CFO THOUGHT LEADER

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

It’s a story that Matt Hagel likes to share as he networks with fellow finance executives and accounting types. Back in 2017—only days after stepping into a finance leadership role at the online prepared meals company Freshly—Hagel was reviewing the company’s chart of accounts when he asked himself: “Why is Plant, Property, and Equipment (PPE) under Operating Expenses?” As he soon learned, this stalwart accounting acronym has long led a double life and is also used by various industries (notably healthcare and food prep) as a shorthand designation for Personal Protective Equipment. Three years later, the protective gear acronym is widely known from coast to coast—just like Freshly. In fact, since its PPE entry first drew Hagel’s consternation, Freshly has opened an East Coast kitchen and distribution center, an expansion that extended the firm’s geographic reach from 28 to 48 states and propelled its sales to nearly 10 times their early 2017 volumes. “I inherited a finance and accounting team of three, and now I have a team of 30,” comments Hagel, who located many of his new finance and accounting hires at the company’s three distribution centers, the newest of which opened in Arizona this past April. “From a cost accounting perspective, we have feet on the ground, so if any issues arise, our folks can quickly step onto the plant floor and determine the correct inventory number or provide whatever other information is needed,” says Hagel, who entered 2020 keen to sharpen his team’s focus on costs after years of marshaling resources and new plant capacity to accommodate growth. Then COVID arrived. There’s little doubt that the pandemic has been an accelerant on the trend of consumers turning to online for shopping experiences like Freshly that promise safety as well as convenience. (Such was the case for online car seller Vroom, which after record sales in March and April moved quickly to go public in June.) It’s enough to make you wonder whether Freshly management may be of a similar frame of mind. Reports Hagel: "Freshly is focused on building the best company possible, one that will be ready for the public markets or remain as a successful private company." Perhaps momentarily escaping Hagel’s lines of sight is yet another option whereby Freshly is acquired by a giant inside the packaged goods space. Certainly, Hagel doesn’t have to look far when you consider that Nestlé is one of Freshly’s largest investors. To be sure, Nestlé’s move to acquire a minority interest in Freshly back in 2017 was somewhat out of character for the food giant that is generally known to swallow its quarry whole. At that time, Nestle was the lead investor in a $77 million round of funding. Just as the pandemic has accelerated the shift to online buying, so too has it appeared to draw Freshly and its big name investor ever more close. “This has been open-office at both ends. We have had a really good dialog that has helped us both to be successful,” comments Hagel. Back in March, Freshly engaged with Nestlé’s human resources team as it formulated its COVID response, which Hagel credits with having helped Freshly to avoid the mistakes made by other food industry players. For one thing, Freshly hired a number of health professionals to begin taking employee temperatures at every shift across its different locations. “The words ‘essential services’ weren’t even a term on March 9, and there was no way of knowing whether we would be shut down,” explains Hagel, who says that in the event of a state “lockdown,” Freshly has prepared printed laminated forms for each employee to use that would confirm their employment at Freshly. As the pandemic bore down on different U.S. geographies, Freshly issued a press release announcing that Freshly and Nestle would jointly be donating $500,000 to Meals on Wheels America. “What happened back in March was that there was a period of a few weeks when we had no new customers because there was so much demand by people who were already using our service,” explains Hagel, who adds that shelter-in-place ordinances quickly turned dinner clients into lunchtime customers. “People just needed more meals, and this transition to be more of a lunch solution is something that we never would have imagined happening this quickly,” Hagel observes. Sign Up for Our Newsletter

Inder Singh started off his professional life as an engineer, only to learn that the large engineering projects that he aspired to someday lead often faced as many financial obstacles as they did engineering challenges. So, Singh says, he went back to school and earned an MBA in finance, allowing him to redirect his career down a path populated with unique and imaginative financing deals to support engineering feats as well as business transformations. One of the more innovative financing projects that Singh has helped to champion came along in the 1990s, when he was working as a business development executive for AT&T Corp. It seems that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was looking to upgrade its telecommunications infrastructure—to the tune of $4 billion. “Other companies were just offering typical bank financing. In our case, we said, ‘Let’s do an oil barter agreement,’” explains Singh, who says that the proposal involved having Saudi Arabia supply $4 billion of oil to Chevron Corp., which then would pay $4 billion in cash to AT&T, which then would build Saudi Arabia a $4 billion telecommunications network. “If you just think outside the box a little bit, bring your engineering skills, and bring some financial skills and common sense, you’ll see what makes sense for three different parties. And guess what? We actually won the deal,” comments Singh, who notes that the fact that Saudi Arabia may not have demanded such an imaginative financing solution is not important. Says Singh: “The fact that we put it on the table made us stand apart.” And so it goes for Inder Singh, whose imaginative approach to financing deals over the years has routinely set him apart from his finance leadership peers. –Jack Sweeney

At the start of his finance career, Mark Sargent says, he could not picture himself working for a large, big-name corporation. He says that he was drawn instead to smaller companies, which he believed would be more accepting of “creative types” or those employees more prone to self-expression. In Sargent’s case, an accounting and finance job was Plan B, or a “safety” occupation in case his aspirations to become a rock musician didn’t pan out. Interestingly, it was Sargent’s deliberate avoidance of big business that undoubtedly allowed him to quickly garner some of the experiences that finance career builders long to add to their resumes. “The very first job that I got was really a perfect fit: It was a small paper-making company, and I quickly learned that they were 9 months away from an IPO,” recalls Sargent, who was hired as a cost accountant but quickly found himself reassigned to oversee the implementation of a new accounting system intended to add some muscle to the company’s post-IPO reporting regimen. This was the type of early career experience that later helped Sargent to open the door to more senior finance and accounting roles, such as the operations controller role he took on at Spectrian, a Sunnyvale, Calif., technology company. After years of serving government and aerospace industry customers, Spectrian, in the mid-1990s, moved to supply its cellular technology offerings to commercial customers in light of the growing infrastructure opportunities driven by cellular phone usage. Not unlike in Sargent’s first career chapter, Spectrian went public within months of his arrival, increasing the demand for improved visibility into the numbers and challenging the finance team to routinely produce metrics that could help management to better set performance expectations. “I really consider it my inflection point in becoming a CFO and a leader,” explains Sargent, who adds that it was his breadth of visibility across the company and his awareness of being part of a team of highly skilled finance professionals that whetted his appetite for more and turned his finance career into Plan A. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: You first arrived at EPAM in 2017, can you tell us what was top of mind as you entered the office? What were some of your early priorities? Peterson: I joined a company that was growing rapidly, that's got pretty solid profitability in it, a pretty capable finance organization. You kind of look under the hood, I guess, and what you're trying to do is make improvements without breaking anything. One of the things that happened is, the company had grown really quickly. And I think over a period of time sometimes you'll under invest in certain functions and I think that was probably the case with finance. I started by making some strategic hires, so strengthen the external reporting, the controllership and the tax schemes. And then from a reorganization standpoint, I've done a lot of things, but much of my career has been in FP&A, so I work with a head of FP&A who already had some ideas. When we organized the FP&A group, to not only support corporate leadership decisions, but to be able to take information, decision making down to the BU level and be more supportive of the different business units while of course continuing to support the senior leadership. Then I would say one other focus I introduced and not only with the FP&A team, but with the broader finance organization is to really focus on being more future or forward looking. I introduced a regular cadence around forecasting and processes that I guess would allow us to identify problems or bumps in the road. And the idea was it would give us enough time then to do something about it or if we didn't do anything, we couldn't do anything about it, at least we knew what was coming. That's really probably what I brought to the company in maybe my first year here.

