CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Purchasing bananas and moving them through a warehouse in less than 24 hours is perhaps not a professional experience widely shared by today’s finance leaders. Still, as Topia CFO Terry Schmid tells it, mastering banana logistics may just be a worthy prerequisite for many of today’s CFO roles. “It taught me to think about the process that you go through to understand how things flow, how things actually work, and how you can improve things,” says Schmid, who first entered the professional world as a software coder specializing in COBOL—a language that landed him a consulting engagement with Safeway, Inc., in the 1990s, where he spent months alongside a team of Safeway buyers building a new logistics and warehousing system. “Being responsible for the produce piece, I had to learn how they buy produce and move it through the warehouse, after which we wrote a system to automate the process to a large degree—particularly the buying part,” explains Schmid, who recalls the Safeway team as being at first somewhat doubtful about the new system. “Automation has a tendency to unnerve people. It was my job to convince these guys that using the system was going to be beneficial to them and make their job better. It wasn't going to replace them. It was just going to make their job simpler,” he recalls. Schmid doesn’t hesitate to draw a line from his COBOL coding days straight to the CFO office. “The opportunity that I got out of that was a solid understanding of how businesses work, how information flows, and how important it is that information is timely and accurate,” notes Schmid, who characterizes the CFO role as one dedicated to helping organizations fix broken processes or adopt new ones in order to clear the path for growth. This is a role widely coveted inside the tech sector, but few CFOs have been as frequently recruited as Schmid, who has to date served as CFO in more than a half-dozen early-stage companies. Twelve months into his latest CFO role, at Topia, Schmid is back to fixing processes and studying workflows and purchase patterns just as he did in the 1990s. In one way or another, it seems that he’s been moving bananas ever since. –Jack Sweeney

Last November, CFO Bob Feller achieved a career milestone of sorts when he celebrated his fifth anniversary as Workforce Software’s finance leader. “Prior to this, the longest that I have ever stayed anywhere has been four years,” explains Feller, who says that the cadence of his CFO career transitions is normally in step with those of other tech sector CFOs, who are known to job-hop every three to four years. Still, Feller mentions his recent anniversary to draw our attention to his resolve to help build Workforce into a formidable SaaS challenger inside the realm of workforce management software. “It reminds me of when I started at Salesforce and we were up against Siebel—which was then acquired by Oracle—and everyone thought that we didn’t have a chance,” says Feller, who held controller and VP of finance roles during a four-year stint at Salesforce. Feller says that Salesforce’s singular focus as a SaaS company allowed it to overstep its merged rivals, who—while many times the size of Salesforce—failed to exploit all of the maturing advantages of the SaaS model. Feller believes that this rivalry was similar to one that Workforce has today with HR software behemoth Kronos, of Lowell, Massachusetts. “With every deal that we close, we pretty much take market share from Kronos,” says Feller, while naming the widely known rival that is roughly 15 times the size of Workforce. Says Feller: “We like to say that we’re ‘Zeus to Kronos’—and if you don’t know your Greek mythology, just search on ‘Zeus, son of Kronos’ and you will discover just what Zeus ended up doing to Kronos.” Needless to say, there’s a reason that Zeus, and not his father, was known as ruler of the gods. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about your arrival at Workforce and what this career chapter means for you? Feller: How has my career evolved? I tend to be a builder and a fixer. I come into situations when some kind of a transformational event either has happened or is about to happen. This obviously goes back to Salesforce, where I had to build a team as we were building the company and prepping for an IPO, and has continued on to Workforce, where the company was founder-led for a number of years. You know, the founder did a great job in building the company, but it was really his first job out of business school. His first job out of business school was being our CEO. This happens all the time. The company did a lot of things well, but on the administration side, there was a lot of work to be done. When we were acquired by Insight Venture Partners in 2014, I was the first hire that they made. They were looking for an experienced SaaS CFO who really knew how to put together not just a team but also the appropriate SaaS company metrics—the KPIs—and who knew how to work with a private equity firm and build a team to support that. Yes, this took time, but this is part of what I do to transform an organization. It’s not like I come in and aim to replace everybody. There’s a lot of great talent in these companies. It’s really putting them in the right place and in a position to succeed and then making sure that they know what they’re in for when they’re coming out of what the company used to be and going through the transformation into what it’s going to be. The way we think about community is important. It’s not just our employees—our employee community— but also the greater communities that we’re part of. We’re a global company. We’re part of the Michigan community. We’re part of the Sydney, Australia, community. We’re part of the London, UK, area community. We try to do a lot to support community activities everywhere.

Back in 2008, when auction giant eBay acquired Bill Me Later (BML), a Maryland-based payment credit company, Brian Whalen and his BML colleagues breathed a sigh of relief. “We had just enough liquidity and options to give us the runway to sell to eBay and PayPal, so—from a learning perspective—it was really about asking the questions ‘How do you keep those options open?’ and ‘How do you keep your liquidity choices available to you so that you can capture the moment?’” says Whalen. Having served in a number business development roles at BML, he recalls as if it were yesterday the sudden wallop that the credit crisis delivered: “It hit us like a sledgehammer, so we made the decision to tighten credit and sacrifice some growth for the quality of our assets.” In addition to preserving cash, BML would raise $100 million from Amazon and T. Rowe Price, while having discussions with a string of potential suitors. Ultimately, in October 2008, eBay acquired the firm for $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in stock. “People will joke and say, ‘It’s better to be lucky than good,’ but to a certain extent, we made our own luck by being prepared,” explains Whalen, who relocated to California following the acquisition of BML to serve in a number of business development and finance roles at PayPal headquarters, including CFO of PayPal’s global credit group. Eventually, he stepped back onto a more entrepreneurial FinTech path that has led him to the CFO office at Branch, a start-up specializing in what are widely labeled as “financial wellness” offerings for companies and their employees. –Jack Sweeney

When asked whether a new sales enablement hire would be a “direct report,” Bill Koefoed, CFO of OneStream Software, replied: “Organization matters only when your processes and relationships don’t.” It’s an observation not shared widely perhaps among newbie CFOs, who upon their arrival are known to rely more on organizational reporting lines than relationship potential to assert their influence. Nevertheless, four months and one pandemic into his latest CFO tour of duty, Koefoed has his relationship-building skills in high gear as he works alongside OneStream’s sales leaders to better identify those factors contributing to sales productivity. According to Koefoed, the challenge is not just about sales productivity, though, but also about how to make the team productive more quickly. Hence OneStream’s new sales enablement hire. Says Koefoed: “People don’t have to sit in finance to be effective, and having great partners and relationships in other areas of the business is just a great way to run the business.” In addition to sales, Koefoed’s relationship-building skills also appear to be focused on OneStream’s customers. How long a customer has been in the pipeline frequently correlates to deal size, says Koefoed, who concedes, “Obviously, big deals take longer.” Still, Koefoed says that his focus these days is more on something that he refers to as “customer familiarity”—and here, too, he’s looking for ways to accelerate OneStream’s upward climb on his customer awareness meter. “The more familiar somebody is with your company, the better able they are to make key decisions,” adds Koefoed, who note that in the case of OneStream, “key decisions” are what trigger the movement of customers to OneStream’s software offerings and away from software provided by larger, more established rivals. –Jack Sweeney

When Mohit Daswani stepped into the CFO office of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ThoughtSpot this past January, he ascended to something more than just another finance leadership position inside a SaaS start-up. Daswani was joining an influential class of CFOs distinguished by their ability to communicate a vision that connects not just with investors, but also with other CFOs. This is a cohort widely visible within the realm of business Intelligence, or BI, the space where finance leaders frequently shop for new technologies and tools to analyze their business data while surveilling the messaging of BI’s latest class of CFO thought leaders. From the perspective of ThoughtSpot, which raised $248 million in late-stage funding last August, the world of BI is now colliding with the world of artificial intelligence and moving the competitive state of play from visualization to real-time data delivery. “This is just a very different offering and value proposition from the current state of BI,” explains Daswani, who was previously the head of finance and strategy at payments company Square, Inc. “This is about giving business customers not just a static dashboard, but also the ability to query the data in real time and create a natural language search on the front end,” adds Daswani, who quickly lists Walmart, 7-Eleven, Celebrity Cruises, and Hulu as ThoughtSpot customers. For some BI watchers, Daswani’s arrival is a feat of fortunate timing, perhaps matched only by that of those executives who once occupied the CFO office at such companies as Cognos and BusinessObjects, the pioneering BI technology companies that many credit with having helped to launch the first big wave of wide-scale BI tool adoption. Then came Tableau, with its powerful visualization tools that indoctrinated even more CFOs into the ranks of the BI faithful. Acquired by Salesforce last June for $14.6 billion, Tableau was a property whose sale became a milestone that few BI watchers could ignore. Add to this, Google’s purchase last year of Looker, another visually driven developer, and it’s clear that visualization is now in BI’s arsenal, says Daswani. “If I’m a CFO or marketing lead, I no longer have to enlist a data scientist to go build a query or dashboard for me,” notes Daswani. “We're talking directly to that decision-maker and company and saying, ‘How do we make your life easier? If you're a CFO, you need to understand what's going on with working capital, because you're managing your cash flow. Let us make it easier for you to do that directly,’” reports Daswani, who these days is busy standardizing work flows and procedures in preparation for ThoughtSpot’s much anticipated IPO. “The Valley is building a lot of great companies right now. I’ve met with many of them over the past few years, but ThoughtSpot stood out for me in multiple dimensions,” says Daswani. Still, ThoughtSpot has company. Among those companies now amplifying the messaging behind BI’s next big wave to both investors and CFOs are Celonis, Sisense, and DataStax.

