CFO THOUGHT LEADER

CFOTL: What comes to mind when we ask for a finance strategic moment? Friedman: MCI itself, during the ’90s, was a great place. I was there for just a little bit more than nine years. The opportunity within that organization to have different roles and different responsibilities that were all progressive, or progressing, was really key for me. When I had my first real corporate finance job at MCI, I literally was a direct report to the CFO. While I wasn’t going to show up on an org chart, it was kind of heavy for somebody who’ was in his late 20s at the time—to be able to have one-on-one conversations and have a real impact on decisions that were made and, toward the end of my tenure there, the direction that the company was taking. I recall a time when I was working with the internal wireless strategy group. We went to Wall Street to talk to analysts about their views on the emerging wireless market. Keep in mind that this was 1997-ish, right? For CDMA, there were still five or six different providers. T-Mobile hadn’t come around yet. Nextel was still a viable player. Everybody had their projections for the adoption of wireless communications in terms of revenue, and all looked like reasonable growth curves—25%, 30% a year for the next X number of years. And then we met one analyst who said, “You know, they’re all wrong. This thing is going to explode. Every kid in the country is going to have one of these things. You’re going to be talking to your grandmother while you’re standing in line at Starbucks.” This one person had a different insight and a different view that proved to be correct. For me, this was the moment when I gained the realization that conventional wisdom can be stood on its head—that just because there’s a herd mentality around what the right answer is, you don’t necessarily have to go with it. That’s something that has stuck with me every day.

“A CFO role was something that I had not yet really envisioned for myself,” explains CFO Erik Ostrowski when asked about the investment banking chapter of his early finance career. Still, Ostrowski says that he always found the challenges facing smaller or high-growth firms more interesting than those encountered by large enterprises. “I had a choice as to whether I wanted to work for a larger bank that worked with larger, established companies or for a boutique working with smaller firms, and I found that I was pulled to emerging-growth companies,” he explains. Today, as CFO of biotech company AVROBIO, Ostrowski says that he likes to remind himself that while there are many aspects of business that can be controlled, many cannot be. In terms of which variables are beyond a CFO’s grasp, Ostrowski lists the economy, followed by the performance of capital markets. As far as what CFOs can control goes, AVROBIO’s CFO makes it clear that a highly engaged CFO is often the determining factor when it comes to achieving effective investor relations. Says Ostrowski: “Make certain that you are presenting the company’s business proposition in a clear and concise way. And be ready to answer anticipated investor questions effectively.” –Jack Sweeney Ostrowski: There are many things in business that you can control and many that you can't. In terms of variables that you can't control, a good example might be how the economy is doing or how the capital markets are performing. What you can indeed help to control would be, for example, things on the IR side: making sure that you're presenting the company's business proposition in a clear and concise way and being ready to answer anticipated investor questions. Another thing is having the team of bankers and lawyers that helps you with the fund-raising process ready. These are things that you can control. By having these pieces in place, when business developments and capital market conditions align, you're ready to take advantage of the opportunity and, in this example, to conduct a successful fund-raise. So, it was nice to see that play out recently at AVROBIO. Just a few weeks ago, we were able to raise $138 million for the company on the heels of positive interim data from our Fabry gene therapy program. I think that it was proper preparation along with favorable market conditions that helped to make that capital raise a great success for us. Over the next 12 months, my priority is to continue to help effectively manage the growth of the company as we continue to progress our activities not only in Fabry disease, which is our lead program, but also in developing treatments for patients with Gaucher cystinosis and Pompe disease, as we look to build out what we think is really one of the leading pipelines in gene therapy.

The recent opening of a Chicago office of ANGI Homeservices is one that the firm would like to replicate, but not in terms of size (the site has a capacity for roughly 100 sales representatives) or even necessarily geographic location. Instead, the home services player plans to duplicate the approach that it used to determine whether a Chicago location was worthy of investment, according to ANGI Home Services CFO Jamie Cohen, who says that signing a 10-year lease for tens of thousands of square feet is often just too big a gamble when so many questions remain unanswered. “Can we recruit in this market? Can we sell in this market? And can we build upon this foundation?,” rhetorically asks Cohen, who adds that the approach involves “a pop-up sales center” concept that permits ANGI to test out new markets in a “low commitment manner.” In the case of Chicago, ANGI deployed a small team of about 20 people into a Chicago-area WeWork location, where they soon found answers to Cohen’s questions that allowed her and ANGI’s operational team to green-light a larger, more permanent home for the team. Meanwhile, Cohen’s finance function is now home to ANGI’s real estate team, which oversees about 1 million square feet of property. Besides being one of ANGI’s heftiest expenses, real estate is part of a more collaborative financial model that operates in lockstep with the company’s capacity for hiring sales personnel—the same people that ANGI uses to determine future office space commitments. – Jack Sweeney

For most of us, the act of “throwing the book” at someone is just an expression meant to conjure up the image of a judge throwing a book of laws at a criminal as punishment. However, the visual that CFO John Orton summons in the opening minutes of our talk is the act of having a physical book thrown at him by a manager during the early days of his career. It’s clear that Orton found the experience unsettling, and from that day forward, he explains, he became committed to the idea that treating others with respect must always be a key tenet of his CFO leadership. We should mention here how very often finance leadership is summoned to help address bad behavior in the workplace (even at those times when CEOs have behaved poorly). Conventional CFO wisdom tells us that incivility not only is a nuisance, but also is a threat to a company’s bottom line. Still, by identifying the experience as one of a select few that shaped his CFO leadership, Orton does something that most of his CFO peers dare not when he extracts a leadership lesson not from an esteemed mentor, but from a troubled manager. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: What comes to mind when we ask for a finance strategic moment? Parikh: I think that I'd have to go back to the great financial crisis for a finance moment, the week after Lehman Brothers failed, when I actually pulled all of the top-line numbers for the hotel. For the first time in my life, I said to myself, "Well, something is just drastically wrong with our accounting system because these numbers just don't make sense. We've never seen a drop this precipitously this quickly." That was the time of one of the hardest decisions, because we had never cut our dividend up to that point. From 1999 to 2009, we had been a very consistent dividend payer. Not one of the highest dividend payers in the lodging REIT world, but I think that's when you look at forward bookings, you look at what's happening, and you have to make a very difficult decision. We probably cut our dividend at that time by 70% because we looked at it, I looked at it, and I said, "It's more important to batten down the hatches to make sure that we don't violate any of our debt covenants, to make sure that this company's on sound footing for the long term." Of course, the shareholders aren't going to like their dividends being cut by 70%, but it was the right move. You know, you can't let Wall Street and your investors' sentiment on any single day drive your decision-making. There are times when you have to call it the way you see it. I'm happy that we did because it would have been very challenging to continue to pay that type of dividend—and I'm sure that we would have violated some type of cash flow debt covenant.