Back in 2004, on the very day that Ormat Technologies, Inc., began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Eyal Hen began working in as an assistant controller for the geothermal energy company in Israel. The transition to being a public company opened a transformative chapter not only for Ormat but also for Hen, who—after having been with the firm for only a few short weeks—agreed to relocate to company’s new Reno, Nevada, headquarters. “It was a very small office at that time, with only seven people,” recalls Hen, who would for the next 11 years help to build out a U.S. finance team while accruing growing worldwide responsibilities for Ormat’s electricity-segment. Along the way, Hen says, a number of unforeseen developments helped to advance Ormat’s steady U.S. expansion, including the U.S. government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. “Ormat benefited from the response after it received $600 million in cash grants to build renewable energy power plants,” explains Hen, while citing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which stipulated that energy companies be offered government grants instead of tax credits. “This was an enlightening moment for me, as it demonstrated how much impact a government can have when a company is prepared,” remarks Hen, who says that Ormat went on to build renewable energy plants in rural parts of Nevada and southern California. After serving several years as a vice president of finance, Hen would leave Ormat and step into the CFO office for the first time at a life sciences company before being named finance chief for Rekor Systems. –Jack Sweeney

Filter: When we were talking at the executive staff level, it's from a mindset of accelerating around the curve. And so I think our CEO has really coined that phrase, but that's the lens that we're looking through and the question we're asking is what investments can we make now that will allow us not only to come out of this better, but accelerate around the curve. And allow us when we have changes in the macro environment to be tremendously successful.

When Envoy CFO Sinohe Terrero is asked about his career chapter at Etsy, the online marketplace founded in 2005 and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, he begins by explaining how back in 2008 Etsy’s finance function was really just a loose grouping of tools and people. “I'll never forget that I once had to go meet the bookkeeper, and he was like in Coney Island,” explains Terrero, who says that the financial mind-set at Etsy during its early days was that data trumps accounting—or, to put it another way, that data was strategic to the business and therefore should be kept in-house, whereas accounting could be outsourced to Coney Island or wherever. “Etsy was a marketplace, so the transactions occurred in big volumes, but we didn't send invoices. We didn't really have AR. Everything is paid by credit card on the Web,” points out Terrero, who quickly became tasked with establishing more traditional processes in preparation for bringing the accounting function back in-house. “Because of the nature of Etsy’s business, the accounting function initially really didn't have to grow as much as the data function,” says Terrero, who notes that even as Etsy’s finance department evolved into a full-capacity function, the data mind-set still loomed large. Says Terrero: “Understanding the transactions of the business on the data side was the primary responsibility.” Later, Terrero recalls, it was his focus on data and the growing volume of Etsy transactions that led him to back a strategy that not everyone was convinced was a good idea. According to Terrero, there was debate inside Etsy over whether the company should be charging fees on payments received by sellers inside the marketplace. At the time, certain Etsy executives believed that the firm’s mission should simply be to enable the sellers to sell more, which would then result in more transactions. “We argued that the fees could be a revenue source and that, given the volumes we were seeing, the strategy could be game-changing for the company over the long term,” remarks Terrero, who says that he was joined by a number of influential Etsy executives on the winning side of this debate. Says Terrero: “When you look at the percentage of revenue that these fees now represent for Etsy, you see that they’re actually pretty sizable.” - Jack Sweeney Sign Up for our Newsletter

CFOTL: Having only stepped in to the CFO office in April, what is the vision you have for the role of CFO? Hansen: I’m really keen on having Planful be a world class FP&A organization and definitely be one of the best users of the Planful platform. I think that’s important for us as an organization to eat our own cooking so to speak. On the second initiative of covering the basics, particularly in times like these where there’s high level of uncertainty, we need to be able to iterate on company plans and department plans. We need to be able to adjust budgets and investments and offer forecasts that illuminate some of the potential paths forward. So I’m talking about basic competencies here like a direct method cashflow forecast that we really don’t want to mess up. So that’s what I meant by make sure we’re proficient in covering the basics. And then finally accelerating growth. I really want to begin with our end in mind and work backwards from there to uncover the activities that are critical for us to do over the next couple quarters. And maybe if I gave an example there, what actions would we need to consider to improve our customer life cycle or our customer experience that will ensure our customers are getting the optimal value from our platform so that we have low customer churn and a very strong platform to grow from. …I believe part of the job of being a finance leader is to elevate the financial IQ of the entire organization. And I think we’re seeing the role of the CFO in particular and the finance organization at large expand and change to meet that challenge. And I think that the old style perception of finance as a service desk is going away and transitioning more towards a strategic advisor role for the entire organization. And so the ability to have business users in marketing, and in all corners of the business have access to their budgets, to their plans, to the information they need to make their decisions and be a part of the elevation, we’ve seen that pay dividends.

When veteran CFO Ivor Macleod first contemplated joining an early-stage pharma company, the condition known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was not appearing in nightly news headlines and was yet to be ranked as the number one cause of death among COVID-19 patients. Nevertheless, ARDS captured his attention—or rather, Athersys did. The Cleveland, Ohio–based company, with fewer than 100 employees, met one of Macleod’s foremost criteria in that the company was focused on the area of medicine known as “critical care”—a space that Macleod characterizes as having “high unmet medical needs.” “It was the science that attracted me and not necessarily the capital structure,” explains Macleod, when asked whether he may have preferred to join a privately held firm instead of a public one. As the former CFO of F. Hoffmann–La Roche, Inc., North America, and vice president of finance for Merck Research Labs, Macleod knows better than most the risks being taken and the high rate of failure when it comes to introducing new medications. “You take big swings at big diseases, and you are not always going to be successful. So you have to be prepared for failure,” explains Macleod, who says that he came to view “the job” of finance leadership in pharma as being one of enablement. Says Macleod: “I didn’t want scientists to be worrying about resources. I would take care of that. I had to make certain that they had all of what they needed to continue on their path.” Last January, when he entered Athersys’s CFO office for the first time, he would have only a mere few weeks to work alongside his new colleagues before the spread of COVID-19 within the U.S. led management to encourage employees to work from home. Suddenly, as the disease spread, ARDS began to garner headlines, and last spring, within a span of 6 weeks, Athersys was granted FDA approval for a COVID-induced ARDS study and subsequently began populating designated sites with patients. “There is no known treatment for ARDS,” comments Macleod, who appears to be savoring his role as an enabler of science now more than ever. –Jack Sweeney Subscribe

It was October 2019. Red Hat, Inc., was preparing to submit its latest quarterly results to its new parent, IBM Corp., and Laurie Krebs had just been named Red Hat software’s new CFO. As a senior vice president of finance for Red Hat, Krebs had worked closely with the former CFO and more or less assumed that the acquiring company would likely prefer to fill C-suite spots from its “home team” talent bench of senior executives. In fact, Krebs says that during the course of her career she had never truly aspired to be a CFO: “I often wondered who would want all of that responsibility, especially after Sarbanes-Oxley came in. And then, at the time, I realized that IBM had just acquired us for $34 billion and that it was going to be up to us to deliver the results that were needed.” Krebs says that the finance team at Red Hat, like many executive teams within newly acquired companies, had experienced some attrition and was perhaps not as highly functioning as it had been prior to its acquisition. As the first quarterly close for the newly acquired Red Hat approached, Krebs sought to reassure her CEO that she would continue to lead the team. “I’ll help you out until you get a legit CFO,” Krebs recalls saying—to which her CEO replied: “No, no, no—we want you to be it.” The CEO then reassured Krebs that it had been a unanimous opinion across Red Hat’s and IBM’s leadership teams that she should become Red Hat’s next CFO. Still, the pressure was on, and Krebs had to not only deliver the company’s first post-acquisition quarterly results but also activate the collaborative processes required to satisfy a giant parent company. “I did what I always do. I surrounded myself with the right talent and strong skillsets and created a team out of it,” comments Krebs, who says that her team today includes a seasoned “IBM finance partner” now tasked as sort of a go-between and translator for Red Hat and its parent. Echoing the executive’s words, Krebs relays his guidance: “Here are the deliverables that IBM’s looking for. Here’s why they look for them. When they ask for this, this is typically what CFO’s look for.” Krebs adds: “He has been what I call a ‘gift’ on our team." - Jack Sweeney SUBSCRIBE

