—and besides, the Google offerings were pretty impressive. “Google was just getting started, so at the time they would provide search results on the portals of other companies and do a rev share,” explains Vuong, who says that SideStep’s monthly revenues quickly ballooned from $50,000 to $1 million. Having successfully addressed one of SideStep’s most formidable growth hurdles, Vuong saw his responsibilities at Side Step grow over time to include sales, online marketing, operations, and, of course, finance—where he served in the first of his several CFO roles. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM Signup for our Newsletter

When innovation is a topic for discussion, Dynshaw Italia can’t resist mentioning Cobra Beer—or, to be more specific, “the big bottle.” It was Cobra, of course, that first opted to forgo the UK’s standard 500–550 ml beer bottles and introduce an ever more generously proportioned 650 ml vessel. “Cobra was all about doing things differently and better and, as a result, changing the marketplace,” explains Italia, who recalls that Cobra’s big bottle strategic insight had to do with the willingness of UK diners to share their oversize beverage with others at their table. “Because they were sharing the bottle, it would be kept on the table. As a result, customers entering the restaurant would see all these tables having a bottle of Cobra, and it was like free advertising,” continues Italia, who served as group CFO for the popular UK beer brand from 2003 to 2010 as it continued to flummox its beer rivals by touting the brew’s premium recipe while outsourcing the actual brewing and distribution processes. “Cobra was about creating a premium brand with high gross margins that would eventually fit inside a larger brewery portfolio—one that had their own production and own distribution,” notes Italia, who credits Cobra’s culture of innovation with having routinely led him to explore creative ways to generate working capital. “I learned that every single asset on your balance sheet could create and generate cash for working capital, whether it was stock or debt—you could even get financing against your rent deposit,” remarks Italia, whose working capital resourcefulness proved to be a good match for Cobra’s entrepreneurial founders. In the end, Cobra’s appetite for growth (and escalating debt) led its founders to seek deeper pockets, so in 2011 Cobra Beer Partnership Limited was formed as a joint venture with Molson Coors—which allowed the Cobra brand to achieve a “fit” inside a larger brewery’s portfolio. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review Exclusive Content & More @ CFOTHOUGHTLEADER.COM Signup for our Newsletter

Inside the realm of corporate finance, it’s safe to say that the year 2020 has been unlike any that have preceded it. As more employees have occupied remote workspaces, growing numbers of finance chiefs have told us that they are more carefully monitoring the financial and cultural levers that influence workforce behaviors.

Thinking back to his days as a charter boat captain off the coast of Point Loma, San Diego, Dan Stokely marvels at the responsibilities that he shouldered as a young adult. Serving a mix of customers, Stokely would routinely welcome on board groups of small business owners, executives, and doctors before setting off to sea on 3- to 15-day jaunts. “Whether it was dealing with people experiencing some kind of medical emergency at sea, or really rough weather, or mechanical failures—you just had to be on top of your game all the time,” recalls Stokely, who says that the experience forever shaped his mind-set when it comes to taking on challenges. Initially, Stokely had set his sights on acquiring equity in a boat, but conversations with different customers piqued his interest in business and led him to begin a college career alongside his sea captain vocation. Upon graduation, Stokely feared that the lack of an accounting internship on his oceangoing resume might lessen the odds of him landing a job with a big-name accounting house. However, Stokely says, the partner in charge of Deloitte’s San Diego office at the time hired him after summing up the college grad’s seafaring days this way: “You had to make quick decisions, and very often with not a lot of information. And you had to live with the outcome.” Another factor that no doubt contributed to Stokely quickly finding his groove in the accounting and finance realm was that he was accustomed to having gray-haired customers turning to him for answers, a qualification that few hiring officers would likely miss. Such conditioning perhaps served him well at Sithe Energies, where he was hired as a financial analyst inside one of the firm’s divisions but within weeks found himself working alongside the company’s CFO as they mapped out an aggressive acquisition strategy involving the medical waste industry. This led to Stokely crisscrossing the county to meet and consult with the owners of different medical waste firms being targeted. Says Stokely: “This might have scared a lot of people. But with my fishing background and having taken some risks before, I knew how to manage it.” As it turned out, the company would acquire nearly 12 new firms over a 3-year period and reformulate its division known as Recovery Corp. of America. –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

Back in 2018—when Deb Ricci’s name topped the list of leading candidates to fill the CFO role at Guidehouse, a management consulting firm carve-out—three career distinctions likely set her apart from other candidates. First, Ricci was a veteran public sector executive whose finance resume included multiple chapters inside the government services sector, Guidehouse’s home turf. Second, she had worked inside private equity–backed companies—experience that few recruiters could ignore in light of Guidehouse being the offspring of private equity firm Veritas Capital. Third, she had an EBITDA mind-set—an unyielding orientation that allowed Ricci’s lines of sight to seldom stray very far from the metrics that helped to track, measure, and deliver EBITDA. Of course, it is just such a mind-set that has likely kept Ricci’s finance leadership credentials on the radar of private equity partners. To date, she has played senior finance roles inside four private equity–backed firms. “I know what they’re looking for. Often I think like they think. And I find that the objectives that they’re looking to achieve are the same ones that I look to achieve,” explains Ricci. Since Veritas first acquired the public sector practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2018 and rebranded it as Guidehouse, the professional services firm has made headlines with its acquisition of Navigant Consulting in October of 2019, a deal that expanded Guidehouse’s workforce from 2,000 to 7,000 and planted a trove of commercial clients inside Guidehouse’s customer portfolio. What’s more, the Navigant organization brought along two-decade–old processes and practices, whereas the Guidehouse organization had still been mapping out its internal approaches and practices. “We were receptive to adopting some established practices, while on the Navigant side I think that they were very accepting of change—so for me, this was the most successful acquisition that I’ve ever been associated with,” remarks Ricci. –Jack Sweeney

In front of the restaurant’s dozen or more cash registers, customers were standing six or seven deep when Brice Hill raised his voice and began instructing the hungry mall shoppers to immediately exit the store. “No one listened to a single word I said,” says Hill, who opens our discussion by transporting us back to the mid-1980s, when as a teenage recent graduate of McDonald’s management training program he was given a surprise leadership test. Having made a trip to the mall for some holiday shopping, Hill had poked his head into the mall’s marquee McDonald’s only to find a few of his fellow managers nervously waiting for a return call from McDonald’s headquarters. The restaurant—at the time one of the busiest McDonald’s locations on the West Coast—had only minutes earlier received a bomb threat, and as Hill digested the blank stares triggered by his shouts to clear the store, he realized that more extreme measures were required. Leaving the customers in their queues, the young manager dodged the doubtful stares of employees as he maneuvered his way to the back of the store, where he found the location’s electricity source and without hesitation cut it off. “They had told me that 20 minutes was the countdown on the thing—we cleared the whole place with only 4 minutes to spare,” recalls Hill, who estimates that the location may have held as many as 500 customers and workers that day. Later, police would determine that there had been no bomb, but this has never led Hill to second-guess his actions. “When you’re in that type of situation, you have to be able to act and act like an owner. Even if you don’t know whether you have the right answer, you have to act. There cannot be a void of leadership,” says Hill, underscoring what might be a recurring theme for his career. Fast-forward a few decades, and Hill is a senior strategic planning executive at Intel Corp. The venue is an Arizona conference room where a group of Intel executives—including the company’s CFO—has gathered to hear Hill offer an analysis that could potentially lead Intel to begin building idle factories. This time, the doubtful stares quickly turned to dissenting voices as Hill’s strategic analysis failed to win over many of his Intel colleagues. “When I made the recommendation that we should build an idle factory, there was like a melee in the room. All of the CFO staff was arguing, waving their hands, debating different opinions,” explains Hill, who says that in the minds of traditional finance executives, an idle building equals excess cost. To highlight his point Hill repeats the refrain of “You have to heat it, cool it, and guard it!” Still, what Hill’s analysis had begun to spotlight was the cost of missing out on growth opportunities in a business wielding 60% to 70% gross margins. Suddenly, having idle factories in place to add additional capacity when growth demanded seemed to have merit. “At the end, the CFO said, ‘Bryce, I want you to go meet with the treasury staff. They’re experts in derivatives and option modeling. I want you to go see if your math holds up,’” remembers Hill, whose analysis received “a clean bill of health” from treasury before getting a thumbs-up from Intel’s CEO, a final affirmation that led Intel to modify its growth strategy as well as its accounting. Going forward expenses associated with serving the idle factories would be listed as strategic investments rather than costs – a change that has perhaps made management think twice before turning off the lights . –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