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As the newly appointed CFO of agtech start-up Cooks Venture, Ankur Agrawal lists one of his favorite duties as designing menus. Of course, we are referring to the menu of performance measurements featured on the poultry company’s maturing business dashboard. “One of the beauties that comes with joining a new company is that you get to build from scratch,” explains Agrawal, who says that he’s relied on some of his earlier experiences using dashboards at Pepsico and Blue Apron to help Cooks Venture to build a better one. According to Agrawal, a successful dashboard begins with understanding what measurements are needed inside a company’s different business functions. At Blue Apron, Agrawal says, the firm’s finance leader improved the company’s dashboard design by first asking functional leaders across the company, “What are the two or three measurements that you are looking at?” “Once he got that list from everyone, he said, ‘All right, now let’s create our dashboard.’ I’ve tried to take a similar approach in which we talk to people and try to understand what they need to see,” explains Agrawal, whose tour of duty at Blue Apron offered far more than lessons in dashboard design. As a finance director for the innovative meal-kit company, Agrawal worked closely with Blue Apron’s cofounder and COO, Matt Wadiak, who left the company in 2017 to establish Cooks Venture. Says Agrawal: “We had worked closely for four years. We had a great partnership and complemented each other very well. We had been talking for a while, so when he started this company, essentially it became the right time for the business and for me because I had been looking for the right opportunity.” -Jack Sweeney

Along his path to the CFO office at technology firm Trintech, Omar Choucair’s segue from radio to high tech was among his most consequential career transitions. “There were not a lot of radio companies based in Dallas, Texas, at the time, and there was this young but growing tech company. While it was a calculated risk on my part, I liked the people, and the executives were hard-charging, which I also liked,” says Choucair, when asked to recall some of the decision-making behind his leap to the high-tech realm. Today, as Trintech’s finance leader, Choucair has a list of CFO priorities that includes making performance measures more accessible across the organization. When it comes to Trintech’s approach to FP&A, Choucair is typically analytical: “I think that the bones are there and the data are there, but the difficult part lies in organizing the FP&A team around the question of how we get this put together into a form that people can really look at and use to make decisions.” Choucair says that he wants people to second-guess the factors currently driving performance and that they should be routinely asking the question, “Why did this happen last week or last month versus three months ago?” One recent development that is helping to energize performance measurement at Trintech as well as across the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) realm is the broadening publication of KPIs. “Today, versus a couple of years ago, we now have many of these public companies publishing their KPIs through their Investor Day presentation decks or their 10-K and 10-Q financial filing disclosures. So there's a lot of information that we can now mine in order to track how we’re doing when compared to everybody else,” explains Choucair. CFOTL: Tell us about your experiences inside the high tech industry? Choucair: Trintech is my third technology company as CFO. Immediately before this, I was with a software company that was another private equity–backed firm that sold digital advertising on a subscription basis. We had a platform that was a B2B play and very competitive with a lot of the other technology companies that were selling into B2B with marketers all across the U.S. Before that, my first CFO opportunity was with a technology software company that distributed TV commercials and other short-term content on behalf of advertisers and marketers to television stations and cable outlets. So, I’ve been in an interesting space in that I’ve been in three different technology companies and the last two were SaaS. The first one was software, but it was sold by the drink. I think that what’s interesting about this business is that there’s a significant opportunity on the large enterprise side. The office of the CFO has changed tremendously in the sense that there are so many different applications that you can bring to automate a lot of the functions, whether it’s your financial planning, your tax compliance, and so forth. It could be your payroll; it could be your travel; it could be your HR. With all of these additional SaaS-based applications today, maybe only a third or 25% of them were even available two or three years ago. In terms of where we think we are today, we think that we’re in the second or third inning of what we can do with the office of the CFO in terms of automating and creating this ROI for CFOs and automating the way that they close the books.

Nestor: Energy Focus is an LED lighting and controls company. LED lighting is like comparing a smartphone to a rotary phone. LED lights are actually extremely high-tech—it's almost like having a laptop inside the light. If you were to take one apart, you would be amazed at how many computer components and wafers and chips are in there. These lights are not a commodity. They are very differentiated. Unfortunately, the industry historically has sold them very much like a commodity, through the same channels as fluorescent and incandescent lights. Energy Focus does not. One thing that sets us apart is that we use a direct sales model, which does give us, we think, a competitive advantage. We will soon be launching a new product that has dimmable and tunable LED lighting. It allows you to leverage your existing wiring without having to use Bluetooth or wifi or do a big rewiring in a facility. This is coming out in the market soon, and we think that it will be revolutionary. The people who have seen the demos have been very excited about it. This type of approach is what sets us apart. I think that we're a very unique company that is positioned very well in an industry that's going to be growing extraordinarily rapidly over the next 10 years. The key to success is growth, profitable growth, and we will do that. I really want to return Energy Focus to cash flow break-even—this is a very important goal for the next 12 months. We will be getting this new product launched successfully, and of course I'm always focused on generating shareholder returns. One of my key objectives that is the underpinning of everything that I do is generating shareholder returns.

CFOTL: Tell us about this business - what does it do and what are its offerings? Richards: Centauri is a government services business. We've been growing at about 20% a year, on an organic-only basis, for the past four or five years. We just reached just under $500 million in revenue in 2019, and I'm looking to continue growing in the 20% to 30% range in 2020. We're really focused on space and missile defense and where those domains intersect and create sort of an ecosystem in the defense world. We focus on employing what we believe really is our strength, which is the top technical and specialized talent needed to support the missions of our customers. What makes us different from other government services providers is our focus on the people. I think that a lot of government services companies see the billable staff as not really employees of the company but just products that are being sold. When one contract goes away, so do their products, and when you get a new contract, you go hire new people. We really focus on our technical talent as part of the company. They're not tied to a specific contract or project, but we will develop their career, invest in them from a training and professional development perspective, and move them between projects so that they get enhanced skills that allow them to move up in their career. This allows us to retain a lot of the really critical talent that our customers need and move them between various kinds of mission sets over time. This really separates us from the other sort of body shop types of government services businesses. The next 12 months are really about process optimization. We're setting goals right now and objectives for 2020 that are really based on looking at what we're doing and figuring out how we can do it better. How can we measure this? How can we identify that we've successfully improved the way that we do business and operated within the CFO organization to better support the company's growth through better and stronger processes and optimizing the way that we do business?

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CFOTL: Share with us a finance strategic moment? Coletta: The most recent strategic moment that sticks with me goes back two years to when I moved to our North America organization as CFO. We were on the battlefield of innovation and the cloud business, and we were carrying a big share of the company's business, with high expectations on the street already. We had a business that had been a bit bumpy in the beginning of the year, but we had a solid team that was always seeking to improve itself. To me, it was, Okay, what do I bring to the table and how do I change the dynamic here? The good news was that we had a lot to work with, but the bad news was that when you are public and in a very exposed environment, you never have as much time as you’d like. It's very important not only to deliver quickly, but also to change or invert some trends. I really make sure that I bring value to the business. My team and I give advice and make fact-based decisions that really form a success plan for the remainder of the year at any given time. The strategic moment for me came at the end of the year. We had a very sound acceleration and great financial results, and the team got recognized as Finance Region of the Year. We had gotten employee engagement going up, as well as leadership trust. Service attitudes with regard to the business were way above the benchmarks, and all of this was performed with quality, so we had gained in predictability, efficiency, energy, and credibility. Obviously, the credit goes to the team all together, and this takes an entire leadership team really rising to the occasion. But it's quite powerful to see how dynamics can change and how you can sustain success when you focus on the right things. This strategic moment for me was then when I entered that office and got so much responsibility put in front of me. There were a lot of areas to improve—I won’t say “fix”—but to improve. At the same time, we had a very high run rate, and some areas were doing fairly well. We had a business environment that was quite steady, a big customer base, and so on. So, how do you really drive change in a short period of time, which in this case was the seven months left in the year to make an impact and turn the ship, so to speak? We have been riding this wave ever since. We have a lot of positive momentum across the board on the business front and also in finance, and I think that inverting some of the trends at the right time was critical. You learn a lot about yourself. You also learn a lot about the ability to drive change and people. To me, this was a very strategic moment in my career in terms of really having the ability to build on everything that I had learned before and everything that I had seen in different capacities in order to really move the needle quickly.

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CFOTL: What are your priorities as a finance leader over the next 12 months? Freedman: Here at Room to Read, we've just launched our 2020–2025 strategic plan, of which one of the core parts is the continued build of our financial sustainability. I'm super excited and proud that we are launching a five-year, $10 million initiative—we're calling it a Future Fund—to which we're asking our donors to contribute. In addition to funding our day-to-day programs, we're looking to build out funds that will be unrestricted and allow us to get to six months' operating expense coverage, which is best-in-class. This would allow the organization to really build out its operational reserves to give us the wherewithal to weather ups and downs in the financial markets as well as to take some small risks with innovation to try some things out, test some things—to learn quickly and, if necessary, to fail quickly, as our board says—and to then adapt. Having those extra months of operating coverage will really make a difference for us. My own organization has a leadership role in this, in partnership with the development team. We'll be talking to donors and working with all sorts of organizations to describe the need for having that kind of operating expense coverage to give us real sustainability for our future.