When Ray Carpenter retraces his steps to the CFO office at Xandr—an analytics and advertising company formed by AT&T’s WarnerMedia—he singles out two earlier roles as having been outside AT&T’s traditional finance track. “I actually got kicked out of finance for one role,” says Carpenter, referring to a stint as a marketer inside a start-up launched by AT&T’s emerging business markets group. “We did things that were uniquely different from what AT&T typically does when it launches a new business,” continues Carpenter, who in addition to marketing was responsible for the start-up’s pricing strategy. Next, Carpenter joined AT&T’s mergers integration group, where he helped to lead integration planning efforts for different corporate functions, a role that made him keenly aware of the integration challenges such future acquisitions as DirectTV would present. From his stint in the mergers group, Carpenter stepped back inside AT&T’s more traditional finance and accounting ranks and was soon named CFO of its Entertainment and Internet Services division. “It wasn’t a forgone conclusion and still never is. AT&T has a habit of moving people around,” explains Carpenter, who mentions a number of different functional areas recently led by executives who in the past had held traditional finance roles. Says Carpenter: “I always knew that I’d be close to numbers, data, and analytics, and I felt that this would typically put me in the finance camp, but I wasn’t surprised when other opportunities surfaced.” –Jack Sweeney

Not unlike the careers of his finance leader peers, the finance career of Dave Jones, CFO of online car seller Vroom, has been shaped and influenced by economic crises of the past two decades. Last month, as the initial shock of the coronavirus waned and the stock market rallied back, Vroom moved quickly to go public. Explains Jones: “We consulted with our board and our investors and decided that the time was right.” After pricing its IPO shares at $22, Vroom saw their value more than double on their first day of trading. This was not the first time that Jones had discovered a window of opportunity in less-than-friendly economic times. Back in 2002, he had found himself in a tight spot while serving as a senior manager for Andersen, the historic accounting house that collapsed in the wake of the Enron scandal of the early 2000s. “The view at the beginning of crisis was that there was no way that Andersen would be taken down. For me, the lesson became to never say ‘never,’” says Jones, who adroitly stepped from the ashes of the once esteemed accounting house into a financial reporting role at Penske Automotive Group, where he entered the CFO office roughly 8 years later, in 2011. “I think that Penske was a $2 billion or $3 billion business when I first got there, and it was an $18 billion business when I left,” recalls Jones, who prior to entering the CFO office at Penske in 2011 had served as CFO of Penske’s European operations and consequently weathered yet another economic storm. Back in 2008, Penske CEO Roger Penske had described the subprime mortgage crisis as “one of the most challenging periods on record in the automotive industry.” The automotive company would post its first quarterly loss in a decade and painful personnel cuts followed, but for future finance leader Jones, along with professional scar tissue would come valuable lessons for the future. - Jack Sweeney Sign up for our newsletter

Dennis McGrath was only recently married and a new home owner when he was invited to a Phillies game by the CFO of AC Manufacturing. At the time, McGrath was working for Andersen as an auditor of a roster of growing companies, among which AC—a maker of industrial air-conditioning units—was perhaps not the most glamorous. “At the end of the night, the CFO told me that he wanted to hire me and would pay me a lot more than I was then making,” recalls McGrath, who doesn’t hesitate to reveal what allowed AC’s offer to trump all other opportunities. Says McGrath: “I went for the money.” However, what distinguished McGrath’s AC career chapter was neither compensation nor, for that matter, a lengthy tenure (McGrath was controller for 22 months). Adds McGrath: “It was not too long before the owner decided that he was going to sell the company and had a private equity group come in.” Still in his mid-20s, McGrath took a seat across the table from a seasoned group of private equity executives. “For me, my career has just kind of been perpetuated from there in terms of deal-making,” explains McGrath, who has arguably occupied “the seat” from that day forward, guaranteeing a CFO career chock full of M&A deal-making. –Jack Sweeney

When asked to share a few of the experiences that he feels prepared him for a CFO role, Ashim Gupta recalls what he characterizes as a significant accounting problem. However, it was not the nature of the accounting snag that Gupta wants us to know about but instead how his initial response to the problem was somewhat clumsy and ineffective. The event occurred more than 10 years into his finance career and did not lengthen the path to his next promotion because he had only just arrived in a new role as a divisional CFO for GE Water, a General Electric Corp. operating unit specializing in water processing solutions. Gupta remembers the accounting problem as being “the first thing to pass across my desk.” Realizing the gravity of the challenge, Gupta picked up the phone and called the more senior finance leader who was responsible for a wide swath of GE businesses, including Gupta’s group. “I was nervous about it, and I did not articulate the issue in the way that I should have. I didn’t really treat it as a business issue. I almost treated it with some amount of fear,” explains Gupta, who says that the uncomfortable phone call later led him to reach out to a mentor. “He said to me, ‘Your job is to help the business face reality,’” recalls Gupta, remembering the words of his mentor. In short, the mentor told him that the senior finance leader wanted facts and not fear. “I had to learn through trial by fire, and I failed the first time,” admits Gupta, who believes that finance executives must be keenly aware of the facts when delivering bad news and seek to expose possible avenues to where a solution can potentially take root. Says Gupta: “You have to demonstrate that you are now a partner in navigating through whatever the problem may be.”

In the mid-1990s, when Jeff Epstein was busy satisfying the M&A appetites of media clients for First Boston, one of his smaller, but more boisterous clients asked him to join the firm as its CFO. “It was the type of situation where if they had gone to a recruiter, I would never have made the resume cut because I had never been a CFO and I had never even worked for a CFO,” explains Epstein, who was 32 when he entered the lively entrepreneurial realm known as King World Productions. A one-time family-owned company, King World had seen its stature grow inside New York’s competitive media landscape as the firm began producing giant hit TV shows such as Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and The Oprah Winfrey Show. “It was actually a small company with only about 300 employees, but they had three of the highest-rated, most profitable shows on television, with about $300 million of revenue and $60 million of operating income,” recalls Epstein, who would go on to add consecutive CFO career chapters at DoubleClick, Nielsen (Media Measurement), and Oracle Corp., a mix that fortified his footing in both the tech and media worlds—but also revealed little preference when it came to company size. “King World had been a family business that had only recently become a New York Stock Exchange company when I joined them, so I had to put in place some basic procedures, but Oracle had been around for many years and already had very sophisticated processes,” notes Epstein, who today exudes as much enthusiasm for Oracle’s approach to simplifying and standardizing its internal processes as he does for the entrepreneurial instincts of King World chairman Roger King. “Three minutes from when an idea came out of my mouth, Roger King would have picked up the phone and be pitching our largest customer, ” says Epstein, whose CFO tenure there lasted 6 years—a span of time during which King World would triple its value and ultimately end up being sold to CBS Corp. It was following the sale of King World, that Epstein would open the career chapter that permitted his CFO career to grow beyond a single industry. “DoubleClick was an early Internet advertising technology company and wanted a CFO from either media or technology, so I had the media experience part,” comments Epstein. Today, as operating partner for Bessemer Venture Partners of Menlo Park, Calif., Epstein marvels at the continued evolution of the two industries that shaped his CFO career: “Two years ago, global Internet advertising surpassed global television advertising revenues to become the biggest media opportunity in the world—so if you’re around long enough, you see some incredible things.” Sign Up for our Newsletter

When asked what led him to open his latest career chapter as CFO of Biofourmis, Matt Borowiecki quickly mentions the 2018 sale of MassMutual Asia Ltd. to Yunfeng FG. After helping to piece together a string of strategic plays for MassMutual, Borowiecki was instrumental in effecting the Yunfeng FG deal, which was a standout for him personally as well as one that many industry analysts at the time deemed transformational for company. Having helped to spearhead the transaction, Borowiecki was subsequently asked to relocate to Hong Kong and lead international strategy and corporate development for the company. With his deal-making realm vastly expanded, Borowiecki might have been expected to rocket down MassMutual’s transformational M&A track for several more years. However, the move to Hong Kong challenged him in ways that he had not necessarily anticipated. Seeking to discover new strategies for MassMutual to extend its reach in the region, Borowiecki frequently found himself in meetings with local Hong Kong venture capitalists and private equity firms. “I really started to understand the power of data science and how insuretech, fintech, and healthtech really were transforming,” explains Borowiecki, who found his career ambitions evolving and coalescing around the broader notion of making an impact on industries at large. Knowing that his M&A experience would serve him well inside the start-up realm, he soon saw a new career chapter come into focus. “Quite candidly, the exposure that I had to very different consumer patterns and thinking about health and wealth in different ways piqued my interest in the Biofourmis platform,” explains Borowiecki, who adds that the basic premise of Biofourmis is to enable patients to compare their own physiological signals to metadata from a vastly larger population pool in real time. Says Borowiecki: “We call them ‘Biovitals’—they’re effectively a real-time picture designed to help clinicians to predict and prevent serious medical events. For example, heart failure is one of our focuses.” It seems that as one career chapter closed for Borowiecki, yet another opened. –Jack Sweeney