When Tupperware Brands CFO Sandra Harris is asked what set her apart from the other CFO candidates who aspired to fill the finance leadership role at the iconic maker of food storage products, she doesn’t hesitate to mention that her previous leadership turn was not as a CFO, but as chief information officer for outdoor apparel and footwear manufacturer VF Corporation. It was there where Harris first climbed into the company’s leadership ranks from VF’s FP&A function, where she had become increasingly focused on the company’s quickly evolving global supply chain. “VF was on a trajectory of going from $6 billion to $12 billion, and in order to do this, they needed to optimize their supply chain,” explains Harris, who along the way found herself overseeing VF’s procurement function—a position that made her the direct report for VF’s sourcing for all of Asia. “Asia was one of our most complex businesses—it had every kind of retail channel, and it was because of my Asia experience that I was given more financial roles in the retail segment of the business as well as VF’s shared services,” recalls Harris, who credits her retail experience with having helped her to emerge as CIO and IT leader as she helped the company to forge a digital connection with its consumers. At Tupperware, Harris has made “innovation through technology” a central theme of her 20-month CFO tenure. “Until I arrived, we were really still taking orders by hand and using fax machines,” comments Harris, who says that the company’s rapid adoption of cloud-based tools and solutions paid big dividends in 2020 when, due to the pandemic, increasing numbers of consumers went looking for food safety and storage products as the number of home-cooked meals grew. “We knew that we had to think more about the consumer and create a supply chain that could support what Amazon brought to the world, which was 2-day delivery,” adds Harris, who credits Tupperware’s technology investment with helping the company to pivot to a more digital world. –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

It was near the end of her 9 years with Intel Corp. that Yevgenia Fink received a bit of advice that today she credits with having helped her to blaze a path that would ultimately lead to the CFO office. As Fink recalls, “Leave Intel before you forget how to open an Excel spreadsheet” was the brief but memorable comment that a respected manager opined. “I felt that I had a lot of influence at Intel, but most of my function became leading and managing people, and I still didn’t feel confident in my pure finance skill set,” says Fink, who at the time was a group controller for the chip maker’s mobile platform team. Fink’s future finance career path would involve a string of start-ups where she got to demonstrate her FP&A skills and along the way acquire broader finance responsibilities that made her a candidate for VP of finance positions and eventually the CFO office at HOVER, an application that helps users to design and estimate home improvement projects. “The experience gave me exposure to what it is like to be part of a public company on a much more intimate scale than what Intel could have ever given me,” observes Fink, who at the same time credits the giant chip maker with offering its finance professionals a wide berth of opportunities to pursue. Comments Fink: “There was a realization at Intel that to be a strong finance professional, you needed to be well-rounded across all disciplines, so it wasn’t about hoarding employees and keeping them in a finance box but really about providing people with opportunities that an organization the size of Intel can offer.” At HOVER, Fink’s attention these days is migrating from Excel spreadsheets back to people. “When I joined, I built a financial model, and now, as the company is scaling, it’s about hiring people who can improve on what was built,” explains Fink, who says that the transition from “leader and doer” to “people leader” requires a sense of timing. She adds: “If the transition feels a little premature, it’s probably the right time to do it.” –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

When Russell Burke tells us that his days at Sony Music Entertainment included “huge peaks” such as the release of the hit sound track for the motion picture Titanic as well as huge challenges such as the rise of digital pirates, the two developments quickly converge. Suddenly, in our mind’s eye, we see Burke’s career vessel of choice surrounded by pirates and the finance executive shouting a string of orders to a bewildered seafaring crew. Once again, the instant imaging that our conversations often render appears to be strangely prescient of the finance leader’s future career chapter. “Before that piracy, I hadn’t really understood the concept of disruption,” explains Burke, who occupied VP of finance roles at Sony Music in both New York and Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At first, Burke was tasked with helping Sony to lessen piracy’s bite by leading a series of cost optimization initiatives, including setting up joint venture distribution agreements and putting in place shared services facilities. “After dealing with that for a time, I decided that I wanted to join the disruption,” comments Burke, who in 2001 was named founding CFO of PressPlay, a music streaming service formed as a joint venture of Sony Music and Universal Music. “Even though this was a joint venture formed by two massive companies, it was in many respects a true start-up—we sat down and created a business model and executed on it,” explains Burke, who adds that the company would grow to serve 800,000 digital music subscribers before it was sold in 2003 to Roxio, an early streaming service that helped to legitimize the streaming seas as it rolled up streaming assets, including those of pioneering pirate Napster. “PressPlay was really set up by the record companies to battle the Napsters of the world, and, at the same time, these companies were suing the pirates,” remarks Burke, who recalls that PressPlay opted to sell to Roxio as the firm sought to rebrand Napster as a legitimate streaming service—signaling an end to the music industry’s choppy seas. –Jack Sweeney

Twenty-five to 30 years ago, senior executives seeking CFO roles did not think like Tom Tuchscherer. Many still don’t, which is why CFO roles have increasingly come to executives like Tuchscherer, a gate crasher from the world of corporate development. Such was the case back in 2012, when Tuchscherer entered the CFO office for the first time at Talend, a fast-growing developer of data integration software. At the time, Tuchscherer was accustomed to having long strategy discussions with both Talend investors and board members and was even tasked with helping management to recruit “a professional” CFO. However, when a new CFO exited the company only 12 months after being recruited, Tuchscherer agreed to serve as an interim finance leader. “First it was 3 months, then 6 months, then 9 months, and then a year. Eventually, the board said, ‘Hey, you seem to be doing a good job with this—why don’t you just stay?,’” explains Tuchscherer, who characterizes his arrival in the CFO office as an “accident” rather than a “willful choice.” In fact, as time passed and Talend began preparing for its IPO, Tuchscherer says his career mind-set remained untethered to the CFO role. “Had I been in a board member’s shoes, I would have thought that this was pretty dangerous,” explains Tuchscherer, who says that during some “honest discussions” with the company’s CEO and board members, he made clear his willingness to step aside and even to help recruit a CFO with IPO experience. “Essentially, the message that came back was: ‘We value the relationships that you built and your strategic knowledge of the company much more than the downside of your lack of experience as a public company CFO, and we believe that you can grow and learn those skills … but we will be keeping a close eye,’” recalls Tuchscherer, who notes that by this time he had learned to appease his sizable appetite for high-minded strategy insights—a source of sustenance for many corporate development executives—in order to better digest the company’s accounting and administrative functions. Looking back, Tuchscherer recalls that his “accidental” arrival inside the CFO office in some ways allowed him to be more clear-eyed about the role of finance leadership. Comments Tuchscherer: “It forced me to ask a lot of questions and to challenge the role and reinvent it at the same time.” –Jack Sweeney Subscribe to our Newsletter

When Drew Vollero arrived in the CFO office of Snap (formerly Snapchat) in 2015, the executives occupying the tech world’s traditional IPO talent bench no doubt raised a few eyebrows. Having spent the previous 25 years inside the corporate corridors of Mattel, Inc., and PepsiCo, Vollero had a resume chock-full of strategic planning initiatives that any finance leader would covet. Still, he could not be counted among the familiar CFO all-stars known for their routine rotation into IPO-minded tech companies. Of course, whatever buzz Vollero’s hiring may have stirred, Snap left no room for IPO skeptics, having earlier in 2015 hired Imran Khan, head of Internet investment banking at Credit Suisse, where he had recently led the IPO for Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. “Whenever we walked into a room together—on the road show or wherever—there were seven or eight people who knew Imran,” explains Vollero, who characterizes his pairing with Khan as “a one, two punch.” “The founders knew that I had experience in building world-class teams, and they knew that I could hit the ground running,” comments Vollero, who adds that “the match really made sense” in light of the tight time frame involved in Snap’s plans to go public. During the 18 months in the lead-up to the IPO, Vollero initially committed to a 70-mile commute to Snap’s Venice, Calif., headquarters from his home of 30 years in Orange County—a daily trek that became more daunting as IPO action items began pressing down. Says Vollero: “I got an apartment up in Los Angeles, and I was there Sunday through Friday, moving the things that we had to get done.” These days, Vollero has been working closer to home while occupying the CFO office at Allied Universal of Santa Ana, Calif. Despite his shorter commute, Vollero says, his days are once again becoming populated with IPO action items, as the $8 billion privately held supplier of security and facilities begins eyeing the public markets. Comments the CFO and now IPO veteran: “We’re a founder-led company, just as Snap was founder-led—these companies tend to take on the personalities of the founder, and they drive hard.” –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

"Talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it—today, I spend around 20% of my time on it." - Ross Tennenbaum, CFO, Avalara CFOTL: What are your priorities for the coming year? Tennenbaum: One is building out our finance and accounting talent to take us to a billion dollars’ worth of revenue and beyond. We’re at close to half a billion of revenue, and we’re looking to go well beyond that. You really need the talent that has experienced a larger scale, knows how to achieve it, and can take you there. So, talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it—today, I spend around 20% of my time on it. CFOTL: What does the phrase “workforce culture” mean to you? Tennenbaum: Beginning in my investment banking days, I’ve studied many companies and management teams. I’ve seen teams that were really high-functioning, really strong, great cultures. I’ve also seen management teams and executive teams that were not cohesive. There was a lot of distrust and backstabbing. Each of these scenarios could generate great numbers and be performing well, but I would only want to invest my money in the one that has that trust and has a cohesive team—and where this is really being driven forward in a cultural way. I don’t think that Wall Street really has a view of this. There is really no metric internally—and certainly not externally—that gives this view on culture. But I think that investors are increasingly trying to get this view into talent and culture. Drew Vollero, CFO, Allied Universal When Drew Vollero arrived in the CFO office of security and facilities company Allied Universal in 2018, he understood that the primary constraint to Allied’s future growth remained human capital. Like so many other meaty challenges, Vollero had helped to remedy during his finance career– Allied’s new CFO understood finance must play an active role when it came to optimizing the company’s “employee funnel”. Then Covid 19 arrived - overnight elevating Allied’s hiring hurdle to Vollero’s top of mind status. We recently asked Vollero to explain how the company’s hiring priorities may have been altered due to the pandemic. Vollero: I would say that we hire 3,000 people a week. We see a million resumes a year here at Allied Universal. There's 150 million or so people employed in this country. So, you're talking about a meaningful number of resumes that this company sees. Our ability to hire the right people is really important. How do you do this at scale is really our challenge. Our strategy team has adopted a couple of new tools that helped us do that through the field. We now have an artificial intelligence vehicle that we're testing that will help us identify what are the key metrics when it comes to hiring and what are the key personality traits or key answers that applicants can give us that (signal) they will fit well with our culture, as well as indicate that they might be successful employees. We're also using an automated workflow to really help us get through some of our staffing bottlenecks. Our challenge here today is we may get a resume, but we may not be able to call you for six to eight weeks. Managing that workflow better is very important to us and something that we spend a lot of time studying the employment funnel. How do we find 150,000 of the best employees? We hire based on customer needs. Customers continue to need services and some have used less during the pandemic like the retail channel, or some of the local office buildings, but a lot of customers have asked for more hours. State governments have wanted more hours. Hospitals have wanted more hours. As we manage through the pandemic we've really focused on three important pieces. First, and foremost, we focus on our employees. We've instructed all of our employees to follow the CDC and WHO guidelines, social distancing, very important. … We've supplied over 650,000 cloth masks to employees during that time. We've also been very active with virtual events, hiring people, so lot of kind of drive-through hiring events to practice social distancing, and meet the demand for security services and we still have a significant number of open posts and we've been trying to fill those. The customers, we've got 30,000 customers. And these 30,000 customers have 13,000 different ways that they've attacked this situation. Different customers have done it different ways and we’ve tried to be responsive to their every step. From a financial perspective, obviously during the pandemic, we've been focused on really the liquidity of the company. On the financial side, there's a couple of things that we've been trying to do to make sure that the company can continue to do well and to frame the magnitude, our payroll here is a $100 million a week, and we have to make sure that we have the ability to continue to pay the people who are working hard through this.

Of all of the business discussions that Chad Cohen has had over the years, few are likely as memorable as the 20-second conversation he had with Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff about midway into his 9-year career stint with the online real estate company. Cohen joined Zillow back in 2006 as corporate controller, a position that he says also had the added distinction of being the company’s first full-time finance role. Over the next 4 years, as Zillow’s back-office finance and accounting team took shape, Cohen’s responsibilities grew, allowing him to step into the role of vice president of finance. “I had been moving up the ladder, and it was right before we made the decision to go public—I remember Spencer coming into my office and saying, ‘You’re going to be CFO,’” says Cohen, who recalls Zillow’s CEO saying little more before exiting. For Cohen, the exchange signaled a 6- to 12-month transition that would enlarge his focus from being largely back-office to being both back- and front-office. “I had built an accounting and finance department, but this was a big step that required coaching from mentors and formal media training and IR experience,” says Cohen, who today views the Zillow IPO as only one of several Zillow milestones during his CFO tenure with the firm. Says Cohen: “I spent 4 years—or 16 earnings calls—as CFO, acquired about 10 companies, and raised somewhere between a half-billion and a billion dollars in capital from the public markets for Zillow Group.” Asked to recall a learning moment from his CFO years, Cohen says that he recalls waking up in a cold sweat during the 20- to 30-day period that immediately followed Zillow’s 2015 acquisition of Trulia. Having carefully crafted a 90- to 120-day postmerger integration plan, Cohen says, he realized that as the number of Trulia employee departures began to quickly escalate, “speed of integration” was going to play a plus-size role in the merger’s success. “Our retention bonuses—albeit very healthy and robust—were being offset by a very frothy employment market in San Francisco and even larger sign-on bonuses that we were having trouble competing with,” recalls Cohen. “I called my controller in a panic and said: ‘Hey, we have to do this faster because I think I see how the scenario is playing out—and it ain’t going to be pretty,’” remarks Cohen, who then instructed his team to “rip up” the 90-to 120-day plan, while accenting his new mandate for speed with the words “We’re going to do this now!” –Jack Sweeney

In 2016, when Jeff Nichols had been a senior member of Glassdoor’s FP&A team for 2 years, he and other members of the finance team were confronting the nagging truth that the firm’s path to going public wasn’t getting any shorter. The online job recruitment firm’s efforts to grow its profit margins had met only mild success, while its cash burn rate was inching upward. According to Nichols, Glassdoor’s path to going public was further complicated due to the unique characteristics of its business model. Points of comparison between Glassdoor and top recruitment rivals such as LinkedIn and Indeed offered few insights due to the firm’s unique approach, making Glassdoor’s story more challenging for management to tell. To help remove the firm’s storytelling obstacles and address its meager margin growth, Nichols says, the firm’s finance team began asking, “How do we get the business to perform over the long term in a way that would actually make for a compelling story?” To help answer this question, Nichols reports, Glassdoor first had to widen its lens and search for points of comparison with SaaS companies, ad tech firms, and other companies beyond the traditional recruitment realm in order to identify competitive attributes that aligned with those offered by Glassdoor. At the same time, this broader comparison helped to magnify certain weaknesses in Glassdoor’s model. “What we were lacking was retention. Most SaaS companies are focused on net dollar expansion or gross dollar expansion, and we just didn’t have it,” explains Nichols, who says that another challenge that quickly came into view involved small and medium-size businesses. “The way in which we went about SMB sales was just not efficient—it was very labor- and cost-intensive,” comments Nichols, who—having played a central role in helping to broaden the company’s strategic view—was soon helping to put a restructuring in motion. Says Nichols: “We reprioritized. We made some new investments that we had not made before, but at the same time we curtailed some costs and refocused what we were actually doing.” Ultimately, Glassdoor’s path led not to an IPO but to a sale, when in 2018 Recruit Holdings, a large Japanese human resources company, paid $1.2 billion for the company. Having been valued by investors only 2 years previously at around $860 million, Glassdoor had a story that had no doubt become more compelling. Looking back, Nichols’ cites his part in helping the company to widen its lens: “All of this was a directional change for the company. I feel that I brought something to the organization that it really needed, which was an honest, objective look at ‘here’s what’s going on in the business, and here’s how it appears to its peers.’” –Jack Sweeney

Ross Tennenbaum remembers that back in 2018, when he was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, he had conversations with a number of senior executives from Slack Technologies, Inc. At the time, the fast-growing workplace messaging and communication platform was preparing to go public, and the company was making a special effort to educate bankers and analysts alike about the firm’s business. As his questions became more pointed, Tennenbaum says, he noticed that members of Slack’s senior management team would frequently permit other executives stationed along the conversation’s periphery to supply the answers. “At first, I thought that they served sort of a chief-of-staff type of role, but what I realized was that when the executive was pressed with a question, one of the sidekicks would always be turned to for the answer,” explains Tennenbaum, who found his conversations with Slack to be highly informative. Later, Tennenbaum learned that the sidekicks were members of Slack’s business operations team, a cluster of analysts that he describes as being “cousins” to Slack’s finance and FP&A teams. “This team was incredible: They were so dialed in to the business, and they were partnered with Slack’s executives, which allowed the latter to quickly make data-driven decisions,” says Tennenbaum, who today, as CFO of software developer Avalara, is seeking to borrow a page from Slack and populate his own business operations and FP&A functions with teams of analysts on the ready to inform and supply answers to questions. “This is about creating not just budgets but also operational plans that tie strategy and tactics to key metrics so that we can see when things are trending up or trending down and be able to more quickly take action,” adds Tennenbaum, who believes that many businesses struggle due to a disconnect between what he calls “top-level metrics” that are being widely shared and reported by the company and decision-making by “everyday operators” often situated deep inside a company. “How do we make these people feel a sense of ownership of the measure and feel more accountable when it comes to driving outcomes?” asks Tennenbaum, who notes that a disconnect can occur even after a company has made an effort to push a metric deeper into the organization. “What happens is that they don’t do a good job of updating the metrics every month, reviewing them and quickly assessing where they’re on and off track, and course-correcting,” comments Tennenbaum. At Avalara, remedying the metrics disconnect is now a top priority for finance. Says Tennenbaum: “To me, that’s the impactful part of the CFO job.” –Jack Sweeney Subscribe to our Newsletter