Less than a year after his arrival at Splunk—a fast-growing, San Francisco–based software developer—CFO Jason Child appears to have been fully repatriated to his native land. To be clear: The “land” to which we refer is not the code-crunching zone of software development but the turf of business growth and scale—a locale in which Child resided for more than a decade while serving in multiple finance leadership roles at Amazon. Child first joined that company in 1999 as a corporate controller before being reassigned to the firm’s FP&A function. During his 12 years at Amazon, the online retailer grew into a colossus, with annual revenue jumping from roughly $1 billion in 1999 to $50 billion in 2011, the year following his departure. Since his stint at Amazon, Child has occupied the CFO office at multiple companies, including Groupon, where, less than a year after his arrival, the company would raise $700 million in an initial public offering—the second-biggest tech IPO in history at the time, behind only Google’s. Still, as Child points out for us, he had yet to nab a CFO position inside the more traditional software development realm, where his “growth and scale” credentials appear to always be in high demand. At Splunk, where sales grew 38% year-over-year in 2019, Child appears to have found a software match. – Jack Sweeney Less than a year after his arrival at Splunk—a fast-growing, San Francisco–based software developer—CFO Jason Child appears to have been fully repatriated to his native land. To be clear: The “land” to which we refer is not the code-crunching zone of software development but the turf of business growth and scale—a locale in which Child resided for more than a decade while serving in multiple finance leadership roles at Amazon. Child first joined that company in 1999 as a corporate controller before being reassigned to the firm’s FP&A function. During his 12 years at Amazon, the online retailer grew into a colossus, with annual revenue jumping from roughly $1 billion in 1999 to $50 billion in 2011, the year following his departure. Since his stint at Amazon, Child has occupied the CFO office at multiple companies, including Groupon, where, less than a year after his arrival, the company would raise $700 million in an initial public offering—the second-biggest tech IPO in history at the time, behind only Google’s. Still, as Child points out for us, he had yet to nab a CFO position inside the more traditional software development realm, where his “growth and scale” credentials appear to always be in high demand. At Splunk, where sales grew 38% year-over-year in 2019, Child appears to have found a software match. – Jack Sweeney CFOTL: What was the business opportunity that brought you to Splunk? Child: When I found out that the Splunk job was open, I jumped at the chance just because I had seen that Splunk really has a chance to be one of the next generational software providers and that it just has a really unique approach to managing the largest datasets. In the software business, we don't have COOs. There's typically a TRO, which we have, and a president of sales. We've got the technology and engineering organizations, of course. My team is trying to really build up the business operations and the transformation teams. I'm taking on those teams, which is a recent decision that we've made. I want to see the finance function become the team that really helps to drive our operational cadence and our progress because this company is growing. Our ARR growth is over 50%—we're at $1.44 billion. We have pretty high growth and already pretty large numbers, so it's all about getting the operational cadence, getting the dashboarding and the weekly business reviews and all of the right operational reviews in place to make sure that all of the right info is in place. Things are breaking every day somewhere, and being able to identify as early as possible where things are breaking and where resources and attention are necessary is critical to being able to fulfill our growth objectives. That's on top of the normal things, like being tied to controllership, having great transparency with investors, and having an efficient and timely close process. We have all of these kinds of table stakes, but the goal is really to help the finance organization to have a front seat at what I call the truth-seeking table. We just want to tell it like it is. We want to provide metrics that tell what is happening in the business, not what we want to have happen, so we have to partner with every part of the business to do this. This is our focus for this year. We're off to a good start, but we have a lot of work to do.

When finance leader Carolyn Koehn looks back on her career to identify the experiences that she feels best prepared her for a CFO role, she shares a candid observation: “I went to places no one else wanted to go.” Such was the case in the late 1990s, when she moved to Bogotá, Colombia, for Nortel Networks, after having helped the company’s finance leadership understand why she was a good match for a sudden job opening. “I was the only interested candidate who wanted to go,” recalls Koehn, who says that her initiative and willingness to relocate helped her to become short-listed for other roles in Nortel’s Latin American finance operations. When a more senior role opened up in Mexico, Koehn’s Bogotá experience helped trump that of a second interested job candidate. “When I look at those two opportunities in hindsight, they honestly were like mini-CFO roles, where you are pulled into everything from facilities and supplier relations to local communications, customer meetings, and more,” says Koehn, who in 2003 became a finance director at Dell, where multiple finance leadership roles would eventually bring her to the position of VP of finance for all of Dell’s global sales compensation. “A lot of people would look at this as a thankless role, but it’s one of the most critical ones when it comes to turning sales strategy into execution,” she explains. “This was about taking 31,000 salespeople and applying $1.5 billion in commissions,” adds Koehn, who credits the role with having challenged her “soft skills” as she became tasked with bringing different parts of the organization together to better inform her decision-making. A number of years into her sales comp tenure, Koehn began hearing about yet another opportunity in a different land. After spending most all of her career in helping to grow hardware and infrastructure technology businesses, Koehn became interested in a CFO role at one of Dell’s software-as-a-service businesses, Boomi. Not unlike the role in Bogotá, it was a match. –Jack Sweeney

It doesn’t take long for CFO Guido Torrini of Celonis to draw our attention to the burden of the growing pools of data within organizations and the great irony that is afflicting many corporate finance departments today. He’s referring to the fact that while at no time have finance organizations had more data to help them better expose the opportunities that lie ahead, at no time has finance been at greater risk of losing the focus required to help their organizations benefit from the opportunities. “You can’t just throw new dashboards at people and make them awash in KPIs,” observes Torrini, who believes that it’s the responsibility of the CFO to first “distill the numbers” and then share them in a way that doesn’t undermine the focus required for organizations to succeed. “The ability to successfully execute is completely tied to focus,” says Torrini, who underscores his point by recalling the “3 C’s”—a favorite mantra of one of his early mentors, who implored his finance team to make every communication “crisp, clear, and concise.” Beyond clarity, Torrini points out, messaging is about consistency and making certain that the organization as a whole is able to receive it. “This is about crafting a message and delivering it over and over again, making sure that it goes across the organization and that there’s a structure and cadence to communicating and reviewing it,” notes Torrini, whose emphasis on “cadence” makes us think that he has perhaps added a fourth “C” to his mentor’s mantra. Says Torrini: “It’s almost like a song that you find yourself repeating in your head without really understanding why.” –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: What are your priorirites as a finance leader over the next 12 months? Torrini: I like to describe the CFO as being kind of like the architect of the enterprise, in the sense of being someone who can actually design the machine and explain to people how the machine works and root every function in the organization in the revenue equation. This is how we make money. There are four or five important variables that matter at the company, and it’s all about how everyone can align around how we move these variables up and down so that we grow and expand our business. I think that it’s about not only providing the theoretical context for these, but also then leading people with the practical data and resolve and follow-through and monitoring that shows progress. Ultimately, you end up being not only the architect but also the drummer for the business–the one who sets the cadence and gives the rhythms on what’s working, what’s not working, and what we need to improve and on how we decide to allocate capital among the different initiatives, depending on what’s yielding the best results. I think that the CFO position is amazing because you have a unique vantage point in having the opportunity to run the data side of things as well as the finance function. The standards compliance and stewarding responsibilities are very enriching and something that I’m very excited about. Throughout my career, I’ve tried to progress and be ready to do more. You go from steward to operator to strategy, but I think that the bigger role that synthesizes it all is this idea of the architect and the drummer. A priority for us is making sure that the company can continue to double in size and create scalable and repeatable processes around the way that we operate and execute. This is pillar #1. Pillar #2 is to up our game in the way that I and our organization and the broader group that we’re building here can come to the front lines to not just be a good sparring partner but also actually drive business and drive revenue.

Among the more novel approaches that CFO Anup Singh has recently used to help advance a more open working environment at Illumio, of Sunnyvale, California, was the creation of a channel inside the instant messaging application Slack through which employees can access Illumio’s finance leader by tagging their queries with an unassuming “#CFO ask me anything”. “They will ask me my views on things. This is about high employee engagement and being really accessible to the employees. I’m letting them know that they’ve got an avenue where we can be straightforward and very transparent with sharing information,” says Singh, who joined Illumio in early 2019 after having served in the CFO role for several different companies, including Anaplan and Nimble Storage. According to Singh, the CFO Slack channel extends his reach beyond his finance team members and helps him to communicate with Illumio employees with whom he may not ordinarily engage. Says Singh: “I can use the opportunity to explain the meaning of some of the financial analyses and metrics to a nonfinancial audience, and this is information-sharing that is conversational.” At the same time, Singh’s efforts to inject more openness into Illumio’s finance function and the company at large have also involved more conventional methods. Such is the case with “The Bottom Line,” a label given to a number of somewhat impromptu meetings that Singh has held to better engage with Illumio employees. “I do these a couple of times a quarter here at Illumio. It’s off-the-cuff. I show up for an hour in the break room and employees can dial in from anywhere around the world and ask me questions,” says Singh, who frequently uses the words “openness,” “conversation,” and “engagement” when describing the role of finance at Illumio. “As a CFO, you are truly a cross-functional executive. You’re wearing the hat of a GM. So this is about getting in there with sales and marketing and product people and sharing a very clear understanding of the value drivers and how your team helps the organization,” he explains. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: What are your priorities as finance leader over the next 12 months? Singh: In looking ahead at Illumio, my big focus is on continuing to support our go-to-market expansion. Our company's growing quickly. We're expanding globally. This means recruiting in different geographies, expanding our offices, and so on. This is something that I and my team do a lot to support. In the past year, I would say that we've also worked hard to transform Illumio into a really data-driven environment as well as to emphasize the operational excellence of the company. The ongoing task is to continue to automate our metrics and automate our key processes. This obviously helps us to manage our growth efficiently. The last thing, which is very near and dear to my heart and a priority for me every year, is to continue the journey in building out a world-class team here at Illumio. This is an ongoing quest that we have. We try every year to just be better and better. When you have a model such as ours, which is very much "land and expand," having a healthy NRR or net revenue retention rate is a great indicator that the customers that you are getting in and winning are coming back to buy even more. You look at things like renewal rates and churn and so forth. These are good metrics to examine not just because they impact revenue but also because they act as good indicators of customer satisfaction, of how the product is doing, of the value that the customers are getting from our software, and so on. In addition to growth, we also track a bunch of other KPIs and metrics to ensure that we're achieving a healthy mix between growth and improving our margins and leverage in the business. We want to ensure that over time our gross margins are healthy and that we see this sequential improvement in margins every year.