CFOTL: When we ask for a finance strategic moment what comes to mind? Yenaropulos: Maybe we can look at one of my experiences when I was living in Chile and I was the CFO of a company whose main business was to provide services to trade and eliminate industrial and hazardous waste. The revenue recognition process began with the reception of the waste the bulk form. The next step was to identify the type of waste and then finally to define and apply the chemical process required in order to convert it into nonhazardous waste. All of these processes were very manual, which as a result had a huge impact on the finances and working capital. Imagine if a company was not able to invoice for services to the client until it had finished the identification of the waste and its subsequent treatment. Additionally, another problem was that the company was held responsible for any environmental damage that may have occurred from the hazardous waste that it had already received and that was waiting for its final treatment. What we did was to create a team from the operations people, the commercial people, and the technology department of the company. We proposed and successfully implemented a plan that reduced the days of accounts receivable from over 200 days to just 90 days in only one year. This was achieved due to changes in the processes from the client’s side and from the operations side and by adding new software capabilities to the process. Of course, we don’t want to forget about the importance of training all of the employees involved in the process—that is very important to also highlight. So, finally, after a year of working with a new team, With a clear plan, and milestones well defined we were able to consistently track our progress by changing commercial and production processes, and achieve extremely positive financial impacts for the firm. By implementing a sizable reduction in days of accounts receivable, we’ve been able to generate an impressive positive cash flow for the company.

Among all of what is remarkable about Andreas Schulmeyer’s finance career, the timing with which he enters and exits different career chapters is most worthy of some added attention. For instance, consider his timing at Pepsico, where in the late 1990s he arrived inside Pepsi’s corporate strategy group—the beverage behemoth’s performance-minded brain trust headed by none other than Pepsi up-and-comer Indra Nooyi. It’s just this type of timing that makes you doubt that Schulmeyer ever has had to cross-examine himself by deploying a few “If onlys … .” To prove our point, we thought that we might speculate on what such a self-inquiry by Schulmeyer might sound like, so here goes: “If only … I had been part of Nooyi’s group when it helped to hatch Pepsi’s historic acquisition of Quaker Oats.” But wait: I was part of that very group. “Well, if only … I had agreed to join Pepsi China Beverages as CFO when Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred to the People’s Republic of China.” But wait: I was CFO of Pepsi China Beverages when Hong Kong was handed over to China. “Well, then, if only … I had agreed to join Walmart’s e-commerce business as CFO, today I would be a seasoned C-level e-commerce executive with a wealth of experience.” But wait: I was CFO of Walmart’s e-commerce business. Finally, one “if only” of our own. “If only we told you how truly remarkable Schulmeyer’s career has been.” But wait: We just did. – Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO THOUGHT LEADER

A brief summary of this episode

Ballbach: We found something really interesting on the go-to-market side that I believe will have a major impact on our top-line growth, and it came through the analysis that the finance team conducted. We looked at our sales model and at the number of customers that we have around the country. We looked at the run rate and the renewals and the retention of these customers. In partnership with our new head of sales, we then did a deeper dive into what kind of time was spent by our sales force—that is, primarily our outside salesforce. We noticed that the sales enablement infrastructure was not set up so that our sales folks could go out and win big deals—win big deals that could make a step change difference in our business. Instead, they were spending a lot of their time on working with the existing customer base. So we are actively now reinventing our go-to-market by investing in tech enablement for our sales folks so that they are freed up to truly do what they do best, which is to sell and to go obtain new logos with more strategic and kind of longer-term sales cycles. The second thing that came out of this was a desire to invest in digital marketing. There's never been any testing of what kind of ROI we can get from investing marketing dollars in these new areas. Given the long list of customers that we have and the disparate array of long-sale customers that do relatively small deals, we suspect that we can invest in digital marketing that will that will return a very high ROI on the investment as opposed to what we get with the kind of legacy sales model.

CFOTL: Help us to understand what sets Sage and its offerings apart? Iguchi: In eight years we’ve developed a company that’s at about nine and a half billion dollars in market cap. We are really well positioned from a cash perspective, and we’ve grown to over 650 people strong. Let me tell you a little bit about the history here. We are focused on developing innovative medicines for brain disorders. When we started the company eight years ago, there was a total innovation void. Companies had had many, many failures, and they were shedding their CNS pipelines. Everyone was saying that brain disorders were too tough to tackle, and we said that they were way too important not to. So we were going to take some risks, and we knew that we were going to have to shift the paradigm. That was what we focused on. How do we learn from those mistakes? From the science side, I think that a couple of things that we did really differently was that we always followed the science. We didn’t go after an indication because it looked good or it felt good or it was a big market. We followed what the science and the molecules told us. That was one key feature. I think that the second key feature was that as we moved into development, we used a differentiated approach, a development strategy where we started with what I would call “methodology studies.” These were smaller studies that had very quick end points, and they were very clear, very unambiguous. What was great about this was that it not only gave us a look at activity very quickly so that we could determine whether to move forward but also enabled us to design the next trial. We could do that more efficiently, right? We know something from that earlier, smaller trial, so now let’s make whatever changes we need to design the next trial. So, we have used this approach over and over again at Sage, and I think that this has really been a core component of why we have such a vast pipeline. I think that the key here is that what Sage is all about is seeing the brain differently so that we can make all the difference. I think that’s been the core of how we’ve been able to set ourselves up as leaders and differentiated in the field.