In 2008, as the economic downturn threatened to upend IBM Corp.’s financial well-being, the company’s leadership was considering different candidates to lead a corporatewide restructuring when Kieran McGrath’s name surfaced. McGrath was known as a troubleshooter inside the ranks of IBMers, a seasoned finance executive whose 27 years with the company had produced a zigzag career trajectory tracing a jagged path that signaled to IBM insiders both a breadth of experience and company loyalty. “Early in my career, I got a reputation as a workhorse and a bit of a problem fixer, and while this was positive in the long haul, it did not always seem that way at the time,” explains McGrath, who says that he was 10 years into his career with IBM when “special assignments” began regularly populating the path before him. “I was constantly getting pushed out of my comfort zone because I was never able to stay in any one space too long,” says McGrath, whose IBM resume included tours of duty inside the technology realms of storage technologies, semiconductors, and global technology services. McGrath was offered the restructuring assignment, and, as usual, he accepted the invitation. “This was really tough work because you’re really forcing decisions as you try to push along a restructuring in response to economic realities,” recalls McGrath, who—while in midstream of a restructuring gig that he hoped would last only 6 months—suddenly found himself being approached by IBM’s leadership with yet another opportunity. Says McGrath: “As luck would have it, the restructuring role became temporary because the CFO of IBM software at that time decided to leave the company for another opportunity.” McGrath was shortly named finance leader for the company’s $25 billion software business, a demanding and high-profile leadership role both inside and outside the company. “Clearly, I would never have been the CFO of CA Technologies or today the CFO of Avaya if I had not taken up many of these other experiences and gone down these side roads,” explains McGrath, who would leave IBM after nearly 33 years in 2014, when he joined CA Technologies. He continues: “This is kind of how I was raised—to be a little accepting of things coming my way, because there would always be opportunity associated with them.” –Jack Sweeney Sign up for our Newsletter

Had Martin Nolan studied engineering instead of accounting, his career path would likely never have entered the worlds of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, and Michael Jackson. Still, Irish-born Nolan is quick to point out that it was a Green Card lottery, not his accounting degree, that facilitated his relocation to New York City, where he would meet and ultimately team up with Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions, the world’s leading entertainment auction house. Before the two men met, Nolan had traveled a remarkable distance from his early days in New York, where in the early 1990s—Green Card in hand—he had landed a job working at the front desk of the New York Hilton. In the years that followed, the determined Irishman had networked his way up into a string of Wall Street jobs, where he found success as a stock broker and investment advisor at such firms as JP Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch. “Darren was doing a Johnny Cash auction when I met him—he was a marketing guy who needed a finance guy, so I joined him,” explains Nolan, who met Julien in 2004 and the following year signed on with the auction house as CFO. By 2010 Nolan had become an equal partner in the business. “When I resigned from Merrill Lynch in 2005 and told my colleagues that I was joining Julien’s Auctions, there were looks of dismay—they would say: ‘Why auctions? It’s such a different business. It’s so risky …,’” says Nolan, who pointed out to his colleagues that the buying and selling on the floor of the stock exchange was no different than what takes place inside an auction hall. Fifteen years later, he continues to wield a healthy appetite for risk, a prerequisite for any CFO daring enough to enter the ebb-and-flow of the auction business. For Nolan, the risks are best hedged by using a mix of financial best practices and good humor. Says Nolan: “Darren wakes up in the morning and checks Google and asks: ‘Are we in the news?’ I wake up and check the bank accounts and ask: ‘Are we still in business?’” However, there’s one risk that Nolan may fear more than any other: that a finance career hatched by a lottery win could put Wall Street in its rearview and still someday be deemed as ordinary. – Jack Sweeney

It’s a familiar sequence: A strong-minded investor musters the will to lead and steps into the CEO office determined to revitalize a struggling technology company and put it back on the growth track. For Bill Adams, this swift turn of events occurred only a year into his first industry stint as a corporate controller—a career chapter, he recalls fondly, that included a devoted CFO mentor. However, the company’s CFO and CEO had exited the firm just prior the investor’s arrival, and Adams found himself stepping into a finance leadership role. Although stressful, the circumstances swung open the door for Adams to not only oversee the finance function but also have the opportunity to play a more strategic role in the business. In short, he would now be in lockstep with the new CEO as they together championed the latter’s strategic vision that would upend the tech company’s growing focus on software revenue and double down on hardware sales. Or so the CEO believed. “The challenge that I faced was that I didn’t agree with him,” explains Adams, whose in-depth knowledge of the business made him quietly question the new CEO’s big bet on hardware. “The company was full-steam-ahead focusing on software and system development, and the hardware part had already become secondary,” adds Adams, who says that his broadened responsibilities within the company allowed him to reach out to different stakeholders and bring back “suggestions” to the CEO. “Being able to talk to customers was extremely enlightening in terms of how to steer the company in the direction that it needed to go,” comments Adams, who says that at the time the company counted Boeing and General Dynamics among its largest customers. According to Adams, the company’s strategy would continue to evolve as it lessened its hardware orientation and came to enjoy newfound success. Even today, as Adams reflects on the circumstances that first advanced him into a CFO role, his sense of apprehension and excitement lingers: “I was not yet 30 years old when I was thrust into the CFO role at a public company, not really knowing where I was going or what I was doing.” –Jack Sweeney

When Adrian Talbot tells us that he parachuted into Thames Television in the early 1990s, the image of the London skyline—once used to brand the popular British broadcasting company —quickly comes to mind. Suddenly, in our mind’s eye, just to the right of St. Paul’s dome, we spy a 20-something-year-old Talbot floating confidently downward. Along with a boatload of first-class metaphors, this is the type of instant imaging that every conversation renders—at least for those of us on the lookout for them. But Talbot’s successful first jump—not unlike those of many future finance leaders—came about with a degree of serendipity. “The lead auditor became sick—I was parachuted in for 2 years, and this gave me an early taste of media,” explains Talbot, who at the time was an auditor for BDO. Several internal auditing roles followed, including one with Hilton International that required a good deal of travel in order to complete audits in different parts of the world. “When you have chased the financial controller for the Caracas Hilton around the airport with a sheet of accruals or when the general manager of the Nairobi Hilton is yelling at you for telling him that he made a mess of a capex project, it is rather character-building,” comments Talbot, who soon jumped back into the media realm with United Business Media, where he would serve as a finance director for the company’s television broadcasting properties before entering the global communications sphere as a finance director for Burson Marsteller. Talbot reports that years later, when he was recruited to be CFO of Hotwire, a fast-growing global communications firm, he found a unique match—not because of his years inside media and communications but because of Hotwire’s global CEO, Barbara Bates. Bates had sold a communications company that she had spent 25 years building to Hotwire in 2016 and gone on to be named Hotwire’s Global CEO. “I was able to help her with my experience around the globe, and she was able to help me with her experience inside the USA,” says Talbot, who today credits Bates with helping him to safely land inside a finance leadership opportunity. - Jack Sweeney

Bendetti: I'm trying to steal that great quote from Warren Buffet, "I'm trying to be greedy while others are fearful." And I'm trying to grow. And if you're an existing organization with a big overhead, wow, you're retreating. You are worried about how you're going to continue if you're a 501C6, you're not eligible for the PPP loans. They're in a period of retrenchment, these other professional associations. I have no costs. I'm lean by design. I have a job. This is my nights and weekend gig. So everything I do is easy and lean. And so I have no costs. And so I'm trying to grow, I'm trying to be greedy while others are fearful and expand this thing. While I can't meet anywhere physically, so I can grow virtually.

Just as Michelle McComb was imagining that she would shortly be joining another Silicon Valley start-up as a finance leader, the CFO of Lucent Technologies helped to upend her plans. Back in the early 2000s, McComb’s first CFO tour of duty was coming to an end with the successful sale of her company to a larger, publicly held software firm. However, within a matter of months, the buyer was itself acquired by the giant telecommunications player, and Lucent’s CFO offered up a question to McComb: “What would it take to keep you?” The coveted query is one that career builders long to hear but don’t always answer in rational ways. “I packed my bags and moved to England, where I became CFO of one of Lucent’s major divisions,” she explains, leaving little doubt that her answer had landed well. “I received tremendous international exposure as I traveled extensively and got to deal with finance people with very diverse backgrounds,” says McComb, who worked abroad 5 years before returning to the U.S., where, over time, she has occupied the CFO office for a string of technology companies. The latest is Bluecore, a marketing technology firm that she joined in May of 2020. Of course, in light of the pandemic, it’s safe to say that Bluecore will likely be a career chapter unlike any that have preceded it, and, not unlike her CFO peers, McComb finds herself now being drawn to the mix of financial and cultural levers that influence Bluecore’s workforce. “I think that the people strategy—especially as we come through environments like COVID—is going to be extremely important to ensuring how we retain and hire the right talent, especially when it comes to remote. What does the new office environment look like?,” comments McComb, who begins voicing a series of questions: “What is our compensation philosophy today? Are we competitive? Are we a merit-based company?” It’s just such questions that in the wake of pandemic make McComb—perhaps more than some other CFOs—better prepared to land on the right answer. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: What are your priorities as a finance leader as we go forward? McComb: I think it's super important that you have a solid foundation. So for me, I got to make sure that that foundation of my GL's accurate. I can close the books in a timely way. And make certain I have got audited financial statements. Those are super important. But as a finance leader, you're not going to get credit for them. So make them happen, get them done, and then it's important to move on to other things. And so for me, looking over the next 12 months, especially in light of COVID, I think it's paying attention to the capital strategy. So around cash management investment, what do we need to look at? ... Should we look at acquiring a company or other companies? What do we want to do with our investments in our cash strategy? So that's one side. I'm going to add to that because I think a lot of times CFOs do tend to look at capital as cash. I'm one of those CFOs who look at people as a huge asset. I also look after the people function at Bluecore and I think the people strategy, especially coming through environments like COVID, is going to be extremely important of ensuring to retain, hire the right talent, and especially of looking at remote. What is the new office environment look like? And then the last thing that I would say that I'm looking at is all around the other keyword that I mentioned to you earlier, around data. I think data is going to be absolutely essential in helping the company transform strategically. The decisions it's going to make, the avenues it's going to take supporting its customers. So it's really double clicking down on the data side of things. And the analytics because it's not just about data. What is the data telling us? What changes do we need to make? What's the story being told? And I think it's just going to become increasingly important to help get the company to the next spot in its journey.