Knowing that Mike Ellis has been the CFO of several growth companies, we can’t help but ask him about his tour of duty at the Massachusetts Port Authority, where the experienced finance executive served as controller from 2006 to 2009. Although the Port Authority is not exactly the type of employer that you would expect to find on the resume of an accomplished “growth CFO,” Ellis is more than happy to answer our question. “The Port Authority was not tax-funded—it was a bona-fide business with multiple revenue streams generating profits,” he explains, while characterizing the government agency as a $600 million business that contributes enormous value to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “I had never worked for a not-for-profit from the inside, but what made me excited about the Port Authority was the sheer size of it,” says Ellis, who during his tenure as controller would sign off on the accounting operations of three airports and a patchwork of revenue streams across Boston’s sprawling seaport. Looking back, Ellis says that up until the Port Authority, his senior finance leadership roles had permitted him to make decisions on his own, whereas inside the Port Authority—as in any large enterprise businesses—decision-making had to be more collaborative. “I had 40 people reporting to me at the Port Authority, and whether you are public or private or a not-for-profit business, decision-making has to be more collaborative,” Ellis explains. “It was awkward at first, but in the end, being able to achieve collaboration and innovation as a group versus having to just make the call myself made me a better CFO,” says Ellis, whose Port Authority career appears to have been well timed when you consider that it roughly coincided with the beginning of the CFO role’s ongoing march toward requiring more overtly cross-functional leadership and regular collaboration with other functional groups and leaders. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about the history of the company's capital structure? Ellis: I started with Flywire four years ago. We were basically a series C business at the time, basically a break-even business, so we really didn't need any additional capital. We have raised our series D, which came in approximately 18 months ago and was about a $100 million round. We've raised roughly $140 million for the business over the course of its nine-year history, and we still have plenty of it left. We've done a really good job of being efficient with our capital structure as well as making sure that the business model itself works appropriately and is efficient across all of its different tailored offerings to its customers. We're able to show that we're basically a moderately break-even business with respect to the business data analytics. We get real-time data on an hour-by-hour basis, essentially, so I'm able to understand our revenue and our transaction counts well by different verticals, by different geographic locations, by size, and by everything else across our different verticals. That's really robust, and there are no issues there. With respect to the financial investments, this really came down to the ability to close more quickly in order to get information out to the business leaders in a more timely fashion. This is really what the investment has done historically, enabling us to be really strong and robust on the business operations side and have the business at our fingertips on a real-time basis as to our clients so that the business leaders have the same view into that information. It took some time to kind of get that financial information and be able to close more rapidly. We have a different program within the organization, our business operations team, which basically--with the help of the data architects--really augments and creates the analytical function as it relates to what we're seeing in the data. This is a shared services model, with multiple people working together collaboratively to be able to share with the executives what's really happening in our business, and we can cut this up in multiple ways.

mong the different experiences that Alan George credits with having prepared him for a CFO role, one office meeting looms large. After he had spent days and nights preparing his first presentation for the president of a portfolio company, George recalls, the meeting came to an abrupt end when the executive reached across the table and shut George’s laptop. “Come with me!” was the curt command he recalls being issued as he followed the executive out of the office. Over the next few days, George says, he toured the company’s manufacturing facility alongside the executive and went on visits to different suppliers. “We were literally riding on delivery trucks and talking to retailers, and he took me through the entire life cycle of the product,” says George, who credits the excursions with illuminating the realities of the business and delivering a lesson that to this day informs his decision-making. Of course, the experience that truly sets George apart from those of most of our CFO guests is one that happened at midstream in his career, when—after having spent a number of years at JP Morgan as an investment analyst and ridden inside delivery trucks as a private equity executive—he exited the business world and joined the U.S. military. “I usually tell people that I took a five-year sabbatical,” says George, who, after completing basic and airborne training, was selected as a Green Beret and assigned to a team within U.S. special forces with which he remained engaged for three years. “I was obviously older than most people, and I think that if I had waited three more months, I would have been over the age limit,” explains George, who adds that a desire to serve in the military first took root while he was working at JP Morgan in New York in the months after 9/11. Six years later, his plans took flight. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: What are some of your top of mind numbers? George: The first thing that I look at is daily sales. I get a report that comes out in the middle of the night. I know what we did in sales the day before, and then I can drill down into it and say, OK, since I'm primarily a direct-to-consumer business, I want to see my traffic conversion and AOV. I want to see how we're doing relative to our forecast. I want to see how any specific programs are driving those key metrics. For us, specifically, traffic is a huge driver. We have really strong conversion and AOV. Traffic-driving awareness programs have a huge impact for our business. When we're looking at where we're spending marginal dollars, the ROI of driving traffic to our site today is really high, so the couple of betas that we've done to drive traffic have been really, really meaningful for us. The other thing that I look at is repeat purchase rate. I think that this is an indicator of the health of your product portfolio and the quality of the products that you're delivering. I tell everybody that it's easy to get that first sale. It's really hard to get that second and almost impossible to get the third. So, how do we be the best at this? By getting our consumers to buy into what we're doing and continue to purchase. These are the major things that we look at today. When I came in, I revamped the forecasting model. The team had done a good job with the limited resources that they had in putting together a forecast to try to stay ahead of growth and be able to manage inventory and cash properly. When I came in, I tweaked the process. The biggest thing was instituting a weekly direct cash flow model. As an early-stage company, cash is the most important thing for us. We're in the middle of a fund-raising round, so being able to manage my cash flow on a weekly basis until we get that round closed is critically important. This is something that I do and look at every day—tweaking the forecast based on what I'm seeing and being able to make sure that I have visibility into what the cash flow will be for the next 13 to 26 weeks.

Years from now, when finance leader David Burt is reminiscing about his varied career chapters, you might imagine a captivated listener politely interrupting the veteran CFO with the question, “Excuse me, but what exactly was your profession?” This is a query perhaps more likely to be asked of veteran CFOs than other seasoned business leaders, in light of how finance leaders are less tethered than others to any one industry or opportunity throughout their careers. Such is the case with Burt, who, as CFO of ServiceTitan, is busily applying his patchwork of business and industry experiences to the multibillion-dollar residential home services industry. Turn back the clock 20 years, and you’d find Burt helping companies expand into China as a Bain & Company consultant based in Sydney, Australia, his original home. Ten years later, you’d find him evaluating digital media acquisition targets as an investment banker with JP Morgan. Only 8 years after that, you’d see him roaming the frontlines of the streaming wars while serving as co-head of corporate development for Netflix. Today, Burt views his finance leadership role as being not unlike that in an earlier chapter as a strategic advisor, when he sought to help empower management to be more outward-looking. He says that finance executives “oftentimes get boxed into just looking at the internal aspects of the company.” To highlight his point, Burt recalls that back in 2012, Netflix realized that three companies—Disney, Nickelodeon, and the Cartoon Network—would someday soon wield a powerful advantage inside the realm of children’s content as more consumers turned to streaming. “I asked myself, ‘If I were sitting in the FP&A teams for those companies, what would things look like?’ I realized pretty quickly that this meant that we as a company would need to begin investing in original content much sooner,” explains Burt, who says that up until that time, Netflix had been focused on developing content mostly for more mature audiences, with shows like the “Orange Is the New Black.” – Jack Sweeney CFOTL: What are your top of mind numbers? Burt: The first things that I look at on a weekly and monthly basis tend to center on the fundamentals. Once we're in the door with a customer, there's an opportunity for us to provide additional services that might add additional recurring revenue. This growth is really important because it allows us to forward-invest into areas of R&D, sales and marketing, and so forth. We are of a certain size today, but we have aspirations to be much, much bigger, and as we grow, we are enabled to do more and more for our customers more efficiently because we can scale our investments in R&D across a larger base. The second big area that I like to focus on is our unit economics. In particular, one of the key metrics within the unit economics would be how efficient we are in delivering the service. The financial measure that we look at there would be ongoing gross margin. Then there's how efficient we are at actually acquiring a customer, so we have a set of measures around customer acquisition costs. There's also how good we are at satisfying the customer, which manifests itself in churn. You can get pretty misled by churn, particularly in a B2B software company where your software is so critical to a company. It's important to look at not just the numbers and the financials, but also what might be underlying indicators of key metrics in this third area. Our measures of customer satisfaction are important here, and in particular we spend a lot of time looking at net promoter score, NPS, among a few other C-SAT types of metrics.

Inside the world of retail businesses, Greg Wookey’s CFO career has advanced down a path that parallels the sector’s growing appetite for more sophisticated software. Such was the case roughly 10 years ago, when he stepped into the CFO office at Mindbody—a firm whose well-known software helped fitness centers across the country to manage the demands of their clientele—and such is the case today, as Wookey serves as CFO of Boulevard, a SaaS developer whose offerings are specially tailored to high-end salons and spas. This arena—in what Boulevard and other software developers commonly refer to as “appointment-based retail”—is where Boulevard now hopes to help salon and spa owners to achieve a more sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing customer booking experience. “We saw that there was an inability of salon owners to connect effectively with their clientele, so this was about making booking appointments and integrating payments easier so that salon owners could accept payments more easily,” says Wookey. Meanwhile, Wookey is keeping a close eye on Boulevard’s own customer engagement activities. “We actually have very good metrics in terms of the size of our pipeline, the pipeline velocity, and how fast the opportunities are moving through that pipeline. Then we measure the direct marketing spend that we have and how that relates to new business,” the finance leader explains. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about a finance strategic moment. Wookey: One that comes to mind was back in 2009, when I started at a company called Mindbody. We were a little bit bigger than Boulevard is now and we were a few rounds of investing ahead of where we are at Boulevard, but it was very clear that the business was growing extremely fast and that there was the potential that at some point in the future we might be able to become a public company. With this in mind, I knew that there were certain things that we needed to do at Mindbody to prepare for that moment--which didn't come until six years later. But in the time that I was heading finance there, what I tried to do was lay the foundation for what would be the ability to go public at some point in the future. This really involved several things. One was to build out a more robust internal team in terms of accounting and finances and FP&A. Another was to create the ability to use tools that would be more supportive of a public company--for example, moving off of QuickBooks and onto NetSuite so that our reporting would be stronger. We also changed relationships in terms of our audit, banking, and legal. These were all things that I set in motion very early on in my career there. This eventually proved to be something that was important for the ability of the company to go public, which we did in 2015. This was a moment when I looked at the finance operation, looked at what the state of it was at the time, and then thought about where it needed to be several years down the road. You have to start these processes in motion and not wait too long, or suddenly you're up against it in terms of timing. This was a very strategic thing that I did in terms of trying to make sure that the company was prepared in case this happened, which it eventually did, and it goes well beyond finance. It touches the entire company in terms of how we operate, what processes we put in place, how we access data, things of that nature. For me, this was probably the most significant strategic initiative that I embarked on that started from finance and really ended up impacting the entire company.