Early in his finance career, Anders Fohlin discovered that he could ratchet up his capacity to consume information and problem-solve simply by drawing pictures. However, what had originated more as a personal observation would eventually evolve to something more as he discovered that his visuals could serve others. “I started to regularly draw processes on white boards and paper to make things very visual for everybody and help others to get the full picture,” explains Fohlin, whose knack for creating visuals and goal of making things more visible “for everybody” led him to begin viewing routine meetings as opportunities for visualization. Says Fohlin: “I found that process maps and gathering people in the same room was a really good way to spark energy and collaboration and have people feel that they were important and doing something more than just shoveling coal.” Fohlin adds that his early efforts to create greater collaboration and inclusion ended up opening the door for him to various senior finance roles and eventually led him to the CFO office at software developer Medius. Among the guiding principles that Fohlin says have influenced his leadership style and approach over time is the notion of transparency. Ten years ago, while a senior finance executive at NASDAQ, he participated in a series of meetings to discuss the adoption of an activity-based costing model. “We would sit around the table and go product by product to explore ways in which we could improve,” he recalls, “and this was done with representatives from all of the different functions.” Part of the approach involved sharing numbers more widely across the organization and downward to the workforce at large. “If each employee can see the overall picture and what aligns their daily activities with the strategy and vision of the company, then they make better decisions,” explains Fohlin, who adds that today—as a CFO—he’s still drawing pictures. –Jack Sweeney

Back in the mid-1990s, David Wells was a financial analyst for a Bay Area supply chain management company that boasted an impressive list of Silicon Valley marquee customers. Counted among their clients was a large chip maker whose customer relationship upkeep had over time become Wells’s responsibility. Because this was a coveted customer, Wells always sought to be highly responsive to any of the chip maker’s requests for information, but he increasingly found his company’s pricing model out of step with the customer’s needs. “There was a lot of confusion and a lot frustration over what the prices for our services and products should be. Basically, we needed a much more sophisticated pricing model that the customer would accept,” recalls Wells. Faced with growing customer unrest, Wells and a colleague created a new pricing model that was carefully tailored for the chip maker’s business. Says Wells: “It was very intricate and more specific, but it was modeled exactly the way the customer saw their business.” The customer quickly gave the new model a thumbs-up, and all was well—until roughly 4 months later, when Wells realized that the new model was about to deliver to his company a windfall that would generate 4 to 5 months of revenue within only 6 weeks. “When I saw what was happening, I went to the customer and said, ‘Listen, this model that we built … there’s kind of a flaw in it. It’s a flaw in our favor, but we didn’t intend for this to happen and we don’t want you to view us as being unethical,’” recalls Wells. To Wells’s surprise, the chip maker was not concerned about the imminent financial swell of its purchases. It was instead highly pleased to have had a model created specifically with its needs and requirements in mind. “What this taught me was that as a CFO you’ve got to understand the customer and you’ve got to understand your business,” explains Wells, who believes that finance chiefs must first have visibility into customer engagements to better understand the inner workings of relationships with them. He continues: “If you can distill it down into tools that will then quantify the activity, then as CFO you’ll be in perfect shape to make the right decisions both for the customer and for your company.” –Jack Sweeney

Jon Nguyen got his first taste of M&A-related work in the early to mid-2000s when he served as the finance partner for the auto lending unit of HSBC. “In consumer lending, you end up doing a lot of portfolio purchases rather than equity ones, but I have become more involved in the execution of deals over the past 8 years,” says Nguyen, who, distinguishes the past 8 years as a standout chapter -one that has allowed him to certify his M&A credentials and enter the CFO office at Kyriba. Turn back the clock 8 years, and Nguyen is vice president of finance for Mitchell International, a $600 million software and service business. As the company’s FP&A leader, Nguyen was tasked with supplying key insights to management decision-making behind the sale of Mitchell to KKR in 2013. Meanwhile, 5 years later, Nguyen was once more in the M&A diligence mix when KKR sold Mitchell to Stone Point Capital. Along the way, Nguyen’s M&A resume quickly expanded. “At Mitchell, we were very acquisitive, and during my tenure there, we acquired 12 to 15 companies,” says Nguyen, who frequently became charged with leading the integration of Mitchell’s latest bounty. In mid-2018, following the sale of Mitchell to Stone Point, Nguyen joined cloud treasury and finance solutions company Kyriba as senior vice president of FP&A. Roughly a year later, he was named Kyriba’s CFO—a development that came on the heels of Kyriba’s sale to private equity firm BridgePoint. There’s little question that Nguyen’s latest career chapter has a familiar ring to it and is perhaps part of a larger M&A volume that he first started creating 8 years ago. Says Nguyen: “It’s interesting how life can take you where you belong.” - Jack Sweeney

Finance leaders who remain skeptical of the prospects for economic recovery inside the 2020 calendar year may want to consult LYNX Franchising CFO Michael Borreca. “I don’t think that it’s going to take us to 2021 to get back to March sales levels,” says Borreca, who doesn’t hesitate to credit three nontraditional metrics for influencing his current thinking on the subject. The first is the volume of disinfectant currently being purchased by franchisees of JAN-PRO—owned by LYNX—which boast of being the largest commercial cleaning franchiser in the country, with over 8,000 small business owners. “The more our franchise network is buying disinfectants, the more this means that more businesses are starting to reopen. They are doing a deep clean ahead of time, and then customers are being welcomed in,” says Borreca, who counts the lengthening commuting times surrounding LYNX’s hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, as yet another unconventional metric pointing now toward a recovery. The third metric influencing Borreca’s upbeat economic outlook is the growing digital sales leads for Intelligent Office, a virtual office business that LYNX acquired early last year. In addition to its à la carte virtual office assistant services, Intelligent Office also provides businesses access to furnished office spaces and meeting rooms. “Folks are looking for private space where they can go to get out of the house and work, but ours is not an open coworking environment,” explains Borreca, who says that as leases expire, the pandemic is already leading many companies to rethink how they use and pay for space. - Jack Sweeney

It’s a story that Verizon CFO Matt Ellis seems to enjoy telling and one that he has undoubtedly related more than once before. One evening while in high school, Ellis was working at the fish counter of a local supermarket when he received some feedback from the store manager. Earlier in the day, the man had asked Ellis to clean a number of shelves beside the counter, but Ellis had soon become busy with fish patrons and hadn’t able to complete the task. More than 30 years later, Ellis easily retrieves the store manager’s words: “I’m not disappointed that you didn’t get it done—I know that you were busy with your normal stuff. What disappoints me is that if you had only told me, I could have arranged to have someone else to do it.” This is a classic management lesson that many business leaders have communicated before, but when Ellis presents it, the message is endowed with renewed relevance for finance. It is easy for us to imagine Ellis retrieving the store manager’s lesson to enlighten a young finance analyst—or perhaps even his own approach as he prepares to brief Verizon board members on looming strategy snags. “This taught me two things: One was the value of communicating bad news as early as possible, and the second lesson was the way in which he gave feedback—ranting and raving is not the way to get through to people,” explains Ellis, who even today seems to muster genuine appreciation for—and perhaps even marvel at—the store manager’s evenhanded demeanor. It’s not surprising that Ellis shares a lesson that reveals the power of communication in finance. This is no doubt a skill he acquired early in his career and that has co­­­ntributed to his ongoing ascent in responsibility and reward. Having worked beside CFOs at Tyson Foods and Verizon for nearly a decade, Ellis arguably understood the CFO role better than most when he eventually became a CFO himself, at Verizon. Asked what advice he would have given himself in the first week of his tenure, Ellis responds that the parts of the CFO role about which he was most uncertain turned out to be those that up to that point had not been part of his experience. “It’s the interactions with the other members of the senior leadership team that become different,” he reports. “It’s the importance of one-on-one communication—not the group meetings to which I had become accustomed before.” Here, too, Ellis’s communication skills have no doubt served him well. –Jack Sweeney