There’s little question that 2020 will long be remembered as a year of crisis for the casino industry. Commercial gaming revenues in the U.S. were down 79 percent during the second quarter when compared to Q2 2019, a fact that made IAC/Interactive’s August announcement that it was purchasing 12 percent of hospitality and gambling giant MGM all the more headline-grabbing. “We think we found a once-in-a-decade opportunity to find a meaningful position in an iconic brand,” explains IAC/InterActive CFO Glenn Schiffman, who says IAC’s balance sheet remains flush with cash (more than $3 billion) after the recent spinoff of online dating site Match.com. “We believe that Las Vegas will come roaring back, and this comes back to how IAC likes to invest: We like massive addressable markets with tailwinds from offline to online, and that’s what we see with gaming,” says Schiffman, who is no stranger to industries in crisis. Back in September of 2008, Schiffman was head of investment banking for Lehman Brothers’ Asia-Pacific business when the firm filed for bankruptcy due to its part in the subprime mortgage crash. Schiffman, along with other top Lehman partners, helped to manage the sale of Lehman’s Asian business to Nomura Securities. “In times of crisis, you have to separate the urgent from the important because in a crisis everything appears urgent but not everything is important,” explains Schiffman, who says that he learned just how important being able to separate the two was when the clock was ticking in the wake of the Lehman bankruptcy and his team was seeking a resolution that would best serve Lehman’s Asia workforce. (Episode 440) “We saved every single job in Asia—and that was 3,000 jobs, including my own,” comments Schiffman, who adds that the Lehman bankruptcy, among other things, revealed how during a time of crisis an individual’s character becomes more evident. “Crisis doesn’t define character, crisis reveals character,” says Schiffman, who, after joining Nomura, went on to help establish and build the bank’s North American investment banking division. –Jack Sweeney

More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees. The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations.

Back in the late 1980s, Mike Brower’s list of audit clients included a roster of oil and gas companies as well a local university and a number of different state and local government entities. It was the type of client list that any accountant based in and around Cheyenne, Wyoming, might covet, a fact made all the more undeniable by having Taco John’s International top the list. A restaurant franchisor with over 450 restaurants nationwide, Taco John’s first began serving local Cheyenne customers in the 1960s, before expanding rapidly across the Plains and upper Midwest as it outfitted franchisees in small towns rather than big city locations. “They just popped up everywhere, and I sort of had an insider’s view,” says Brower, who joined the Taco John’s finance team in 1990 after having given notice to the Cheyenne office of McGladrey & Pullen. For the next 6 years, Brower’s responsibilities intersected with every aspect of Taco John’s accounting and reporting function, eventually landing him in the controller’s office, where he oversaw the company’s financial statements as well as those of the 30 company-owned restaurants. However, as time passed, Brower began evaluating other local opportunities and came upon an advertisement in the Sunday newspaper seeking CFO candidates. “It was a blind ad, but you have to remember that this is Wyoming and everyone in the local business community sort of knows everyone, so I called the guys up and said ‘Hey, I’d be perfect for you,’” explains Brower, who notes that the ad was placed by a fast-growing insurance company owned by two local businessmen who had in fact underwritten policies for Taco John’s. “I told them that I’d love to talk with them about the job, but they were like, ‘Well, we don’t want to lose the Taco John’s account,’ so I said, ‘Look, Barry isn’t going to take the account away just because you took his controller,’” said Brower, while mentioning his former boss who at the time was Taco John’s CFO. Brower got the job and became CFO of the insurance brokerage, which in short order began talks to acquire two Midwest insurance brokers. The insurance firm’s appetite for M&A deal-making gave Brower a new set of experiences that injected some excitement into his first CFO role that even today he looks back upon and savors. –Jack Sweeney

Back in 2015, Katie Rooney was only 7 months into her first industry CFO role at Aon when her boss asked her to exit the office. “He came into my office on November 1 and said, ‘I’m retiring, and I want you to take on my role. I’m leaving in 8 weeks,’” recalls Rooney, who says that the news triggered a mix of surprise and fear, which she recalls outwardly expressing with the words “Oh, my God!” Her boss quickly sought to ease her concerns. “He said: ‘You know what? It will be the best thing for you. If I stick around, you will never get the credit from the team,” explains Rooney, who subsequently swapped her CFO business unit responsibilities for her boss’s broader, divisional-level CFO portfolio. Looking back, Rooney confides that she expected to someday to fill her boss’s shoes, but perhaps in 2017 or 2018—and certainly not in 2015. For her, though, the timing would turn out to be most fortuitous. In early 2017, 13 months after she had officially taken on her boss’s role, Aon announced plans to sell its employee benefits outsourcing business to private equity firm Blackstone Group as part of a “carve out” strategy that eventually rebranded the stand-alone business as Alight Solutions. “We called ourselves a $2.3 billion startup,” remembers Rooney, who says that she now realizes how her boss’s decision to step aside in late 2015 ensured her inclusion in the early round of discussions that ultimately led to a deal with Blackstone and her subsequent appointment as CFO of Alight Solutions. “We kind of had this moment when we said, ‘The capital structure and some of the margin components just don’t fit with the larger business,’ so we started thinking about carving the business out,” responds Rooney, when asked to recall the moment of insight that may have helped to hatch Alight Solutions. –Jack Sweeney Rooney: As I think about the next 12 months, we have to execute on the strategy we've now brought together. We are at this incredible place in time where our business is uniquely positioned to help solve the needs of our clients and their employees. We can help drive down the total cost of the workforce. We can try to drive and improve health outcomes. And as we think about the financial stresses created by the pandemic, thinking about overall financial wellbeing, there's so much opportunity here, and we've pulled the strategy together, and as I mentioned, I think we've built the right KPIs around it. We're now working on building out a detailed operating plan that will hold us accountable day over day around executing against this, because its about driving more value. We're taking an outcome based approach. We're leading with technology and really looking at everything, but we now have to hold ourselves accountable day over day to execute against that. And I think finance plays an incredibly important role there as we think about how we develop the operating plan to get all of our leaders, all of our businesses, aligned around what's required to drive that forward. So that's really where we're focused here over the next couple of months.

It’s not uncommon for career-building executives inside the finance realm to obtain an MBA in order to pivot their careers in a new direction. Such was the case for Sachin Patel, who after finding some early success as a systems engineer at IBM Corp. began to study the path before him more closely. “One of the things that you don’t very often get to do as an engineer is to articulate what you did by using the written word or even verbally. Just having this not be a feature of the job was something that began to be evident to me,” says Patel, who as the years passed found the laconic nature of engineering to be in direct conflict with his growing desire to play a more active role in shaping and influencing business strategy. “I looked at two areas—investment banking and strategy consulting—and began pursuing both, which probably wasn’t the best approach from a time management standpoint,” explains Patel, who says that ultimately the numbers—or, as he describes it, “the common wiring between engineering and finance”—drew him toward the world of finance. With an MBA in hand, Patel joined Citigroup and set about developing the relationships and industry insights required to succeed in the investment banking realm, until one day—roughly 4 years after his carefully executed career pivot—he received a call from a friend and business school classmate with a job opportunity. In short order, Patel was accepting a director of finance role with Vantage Oncology, a network of cancer centers and supporting physicians that was quickly expanding across the country. Over the next 4 years, Patel would build and lead Vantage’s FP&A team as he advanced from controller to the CFO office, where in 2016 he ultimately helped to sell the company to McKesson Corporation for $1.2 billion. Looking back, Patel credits his years at Vantage for providing him with consecutive opportunities to prove himself as he climbed steadily upward. Still, he makes clear that his success there was not always obvious. In fact, even before he accepted the position, he needed to confront a potential obstacle that surprisingly had little to do with strategy or Vantage’s financial footing. “An interesting wrinkle was that I reported to the business school classmate who recruited me,” explains Patel, who at first mentions his classmate to highlight the added rewards of having returned to business school but is compelled to emphasize the added complexity of such a relationship. “It was good that we had the baseline of a friendship, but sometimes this can lead to a little more ruffling,” he says, before giving kudos to his classmate as well as to Vantage’s management team for creating an environment where the two friends could both succeed. –Jack Sweeney Patel: We developed an in-house pricing tool for each of our solutions that we offer. And so based on our experience out of what the different components of the expense were, whether it's human time from the operations team, over to cloud expense that I mentioned, anything else that all gets folded into there, I should say, and then we can set the pricing based on that. And this tool allows them to check each of their contracts, or as they're negotiating they can check those margins using that tool. Ultimately, that goes to our chief growth officer who oversees that, and then if we need to make any additional decisions around that, we meet as a group. But it's become part of the practice, and I think they were actually looking for that being that we are developing new solutions. You're not entirely sure how we should price those in the market when it's a new solution. Many times there's a lot of puts and takes there that you have to consider. And so early on it was a very much live discussion, but now it's part of the standard process, and very much something we follow. We were guarded about that margin profile. We were very particular about it. And then we realized that there's many other components to our numbers that we can manage better to free up those dollars to win more business. And what we were able to do is understand that from a valuation perspective, moving from X to 1.1 X margin may not be as important to us as having higher revenue growth. So let's orient around that. Let's take the additional dollars we have and maybe give a little here, invest a little there, and make sure that we're driving that top line growth. Because ultimately there's a finite universe of health plans and provider groups after which the sales team can go. But once you're in there, the opportunity to sell more is really where the sizzle is. And so it's important to sort of win the day, and that became something that the management team, ranging from operations and engineering over to obviously sales and marketing, everyone could coalesce.