When Ben Luety first arrived inside the CFO office at the Seattle Indian Health Board, he would frequently rely on his smartphone’s roaming service to search the Web rather than depend on the organization’s Internet connection. “The Internet for the entire organization had less bandwidth than I did,” explains Luety, who describes the IT infrastructure serving the organization’s 200 staff members as being minted in the pre-Internet days of the early 1990s. For Luety, it was apparent that the SIHB was the type of organization that cloud technologies often serve best by allowing them to leapfrog certain technologies and approaches that haven’t passed the test of time. What’s more, Luety was in lockstep with his CEO, Esther Lucero, whose vision for the organization could be realized only through greater transparency and visibility into its numbers. “We needed a system that would allow us to quickly and easily produce reports, and it all came down to our ability to manage data and produce a workflow that allows everyone to make certain that the data is getting into the right bucket and that we’re reporting out to the organization—so that people across the organization can make data-driven decisions,” he explains. –Jack Sweeney jb

When Judy Bjornaas first arrived at ManTech International eight years ago, the company relied on a variety of processes and policies that were widely accepted across its various parts—not because they were efficient or cost-effective, but because they were widely accepted. Not unlike many companies that have enjoyed a steady diet of success, ManTech had, over its decades (the firm celebrated 50 years in 2018), adopted the old mantra “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” as part of its list of cultural dictums. However, shortly after her arrival, Bjornaas began advancing her own watchwords: “Always question everything—and don’t assume that we have to do something the same way that we’ve done it in the past.” This new mantra was no doubt a neck-snapper for executives who found comfort in the status quo, and it simultaneously solidified Bjornaas’s credentials as not just a finance leader but also a change agent. “I realized that I could add a lot of value to the company by sort of pushing things along,” says Bjornaas, who characterized her blunt approach as being almost like that of an inquisitive five-year-old. “I’d ask, ‘But why do we do it this way?,’ and I’d receive an answer to which I would then reply ‘But why?’”

iTunes DownloadSpotify There are finance leaders that boast of having always been entrepreneurs in their hearts, who can quickly serve up a story or two about a startup they at one time became involved with, and then there’s CFO Marty Meyer. Of the ten startups where Meyer has served as CFO six of the companies achieved positive exits – an enviable number according to startup pundits. Interestingly, Meyer tell us that the label “operational CFO” is perhaps just as fitting as entrepreneurial CFO when one considers his frequent day-to-day activities as a finance leader. Asked to reveal the types of decisions finance leaders often face in startups Meyer asks us to consider the choice between investing in an innovative new software function or investing in a customer onboarding process that could potentially cut implementation times in half. “The implementation process is really the first interaction we are having with the customer – we want to start that relationship off with a lot of trust and success,” he explains. Meyer launched his finance career after graduating from Babson College, an institution known for populating industry with entrepreneurial founders and more than a few operational CFOs. – Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about Your top of mind Metrics? Meyer: I've sat down with the VPs on our professional services teams to help them think through defining financial metrics to use to run their part of the business. Creating a P&L for them is a little bit more difficult in the services space, in the SaaS world, because GAAP accounting basically spreads those revenues out over the life of the contract. So you have to kind of take a little bit of a non-GAAP approach to this. But figuring out the billable utilization of the staff hours applies to each of the projects that you're going to do and what you've completed. Figuring out some burden of costs per hour and looking at all of that against the implementation fees that you're charging and collecting and building out those custom P&Ls really empowers the services team leaders to understand their business. When's the right time to request to add additional resources to potentially ramp up in front of new customers? To request changes from the development teams to make implementation more efficient because it's taking too long to do these projects and we're actually losing money? Or to tighten up the scope of SOW as we do with customers and use more of a change-order process if the scope creeps? They need to make these changes here versus a lot of places not even thinking about those and really losing efficiency, money, and customers by not thinking about each unit as its own little business. We've really been able to empower these leaders to take control of their own element, to have something to measure against, and to really think through how they're scaling their business. So for me, those kinds of things--that ability to kind of transform the way that teams think about their success--that to me is the game-changer of what a good finance leader can bring to the table.

Marc Schegerin’s arrival inside the CFO office at ArQule is either a fortunate accident or a feat of singular career building precision. For there is little question that ArQule has entered a unique place in time along the arc of its existence and it’s this place in time that Schegerin has been seeking to reach for more than two decades. It’s a place where opportunities are quickly realized or lost depending on management’s ability to correctly answer some daunting questions. “We have to kind of tease out how much money may be required. When do we spend it? What is the end game where we can we have the biggest impact for the most patients?” says Schegerin, while exposing the coordinates of the intersection of medicine and finance. Suddenly, Schegerin’s arduous career-building path makes perfect sense. ArQule is the destination where his breadth of experience (From Harvard to Goldman Sachs to Biogen) appears uniquely suited to answer those questions and perhaps many more. – Jack Sweeney

Up until about three years ago Kevin Lind would likely have been identified as yet another gifted private equity executive – capable of issuing business remedies from the tip of his tongue. At least in the minds of his CFO peers, who are accustomed to listening to PE pundits routinely hand down such remedies for ailing businesses. For Lind the CFO office at Arena Pharmaceuticals is a game changer, where he no longer hands down remedies but serves as a finance leader – an individual tasked with summoning others forward and building trust across an organization even as he or she sometimes completes necessary layoffs. “Good drugs can succeed in spite of bad management and bad management can fail despite good drugs,” explains Lind, who says the frequent mismatch led him to want to get “one step closer” to management decision making. Lind would take that one step after receiving a call from Amit Munshi, CEO of Arena Pharmaceuticals. At first, Lind was less than interested. Arena’s past struggles were not unknown to him – but Munshi encouraged Lind to take a close look at the company’s pipeline. “From an investment point of view the pipeline was really interesting and there was a turnaround opportunity if we got the right management team together,” recalls Lind, who said knowing Arena was a turnaround – and not a standard CFO tour of duty – made it far more appealing. – Jack Sweeney