When the Sarbanes–Oxley Act was enacted 18 years ago, it required the Securities and Exchange Commission to create regulations to define how companies should comply with it—a mandate that would end up impacting the careers of finance professionals well into the future. CFO Jody Cire was one such professional. Back in 2010, Cire found himself in Boulder, Colorado, after having been relocated from a role in Germany as KPMG’s lead audit manager for SAP AG. In light of his recent large enterprise experience, KPMG had been eager to assign Cire stateside in order to scratch the Sarbox itch of some of its largest customers. Within a year, Cire found himself knee-deep in massive Sarbox compliance projects with a number of prestigious clients. Still, something was missing. Says Cire: “It just wasn’t where my personality or my curiosity really thrived. I just didn’t enjoy it and began to express that.” Meanwhile, his appetite for assignments involving start-ups and high-growth firms had never wavered, allowing him to confidently exit KPMG and step into a corporate role as vice president of finance and accounting for Boulder-based cybersecurity firm LogRhythm. During most of his career, Cire’s accounting and technical knowledge had made him a standout. At LogRhythm, he would be responsible for helping the company to develop a successful exit strategy, which eventually was implemented in 2018 when it was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. “We were already over $200 million—Thoma Bravo wanted some fresh blood and new management because there had to be some housecleaning and stripping out of costs,” says Cire, who served as LogRhythm’s interim CFO before joining cloud solutions provider AllCloud last year. –Jack Sweeney Cire: We established a 2020 budget that was approved when we had a board of directors meeting on January 6. We were 6 days into 2020, and we already had an approved budget. I’ve never been able to accomplish a budget approval so fast in my life. Meanwhile, we also had an internal management plan. Unfortunately, in 2020, this doesn’t win you any prizes because within 6 weeks the world had completely changed. Right? So, in March, we suddenly found ourselves in a reforecasting period involving the general management of our regions, as well as the CEO and myself and my FP&A team. Together we had look at what we saw and what amount of cutting we might need to do. When it comes to our priorities going forward, we get a lot of inbound interest from potential investors. What they like about AllCloud as a company is that we have a senior leadership team that is structured very well. We’ve got people who have built and sold businesses before, so we are viewed as a good platform play for additional acquisitions. But to do this, there has to be a good succession plan. There have to be good people below me. so I have to continued to build my teams and to build systems that allow for easy integration, an easy bolt-on of other companies. This is what we are currently focused on and will continue to be focused on for certainly the rest of 2020 and probably through the first half of 2021. We’re still, to this day, probably two-thirds–based, 60% to 65%–based, in Israel, with a big presence also in Germany, Romania, Canada, and the United States. We closed a round of funding last December, our first round of preferred stock. We’ve already bought one U.S. company. We will use that series round in December to buy another U.S. company.

When a new CEO is recruited to lead a company, it’s not uncommon for the incumbent CFO to be replaced. However, there are certain network-savvy CFOs who are able to muster enough influence with their boards to easily discourage incoming CEOs from implementing their displacement as part of sweeping the C-suite clean. Angiras Koorapaty was not one of these well-connected CFOs. Or at least he wasn’t about 20 years ago, when he found himself forfeiting a finance leadership position to a newly arrived CEO’s CFO pick. “This was a pivotal moment for me at the time, and it led me to do some reflection and to think about my career,” explains Koorapaty, who says that he later realized that as a CFO he had been too focused on the company’s internal operations and had failed to build important relationships with board members, investors, and other stakeholders. Says Koorapaty: “As a result, there was a change in finance leadership.” The eviction prompted Koorapaty to take action. Eager to put the experience behind him and open the door to new opportunities, he began working with a business coach, an advisor who specialized in coaching CEOs but understood the CFO role well. Koorapaty says that he personally “set the agenda” and identified the areas that he wanted to address—but that the coach held him accountable. “Oftentimes, I found him to be a pain in the neck. I did not always look forward to our calls, but I stuck with them. This made me a better CFO and a better partner for CEOs, and—most important—it made me a better communicator with my boards and a better relationship builder,” he explains. Several CFO tours of duty later, Koorapaty is now CFO of ReversingLabs, a cloud-based security and networking company based in Cambridge, MA. “When I joined the company, a number of board members approached me with their views,” recalls Koorapaty, who says that he listened carefully before adding a number of items to his list of CFO priorities. For Koorapaty, better communication begins with listening. –Jack Sweeney OPTIN TO OUR NEWSLETTER

Years from now, when Will Costolnick thinks back to the start of his CFO career, he will likely count the 12 months that preceded his appointment as CFO of Hire Dynamics as part of the same chapter, for—not unlike many of his CFO peers—Costolnick first found his footing at his new employer by slipping into a vice president of finance role for a year or two. In Costolnick’s case, the interim role lasted 12 months, or just long enough for Hire Dynamics to reformulate its management ranks and expand its C-suite. Still, Costolnick hit the ground running by using his interim credentials to begin putting in place processes that would accommodate new growth, which was indeed a priority for satiating the staffing firm’s newfound appetite for acquisitions. Four years ago, Hire Dynamics had but 10 offices in the Southeast; today, this number is 47. The growing office numbers follow a recent spurt of deal-making by Hire Dynamics, which today boasts of being the Southeast’s second largest commercial staffing firm. Clearly, the timing of Costolnick’s arrival was no accident. Moreover, the firm’s newly charged CFO had spent four of his previous six years evaluating acquisition targets for LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “We looked at 40 acquisitions during that period and closed on eight,” explains Costolnick, who served as lead finance analyst for the company’s internal mergers and acquisitions group. “I think that this was really a pivotal moment for me. I would be sitting in a room with the leaders from product development, marketing, and sales, and I got to observe them as they looked at these targets strategically,” says Costolnick, who later served as director of finance for the Atlanta-based firm. While acquisition targets are no doubt part of Costolnick’s world these days, so too are the processes and technologies that in the future will permit Hire Dynamics to satisfy the demands of an organization many times its present size. –Jack Sweeney

Unlike the music artists and instructors recruited by School of Rock to provide music lessons at its 270 locations around the globe, John Cappadona was first hired by the firm to provide a crash course in accounting. “The day I joined, my controller and I walked through the door together not knowing anything,” explains Cappadona, who stepped into the CFO role at School of Rock shortly after its CEO, Rob Price, moved the music lesson provider’s headquarters to the Boston area. Says Cappadona: “For the first couple of months, it took us almost 25 days to close the books—and we needed to shorten that number in order to start making decisions sooner.” Next, Cappadona set out to enhance the management team’s visibility into the business. “We wouldn’t have known that we were going to run into an iceberg until we hit it,” comments Cappadona, who adds that while his team did not come across any icebergs, the company’s sales reporting numbers were just not visible enough. After making a number of accountant hires, Cappadona says, he became focused on developing School of Rock’s FP&A function to better reveal the performance at its 270 locations—49 of which were company-owned. The company’s finance team keeps a close eye on the number of new students as well as School of Rock’s net promoter score. Still, when it comes to measuring customer behavior, Cappadona believes that as a consequence of the pandemic, School of Rock‘s lines of sight into customer behaviors are poised to grow rapidly. “We are deriving 100 percent of our revenue right now from something that did not exist 2 months ago. We were an in-person education business. We had to pivot immediately to deliver a remote solution,” says Cappadona, who recorded an episode with CFO Thought Leader in early May 2020. As it turns out, a customer lesson delivered remotely would appear to be a nice complement to School of Rock’s in-person lessons. Notes Cappadona: “At the end of the day, the mission is really the same—and it’s our sense of community that sets us apart.” –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about a finance strategic moment … Cappadona: I’ll tell you about my time at WB Mason, where I was really charged with bringing up the FP&A department, with creating it. Previously, they really hadn’t had the sort of financial insights coming forth that they needed. What really comes to mind is Hurricane Sandy, or Superstorm Sandy, which hit the East Coast hard, as you may recall. WB Mason was primarily focused in the Northeast, so pretty much all of our operations were out of business for several days. We had to quickly engage our forecast models, and there were some tough decisions that we had to make. We had to shore up costs because we had bank covenants that we had to maintain, and we had to make sure that given the decreased revenue, our cost structure was going to be fine. This was one of those strategic moments when we had to look ahead to say, “Well, when are these businesses going to be coming back?” It was very similar to what we’re facing today with the pandemic. Now I’m digging back into my bag of tricks just as I did seven or eight years ago when I was trying to model things out. There was a lot of pressure to do the work and get the answers right. What I’ve found is that you’re never going to have all the answers. You have got to make the decision based on what you know at the time and monitor it. And then if you’ve got to course correct, course correct. That’s the approach that we’ve been using here. If we had waited to get all of our data in to make sure that we knew every answer, we still wouldn’t have a remote offering right now. School of Rock is now remote, and we did that it in 12 days. So if you’re going to fail, fail quickly and move on.