“It’s not cheap to go public,” concedes CFO Steve Cakebread, echoing the oft-repeated refrain that founders and CFOs confront when considering the prospect of selling shares in their companies to the public. Concessions aside, it will come as little surprise to Wall Street and private investors alike that Cakebread—a seasoned finance leader who has taken public such companies as Salesforce, Pandora, and his latest firm, Yext—has come not to bury IPOs, but to praise them. And 2020 might be the year when founders and CEOs are prepared to listen. Certainly, few of Cakebread’s CFO admirers are likely to question the finance leader’s keen sense of timing. In fact, more than a few will likely be making room on their bedside tables for Cakebread’s soon-to-be-released The IPO Playbook: An Insider’s Perspective on Taking Your Company Public and How to Do It Right (Silicon Valley Press, 2020). “With all of the macroeconomic and pandemic issues going on, there have been as many—if not more—IPOs through August than there have ever been in the past couple of years,” says Cakebread, signaling an optimistic note for U.S.-listed publicly held companies, which have seen their numbers cut in half over the past two decades. The coronavirus, it turns out, might in part be the antidote for Wall Street’s IPO blues. As COVID-19 spread, many companies made greater operational discipline and efficiency top-of-mind, which in turn led to the adoption of governance practices more commonly used by publicly held companies. What’s more, they began doubling down on culture, a trend that has prompted IPO-minded founders to more thoughtfully expose the connective tissue between public ownership and social responsibility. “Most founders want to create opportunity both for themselves and for the people around them, and this happens only when you go public,” explains Cakebread, who notes that the social responsibility aspects of going public were a big incentive for each of the companies that he took public, including Salesforce, where he and CEO Marc Benioff identified a number of benefits. “Marc and I talked about it a lot before we took Salesforce public. The discipline of going public makes your organizational governance better. It makes companies more socially responsible, and this was a big item for him and for me. It grows careers and spins off other technology companies,” continues Cakebread, who joined Salesforce as employee #67, when the $17 billion company was eking out a quaint $20 million annually. According to Cakebread, public firms operate with a certain rigor that privately held firms struggle to match—and VC-backed and private equity–owned firms can at times miss the big picture. Notes Cakebread: “I actually find it tougher to work with VC boards because all they care about is the numbers. They don't care about the opportunity so much.” To Cakebread, the IPO process is important because it allows CFOs to realize their role as visionary storytellers with the ability to articulate a narrative that educates others about where the business is headed and what opportunities are being pursued. “You’re always going to have one number out of whack every quarter, but if the sell-side research people understand the underlying story, they can teach the longer vision to their investors and say, ‘This is an upsy-downsy quarter, but long-term, this business is intact,’” he observes. Asked how diminished listings of U.S. public companies have likely impacted industry over time, Cakebread points to the dynamics of wealth creation. “This has meant less access for most of us, and I think that this is helping to create this disparity between people who are very wealthy and people who aren't because they can’t get access to the market,” says Cakebread. “This is a challenging topic for a lot of people, but I personally believe that access is important because wealth distribution happens when employees and other investors get to participate,” asserts Cakebread, who believes that a new generation of investors is quickly emerging. “The retail investor is realizing that there’s opportunity and getting back into the stock market, and this next generation is starting to recognize the public market as a way to create wealth,” continues Cakebread, who cautions IPO-minded CFOs not to become too besotted by numbers. Concludes Cakebread: “What I have found in my career is that science and numbers are important, but you need a little bit of art to make a really successful bottle of wine or a really successful company.” CFOTL: For many CFOs - the IPO process is challenging in terms of communications. Cakebread: That's a good part of it. I mean, you have to be able to one, love your business, have a passion around it, explain it to third parties that may not have a good idea of what you're doing. The IR function is really critical. The good news is, there's a number of very capable IR firms that can help you get through that early stage of communication. Not th

Jamie Samuels still recalls some of the raised eyebrows that he saw after having completed in short order both the verbal and written portions of an exam that his future employer administered to job applicants. Not unlike most of his fellow applicants, Samuels had been invited to take the exam after responding to a newspaper advertisement, but, unlike his peers, he had been the only foreign applicant—or, more important, the only foreign applicant able to complete both portions of the exam in fluent Chinese. “At that time, my written Chinese was very good because I had only recently completed my senior thesis,” explains Samuels, who first became immersed in the Mandarin-speaking world in the early 1990s when at 18 years of age he spent 12 months in China in a gap year before returning to the U.S. and entering college as a Chinese language major. “Language is a tool to go do something else, so I spent a lot of my early career in trying to figure out just what that ‘something else’ was,” remembers Samuels, whose stellar exam performance earned him a junior sales rep position with a Taiwanese medical device company. “While I was good at sales, I discovered that it wasn’t for me—it was too much of an emotional roller coaster,” observes Samuels, who would remain in Taiwan but change companies as he migrated from sales into a corporate development role. The job switch was enlightening. Says Samuels: “It taught me that my financial toolbox was lacking. My response was to get myself into the most quant-oriented MBA program that I could.” Samuels returned stateside and nabbed a Wharton MBA before being recruited by Johnson & Johnson to fill a CFO role at a small Taiwanese operating company. “They don’t give CFO roles to fresh MBA grads for nothing. They had an operating company that was in a little bit of trouble in Taiwan, or so I figured out after starting the job,” confesses Samuels, whose career with J&J would last more than 10 years and span a variety of senior finance positions in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Next, Samuels stepped into a CFO role for a privately owned manufacturer of air compressors. Based in Taiwan, the company operated six plants in the United States and Europe. Finally, with more than 20 years abroad behind him, Samuels began considering CFO career opportunities back in the United States. “When you spend as much time as I did in the Far East, you risk getting pigeonholed,” says Samuels, who, as CFO of EXUMA Biotech, may have finally figured out what that “something else” is. Headquartered in West Palm Beach, Fla., EXUMA produces cancer-fighting therapies largely developed at research facilities in Shanghai and Shenzhen, China—a strategic advantage that Samuels seems uniquely experienced to leverage. - Jack Sweeney Signup for our newsletter

Back in the early 2000s, Catherine Birkett found herself being pulled into confidential meetings where her company’s senior management was discussing restructuring plans with the company’s largest investor. The company—a fiber optics telecom firm known as Interoute—was not yet 6 years old, but its days appeared to be numbered as the company sought to weather the telecom industry’s historic collapse. As Interoute’s top FP&A executive, Birkett knew from the ongoing business plan’s numbers that massive changes were urgently needed, and she as well as others were not optimistic about the restructuring options available to the company. In fact, Birkett recalls, she and many executives had to tamp down the feeling that “this was not going to end well.” From a career perspective, Birkett arguably had less at risk than the other more senior executives sitting ringside during the restructuring discussions. Not yet 30 years of age, she joined the discussions knowing perhaps that other more gainful career opportunities were available to her outside Interoute’s four walls. Nonetheless, she had been given a seat at the meetings out of recognition of not just her ability to recite numbers but also her grasp of the intellectual property that governed the numbers. “I owned the business plan,” Birkett explains. In the end, the company’s multiyear restructuring allowed Interoute to find a new path to growth while operating under a new management team—one that included the 32-year-old Birkett as CFO. “I was thrown into the deep end as a finance leader—I basically had to learn on the job,” recalls Birkett, who entered Interoute’s CFO office in 2003 and went on to serve in the role for the next 15 years. “We managed to transform the company,” says Birkett. Along the way, Interoute marched in step with a new private equity firm owner and closed a string acquisitions. Ultimately, the company was sold to GTT Communications in 2018 for $2.3 billion. “Being promoted so young, I definitely made mistakes,” admits Birkett, who credits her CEO and other members of senior management for standing behind her as she ran at breakneck speed to acquire the skills necessary to manage a quickly expanding finance team. –Jack Sweeney

It's the type of business restructuring capable of striking envy in the hearts of many a company board member—and particularly those known to favor one oft-repeated bit of business wisdom: Never waste a recession. At food ingredient maker Ingredion, where the recession’s bite is directly linked to the eating habits of consumers, a 2-year-old restructuring strategy dubbed “Cost Smart” has begun to deliver on its cost savings promises. In fact, last month, the maker of sweeteners and starches announced plans to increase its Cost Smart run-rate savings target from $150M annually to $170M—a $20M uptick that led certain analysts to believe now might be the right time for the food giant to step on Cost Smart’s accelerator. Not so fast, says Ingredion CFO Jim Gray, who reports that he already likes what he’s seeing in Ingredion’s rearview mirror. The opportunity around remote work environments and online collaboration has accelerated toward us,” observes Gray, who over the past 2 years has replaced the dated architecture of Ingredion’s finance function with a new shared services model and a mandate for greater online collaboration. The restructuring involved the relocation of 107 finance and accounting employees to shared services location in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Guadalajara, Mexico. The movement of this part of Ingredion’s workforce is expected to be followed by that of a number of other functional areas within the company. “This was not about lowering head count—it is about holistically redesigning processes to have a lasting impact on cost,” says Gray, who last month—along with Ingredion CEO Jim Zallie—briefed investors and analysts on COVID-19’s impact on the business. After having experienced a significant drop in demand for different ingredients in April and May, advised Zallie, the company had seen “sequential improvements” in June and July as shelter-in-place restrictions had eased. These improvements were more than likely first detected by a member of Gray’s finance team, which had been working to better expose how the pandemic is altering the buying patterns of Ingredion customers. “With the pandemic, there has been a change in consumer behavior that’s impacting the pull of our customer products. Then you also have the effects of a recession, in which there is less personal income, so this changes how they shop in grocery stores and how often they dine out,” comments Gray, who credits the company’s widening use of technology for helping to track and monitor customer activities.