In the past, Sue Vestri has told friends that she has achieved CFO success by routinely working herself out of jobs. Vestri is not alone. Certainly, many of her finance leader peers have helped to create some exciting M&A deal-making chapters only to be “written out” of the newly merged business’s future script. “Being put out of a job isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one opportunity can open the door to the next—or at least it has for me,” says Vestri, whose latest career post as CFO of Greenphire opened up just as her previous role as CFO of Artisan Mobile of Philadelphia was closing down with the sale of the company in 2015. “I was thinking that I’d actually take the summer off, but that didn’t happen,” says Vestri, who remembers being contacted by a recruiter about Greenphire, which was yet another Philadelphia-area company that had recently been acquired and was looking for some local C-suite talent to beef up its management ranks. Along the way, some of the local deal-making impacting her career has involved out-of-town acquirers. Such was the case back in 2010, when Dell acquired Boomi, a Philadelphia-area technology developer specializing in integration technologies. At Boomi, Vestri had advanced into a finance leadership role just as the giant technology provider from Round Rock, Texas, came knocking. Says Vestri: “With Dell being public at the time, the whole process and early discussions had to be kept very confidential.” In light of Dell’s concerns, Vestri says, Boomi looked for space off-site and ended up renting a hotel meeting room for a period of months. “The process involved maybe a half dozen people from our side, but there was literally an army of executives from Dell,” she recalls. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL When it comes to customer measurement whatare you focused on? Vestri: I think that everyone tries to measure customer service and customer support in some way. In the past, we historically have done customer surveys and implementation after implementation periodically throughout the year. It's always challenging as to who actually responds and how you disseminate the information and make any use of it. We still do these types of things, but recently we've actually gone out and done some user forums where we've sat in the room with some of our users. To be honest, not all of the feedback was good. There were some pretty harsh critics in the room at some of these forums that we did. It was really actually good for us to hear this, and it's driving a different strategy for us going into 2020. We're going to literally have a team dedicated to site satisfaction and getting training to our sites. In the clinical trial world, there are certainly a lot of sites in the U.S. and they're easier to touch, but ours are worldwide. They're all over the world. You have language barriers that you're dealing with. We rely on our partners to do a lot of the training on how to utilize our software, and we're finding that this may not be the most successful way to get people up and using it. For us, a big driver of revenue is getting clients worldwide to use the software in the way that it was intended. We are spending a tremendous amount of energy on understanding our clients and what it's going to take to make them happy and be advocates of using our products in our industry. We're very focused on and paying attention to a number of key strategic initiatives. There's an innovation one and a process optimization one. Things around site adoption and client experience. Everything that we're going to do in 2020 is going to focus on these key initiatives.

Back in the early 1990s, with both feet firmly planted on an auditing career path inside Price Waterhouse’s Tampa, Florida, office, Raj Dani decided to take a detour into the accounting house’s M&A advisory practice. Over the next few years, the one-time auditor began providing deal-makers with financial and operational due diligence on their future mergers and acquisitions. “I became focused on cash and EBITDA generation, the strategic value of two enterprises coming together, and how you drive synergies and value for shareholders,” explains Dani, who says that his segue into M&A opened the door to experiences that have never for a minute led him to reconsider the auditor’s path. Dani’s jump into Price Waterhouse’s M&A advisory services also allowed the former auditor to gain international experience when the M&A practice shortly thereafter transferred him to Zurich, Switzerland. It is perhaps little surprise that Dani’s post-PW career has also involved both M&A and Europe. Looking to enhance its European operations as well as its new ventures portfolio, Jabil Circuit enlisted Dani to help lead its corporate development efforts from its Milan, Italy, office. Reflecting on his different M&A roles overseas, Dani says that “it was just a major life lesson on how to treat people when you’re integrating two cultures and how to be respectful of people and their differences.” Today, as CFO of Ping Identity, of Denver, Colorado, Dani credits his early-career “M&A detour” along with his budding relationships inside the private equity realm for having helped advance him into the CFO office. CFOTL: What are your priorities as a finance leader over the next six months? Dani: In terms of our priorities at Ping Identity and my own as a finance leader overall, my first priority is making sure that I continue to work from a team perspective, to work on progressing my team's knowledge base and experience, and to thus give them greater career path opportunities. If you don't think long-term about your people, they're thinking long-term about themselves, and they want to make sure that they're partnered with a company and leader who have their best interests in mind. This is not something that most leaders think of just off the top of their head as their number one priority, but It is absolutely all about the people for me because without these people, we would get bogged down very quickly. We hire well, we train well, and we make sure that they're getting out of the company just as much as the company is getting out of them. You cannot have this equation be out of balance. So, I really do prioritize the people-centric initiatives from a business perspective. We're doing several things in terms of new products that we've introduced in the past few quarters. As we mentioned on our last quarterly call, we're now really leaning into designing sales and marketing investments to monetize some of these product investments. A lot of my focus will be on the operations of the business and making sure that our new CMO is successful and getting what he needs to continue to elevate our brand such that Ping Identity is top-of-mind in any cybersecurity discussion with global systems integrators, with board-level folks, with C-suites, and so on. I'll also be making sure that our execution, from marketing to product to sales, is just a smooth supply chain, if I can use that analogy. There are investments that we need to make in each, so just making sure that we're making the right investments at the right time and really enabling our teams to be successful is top-of-mind for me.

CFOTL: What are your priorities as finance leader over the next 12 months? CFOT:" Here at Eventbrite, my priorities are to bring focus and simplicity. We just went through our planning experience for 2020. We started with 12 different strategic initiatives, and I'm happy to say that eight of them wound up on the cutting room floor. We've got four that everybody is really focused on. These four initiatives had 20 subprojects, and these, too, have been dialed down to four. We're just bringing focus and clarity and simplicity. I teased the team in our flash report. On the 57th page, we put a little note which said that the first person to read the page and call Lanny Baker would get dinner at the restaurant of their choice. That was three months ago, and the phone still hasn't rung. This was just my way of showing the team that some of the complicated reporting that we were doing just wasn't making a difference. Nobody's looking at it, and that's why I'm trying to bring some simplicity and focus. All of this is in support of allowing the company to drive long-term growth. One of our priorities on the finance team is helping the company to accelerate growth, make the right decisions, pick the right priorities, make the right investments, track these, manage these, and get the payoff, which will be acceleration and sustainable long-term growth for the company. The other thing that I'm trying to do at this particular organization is to always put creators first. As we're developing metrics, as we're developing our financial measures, as we're thinking about our messaging to employees, to customers, to shareholders, and even to the board of directors, we want to make sure that everybody sees that this is a company with creators first. The metrics that we talk about start with creators, and that's helping us to focus. And this focus, I think, helps us to drive growth.

Step inside CFO Kevin Jacobson’s office at LogicGate, and there’s little question that you’ll think you’ve entered a realm where growth and risk are often two sides of the same coin. In fact, LogicGate’s fast path to achieving “product market fit” was no doubt shortened by early customers who today wield a similar growth/risk mind-set. Four-year-old LogicGate, a provider of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software, now expects its workforce to expand to 170 employees before 2021. Says Jacobson: “I tell our team that going forward, we are going to be breaking records across every metric in every quarter.” With yet another year of impressive growth behind LogicGate, Jacobson says that the company’s foundation has been firmly laid for a new growth chapter to be built. “We’ve grown significantly since last year, and my role is now about keeping a vigilant eye on what matters in this new context, this next stage of growth,” he explains.

We are nearly at the end of our interview with Scot Parnell when we ask him to explain what led him to accept the CFO position at DailyPay, a company with a pioneering technology inside the human capital management realm. This is a question that we had asked a little earlier in the interview, but this time we want to know what other factors may have contributed to his decision. Although Parnell has already put forth a compelling explanation of DailyPay’s unique offerings, he is happy to share a bit more with us. “This role was absolutely fascinating. I was at a place in my life where I could take some risks, and I also think that I’ve got some runway here. For me, it was too important to be absolutely excited about goingto work every day. It makes me a better leader. It makes me a better husband and father when I find fulfillment in what I’m doing,” explains Parnell, whose response suddenly widens our lens to a better view of what sets apart his latest CFO career chapter from earlier ones. “As I sat back and looked at what I wanted to do next, this just felt like I could get more excited about it and put more of my soul into it, so that’s what I did,” he continues, while expressing a sentiment that many finance leaders experience but frequently resist acting upon. Having spent the past 20 years as a finance leader in large enterprise organizations, Parnell has observations about the entrepreneurial realm that undoubtedly signal a fresh enthusiasm that few CFOs can muster—and particularly those who may have built their careers as start-up CFOs and but over time have become more integrated into their surroundings. Nonetheless, when it comes to CEO–CFO relationships, Parnell’s comments are suddenly strikingly similar to those of a broad swath of his CFO peers: “The CFO and CEO have to do a Vulcan mind-meld to make sure that they’re not only of the same mind, but also able to work together as a team and provide each other balance and support.” –Jack Sweeney

Tannenbaum: At Brex, pretty early on, I was kind of familiar with the banking landscape from when I had been in investment banking. The group that I had been in actually served regional banks, so I did a lot of regional bank mergers and acquisitions. Then, at SoFi, I had built a lot of relationships with regional banks. I think that when you start in fintech, there's always this belief that you're competing with big banks. That was a lot of the marketing positioning of my former employer, SoFi, but at Brex I saw this opportunity to partner with banks because I was familiar with the card landscape. At least in the commercial card space, outside of the Big Four banks--Wells, Citi, Bank of America, Chase--there are very few financial institutions that actually issue corporate cards. I decided that even though we were a small company, subscale, no one had heard of us, and we had a stupid name like Brex (which actually wasn't as stupid as our first one), banks might want to partner with us because they themselves were fighting their own battles with the Big Four issuers, as well as American Express. So we partnered with a number of banks very early on in a way that most people would think was not possible and was unusual. Ultimately in financial services, brands, particularly with regard to trust and stability, are super important. Today, what's exciting is that technology is changing so many industries and creating lots of opportunities, as well as disruption and uncertainty. Finance is a kind of universal language. At Brex, we need to be known for the brand of our risk management because ultimately we're asking both customers and other businesses to trust us with their money--to buy loans from us, to buy deposits from us, to partner with us and give us access to payments networks. To do this, we really need to be known as a high-quality risk management brand.