In the late 1980s, when Gordon Stuart exited a 4-year stint as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he bid accounting farewell—or at least he did until he stepped into a CFO role roughly a dozen years later. Ever since, he has occupied multiple CFO roles, helping to remove any doubt about his finance and accounting orientation. Still, Stuart’s appetite for broader business experiences during the early part of his career set him apart from many of his finance leader peers. During the 1990s, as a senior engagement manager for strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Company, he found job satisfaction across a variety of industries. Asked what originally led him to join McKinsey rather than take on a more traditional corporate finance role, Stuart says that “the opportunity that I saw would allow somebody who’s naturally curious about business to build a better set of capabilities, frameworks, experiences, and connections to further their career.” Looking back, Stuart says that his biggest take-away from his 6 years with McKinsey involved the approach that McKinsey uses while serving clients. “It taught me an awful lot about how to work with teams and rapidly assimilate and understand businesses and business models, as well as how to communicate with others. In fact, I think that this was probably one of the key learnings,” says Stuart, who would leave the strategy house in 1998 to become director of strategy for Dell Europe, where he would ultimately set up and lead the technology company’s Web hosting business for Europe. “Our timing was unfortunate because the dotcom collapse of 2000 kind of reset priorities within Dell, and that’s when my CFO career began,” explains Stuart, who left Dell after the CEO of a UK software company (and former McKinsey colleague) convinced him to accept the software firm’s finance leadership role. “I never set out with an ambition to be a CFO, but as time passed, I kind of realized that if you pick the right business and it lines up with your interests, CFOs influence a lot of what happens in a business. And having an impact is very satisfying,” he explains. –Jack Sweeney

When John Bonney joined San Francisco–based Harness a little more than a year ago, he became not only the company’s first CFO but also its first finance hire. “For me, this was the first time that I came into a role with a blank slate—it was at Ground Zero,” explains Bonney, who says that the software start-up specializing in the automation of software applications delivery had theretofore been outsourcing its finance, legal and IT functions. Initially, he recalls, he was somewhat doubtful that he was good match for such an early-stage firm—and especially one with such meager internal operations. However, he became intrigued by the challenge that Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal put before him. Looking back, Bonney says that he knew that “we could become really big, and here was a chance to set the foundation right.” Within 5 months, Bonney relates, he had fielded a team of roughly eight people, including a controller, an FP&A leader, and department heads for legal and IT. “Generally, when companies are really small, it doesn’t always make financial sense to have people in-house, but as you grow to 100 people and beyond, what you quickly begin to experience are bottlenecks impacting responsiveness to IT needs or legal bills that are beginning to balloon,” explains Bonney, who adds that positions outside the finance realm were filled first, with the FP&A hire a more recent addition to the team. Says Bonney: “When a company has raised capital and the question becomes ‘Where do you put that capital?,’ the CFO and FP&A team have to impact this and monitor it.” Meanwhile, as Harness scales, the company has prioritized the use of new applications and technologies to perform work traditionally completed by back office hires. For example, Bonney says, Harness did not hesitate to adopt applications vendor Airbase of San Francisco to manage its companywide credit card spending and expense management. Asked to reflect on his first year as CFO of Harness and his Ground Zero “to do” list. Bonney quips: “12 months gone by in a blink of an eye.” –Jack Sweeney

Mair: It was probably in the first week of March, we had to close our Seattle office and have people work remotely. And it was about the second week in March that we did the same for our Portland office. We have the good fortune of having had a lot of experience working remotely as an agency. A lot of people have flexible schedules, a lot of the work we do is digital. But (COVID) is impacting us. It's still unclear as to what the second quarter's revenue is going to look like, but we're projecting it it'll be down probably by 25% at least. We know from a couple of large events that our clients we're sponsoring have been canceled, so that has a direct impact on some of the projects we were doing. But we also see there are some opportunities for us to use our services, to help in this sort of environment and get the messaging out in paid and social media, in ways that don't require a physical conference or event. So it's going to be interesting. We were... I got to say this in the nicest way, we strive to not have to close the business or seriously cut back staff. We had a relatively small riff of about 5% of the population last month and we imposed a salary reduction, sort of a tiered salary deduction, depending on how much your annual salary was, to avoid a more broad riff, if you will. And we have recently applied for relief through one of the Cares Act programs, the payroll protection program to be specific. But it's going to be largely based on how much revenue we continue to generate while we're in this sort of remote environment.

Related Article From Forbes.com Years from now, when Hilla Sferruzza recalls her initial actions to buffer the impact of COVID-19 on home builder Meritage Homes Corp. (NYSE: MTH) of Scottsdale, Arizona, she will likely not forget the seemingly endless calls that she placed to land sellers across the country. “It’s not like I’m calling a manufacturer and telling them to bring less raw material to my factory. I’m calling land sellers in every one of our markets to start the renegotiation process,” says Sferruzza, who, as finance chief for the seventh-largest public home builder in the U.S., is no doubt accustomed to having her calls returned. “They’re reading the same newspapers that we are and they know what’s going on, so they’re fairly understanding,” observes Sferruzza, who has been using her phone time to push back on seller payment terms and defer or delay home building projects in nine different states. Meanwhile, Karri Callahan, CFO of RE/MAX Holdings (NYSE: RMAX), the global franchisor of real estate brokerages, has been formulating her own mode of outreach to RE/MAX’s franchisees, who understandably have been signaling some pushback of their own. Factors such as social distancing and governmental stay-at-home orders are slowing the amount of home buying and forcing real estate brokers to tighten their belts. Suddenly, the franchise fees that real estate brokers pay to RE/MAX and other franchisors are looming large on broker P&Ls, leading franchisors to take action and pull back fees. “Our franchisees can now defer their fees and pay them back later in the year as real estate transactions occur, or they can pay now, but at a reduced rate of 50% of what they would have normally paid,” explains Callahan. Still, it’s the variances of COVID-19’s impact from state to state that is summoning real estate CFOs like Sferruzza and Callahan to be more accessible and visible to their firm’s extended network of partners and stakeholders across different geographies. “Clearly, some of the challenges have to do with how different governments—whether at the state, county, or city level—have classified real estate and whether it’s classified as ‘essential.’ But transactions are still occurring, albeit at a reduced velocity,” says Callahan, who credits the size and breadth of RE/MAX’s franchise network with helping to minimize the impact of those jurisdictions that have classified real estate transactions as being “nonessential.” To better assess Meritage’s sales pipeline and extend her lines of sight deeper into the business, Sferruzza has been keeping a close eye on sales appointment numbers. “I’m also looking at cancellations because as important as it is for us to get sales, I need to make sure that the backlog’s not eroding at a magnitude that’s overcoming sales,” she notes. Still, when it comes to protecting the health of the business, Meritage’s CFO makes it clear that her primary focus remains on cash flow and preserving whatever she can of it to help Meritage weather what lies ahead. Hence her recent outreach to land sellers. “It’s a pretty long cycle, and there is a substantial cash outlay at the start of the life of a community versus at the tail end, which is really when it is cash flow positive,” reports Sferuzza, who estimates that the cash outlays for most of Meritage’s communities run two to three years before becoming cash flow positive. “We have to buy the land, which is expensive, and we have to develop the land, which is expensive. We have to build the models and then we have to build the homes,” adds Sferruzza, whose top-of-mind cash flow priorities are not unlike those of other finance leaders whose businesses were pursuing steep growth trajectories. Meritage, for example, told industry analysts last November that they should expect the home builder to grow by 25 percent in 2020. Meanwhile, more regular communication with the analyst and investor communities has swiftly become a priority for both Callahan and Sferruzza as they seek to tamp down fears across the board. “In terms of the employees, I split my responsibility with the rest of management—my main focus remains on our investors, in terms of where I take primary ownership,” explains Callahan, who since mid-March has participated along with RE/MAX senior management in two companywide “town hall meetings” for all 500 RE/MAX employees. Says Sferruzza: “I think that the real fear in the marketplace right now is one that I think we’ll be able to overcome, and it’s simply whether people will still feel confident about making a home purchase.” As for Meritage’s balance sheet, Sferruzza explains that “it’s actually not as stressful a scenario for us as it might appear to be. We become extremely cash accretive during a downturn because we stop spending money on new land, and everything on our balance sheet converts to cash.” Asked whether additional cash preservation techniques may be required, Sferruzza is quick to add: “If the shelter-in-place e