“You want to be a CFO.” The second the words reached his ears, Bernard Huger experienced a moment of clarity that ultimately lifted a stubborn fog from the future path of his finance career. While this was not the first occasion when such a thought had entered his head, this time the words were delivered by a professionally accomplished friend, who wielded an air of objectivity. Like many investment bankers, Huger had found the doorway to corporate development positions less illuminated than those to other corporate roles, while at the same time C-suite doors-of-entry were especially hard to find. “It wasn’t so obvious to me, but as I explained more about the types of things that I wanted to do, I realized that he was right,” says Huger, who left investment banking after 12 years to become CFO of MuleSoft, a fast-growing San Francisco software firm. “Let’s just say that I caught a tiger by the tail,” recalls Huger, who today derives from the experience a lesson for others: “It was painful, but biting off more than you can chew and pushing yourself is critical to accelerating your career.” Asked about the type of CFO role that he envisioned for himself when he joined OneLogin, Huger focuses his comments on hiring and building a team. Only by having standout talent, Huger explains, will finance be able to signal to the organization at large that it is “a creative force” and capable of creating analytical models that other parts of the organization can leverage to foresee the trajectory of the business. –Jack Sweeney

Pete Tantillo recalls being somewhat surprised when he discovered that his career path could be leading to the CFO office. “I’m sort of an accidental CFO,” explains Tantillo, who first arrived inside the finance function in the mid-1990s, when his employer tasked him with making a promising new ERP application meet the needs of finance. The successful implementation led to a job offer from then little-known SAP–which was busy launching the next great technology wave, known as the client server. Tantillo loved the work (he stayed at SAP for 13 years) and eventually ran SAP’s services–the role that would ultimately become his career game changer. Having helped to grow a profitable services business alongside SAP’s software juggernaut, Tantillo was hired away from SAP by a former mentor who believed that Tantillo’s services smarts could help her to turn around a struggling software unit. However, Tantillo’s responsibilities went well beyond services, as he became tasked with organizing, monetizing, and supporting the company’s finance and business operations. This would the first in a number of CFO tours of duty that from a career experience point of view would appear to have been anything but accidental. —Jack Sweeney

When Pete D’Arrigo is asked to identify the business growth milestones that punctuate his 13-year CFO tenure at Envestnet, he pays passing homage to the company’s 2010 IPO–before drawing our attention to a convertible debt offering made in late 2014: “This was an offering that put us in a different swim lane. It was the first time that we issued debt, and it was a well-received, oversubscribed offering that then allowed us to lay the groundwork for 2015 and beyond to build out the capabilities to drive revenue.” Whereas the IPO appears to have whetted the company’s M&A appetite (Envestnet acquired seven companies within the next four years), the debt offering was designed to help with the heavy lifting that often follows a hardy M&A diet. To achieve greater visibility across Envestnet’s expanded operations, Envestnet’s finance team became focused on building out the infrastructure and systems required to integrate the acquired companies, explains D’Arrigo, who believes that it’s the operational aspects of Envestnet’s finance function that today set it apart. “It’s core to our business today, and that’s with or without an acquisition,” adds D’Arrigo, who notes that these same operational approaches are now empowering Envestnet to better serve its largest customers and partners. –Jack Sweeney

“It’s the economics, the finance,” says CFO Usama Malik, who quickly adds the words “and the accounting” to his short list of finance leader action items. Malik begins where most CFOs end–with the economics behind the business model. Everything else follows, he explains. “This role is about applying a broader lens to an entire industry and figuring out a competitive advantage,” adds Malik, who, while bullish on the science behind Immunomedics’ future offerings, makes clear his contention that it’s the economics that will ultimately determine the company’s fate. “Historically, there have been fund-raising CFOs, operational CFOs, and strategic CFOs. … I’ve now started to combine these disciplines, and the culmination of these is really advancing the role,” explains Malik. –Jack Sweeney

A little more than 13 years ago, when Nathan Feather joined PrimeRevenue–an upstart supplier of supply chain financial services–the 20-member enterprise was just signing up its first direct customers. “We were a complete finance function spanning a person and a half,” explains Feather, who says that despite its sparse resources, finance was from time to time drawn into addressing legal, HR, and IT-related matters. This was what any C-suite executive might expect inside a start-up enterprise, but Feather is not your typical start-up CFO. Put another way: He’s not a serial CFO–the singular species that frequently arrives in the start-up’s C-suite already eyeing a transaction. For Feather, PrimeRevenue was an opportunity to perform an act of creation–one in which the company’s business functions, still in their infancy (or yet to be established), would rely in part on his judgment and ability to see into the company’s future. “We built out the accounting and controllership side of the house first and then built out FP&A,” says Feather, who frequently uses house-building metaphors when describing the evolution of the business. As PrimeRevenue grew, Feather’s appetite for learning all aspects of firm-building was once more revealed when he moved to Prague, where in addition to his finance leadership role, he took on that of general manager, Europe. “I had had some experience in supporting sales and operations, but I had never led them, so this role really allowed me to see beyond finance,” recalls Feather, who after 13 years of firm-building appears little eager to remove his lens from PrimeRevenue’s future. —Jack Sweeney

As CFO Perry Wiggins recounts the different door-opening opportunities that allowed him to advance to the CFO office, APQC’s finance leader doesn’t hesitate to expose the seldom-mentioned sensation that frequently accompanies new responsibility–the feeling of being overwhelmed. According to Wiggins, the sense of being overwhelmed by new responsibilities is an experience that finance career-builders should at times relish because it signals they are being given “room to grow.” “There’s an expression–‘Luck is where preparation and opportunity meet.’ I was prepared when an opportunity came along inside a healthcare company, and that opportunity just opened so many others for me,” says Wiggins, who credits an early mentor for sharpening his career focus and directing him down an accounting track that he routinely widened as he took on different finance roles. –Jack Sweeney