CFOTL: Having splitout from GE- we would imagine there were certain business processes already in place at Synchrony, while others processes had to be reestablished or developed. Wenzel: The processes that have been developed are probably the core part of our business. We had to build everything from scratch. Even the processes for things like very mundane benefits in HR, and paying people, and for some of the regulatory reporting–we had to build all that up. But we did take a process from GE that was a very good process in the credit risk world, a very traditional process. You go out and get underwriting scores from credit bureaus, you look at your data, you kind of put a score together, and you say yes or no. We have developed this process more and invested so much in it. Now we’re taking multiple data elements into consideration, including what we get from our partners. We have a thing called “engagements” through which we know how “Jack” is engaged with our retail partners before he engages with us, so we have an idea of who you are. We look at our 80 million active cardholders. You’re probably one of our active cardholders. We look at the information there. We have a much better picture. Then we take these other sources of data from different sources so that we can get more information on you. We use technology now to authenticate you. If you’re using your cell phone, we can prepopulate applications down to two different sources. We’ve allowed these things to come in so that we know the customer better. We use the combination of data and technology and are then really able to put it into our credit operating model. This was very good under GE, but we have brought it really to a much higher-class standard. For us, the next 12 months are really about creating the 2025 vision. What are the tools and technologies that we have to begin building now to be adaptable to the business and how the business is changing? The second thing that we’re trying to do is, again, to have this maniacal focus around customers and in getting value-added jobs out. We’re moving faster when it comes to the artificial intelligence and the robotic process automation that happens more in the controllership or accounting world and driving meaningful projects that will deliver results this year.

It was back in 2002, Stephen Grist says, when he first punched through a surface of rigid assumptions to grasp the innovative levers that would propel him into the ranks of strategic CFOs. At the time, Grist was the CFO of Viatel, a technology company whose management and sales teams were eagerly seeking to reestablish the company’s footing along a growth path after having recently emerged from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. With its bankruptcy in the rearview mirror, the company emerged with an unbridled appetite for growth—but one that was perhaps lacking in long-term vision. Says Grist: “The existing business managers were so focused on ‘Take that hill!’ and ‘This is our business, and this is the path that we’re going down!’ They just were not capable of identifying the disruptive risks.” Having already logged a string of seven-day weeks to hasten Viatel’s exit from bankruptcy, Grist might have found it easy to applaud the sales team’s mounting tactical wins and provide diligent governance. Instead, he engaged the company’s general counsel, and together they approached a number of bankers in order to “add on” some small Internet businesses that could quickly diversify the types of services that Viatel offered to its small to midsize customers. According to Grist, Viatel at the time was struggling with the “The Innovator’s Dilemma”—a phrase referring to disruptive competitors first coined and used as the title of a popular text by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. “You’re so caught up in your vision of the company that you’re not really capable of identifying where those disruptive risks are affecting the company as they come in from different, different directions,” says Grist, who looks back at 2002 as a turning point for both Viatel and his CFO career. Moving forward, Grist has entered new CFO roles as a disruptive risk expert tasked with questioning assumptions. “Every time I’ve come into a company, it’s been like, ‘Okay, it’s time to do the long-term business plan’—but you’ve got a different view of the world, so you can ask all those questions,” says Grist, who since Viatel has served in a string CFO roles for both founder-led and VC-backed companies. Says Grist: “As the CFO, you bring your experience to bear and you identify risks as you build the next year’s budget or the long-term model from really being in a position to question assumptions.” - Jack Sweeney

Asked to reflect on those experiences that she feels prepared her for a finance leadership role, a cash flow statement quickly comes to mind for Anna Brunelle, CFO of Kinestral Technologies. Only months into her first industry finance job, Brunelle was tasked with preparing her company’s cash flow statement, and she didn’t like some of what she discovered about the business. “I realized that there were a couple of businesses that the company had acquired a few years earlier that had some elements that were kind of dragging down our profitability,” explains Brunelle, who after digging a little deeper and more closely studying the businesses realized that the areas negatively impacting profits frequently involved certain offerings of recently acquired European businesses that offered limited cross-selling potential. “Not knowing any better, I went to the CFO and CEO and said, ‘Hey, have we ever thought about transferring some of the elements out of these businesses?,’” recalls Brunelle, who even today as a CFO appears somewhat surprised by her early-career assertiveness. She continues: “I say ‘I didn’t know any better’ because I was only two months on the job, and I didn’t know that there was probably more of a process of going through your manager to do this. Instead, I just said, ‘Hey, has anybody thought about this?’” According to Brunelle, only days later she was boarding a plane to Europe to help execute on her suggestion and sell off underperforming assets and parts of the business that were perhaps not as profitable as was desired or in line with the company’s future direction. “I got on a plane having never traveled to Rome before, not knowing any lawyers or accountants or bankers there. I worked through getting an introduction to a banker to help us package these businesses and find buyers and then getting an introduction to an attorney who could help us with the local Italian law and how to structure the contracts for these transactions,” says Brunelle, who credits the resulting deal-making with helping to distinguish her as an executive “who gets things done.” “They were relatively small transactions,” she adds. “I think that one was about a $10 million sale and one was about a $30 million sale. But for me, so early in my career, this was the moment when I realized that finance was the way to open the door to being part of the more exciting strategic business conversations.” –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: What metrics are top of mind for you these days? Brunelle: We've been selling commercially for about two quarters now out of our factory in Taiwan, so we think carefully about quite a few metrics. Obviously, cash is very important. We have to finance the company through our early-stage growth until we reach a point of profitability, just like every other growth company. This is very important. Because we have a fairly complex business, we have to have a pretty well thought out strategic plan and metrics. By "complex business," I mean that we have the Taiwan factory and we also have research and development teams here who are creating new products as well as innovating on existing products to make them less expensive. We also have a chemistry division that applies what you would think of as the ink that causes our windows to darken; the do the chemical formulations and composition here. We have the software division in Salt Lake City. So, we're really running a fairly complex business in which multiple elements have to come together in order for us to be successful. When you think of customer experience metrics, you think of how it's really important for us to be on time. The factory has to be very responsive to customer needs. We have to monitor on-time delivery and make sure that our customers are getting the products that they need to button up their building projects in a timely manner. In terms of quality, we look a lot at yield in the factory in terms of efficiency. We're thinking about throughput and how much product is being produced on the line per day, per week, per month. Obviously, because we have a factory and these other elements of our business such as the chemistry and R&D and pilot plant elements, compliance with health and safety is very important, so tracking this and making sure that it's at the forefront of everything we do is key. And then there's reducing costs, such as the manufacturing costs per unit or per project and watching that. Finally, the number one metric that can really poorly influence all of your other metrics is sales growth. If you don't have sales growth, the rest of your metrics will suffer.

Ten years or so ago, the expression “never waste a downturn” became a popular maxim among business leaders who viewed the economy’s downward spiral as an opportunity to trim waste and restructure portions of their businesses. The expression also summed up the mind-set of a unique class of executives who, despite a bleak hiring environment, viewed the period as being potentially transformational for their careers. Such was the case with CFO John Evarts, who entered the downturn as a CFO for a not-for-profit and exited as CFO of Mediafly—a small content asset management company that in the coming years would open a new growth chapter by answering the demand for more compelling content in sales enablement. “From late 2008 to 2009, there were some challenges inside the not-for-profit sector, so I started looking for an opportunity to broaden myself beyond the not-for-profit realm—I was comfortable in taking that risk and making a bet on myself,” explains Evarts, who had originally transitioned into the not-for-profit sector from the world of investment banking and has also taken on the title of COO during his Mediafly tenure. “When I shifted from the not-for-profit area into ‘start-up land,’ I was fortunate to have this amazing opportunity to play a more strategic role and determine how to deploy resources in a more strategic way.” - Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Share with us a finance strategic moment of insight? Evarts: Our first opportunity for mergers and acquisitions was really what I would say was a watershed moment for me. I had never had the opportunity to pursue an acquisition before, and I needed to figure out for myself what a framework would be in order to determine whether this was a good one or not a good one. It's very different from what's in the textbooks. When you get into the actual practical matter of pursuing an acquisition, you need to be very disciplined in how you look at it, how you think it through. We had to come up with this construct that we call our 100-day plan. When I started thinking about how to make that construct and 100-day plan--what we call "one Mediafly"--it really started driving home the point that culture is critical. The reason why we're acquiring this company is so that not only do we get the benefit of the products, but also we get the benefit of the really great people who are on the team. We were able to get this 100-day plan around M&A as a way for us to think about and philosophize about this "one media fly" concept, which is, for example, the way that we look at how to source the capital that is necessary and how to figure out how the people need to work within the organization. So, it's not only how many resources we need in order to acquire this company, but also what does the construct in the comp model look like afterward? What is the expectation of revenue production that's going to come out afterward? Then, over time, you get to the point where you're also talking about culture and its impact. What do you think about when more than 50% of the company is outside of the Chicago headquarters? What do you do? How do you think about remote work? So, all of this goes beyond the typical finance conversation. It's really about culture, by the time you get it all the way out. This, for me, was kind of an "A-ha!" moment, once we got to this concept of "one Mediafly."