The son of two doctors, Tom Fencl recalls that while growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, to him a free market economy was more “an intellectual curiosity” than a possible career destination. “When the Berlin Wall came down, I was midway through high school—it was a very formative experience,” remembers Fencl, who says that the historic happening suddenly released “a market economy spirit.” After studying at Prague’s University of Economics, Fencl says, he was “drawn to the big financial centers” and worked in London for 2 years at Stern Stuart & Co. as a consultant before heading to the University of Michigan for an MBA. “From a university standpoint, the University of Michigan may not be the most obvious place for a European to go—but they found me more than I found them,” explains Fencl, who notes that years earlier in Prague he had met students from the University of Michigan who were involved in a study of post-communist economies. “They were virtually the first MBA students that I had ever met,” he observes. From Michigan, he went directly to New York and Wall Street, where roughly 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall Czech-born and -raised Fencl became an investment banker. “I worked as sort of a traditional investment banker, meaning that I covered everything from capital market transactions to M&As,” says Fencl, who worked for Salomon Smith Barney (later acquired by Citigroup) and Bank of America. “I left Wall Street just before the 2008 meltdown,” he reports. “That was some lucky timing. I moved back to my home country, the Czech Republic, with my newborn and my wife, and there I joined a private equity boutique,” explains Fencl, who over the next 10 years migrated from what he describes as “transaction-driven” finance roles to more traditional CFO posts. “I joined Pricefx in Prague—which was its largest office and where a lot of the banking office functions are,” says Fencl, who was named CFO of the company in 2017 and subsequently relocated with his family back to the U.S.—a market that Pricefx now views as a primary source of future growth. –Jack Sweeney Fencl: To remind your listeners, we're a SaaS company. So that is a subset of the industry where there's one metric above all, which is ARR, annual recurring revenue, and more specifically the growth of ARR. And then you rank companies based on where they are. For the past few years, we've been somewhere around 80% year over year. So that's a pretty decent clip. Now, you ask what did I change since I arrived? I didn't have to introduce that. They were told already by the very first investors, "You need to watch your ARR growth." The thing that I had to work on doing, and it is obviously a cultural shift, is understanding that particularly when you're using other people's money, where you're not regulated by, do I have the cash or not ... Now, you have a lot of cash, but the right question is how are you deploying it? How efficiently are you using that capital? So, the metric that I had to work and make sure that the organization understand is payback, customer acquisition cost payback. So understanding how the growth ... How much did I have to spend to get that growth? And that of course is something that then leads to further analysis because you break down the metrics into its components. And that's something where you can't just buy the growth, right? You have to have a certain level of patience. Well, for us, we mentioned before that we just finished fundraising. So we have plenty of cash to give us the, what they say, runway; meaning, we don't have to worry immediately on the short-term of funding the business. But conversely, we need to deploy that capital and, what we say, that's to scale up. And as I was saying before about it's not just growth, but how efficiently it grows. So I guess the biggest priority is make sure that we deployed efficiently, that we do achieve the growth, but we do it in a way that will satisfy sort of the requirements of the return on capital. And to do that, one of the key areas of our focus today is work with data. There's obviously a lot of data in the business, but not all of it is structured perfectly. And not all of it is organized in the right way. So we're currently spending a lot of effort on making sure that we clean that up and that we, going forward, make the decisions based on data. Data-driven decision-making is a big priority internally.

Members of Siemens USA’s finance team would probably not be surprised to learn that when their CFO, Marsha Smith, is asked to reveal the experiences that prepared her for a finance leadership role, the ones that she relates most often originate from being part of a team. Such was the case in 2004, when she had been assigned to a Siemens joint venture as a commercial project manager. “I’ll never forget: It was my first week on the job, and the project manager came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Marsha, we need to ask for a change order on this one, so write a letter to the customer,’” comments Smith, who recalls thinking at the time: “I know how to use spreadsheets, I perform calculations—but I don’t know how to word this letter.” Later, Smith says, she reached out for guidance from the technical team, followed by the legal team, before sitting down and writing a letter to the customer. Very often, the customer relationship would involve multiple partners and payment schemes, she explains. “This was the beginning of my external-facing experience,” comments Smith, who at different times during her career has found herself seated at conference tables flanked by dozens of customer executives and their attorneys. Says Smith: “I’ll never forget when at a certain meeting I asked a question and one of the managers asked: ‘And who are you?’” From her early customer-facing experiences on forward, Smith’s business mind-set has become largely influenced by teams. “Everybody has to work together because everybody has a piece of the puzzle and we must make sure that we’re collectively doing the right thing for the customer,” says Smith, who believes that teams can also help to bring clarity to each individual’s contribution. “You see who goes the extra mile,” she says. –Jack Sweeney SUBSCRIBE

The Berlin headquarters of software developer Contentful occupies an old brick warehouse with heavy metal doors and broad functional corridors and spaces native to its industrial past. Standing six stories high, the structure once accommodated its worker population with a miniature kitchen on every floor, a favorite employee perk perhaps first introduced by a coffee-loving tenant. Still, not everyone at Contentful loves coffee—or at least its CFO, Markus Harder, doesn’t. “My secret is that I hate coffee—I just don’t like it,” says Harder, who shortly after his arrival at the firm put in motion a mandate to remove the small kitchens. “It was arguably one of my biggest career gambles,” says Harder, as he captures our attention and leads us to wonder why a finance leader would make a point of championing such a seemingly misguided decree. Of course, Harder’s actions are only Part I of a two-part tale. The second part involves the creation of what he dubs “a central watering hole” complete with a coffee machine worthy of Berlin’s trendiest “third-wave” coffee shops. “With all of these floors and their little coffee machines, we were never seeing each other—we never talked to each other,” explains Harder, who reports that Contentful hired a champion barista for a 2-week period to teach every employee how to properly use the new machine to render an excellent coffee. Says Harder: “Whatever you want to drink—a coffee, a latte, an espresso—you’ll find that there’s always somebody there who has been to the training or someone in line who is ready to train somebody else.” According to Harder, skeptics of the original mandate have largely been won over, but outsiders still find the coffee-making arrangement hard to imagine. “Three hundred people, just one coffee machine—how does that work?” asks Harder, echoing the thoughts of coffee drinkers beyond Contentful’s four walls. “Well, actually, it works. And it’s about the line. It’s a social experience, and one that I celebrate each morning,” remarks Harder, who says that on any given morning he’ll spend a minimum of an hour at the café. Says Harder: “We’re all in the open. I’m available. Ask me something.” –Jack Sweeney Harder: We're in the fortunate, but also tricky situation that historically we've doubled or more than doubled revenue over basically every year of our history. And that brings challenges toward pipeline generation. Because if you want to double the revenue again, you need to have a massively bigger pipeline. So we are doing more with existing customers. Our existing customers have certain requirements that today we can't fulfill. So how do we get them to be successful in all those things they want to do? We have just relaunched our partner program. So oftentimes Contentful gets implemented through a large partner who is either specialized in building web presences, or building workflows for the customer without touching any internal user interfaces and so forth. So you can think of the Accenture's and Capgemini's of this world, or Razorfish or ... There are certain marketing agencies that use Contentful. So you were trying to work more with partners, enable them to be more educated with how to best implement Contentful. We're investing a lot in enablement and training and coaching. So the learning materials about Contentful are out there are heavily downloaded. We have a Contentful certification. So if you are a developer, you can actually graduate with a Contentful diploma. And we try to be industry agnostic, such that our solution really works for a broad variety of customers though. Yeah. So I continue to invest in the team. I continue to invest in automation and systems. I'm actually accelerating hiring at this point and I'm getting Contentful ready for being a public company in a couple of years. That is sort of a North star. That doesn't mean that we will go public, but a North star that I'm instilling in my team because the quality of financials, the quality of insights, the quality of processes I want to see us have is that of a public company. - Jack Sweeney SUBSCRIBE