When Amir Jafari looks back and reflects on his path to the CFO office, he includes two character traits that have arguably long distinguished finance leaders from other functional leaders. “We in finance have high levels of accountability and integrity, and these are the things that we’re able to then transpose in terms of what we do and how we are able to lead as CFOs,” explains Jafari, who says that it was his ability to “transpose” these traits during a recent career chapter at ServiceNow that allowed him to ultimately gain the leadership experience required to step into a CFO role at Reputation.com. “I landed at ServiceNow as their corporate controller, but the biggest twist in my entire life—and one that I think ultimately helped me to prepare for a CFO role—is that I had a chance to be the general manager of a business unit,” explains Jafari, who notes that his GM tour of duty was rooted in the creation of two applications that ultimately evolved into a business unit. “Being able to lead a product management team, an engineering team, a design and go-to-market team is very different from my past assignments and has really helped to round out the core elements of what we do in traditional finance,” comments Jafari. While there’s little doubt that Jafari’s ascent into leadership roles was aided by more than accountability and integrity, he credits his finance career track for helping to preserve and nourish these traits along the way, allowing him to more confidently assume leadership roles when opportunities arrived. –Jack Sweeney

At the age of 31, David Woodworth was offered CFO positions at two different firms. The first offer came from his then current employer, where as vice president of finance he was keenly aware of urgent challenges that the company’s next CFO would need to address. The second offer came unsolicited from a smaller company in the same field, where he could expect to ease into the role and set the pace for his first 100 days. “It was a hard decision, and one where you wish there was a silver bullet,” says Woodworth, who opted to stay where he was, which was at a highly leveraged firm that had recently been taken private by a group of investors. Woodworth’s early chapter flies in the face of the widely expressed conundrum that to become a CFO, you have to be a CFO. However, in Woodworth’s case, the price of entry to the CFO office was a cool head and an even keel—or at least being someone capable of working alongside a group of edgy investors. “I had to embrace the role pretty quickly and operate in some unique environments,” he adds. Thinking back on his first CFO tour of duty, Woodworth concludes by saying, “The advice that I would like to give to someone stepping into a CFO role would be about how to prioritize and how to say ‘no.’” – Jack Sweeney

Earlier this year, when the FDIC approved fintech start-up Varo Money’s application to become a national bank, Thibault Fulconis’s latest CFO career chapter suddenly appeared to make perfect sense. Still, it was only two years ago that Fulconis’s entry into the land of fintech start-ups no doubt raised a few eyebrows among his former colleagues at BancWest Corp., where he most recently served as vice chairman and COO. “I was coming from a position where I had about 3,000 direct reports when I was COO to an entity where I had three people reporting to me,” says Fulconis, whose banking resume, rich with senior leadership roles, spans nearly 30 years with roots inside BancWest’s parent company, BNP Paribas. While certainly not the first banker to find a door-of-entry into the realm of fintech start-ups, Fulconis, in light of the FDIC’s recent approval, became the first CFO of a fintech start-up that is able to hold customer deposits—much the same as in the world he left behind. Until recently, fintech firms have partnered with community banks to actually hold customers’ money, while start-ups like Varo have traditionally handled only the consumer interface and mobile app technology portion. Who better than a seasoned banking leader to help architect a finance function capable of responding to the breadth of consumer activities on a national scale? “When I arrived at Varo, we were at version 76 of our financial model. Now, a year and a half later, we are at version 180,” says Fulconis, who routinely expresses his fondness for Varo’s nimbleness. –Jack Sweeney

Last February, following his arrival on a flight to Israel, Tomer Pinchas recalls receiving a startling text from the Israeli government. Having recently visited Italy, the text explained, passenger Pinchas must now agree to enter self-quarantine for a period two weeks. As CFO of Kryon—a Tel Aviv start-up specializing in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)—Pinchas, like most business travelers, was well aware of the recent spread of COVID-19. Still, the order to self-quarantine seemed aggressive to Pinchas, who at the time could not have imagined that in a few short weeks he would be sheltering in place with the rest of Israel. “The actions taken by Israel were quite drastic and came pretty much a few weeks before the rest of the world, but what we learned during the process was that we can work anyplace—and sometimes we can be even more organized,” says Pinchas, who believes that a new business environment is beginning to come into view. So far, the remote workforce is perhaps the new environment’s most pronounced characteristic. However, some of the more interpersonal attributes of doing business may be compromised. “Due to the fact that we work with enterprise customers and many things that we use to install are on-premise, we would often meet the customer face-to-face, so this will be kind of challenging in the new environment)” explains Pinchas, who says that while face-to-face selling will likely be curtailed, Kryon’s RPA offerings will find new traction among companies seeking new tools to help automate repetitive tasks and help them to better engage and respond to customer demands. Fortunately, the RPA start-up closed on its latest round of financing within weeks of Israel sheltering in place. “I really believe that you need to raise money when you can and not necessarily when you need it,” remarks Pinchas, who believes that as long as a company has a strategy that it’s prepared to execute—and not just an appetite for cash—the timing of a capital raise should not matter. Says Pinchas: “Don’t wait for the right time, because the majority of the time, there’s no such thing.” –Jack Sweeney

When John Theler stepped into the CFO office at SaaS developer Avetta last summer, among his list of priorities was the daunting task of better articulating supply chain hazards to management teams and industry at large. Nine months later, Theler has no doubt added a number of items to his list of finance leader priorities, but his articulation task has become far less daunting. Not surprisingly, it seems that his thoughtful comments on the perils of poorly managed supply chains have paled in comparison to the high-wattage exposure that COVID-19 has suddenly brought to supply chains—an illuminating spotlight that Avetta and other suppliers of supply chain risk management services are now eager to put to work. “There clearly are some supply chain challenges and weaknesses that have already been uncovered through this crisis that we’re in right now, and one of the long-term effects of this is going to be a higher scrutiny of supply chains going forward,” explains Theler, who says that while many company boards have made supply chain risk management a bona fide component of their environmental sustainability and governance (ESG) efforts, COVID-19 is suddenly causing some firms to take a closer look at what’s under the ESG hood. “Our biggest competitors, frankly, are supply chains belonging to firms that just want to do it in their homegrown solution,” says Theler, who quickly mentions the advantages of using Avetta’s technology to address supply chain risk versus relying on typical in-house supply chain risk solutions. There’s little doubt that COVID-19 and its impact on industry at large will play a defining role in the careers of many finance leaders. For Theler and other CFOs, the pandemic is a house filled with obstacles and innovation where for every door that closes there’s another that swings open. –Jack Sweeney