Years from now, if Silicon Valley’s glitterati were ever to gather to celebrate the opening of a National Cloud Computing Museum, CFO Raman Kapur would make an excellent tour guide for the facility’s finance wing. In fact, he could just chart the trajectory of his career from the dot-com bubble forward to help the world at large to better grasp how the cloud opportunity has grown and reshaped the finance business function. Our tour could begin at Intuit, the accounting software developer that Kapur joined in 2001 while seeking shelter from the dot-com bubble burst, where he quickly found his footing as a controller inside the company’s fast-growing QuickBooks division. Looking back at his Intuit career chapter, Kapur recalls a loud internal debate that would ultimately determine the fate of a money-losing unit known at the time as “QuickBooks on the Web.” “I’m proud to say that I was among those who helped to make the decision not to close it. There was still a lot of talk around the question, ‘Should we just close it down?,’” explains Kapur, who says that while the answer may seem obvious now, there was still room for debate back then, in light of the unit’s losses. Kapur’s controllership savvy propelled him into the cloud-friendly Big Data era at Splunk, where for nearly a decade he helped the data-hungry company to chart new growth paths as he himself advanced into the role of vice president of finance—capping a tenure that exposed him to the likes of Godfrey Sullivan, a Silicon Valley stalwart who served as Splunk’s chairman and CEO. Today, Kapur recalls a quarterly meeting at which Sullivan surveyed Splunk’s senior executives about the future direction of the company. According to Kapur, the discussion focused mainly on two areas where the company’s offerings had been experiencing some extra traction. Still, not everyone viewed the new areas of traction as resources-worthy, at which point Sullivan remarked: “Your successful tactic becomes your strategy”—an insight that Sullivan used to open the minds of his management team and which led the company to double down on one of the two areas – a space Splunk has since grown exponentially. Meanwhile, Kapur is able to quickly validate the insight as he reflects back on his own experiences: “More often than not, you try a couple of things and one of them becomes the bigger part of your business,” says Kapur, who would exit Splunk in 2018 to step into the CFO office at Moogsoft. –Jack Sweeney

Perhaps, unlike most of her professional peers, when Bea Ordonez first interviewed for a CFO role, she got the job. At the time, perhaps no one was more surprised than Ordonez, whose finance resume—while impressive for a 26-year-old—still lacked a number of C-suite prerequisites. Twenty years later, she still resides in the C-Suite, having filled a number of consecutive CFO and COO roles over the years. Nonetheless, she credits her first CFO tour of duty with having opened the door for everything that has followed. “On paper, at least, I was woefully underqualified for the job. I interviewed, landed the role, and then worked really, really hard to learn the business from the ground up,” says Ordonez, whose first CFO stint was with a joint venture originally formed with Bloomberg Tradebook known as G-Trade. Located on the island of Bermuda, the broker-dealer start-up no doubt found Ordonez an attractive hire in part because she was at the time an island resident. Still, for all of those trying to decode shortcuts to the C-suite or uncover a coveted secret behind becoming a 26-year-old CFO, we’d wager that Ordonez’s words “worked really, really hard” perhaps best reveal her world of both today and 20 years ago. As G-Trade grew, Ordonez became tasked with quickly adding talent to help answer the organization’s growing demand for financial and operational support. “We were providing support for trading activities across close to 90 global markets and at the same time building a culture and creating a work ethic that even to this day I am very proud of,” recalls Ordonez, while once more drawing our attention to her unwavering appetite for the work itself. “At times in my career, I didn’t have any personal life, and what time I did have, I used for sleeping,” confides Ordonez, who adds that today—more than ever before—she is achieving a positive work/life balance. –Jack Sweeney

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

CFOTL: What metrics are top of mind for you? ERTEL: Largely defined, most of Vizient's revenue is—I'm going to put it in air quotes—"subscription-oriented." Some of it is literal subscriptions, whether SaaS or other offerings, but much of it is driven by multiyear contracts that operate as subscription services, such as for clinical data or for a group purchasing organization. While on the one hand this provides great visibility on future revenue, the challenge with these types of organizations is to not just sit back and rest on your laurels. What offerings enhancements do you put forward to really take advantage of the built-in stickiness that you have because it's either a contract or a subscription that serves as a contract? How do you really enhance something so that you're providing value to those customers on an ongoing basis by improving the offerings? That's a good starting point, but it doesn't change the dynamic of the fact that you have to be out there every day as a company, whether you're on the back office or CFO side of the equation or you're out with customers. I think that it's an important point for a company like this to understand and rise to that challenge. As far as metrics go, it's revenue per customer, it's margin per customer, it's overall EBITDA margin when you look at financial statistics, but then it's also member retention. That's not literally measured every single day, but certainly it's something that's looked at month by month. How many of our customers do we retain? Another metric is new business, what our market share is, and so forth. So, there are probably 10 to 12 metrics altogether.

A brief summary of this episode

CFOTL: What are the numbers or metrics that are always top of mind for you? Shelly: Ninety-five percent of our revenue is driven by the volume that we clear, settle, and risk-manage every day, which is something that we don't control. We charge a clearing fee for our services, and as a low-cost service provider, I can't just charge any old amount. I'm very cognizant of how much volume we clear every day because our budget is based on an average daily volume rate. I'm also very cognizant of expenses. I'm okay with spending money, but I want to do it in a smart way. Last year, we began what we call our Renaissance initiative. It's a multiyear, multimillion-dollar program through which we are replacing our core technologies. The system that clears, settles, and risk-manages those positions every single day is about 20 years old, so we are looking to create a more modular, more agile system whereby we can increase our processing, we can better utilize the data that we receive every single day, and we can expand upon the risk management services that we provide. Right now, it's currently being done on premises on a couple of mainframes. We'll be looking to move all of that processing up into the cloud so that as our volume increases, we can expand and manage it without an issue. Now, don't get me wrong: The mainframes that we currently have can process an exorbitant amount of volume. In 2019, I think that we had a few days where we cleared and settled over somewhere between 30 and 35 million contracts. In 2020, we are clearing and settling, on average, probably about 19.5 million contracts every single day, and the system works just fine. It's just very cumbersome to make changes to it, and that's another part of the reason for the drive to make a change.

Few megadeals within the past decade have received as many recurring kudos as the acquisition of Genzyme, of Cambridge, MA by France’s biggest pharmaceutical company, Sanofi. The marriage of Sanofi and Genzyme appears to have exceeded expectations, allowing all of those involved in minting the newly merged entity to rightfully keep a feather in their postmerger caps. Thus it was for Mike Kaseta, who in the wake of the merger found himself tasked with integrating the finance and IT functions of the two companies. “It’s probably the achievement that I’m most proud of in my career,” explains Kaseta, who, after nearly a decade climbing the finance ranks inside Sanofi, exited the giant pharmaceutical company to stake a claim inside the realm of early-stage biotech, where today he is CFO of Aerami Therapeutics. Looking back, Kaseta believes that the greatest lessons he gleaned from the Sanofi–Genzyme merger were people-related: “There was no iron fist. We listened to employees. We understood. In the end, we had no control deficiencies, no comments from our external auditors, and the integration occurred in a timely manner.” Looking forward, Kaseta says that raising money now tops his list of CFO priorities at Aerami. “We have to get our story out,” he adds. “We have to get it out to the right people and really engage with investors, allowing them to get as excited about our story as we are.” –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

Among the many lessons that David Moss has learned along the trajectory of his 25-year finance career, the one to which he refers simply as “the $3 million sweatshirt” is perhaps the most enduring. Even after 20 years, Moss can’t help but mention the sweatshirt bearing the logo of Pets.com, which he kept as a souvenir from an earlier career chapter involving a $3 million investment in the infamous dot-com retailing upstart. Pets.com began operations in November 1998 and shut down in November 2000, becoming one of the more high-profile victims of the dot-com bubble. However, looking back, Moss says that while the economy’s sudden gyrations certainly contributed to the firm’s demise, other mistakes also came into play, including the filling of leadership roles with executives from large enterprise companies. “Someone from a large business often has a difficult time in adjusting to dynamic environments where you have to get your hands dirty and wear all of the hats and take the trash out,” says Moss, who clearly has kept his appetite for investing in early-stage companies—especially inside the biotech realm, where he now resides as CFO and cofounder of INmune, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company. “We don’t have a lot of complexity when it comes to how we built the business or the way that our accounting works, ” adds Moss, who, along with two other cofounders, formulated a plan to self-fund INmune. “Our mantra is to keep things simple,” explains Moss, who says that the firm’s capital structure underscores this philosophy, along with a preference for selling only common stock. –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about a finance strategic moment? Moss: One very strategic moment in our business at INmune Bio had to do with something that we did that was very unusual with regard to our financial situation. When companies go public, they typically go and hire an investment bank first. Then they go and draft all of their financial documents, and then they go and do their IPO and raise the money. We did the opposite here at INmune, which is probably very, very rare. We went and actually drafted our financial documents, got them approved by the regulatory authorities like the SEC and the NASDAQ, and then went and got our banks to do our capital raise. We did this because we wanted to be in the driver's seat. You know, we kind of have this view that you want to drive your own destiny. You put yourself more in the driver's seat, show that you can do it, and then try to bring your financial players on board. That's what we did here. As a result, what does this mean? There are positives and negatives with everything that you do. One positive is that because we drove the deal, it was mainly on our own terms. We also were able to maintain a lot of insider ownership, because we're big believers in this business. We believe in simplicity, so we wanted a simple cap structure. We didn't want to go into preferreds, we didn't want to go into convertible debt. We didn't want to go into warrants or anything like that. So, we kind of drove that on our own. A negative is that we weren't able to attract investor audiences as large as we would have if we had been more flexible in our terms and our deal structure. But all of this led to us ringing the bell on the NASDAQ, where we were actually the first biotech IPO of 2019. Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