It was a little over 40 years ago when Steve Young first joined what would become Duke Energy, the giant electric power holding company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Not only has it been a long tenure, but also it is the only post-college job that I’ve ever had,” says Young, who first roamed the energy giant’s corridors as a finance assistant. In the years that followed, Young says, he became involved in various finance-related projects as different executives sought him out because he had become recognized as a hard worker. One such senior executive, who sat inside Duke’s rates and regulatory affairs realm, approached Young about a staff position in the department. “It was a smaller group and outside of finance, but from what I could see, the group intersected with the lifeblood of the company’s profitability and revenue streams and pricing,” explains Young, who accepted the position and in short order acquired the regulatory executive as a dedicated mentor. Says Young: “This person was a tough, hardnosed executive who had a reputation for being that way.” Years later, when the executive retired, Young advanced to his mentor’s position, a promotion that firmly planted him inside Duke’s executive ranks. Along the way, Young’s regulatory focus and experience afforded him a keen sense of how the changing legal landscape would alter the industry in the years ahead. “I was pulled into that process,” recalls Young, who says that back in the mid-1990s, he enjoyed a ringside seat as Duke pursued and acquired one of its early M&A targets, PanEnergy. “Mergers were rare in the utility industry back then, and certain laws had to be repealed—they were, and other mergers have since occurred,” explains Young, who in the decades that followed influenced and championed a string of transactions that would reshape Duke’s business over time. “I found it a fascinating challenge to pull the pieces apart, put the new pieces back together, and come up with a cohesive business plan that was understandable to the SEC, regulators, and shareholders,” remarks Young, who would find himself at the center of Duke’s M&A activities in the mid-2000s, a period during which Duke sold off its international and merchant businesses and merged with energy company Cinergy of Cincinnati, OH. “All of this happened within 2 years,” says Young, who advanced into a number of organizational CFO roles during that period and was named senior vice president and controller for Duke Energy in 2006. He would be named CFO and executive vice president in 2013, following the energy company’s 2012 merger with Progress Energy—yet one more transaction along Young’s career path. – Jack Sweeney SUBSCRIBE

Among the more transformative chapters of Matt Briers’s finance career was his 3-year stint monitoring and forecasting margin performance inside Google’s UK operations. “The core role was really to understand what was happening in the organization from a revenue and margin performance perspective and then help to operate the organization so that it could better drive that revenue,” explains Briers, who says that his responsibilities included an unyielding effort to expose new drivers of Google revenue “even down to keyword searches.” “My role was to provide a hotline back to product in Mountain View,” says Briers, who notes that UK customers are known to be among the most advanced users of Google’s advertising offerings, outpacing users in the U.S. and other markets by as much as 3 years. The insights gleaned by Briers and his team would become an important strategic voice for both sales and finance at Google and allowed Briers to add an impressive FP&A chapter to a career that up until Google might have advanced in any number of directions. Still, his subsequent hire as CFO of TransferWise might have surprised certain finance career builders, given that Briers’s pre-Google career had largely involved consulting roles rather than traditional accounting or audit work. Today, Briers says, his consulting background has routinely informed his finance leadership as he helps TransferWise’s finance function to sharpen its customer focus and collaborate across the organization. Still, he admits that during his early days at TransferWise, his consulting past led him at times to too frequently focus on achieving “buy-in” across the organization. Eventually, he reports, “the two founders told me, ‘Stop trying to achieve consensus—make up your mind and get on with it!’” –Jack Sweeney Briers: In all my time in consulting, we spent a lot of time working with people driving mission statements, and I can't honestly tell you that I believed in it back then. But since joining TransferWise, it's kind of this slightly religious maniacal focus on mission, which runs deep, and it's pretty amazing. So my challenge is how do I help on this mission of pushing the product forward, such that we get faster, cheaper and easier, for a wide range of customers. The things I focus on: Are we growing? Are we getting new users? Are they putting volume through TransferWise? We know we're being used and we know we're useful if customers are engaged. ... But when I say volume, the amount of money people are sending across borders, I worry about those metrics. The second thing I worry about, is what's happening to price, so not just revenue, but price. Price times volume gives you revenue, but price isn't going down. Many CFOs might ask what is he talking about? Why does he worry about price and revenue going down? Surely you want to drive this up? Well, actually, no, because if we're going to be successful in the future, we know that we need to get cheaper over time. Because we believe it can be done and we believe it should be done and we can solve this problem of hidden fees. That's equal to $200 billion and it gets paid to banks. So I worry about price. - Jack Sweeney SUBSCRIBE

Jacqueline Purcell’s path to the CFO office began inside an Australian law firm where as a young attorney she was advising corporate clients and their bankers on how to best address some of the legal hurdles that their M&A deal-making might confront. At the time, her routine collaboration with different banking executives gave her a point of comparison to the seemingly less energetic legal world. “They seemed to be having a little more fun and a lot more impact on the outcomes,” she recalls. “This is what sparked my interest in moving into finance,” continues Purcell, who was soon headed to Stanford University for an MBA and then to New York, where she joined Morgan Stanley’s M&A practice. “I spent just over 8 years there focusing on a full spectrum of mergers and acquisitions transactions,” comments Purcell, who says that it was during those years of M&A deal-making that she grew to respect the CFO role and the executives who filled it. “CFOs were very often the ones in the driver’s seat for the deals, and they were just particularly influential,” notes Purcell, who realized that the CFOs across from whom she sat often applied deep operating experience to their decision-making. Determined to add an “operations” stripe to her sleeve, Purcell would exit Morgan Stanley in 2017 and return to Australia, where she would step into her first CFO role at Culture Amp, a workforce management company headquartered in Melbourne. – Jack Sweeney

Back in the early 1990s, Steven Springsteel nabbed an interview for a CFO role with a high-flying tech start-up. At the time, he was controller for Apple’s worldwide manufacturing operations, but the buzz surrounding the brash start-up intrigued him, and the young but accomplished executive shortly found himself waiting to be interviewed by the firm’s CEO. According to Springsteel, his interview aspirations quickly became somewhat tempered as he sat listening to a stream of expletives originating from the CEO’s office. Within minutes, the CEO’s door swung open and several long-faced engineers beat a hasty retreat, to be followed by a smiling and gracious Steve Jobs extending a hand to Springsteel. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you! Can I get you something to drink? Are you hungry?” Springsteel remembers the legendary tech innovator saying before explaining the role that he had in mind for the CFO of NeXT, Inc. Recalling the interview, Springsteel says that he felt that he had just met with “the nicest, most charismatic guy that you would ever meet in your life.” Of course, Springsteel had reason to doubt first impressions, having for a number of years worked at Apple, where stories circulating about Jobs’s darker side were plentiful. What’s more, a book titled Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing (Scribner, 1993) had only recently been published, and Springsteel had made a point of reading it prior to his interview. According to Springsteel, the text relates the experience of an Apple employee who was hired by a very gracious Jobs only to experience his darker side a short time after joining the company. Springsteel says that Jobs’s evil twin was only one of several issues that led him to look for CFO roles elsewhere. In the end, he says, “I just didn’t believe in the business model.” –Jack Sweeney Springsteel: First, let me start off by saying that with every management role that I take there are four key operating principles that I run by, and I explain those to the team right upfront. The first operating principle is, never say no without giving options. It's very easy, particularly in G&A roles, when someone comes to you with a proposal to say, "Well, you can't do that. "Sorry, Jack. I know you want to spend that money or structure the deal that way. We just can't do that." But you're not adding value when you do that. But, if you can now have that conversation with Jack, understand what's the business result he's trying to achieve, work with him on developing options, now you're adding value. So the first principle that I sell is, never say no without giving options. The second principle that I sell is, think in terms of the business. When someone comes and says, "Well, what happened that our expenses went up last quarter?" Let's say I have an answer of "Well, we had a large accrual for compensation." Well, that doesn't tell you anything. Give the business reason behind everything. Look behind the numbers to articulate the story of what happened that answers their question. The next two are open communication. My staff, we're going 200 miles an hour, but everybody knows what the other people, the other groups within my organization, are always doing. That helps because then you can leverage. And then very often, somebody will hear something that sales is thinking about a promotion that affects maybe some other groups within my team that they didn't know about it, and so that open communication is key. Then the last thing is, no surprises. Bad news does not get better with age. Let's get it out upfront. We don't like surprises. Give me an early head's up on things, and if I have an early head's up, then I can help you. Or other people on the team can help you get past this, and all of a sudden, what was the negative we can turn into a positive. So, I start off with those four key operating principles.

It was the type of role that any recent business school graduate could envy—not because of the position’s title (Chief of Staff) or how much it paid, but because of its proximity to management decision-making. The job is one that Bennett Theimann remembers well as he looks back on the days when he served as chief of staff for the president of Gruner + Jahr’s German magazine division. “It exposed me to that sort of very-high-level strategic thinking. We launched magazines, we sold magazines, we bought magazines,” says Theimann, who very often found himself finalizing some of the documents that Gruner + Jahr management ultimately used to brief its board. “My job was to help senior management translate their investment proposals, budget requests, or whatever they needed to get done, and very often they needed money,” explains Theimann, who adds that while the position was not officially a finance one, this early experience of being a “business case builder” later helped to propel him into a number of FP&A and senior business development roles. Theimann, who would step into his first CFO role in 2005, has now occupied the CFO office for several early-stage companies, the latest being Applicaster, a SaaS developer specializing in app development and content distribution. –Jack Sweeney