A little more than 18 months ago, when CFO Kelly Steckelberg joined Zoom Video Communications, there were a number of key hires that needed to be made if the company was going to achieve its goal of selling shares to the public in the not-too-distant future. Three months after Zoom’s IPO and one month after its first earnings call, those hires are still top-of-mind for Steckelberg, who, while working alongside CEO Eric Yuan, filled the positions of general counsel, head of investor relations, and head of FP&A. Next, Steckelberg says, she wanted to make certain that finance and sales “had a great cadence” as far as how the teams interacted went and established a level of visibility into the sales pipeline that would allow Zoom to forecast on a weekly basis. Looking back, Steckelberg says that visibility into sales and spending was good when she stepped into the CFO role–but not where it needed to be. “When I arrived here, there was one FP&A analyst. She was doing a great job of holding it altogether while using Excel–but it was just not enough. We had the good fortune of being a company that was growing very quickly, and the spending was appropriate–but we needed to be a little tighter.” —Jack Sweeney

As Ronen Faier recalls the career-building ups-and-downs of being entrepreneurial CFO, few memories appear to be more vivid than a meeting with Guy Sella, a seasoned Israeli entrepreneur, who invites Faier to lead the finance team of his solar startup. Not yet a midsize firm, SolarEdge Technologies was only about $9 million in annual sales with roughly 100 employees when Faier receives Sella’s invitation. Having already experienced firsthand the heartache and financial repercussions of climbing onboard a struggling startup, Faier says he was confident this time things would be different. “I saw this amazing entrepreneur with a very deep technological understanding of the field as well as a deep understanding of business and I knew you seldom find these in one (individual),” explains Faier, who accepted Sella’s invitation in 2011. Eight years later, SolarEdge has close to 2,000 employees and last year reported sales of $937 million. Faier says, the company’s impressive growth is perhaps most visible today inside the U.S.’s residential realm where use of SolarEdge’s offerings has jumped from less than one percent market share in 2012 to nearly 56 percent. “Our CEO understood – that if we were able to get our cost point to where we were selling at almost an equivalent price to our competitors and at the same time offer superior technology – we would (experience) rapid growth,” says Faier, who has sought to outfit SolarEdge with a finance function that prioritizes cost visibility as it manages rapid growth. – Jack Sweeney

Back in the early 1990s, while a senior manager at Ernst & Young, Elizabeth Salomon was selected to be an “Accounting Fellow” at the OCC – the nation’s primary regulator of banks. Nominated by E&Y for the prestigious post, Salomon moved to Washington DC and was soon writing policy statements that would provide guidance to bank examiners across the country. Reporting directly to the OCC’s chief accountant, she quickly became a “go-between” with other banking regulatory agencies as she coordinated policy development. “This was something I never expected to do and the big learning for me was that it was okay to get out of my comfort zone.” Up to that point, Salomon says her career was about helping clients apply accounting rules, whereas at the OCC she was developing the rules – an exercise she credits with extending her thought process. Explains Salomon: “It was just a very different way of thinking.” Following her OCC posting, Salomon joined Bank of America where she became controller of the bank’s IT and operations division. However, once more intrigued by opportunities that surfaced beyond her comfort zone Salomon jumped to a healthcare startup where as VP of finance she became the the primary architect of the company’s finance function – a role that certified her leadership credentials and advance her down the path to future CFO appointments. – Jack Sweeney

A brief summary of this episode

If CFO Joe Aho’s career DNA were uploaded to Ancestry.com, he would likely discover a family tree populated with no less than five financial planning analysts and 17 senior sales representatives. Needless to say, his career roots are multifunctional, with numerous titles and different tours of duty inside both finance and sales operations. Having joined Compuware nearly 20 years ago, Aho has served as CFO for the last four – his longest occupancy of any one position at Compuware — which says a lot about his past appetite for job migration. Asked about his priorities as Compuware’s finance leader, Aho leaves little doubt that acquisitions are top of mind for the mainframe technology company that appears eager to open a new chapter of growth one that opens new doors for Compuware while discovering fruitful synergies with its past. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

It was the type of introduction that finance executives will invest decades of thoughtful career-building to receive. After dwelling nearly 20 years inside the capital markets and investment research corridors that scrutinize and energize the activities of publicly held real estate companies, Michael Knott was perhaps better prepared than most to receive an introduction to the search executive or team of search executives that had begun extensive outreach. Certainly, Knott’s robust professional network was rich with introductions to different executive searches, but unlike others, this was a CFO search and therefore more worthy of his attention. For many of the ambitious professionals Knott had worked alongside over the years, CFO search had long been a preferred doorway to the C-suite, a familiar path for opening a new leadership career chapter. Meanwhile, it was no secret that the search team was working on behalf of The Blackstone Group–the largest owner of commercial real estate in the world. Twelve months after accepting the sought-after CFO role at EQ Office–a Blackstone portfolio company–Knott routinely emphasizes that no matter how impressive an executive’s resume may be, it’s their network that often makes the difference. Knott modestly recalls: “My role here stemmed from a critical introduction when someone in my network presented me with knowledge of the search.” –Jack Sweeney

Like many CFOs, one company more than others dominates James Denena’s finance career building years. Denena spent more than ten years at Applied Materials of Santa Clara, California where an executive development program encouraged him to move around inside the chip maker’s sprawling finance organization. While Denena filled traditional FP&A and treasury roles, he also actively sought out different operational roles that could provide him with a more wide-eyed view of the manufacturing side of the business. However, it was his involvement in the expansion of a corporate development function that Denena today singles out as having perhaps made the greatest contribution to his CFO mind set. “I was one of the early team members that actually built the function out,” recalls Denena, who says the newly minted team quickly became involved in M&A activities and was soon being sought out as an adviser on different strategic decisions across the company. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Asked to supply us with a finance Strategic moment, CFO Sean Sobers recalls an acquisition completed during an earlier chapter of his career. Convinced the the acquired company was only capable of yielding a meager profit, Sobers and the finance team set out to expose the company’s shortcomings only to discover the opposite. “It was probably the most profitable business unit we had,” explains Sobers, who says the discovery came as part of a broader effort on the part of finance to require management to apply R.O.I. measures to their investments across the company. Meanwhile, certain opportunities that had garnered steady investment over the years would lose their luster as finance fine tuned its R.O.I. lens and began tracking returns more closely. “As we went forward, if you were going to ask for funding you had to supply an R.O.I. measurement that was approved by finance,” explains Sobers, who says the R.O.I. performance of investments would be tracked annually and frequently quarterly. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