It was supposed to be the type of introduction that would help to break the ice between a new business leader and her direct reports. However, the words spoken by the managing director (MD) became frozen in time. Or at least this was the case for Virpy Richter, who at the age of 27 had only recently relocated from Germany after having accepted a promotion to oversee the finances of her company’s Dutch operating unit. “This is the German girl from our central unit. Be nice to her. She is just visiting us,” Richter recalls the MD saying, as her 25 direct reports curiously stared back at her. In retrospect, the MD might even be commended for having had language skills sufficient to so thoroughly and completely undermine a colleague in the space of a few short sentences, which was no small feat considering that he was able to reference Richter’s youth, gender, and nationality while at the same time even summoning doubts about the permanence of her position. While these words remain frozen in time for Richter, the lesson that she would carry forth from this role involved more their aftermath. “This was my first leadership role, so my response was much more intuitive because at that age I had not taken any leadership seminars and didn’t have any past experiences on which to draw,” explains Richter, who says that her intuition told her to be a good listener. “Listen to the people—listen to their expectations and let them help you to understand,” she explains. Fast-forward a number of years, and Richter is once more crossing borders—this time into Russia, where she is working as a senior finance professional for myToys, a large German e-commerce retailer. Says Richter: “I had three months to set up the Russian entity, recruit the people, and make the goods available because we wanted to be operating by Christmas.” Today, Richter resides in Germany, where as CFO of Awin Global she applies her cross-border lessons to Awin’s quickly expanding operations. –Jack Sweeney

When it comes to raising money from the investor community, finance executives often find themselves standing in line for job assignments that promise to make them active participants in the process. Such roles allow aspiring finance leaders to check off one of the more essential items on the demanding list of prerequisites required of high-growth­–firm CFOs. For those executives who have climbed the accounting career ladder or toiled for years in an FP&A cubicle, the “money box” is often one of the last ones to get checked off. Such was the case for finance leader Chris Mausler, who after a decade of devouring high-calorie FP&A assignments at IBM Corp. exited the computer giant to join a string of Silicon Valley firms. Removed from IBM’s sprawling organization, Mausler found himself in closer proximity to the action. Nevertheless, it would take years for the seasoned FP&A executive to land a role that allowed him to check that box and ultimately raise money for a variety of different firms. “Even though my assignments had touched on treasury-type operations in an indirect way, I myself had actually never directly raised money before,” says Mausler, who last fall helped to raise $31 million in funding for San Jose, California’s PeerNova, the data governance company that he joined as CFO back in 2014. “I’m certain that there are companies out there that make their first pitch and get funded with a term sheet, but this is not the norm,” says Mausler, who notes that most companies can expect to receive only a handful of term sheets from roughly 100 pitches. “It's a little bit of an art, a little bit of a science for anyone going through it,” he adds. –Jack Sweeney Mausler: As I’m sitting here at home under a shelter-in-place order, my first priority clearly is to manage our company over the next couple of months to make sure that we don’t lose any efficiency and effectiveness in meeting our short-term goals, and this is certainly a new challenge through these times. Other than that, the challenges that I have remain much the same at PeerNova. We raised a good financing last fall. We announced a $31 million round that’s going to take us for a while. We have goals and milestones for getting us through a large kind of growth round in the future. We’ve got to make sure that we get there, so it’s making sure that we’re hitting the near-term milestones and tweaking our strategy to hit the next ones. Here at PeerNova we had good data, so it was just a question of organizing it into one place so that we could manage the business. It’s been very much of a journey for us as we’ve raised rounds to build out this platform and worked with early customers on projects to grow our business. The most critical thing at PeerNova has been to raise the right amount of capital to help to get us to the next set of milestones and to make the right set of investments to get to these milestones so that we can continue to grow the company and keep this kind of growth pattern going. At this point, having worked with a number of large institutions, we’re in that growth phase of a company where we’re ramping up revenue. For me, it’s always been about trying to balance how quickly you grow the company to achieve the next milestone while keeping in mind how much cash you will need to manage the company until the next round. You’ve got to keep an eye on both. You want to build a company that’s growing extremely fast, but you have to reconcile this to some extent with how much capital you have. You also have to organize the milestones that you need to hit to get to the next round as well.

For many future finance leaders, the year 2020 is destined to provide the dark moments of doubt that sweeten the upsides to be savored in years to come. Certainly, few business lessons are more widely cherished than those related to challenging economic times—and few are summoned more by finance leaders when it comes to explaining their business-building philosophies. Such is the case with Narvar CFO Jim Emerich, who in recounting the experiences that have prepared him for a finance leadership role always singles out the year 2001, when the September 11 terrorist attacks disrupted an economy still reeling from the burst of the dotcom bubble. That May, Emerich stepped into a controller position at Salesforce, the pioneering SaaS developer that had only recently entered the ranks of midsize companies. “We were burning cash throughout that year, and we were getting pretty close to the end. What saved us was the knowledge that eventually people realized that the world hadn’t ended,” recalls Emerich, who confidently and swiftly draws a line from his early Salesforce days to his arrival at Narvar earlier this year. As at Salesforce, Emerich is now tasked with building the financial infrastructure of a SaaS developer in the midst of economic uncertainty. But now is a time well suited to experienced leaders accustomed to quelling doubts and exposing the path to the future. –Jack Sweeney

Having built a successful career in private equity—including 13 years with formidable Carlyle Group—Sameer Bhargava was probably not the most likely candidate to fill a CFO position at Clark Construction Group of Bethesda, Maryland. The two businesses belonged to strikingly different worlds. Whereas Carlyle populated its world with leading-edge investment vehicles and innovative global assets, Clark has left its mark with signature skyscrapers and civic projects that are credited with transforming public spaces in a big way. Still, both Washington, DC, area–headquartered businesses share what arguably remains industry’s greatest hiring determinant: a common geography. Clark Construction’s resume is filled with “hometown” projects of stature, including The Wharf—a pedestrian-oriented DC waterfront community—and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. “In every block that you drive by, Clark is building something incredibly impressive,” remarks Bhargava, who quickly emphasizes Clark’s national footprint by mentioning other Clark credits, including San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower and San Antonio’s Frost Tower. While Bhargava’s enthusiasm for Clark’s work is evident, he makes it clear that his move to Clark was driven by more than geography and the firm’s A-list menu of cityscape projects. “In medicine and other industries, you get better and smarter the more specialized you become, but in business it’s quite the opposite,” says Bhargava, who encourages others to “take the risk to be uncomfortable” and “do things differently.” –Jack Sweeney

Years from now, when Andrew Casey reflects back on his CFO career and seeks to make sense of its various chapters, he may want to title the mythical volume Timing Is Everything. Certainly, few expressions might better summarize the career path of a finance executive who for years diligently checked off each CFO prerequisite only to arrive in the CFO office in March 2020—the very month when industry faced the seismic consequences of COVID-19. No matter what lies ahead for Casey—or how he chooses to label his arrival in the C-suite at SaaS digital adoption enabler WalkMe—there’s little doubt that COVID-19 and industry’s response to it will become a defining chapter of his finance career. Says Casey: “You learn from the good times and the down times, but when finance is most important to an organization is the down times because finance is the unbiased party in the room with respect to employee priorities as well as overall priorities.” Turn back the clock to 2019, when Dan Adika, CEO of WalkMe, was meeting with Casey to make the case for the widening appeal of WalkMe’s digital offerings. “About halfway through the meeting, I said, ‘This is one of the strangest interviews I’ve ever had,’ and he asked, ‘Why is that?’ I said, ‘It feels like you’re just pitching me on the company.’ He stopped midstream and looked me in the eye and said, ‘Well, you know, we’re already convinced about you. We’re just trying to sell WalkMe to you.’ At that moment, I knew that I could ask any question, and I knew that my rapport with Dan was going to be strong,” recalls Casey, who at the time was a senior vice president of finance for cloud computing giant ServiceNow. “At that moment,” there was little question that for Casey, timing was everything. –Jack Sweeney