Ravi Chopra has built his career inside finance functions designed to serve growth-minded management. Such was the case in the late ’90s when Chopra joined Cisco Systems, which at the time was experiencing 50% growth annually. Jump forward 10 years, and you’ll find him busy leading the FP&A function for growth-driven Juniper Networks. Asked to reflect back on a 25-year finance career, Chopra doesn’t hesitate to cite his former employer. “I learned most of everything that I know today at Juniper,” says Chopra, who quickly names Robyn Denholm, Juniper’s former CFO and current Tesla chairman, as a present and former mentor. Still, when the door to the CFO office swung open for Chopra, the accomplished finance executive no doubt found his operations knowledge being put to the test. In 2017, Chopra would exit Juniper Networks and take on the CFO role at SonicWall, a company that had neither a finance nor an HR organization after it split off from Dell, Inc., in late 2016. Dell had acquired SonicWall in 2012 but divested the business along with Quest Software as part of the larger Dell EMC integration. Despite some missing parts, SonicWall arguably split off with something far more valuable intact: its brand name. Prior to being acquired by Dell, the cyber protection company had long since established itself as a leader in the small and midsize business space. “It was just an amazing challenge, and I think that we have now come out on the other side of it rather well,” explains Chopra, who believes that the speed with which SonicWall built its new infrastructure and achieved operational efficiencies allowed the firm to more quickly determine where to allocate capital. –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

Had Valerie Burman entered the CFO office a decade ago, you wonder whether the role would be as good a match for the accomplished finance executive as it appears to be today. Back in 2007, after working nearly a decade in M&A as an investment banker, Burman exited a banking career to take on a corporate development role at Business Objects, a French software company that was soon to be acquired by SAP. Post acquisition, Burman quickly found a groundswell of opportunities coming her way inside SAP, where she would serve in a variety of roles involving technology partnerships, business development, and product management. Fast-forward a few years, and we find Stanford Law graduate Burman serving as general counsel first to Mindjet and then to crowdsourcing innovation upstart Spigit. “I would say that working from those perspectives—although it is a bit of a roundabout way to become a CFO—has really led me to a place where I can be a CFO with a business-minded, strategic approach,” says Burman, who points out that along the way, she was given the opportunity to closely observe the board room decision-making behind certain acquisitions designed to drive growth. “The breadth of experiences that I have taken with me are not necessarily specific to my core finance role, but speak to my ability to understand cross-functionally what’s important to my peers,” Burman observes, while underscoring the growing cross-functional role that finance plays in business today. For just as Burman’s resume has evolved, so too has the role of CFO. – Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

When Chris Sands accepted an investor relations position at a midsize health care firm, he did so with the understanding that he would be permitted to occasionally sink his teeth into some of the firm’s growing FP&A challenges. Having a resume rich with investment banking experience, Sands was now determined to add some FP&A, a tour of duty that he viewed as a necessary prerequisite if he were going to advance down the CFO path. Unbeknownst to Sands, his FP&A plate would shortly be overflowing following the acquisition of his new employer by Thermo Fisher Scientific of Waltham, Massachusetts. In the aftermath, Sands was enlisted to help lead the science giant’s planning function, which allowed him to dine regularly on high-calorie planning and begin to consider his next opportunity. Sands would open what he views as the third chapter of his career at MineralTree, after having been recruited by CEO Micah Remley, with whom Sands had worked earlier in his career. “Anytime a company is looking to hire a CFO, they inevitably ask for CFO experience as if people are born with it, so, for me, getting that experience became really important,” observes Sands, who describes his decision to join MineralTree as a “no-brainer.” Looking back, Sands says that he would advise up-and-coming finance executives to actively seek out leadership mentors and not hesitate when it comes to expressing aspirations to become a CFO. Says Sands: “People aren’t mind readers, but if they are a true mentor and know what your aspirations are, they will seek to enable you on your journey.” –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

For every top sales leader who confides to friends that he or she is really a numbers freak at heart, there’s an Andrew Hicks, who, as CFO of Advanced, would be just as apt to boast about a sales funnel innovation as he would about the adoption of a new accounting rule. In fact, it would probably not surprise Hicks’s past and present business colleagues to learn that when asked to identify a mentor from his past, Advanced’s CFO chooses the head of sales for a former employer. “It was because of this relationship that I first experienced an inkling of how people can think about the business differently and think differently about what drives value in the firm,” explains Hicks, who found his mentor after being transferred to Austin from London by Misys, a UK-based software developer that today is part of Finastra. “I had moved across the world, and the sales leader took me under his wing a bit as someone new in the U.S. who didn’t really have family or friends nearby. Talking to him really piqued my interest in learning more about how the business worked,” recalls Hicks, who would remain in the U.S. for nine years before being recruited for a CFO role back in London. Along the way, Hicks’s professional network became energized via a budding relationship with private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, which enlisted him as an advisor after Vista bought a portion of Misys’s healthcare business. “Vista is continually working its network to find talent, and I was found by that means,” says Hicks, whose CFO career chapter has to date been populated by multiple Vista-owned companies. –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

As is the case with many finance leader resumes, Cort Townsend’s reveals a repetition of professional advancement and achievement that allows casual readers to quickly validate his CFO credentials. However, like those of many, Townsend self-tale is only a shorthand rendering of a career path filled with twists, turns, and high-stakes industry drama. Such was the case in 2015 and 2016, a period in Townsend’s career annals with enough M&A high jinks and boardroom intrigue to fill an entire volume. Subsequently, though, in July 2017, Townsend landed neatly inside the CFO office of Kofax via an appointment that casual readers of his resume might have assumed was the natural next step for a dedicated senior executive who had already served as the firm’s controller and vice president of finance. So, where was all the drama? Lost between the lines of Townsend’s resume was the acquisition of Kofax by Lexmark International in 2015 and the subsequent acquisition of Lexmark by Apex Technology in 2016. Along the way, Townsend was named finance chief of Lexmark’s enterprise software group, which turned out to be an abbreviated tour of duty that made him the obvious choice for a C-suite posting when Lexmark opted to spin off the software group in late 2016 and later sell it to private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The sale of the group would be completed in July 2017, the very month in which Townsend was appointed CFO of newly branded Kofax. Witness just the type of swift-moving, complex narrative that allows even detail-oriented leaders like Townsend to much appreciate the virtues of a shorthand bio. –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

A brief summary of this episode

CFOTL: What are your top of mind metrics? Karnes: I think about metrics sort of under three rubrics. The first is what I would think of as a customer-centric layer. Then there's the financial performance one that we all think about as CFOs, and then there's a very distinct operational layer. On the customer-centric layer, we think about things like SLAs, our service-level agreements with our customers, uptime, system availability. These are the things--before we get to gross margin--that really impact our success as a business and what our next quarter is going to be like. There are things like customer health scoring in your customer success organization. Happy customers don't leave. Keeping your revenue is much cheaper than trying to go acquire new revenue. Things like NPS, net promoter score. Things that I watch very, very carefully are very customer-centric, as opposed to what's next, which is more pure financial performance. At the end of the day, your economics are based on your base business, your new business, and the investments that you make going forward. That's what drives economic performance. The first thing that I look at in the morning is churn and retention. "Churn," for those who aren't SaaS experts, is simply our subscriptions that are terminating and my customers that are leaving me or deciding to subscribe to me in a lesser amount. So, it's lost revenue. After that, it's gross margin. Obviously revenue is tops. Churn is my top line. Gross margin is after my cost of goods sold and tells me how efficiently I'm delivering my product. All of these businesses are built on free cash flow. After I pay my G&A, after I pay the capex that I've got, how much cash am I making and am I self-sufficient or dependent on the equity markets to grow my business? That's a really important part of the business, from a baseline. New business cost is very important. These are things like customer acquisition costs. I'm making an investment for every customer. How quickly do I get that investment back? How many months? Is it six, 12, 18 months before I recoup that investment? And, like all good SaaSware companies, we invest a tremendous amount of money in our future through research and development. The question is, What is the rate of return that we're engineering to for that research and development? How does this correlate with other opportunities that we may have, like acquisitions or debt repayment?

When asked what sets BioXcel Therapeutics apart from other clinical-stage biopharmaceutical companies, CFO Richard Steinhart doesn’t mention a specific drug or therapy. Instead, he describes a system that the company developed to advance the speed with which drugs are commercialized. According to Steinhart, the biotech company’s system uses artificial intelligence to reveal “hidden connections” that, once exposed, can multiply opportunities for the application of certain drugs. “Good drug developers can see first connections between drugs and diseases and they are pretty apparent to everyone out there, but second- and third-degree connections are not apparent,” explains Steinhart, who says that such connections have been too time-consuming and expensive to expose in the past. “The last company I was with took 10 years to go from the discovery (of a drug to the licensing of the discovery to a phase two trial,” adds Steinhart, who reveals that it was BioXcel’s system for shortening the path to commercialization that first attracted him. –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

The way Ken Stillwell tells it, his career as a CFO can be divided into two distinct worlds: the world before ARR and the world after ARR. ARR, of course, is the acronymic identifier for the widely used SaaS metric known as annual recurring revenue. Stillwell prefers to put his own twist on the acronym by declaring its actual meaning to be annual recurring relationships—as in client relationships. Says Stillwell: “Whatever metric you use to measure recurring relationships is really misunderstood in the marketplace until you start to track it.” What happens next has led many a finance leader to shout, “Where have you been all my life!” Or so Stillwell might have us believe in light of his evident passion for the metric and the singular emphasis that he places on it when asked about the career chapter that he has opened as CFO of Pegasystems, a firm specializing in customer engagement solutions. “Once CFOs track it and begin reporting it, its value becomes so obvious—not just the value of the metric, but also that of the relationship with the customer and of the different mind-set and shift that occurs when you are an ‘as a service’ company and of making customer success a key part of keeping that relationship,” says Stillwell, who began his finance career in Price Waterhouse’s audit advisory services practice, which he soon exited to become part of an early PW mergers and acquisitions group where he would become involved in various deal-making activities outside the US. It was this experience that Stillwell says helped to propel him into a number of consecutive CFO roles, including his latest CFO tour of duty at Pegasystems. “The one thing that’s different about Pega from my earlier experiences as a CFO is that Pega is one of those rare examples where a company is growing both at an accelerated pace—by this, I mean that it’s growing faster than the market growth rate—and also at significant scale,” explains Stillwell, who adds that Pegasystems is quickly approaching $1 billion in annual revenue. “In my previous experience, the companies were typically slower-growing and focused more on operational excellence and how to maximize shareholder value when growing in the single digits. Pega is an interesting mix of both growth and scale.” –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020 featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more