The young man’s smile is broad and welcoming. It’s the type of photo that colleges and universities frequently use to attract young applicants. However, when featured on the home page for Tri-County Mental Health Services, Inc., the image’s message seems less manufactured and perhaps more ambitious as it seeks to signal hope to families seeking mental health and substance abuse services. As the primary safety-net provider of behavioral health services to a community of more than 346,000 people, Tri-County, of Kansas City, Missouri, keeps hope in large supply, along with treatments, therapies, and professional guidance. Just what role finance leadership plays in delivering Tri-County’s services may not have been entirely evident if not for the untimely death of the organization’s CFO. New leaders are often tasked with driving change, and there was little question that newly hired CFO Michelle Naus was well prepared to drive it. Still, Naus would first need to address a number of nagging obstacles, including a new federal designation poised to radically alter how Tri-County paid for its services. As Naus explains her CFO priorities, certain qualities less visible among her leadership peers come into view. Not unlike the message conveyed by the smiling young man, that of Tri-County’s CFO is less manufactured and more ambitious. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Inside the middle market today, it’s not uncommon to find a seasoned private equity executive serving as CFO of one his or her firm’s portfolio companies. Such an arrangement provides the business leader with a coveted split-screen view that buffers the investor’s demands with real-world operational insights. CFO Steve Coughran, who last year entered the C-suite at EMJ Corporation, of Chattanooga, TN, enjoys a similar split-screen of the business. However, this time the other half of CFO Coughran’s screen belongs not to a private equity executive but a strategy adviser and author. ” I was initially hired by EMJ to help them to develop and execute a client experience strategy. I entered their offices and helped them to develop tools and processes to help its leaders understand how they could enhance the client experience, but as I got into the engagement, I realized that the corporate strategy was not aligned with the customer and that there was a big disconnect,” explains Coughran, who stepped into the CFO office a year ago following a number of changes inside EMJ’s finance function. In the meantime, CFO Coughran’s strategy itch has seldom waned, and the split-screen CFO can still be found delivering keynote and seminar presentations for conferences across the country on topics focused on strategic growth, innovation, and financial management. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

A number of years after he first joined the lodging and hospitality industry, Ryan Hymel recalls being confronted by a fork in the road. Having labored deep inside his company’s M&A growth engine, he realized that his native tongue would curtail his career opportunities as the company’s appetite for growth became increasingly focused on Mexico and Latin America. “While I can get by conversationally in Spanish, I knew that there was no way that I would excel when it came to speaking with potential acquisition targets and partners, ” says Hymel, who opted instead to master the language of finance and entered the ranks of FP&A professionals, where he set about learning the intricacies of the company’s forecast model while carefully observing the decision making criteria behind capital allocation and how a decision made in one part of the organization could impact all parts. “For me, it was important to learn how these different worlds bridge each other internally–because in large organizations, it’s hard sometimes to even talk to one another, and this was my first experiences in seeking to bridge the gap,” says Hymel, who clearly views finance as a powerful tool when it comes to helping organizations to speak the same language. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Twenty four months ago CFO Mark Guerin had a pretty clear notion of what he wanted Onconova’s financial footing to look like during the second half of 2019. However, the question that lingered was whether the plan Guerin and his team were putting in motion had the vigor to overcome the obstacles along the way. Beginning with a strongly worded May 2017 message from NASDAQ claiming that Onconova’s stockholder equity was no longer sufficient to meet its listing standards. While Guerin’s plan included two new stock offerings and growing the firm’s stockholder equity – NASDAQ rejected Onconova’s initial response triggering a NASDAQ hearing where Onconova’s plan ultimately received a nod from the stock exchange. “It was an arduous task all the way through May of 2018. To do two offerings and raise a total of about $40 million in order to have the cash we needed to get to the end of 2019, and also to have the stockholders’ equity that we needed to retain our NASDAQ listing,” explains Guerin, who says the plan’s success was all the more impressive in light of the stock’s small market cap. In the end, Onconova’s financial footing – give or take a short stride – was spot-on with the plan. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Many CFOs have told us that storytelling is a big part of being a successful CFO today. However, quite a few finance leaders have told us that this did not come naturally to them and that in fact it was only by virtue of an “A-ha!” moment that they did finally lock on to the notion that as a CFO they had better be able to tell the story in a compelling and engaging manner. When it came to the importance of finance telling the story, Steve Gaven, unlike quite a few of his peers, did not require an “A-ha!” moment. Instead, Gaven arrived inside the CFO office at Boston Private well schooled in communicating both good and at times not-so-good news to investors and analysts. This involved a skill set that he had begun acquiring during the earliest days of his finance career, when he worked for a boutique consulting firm that specialized in helping publicly traded firms craft their messaging to help better drive their capital planning strategies. Along the way, Gaven joined the ranks of equity research analysts, a role that led him to accept a position with Boston Private, where his communications and messaging skills made him an obvious candidate to head up the firm’s investor relations function (as well as serve as VP of finance). So, at this time when other senior finance executives are beginning to flex their storytelling muscles for the first time, Gaven is already fluent and has mastered the combination of relationship-building and easy rapport that finance leaders are frequently left scrambling to develop. Or thus explains Gaven, while using the very skills that undoubtedly distinguish his leadership today. - Jack Sweeney NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Years from now when Katherine Edenbach looks back on her CFO career, 2019 might be remembered as a pendulum year – or a year when her priorities as finance leader swung from growth to profitability. “Smaller companies are much more focused on revenue and revenue growth, which is very important, but we need to drive a lot more reporting around our profitability, and more understanding on that side,” explains Edenbach, whose finance team appears poised to administer a dose of investigative medicine to Certify’s organization. “We want to drive more robust reporting to focus on different areas of the company and dig into product profitability to get a better feel for different profitability levels.” NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

When asked what his priorities are as a finance leader over the next 12 months, CFO Nadeem Moiz supplies an answer that uses the phrase “shareholder value” not once, but three times. Needless to say, shareholder value appears to be top-of-mind at Select Interior Concepts, a diversified building products and services company. Explains Moiz: “In a public company reporting becomes very important. Governance becomes more important and investor relations and shareholder base management are always priorities. And so this requires some thought when it comes to the time allocation required for these added functions.” NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Asked to reflect on his path to the CFO office, Dan Fletcher characterizes his years in private equity as being more operationally focused than transaction focused. Or at least, he recalls being drawn more to the challenges facing CFOs and other senior members of management teams, rather than the deal making mechanics of the banking side. As CFO of Host Analytics, Fletcher’s operational view is now fully unobstructed and meanwhile, HA’s finance leader has managed to keep one foot inside the private equity realm. Today in addition to being HA’s CFO, Fletcher remains a vice president at Vector Capital, the private equity firm that acquired HA last January. It’s a finance leadership tour of duty that is expected to unlock new value for both HA and Vector as Fletcher decodes the synergistic benefits of growth capital and technology enriched performance. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Three years ago, Tim Adams probably never imagined that today he would be taking spin classes in Geneva, Switzerland. At the time, the seasoned finance leader could be found queueing up at Logan Airport to board yet another flight to San Francisco. Of course, one could argue that a certain Logan departure gate ultimately helped to put Geneva spin classes on the horizon, since it played no small role in transporting the CFO to a round of talks that helped to seal the sale of the finance leader’s earlier company Demandware of Woburn, MA, to Salesforce of San Francisco back in 2016. As Demandware’s CFO, Adams says, he was involved when an unsolicited offer arrived from Salesforce after the e-commerce platform had achieved consecutive years of 30% growth. “It’s sometimes hard to sell a company when you enjoy what you are doing and there’s a personal aspect, but you have to put that aside to do what is right for the company’s shareholders,” explains Adams, who today is CFO of ObsEva, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company based in Geneva, Switzerland. “When I joined ObsEva in January 2017, mission number one was a successful IPO to raise the money that we needed to develop our compounds,” explains Adams, who operates from the company’s Boston office. While ObsEva achieved “mission number one” shortly after his arrival, financing stills remains top-of-mind for ObsEva’s finance chief, who–regardless of travel–likes to make exercise a part of his daily routine. Asked if he’s opened a gym membership in Geneva, Adams tells us that his next spin class is one departure gate away. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

A career stint inside the corporate development realm at Visa – quickly came to mind for CFO Adam Meister when asked about those experiences he believed shaped his CFO mindset. Characterizing his time at Visa as more “a detour” rather than a straight line along his career- building trajectory, Meister recalls the career chapter as one where he had few direct reports or underlings and yet was tasked with motivating a team. “You learn a lot about how to motivate and mobilize a team from a position of collaboration – but without a lot of direct authority,” says Meister, who believes the experience parallels the challenges many CFOs face to day as they step beyond their traditional realm of influence to build new relationships across the enterprise. “There’s a real power in how you lead by example and how you show value to business owners and peers by helping them look and understand the economics of a business,” says Meister. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Thanks to an entrepreneurial itch, Bal Bhullar will never be a conventional CFO. In fact, her CFO resume may be the only one ever to include three-wheel electric cars alongside vitamin supplements. However, when it comes to finance milestones such as the $12 million in new financing on which Electra Meccanica closed last March, Bhullar is clearly marching in step with her professional peers. This being said, when your CEO is a former race car driver and you’re building three-wheel vehicles using Chinese parts in western Canada, a CFO would be more likely to attract the interest of People magazine than Wall Street investors. Nevertheless, Wall Street has been listening, and, as for many CFOs along the front lines, Bhullar has found that communication and relationship-building remain top-of-mind. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

One of Brett White’s first assignments as a CFO was also one of his toughest. Back in 2001, with 10 years of career-building at Oracle Corp. behind him, White recalls eagerly stepping into his first CFO role–only to be handed a less than exhilarating task. During a meeting in his first week on the job, White was welcomed by the CEO, who then asked him to pull together and execute a plan to eliminate one-third of the company’s workforce, or roughly 850 employees. “It was a palm-to-the-forehead moment,” says White. “I realized that this was just not crunching numbers, and that the decisions that were required to be made would have an enormous impact on people’s lives.” Fifteen years and four CFO tours of duty later, White received a call from a recruiter regarding a health and wellness business located down the coast. “The business was a recurring revenue model and SaaS business, so it meant no more of this end-of-quarter fingernail-chewing stuff. It was all highly recurring with a group of A-list investors,” adds White, who arrived in Mindbody’s CFO office in 2016. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

At times, it must seem to Vijay Kumar that his 12-year tenure as a CFO has been spent not at one company but three. This must be a sense that most C-suite members at Sify Technologies likely experience in light of the company’s appetite for continuous reinvention. Back in 2007, when Kumar arrived at the information and communications technology company, Sify was widely known as a consumer business–and one perhaps without the will or resources to attract business customers. As CFO, Kumar was part of a management team tasked with changing that perception both inside and outside of Sify’s existing world. More specifically, Kumar and his finance team were responsible for calculating and tracking the necessary capital expenditures that could provide the new business-to-business infrastructure that business customers would demand. Of course, no sooner was the infrastructure in place then Sify decided to super-size its business services menu, making it a bona fide provider of technology services. Looking forward, Kumar says that Sify’s latest innovation involves not so much its customer offerings but how customers buy its offerings by using outcome-based pricing. This is an approach that Kumar believes will empower Sify to open a new chapter of growth. “I have one primary agenda for the next 12 months: to ensure that the organization has enough support available across all of the functions to enable scale. I want to ensure that every part of the organization is in a position to enable scale and monetize market opportunities,” explains Kumar. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

It wasn’t long after David Evans arrived inside the CFO office at Cardlytics that finance team members learned that their office surroundings were about to change. Originally domiciled in the less-trafficked–some would say “quiet” side–of the building, Evans wasted little time in relocating his team to more central (and arguably more social) office space. “Physically speaking, if I’m advancing a mantra that my team is a trusted business partner, they need to be visible, and part of that involves the cadence and frequency with which they operate,” says Evans, who believes that finance team members at Cardlytics have perhaps a plus-size opportunity to play a strategic role in the business. It’s an opportunity that becomes more easily grasped when one considers the company’s unique lines of sight. The Atlanta-based company partners with financial institutions (2,000 of them) to run their banking rewards programs that promote customer loyalty, providing Cardlytics with a coveted view into where and when consumers are spending their money. Meanwhile, that view over time has become pools of data, into which the Cardlytics finance team is today known for taking deep dives. “Our team is very much involved with helping to assess those opportunities. And that means assessing the required resources and capital to go after the opportunities where we think that there could be pockets of outsized returns to the organization,” explains Evans. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue). v291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Back in 2014, shortly after Arthur Levine first stepped into the CFO office at Sensus Healthcare, the fast-growing medical device company hit a sizable speed bump. A growing number of future Sensus customers were putting their purchases on hold as uncertainty around insurance reimbursements grew in relation to a review being conducted by The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. In order to quickly ease the company’s hefty appetite for cash, Levine and Sensus management executed a sizable layoff largely impacting the company’s sales team–while for the time being the healthcare company opted to leave its research and development team untouched. Ultimately, reimbursements for Sensus offerings remained in place and product demand surged, allowing its 2015 revenues to jump 77 percent. Such news could not have been better timed for an initial public offering, a notion upon which Sensus acted in early 2016. “We became one of the first companies to complete an IPO in 2016. Actually, we were the only Florida-based company to go public on a major exchange that year,” explains Levine, who had helped to restore the company’s sales function by green-lighting a flurry of new sales hires in 2015. “I like the challenge of turning companies around,” says Levine, who quickly adds: “I also like periods of stability and a little less stress.” –Jack Sweeney NOW SUBSCRIBE The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight- http://bit.ly/2Wfv291

When it comes to newbie accountants, few clients are more coveted within the realm of public accounting than those preparing for an IPO. So it was back in the early 1990s, when Craig Nickerson found himself knee-deep in CPA envy after having served not one but five of his firm’s IPO-minded tech clients. Today, Nickerson credits his IPO client streak to having aligned himself with a well-connected senior partner widely known in Florida’s tech community for his IPO savvy. Fast-forward to the late 1990s, and Nickerson is living in Beijing after having been tasked with helping to set up a Chinese manufacturing plant for a client company that he had joined as a controller. “It was the Wild West,” explains Nickerson, who recalls the added complexities of business dealings involving large amounts of cash. “As they said in China, an executed contract is just the start of a negotiation.” Nickerson, who would later ascend the finance leadership ladder at a string of private equity–backed companies, observes that “anyone can be a good CFO when the numbers are up and to the right … but being a good CFO is about having the fortitude to stick with your investment thesis through good times and bad times.” THE PERFECT PODCAST COMPANION Order Now: CFO Thought Leader Magazine Twenty five CFO profiles each issue curated from hundreds of hours of finance leadership interviews originally featured on the award winning CFO Thought Leader Podcast. http://bit.ly/2Wfv291

When Ted Myles is asked to reflect back on his early efforts to land a CFO role – he arguably sounds a little bit like a safe cracker: “Breaking into the c-suite that first time is always hard,” he explains. “I went in and would continue to get beat out by a sitting CFO,” says Myles, who comments: “Understandably – a board or a CEO is always going to look for someone who’s already proven in the seat.” Having to date successfully decoded the c-suite’s entry formula not once but four times – the CFO seat at AMAG Pharmaceuticals is today filled by a seasoned CFO, who is routinely raising the bar for himself as well as AMAG’s finance team. This past January – six days into the new year – AMAG preannounced its 2019 earnings at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco – an energetic gathering where the bio pharmaceutical crowd traditionally kicks off the new year with some blatant chest beating. “Our accounting team had about six total calendar days to provide us with a tight fix on what the accounting numbers were,” recalls Myles. “Fast forward six weeks after we got through an audit and the numbers were pretty much exactly what we announced six weeks earlier, ” explains AMAG’s finance leader, while exhibiting a little extra pride in the biotech firm’s fast and accurate close capabilities. At AMAG, apparently, the ease with which numbers are accessed is as worthy of note as the numbers themselves. – Jack Sweeney NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

From the moment Chris Whitfield stepped into the CFO office at Mana Nutrition, it was clear to him that various snags in the organization’s information flows were keeping the not-for-profit’s board members on edge. To remedy the situation, Whitefield reformulated the not-for-profit’s approach to reporting, beginning with a beefier balance sheet instead of the slimmed down Statement of Financial Position on which Mana had relied to date. “It was clear to me that we had to begin reporting on our performance back to a pretty savvy board of directors just as any for-profit company would,” says Whitefield, who also sought to give the board greater visibility into the ebb and flow of the not-for profit’s working capital. “I realized that we could not behave like a not-for-profit that relied on giving and charitable donations, but instead had to rely on our own wits and ability to raise capital through beneficial investment or normal credit channels,” Whitefield explains. After a few tense meetings–where some pointed questions lingered–Whitefield began to adopt the tools needed to routinely output the reports required to satisfy Mana’s board and at the same time draw the more capital-intensive parts of the organization closer to his finance team. “We now plan to routinely engage our operations management in the budgeting process,” explains Whitefield, who says that Mana’s operations people began collaborating more closely with finance a year ago, when the organization adopted a cost center reporting process. –Jack Sweeney NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

It’s unlikely that this is the first sentence ever to include the phrase “even-keeled” alongside the name Robin Gantt, but this is a pairing that bears repeating here to reveal not only an obvious character trait of our latest guest, but also one that frequently sets apart CFO leadership at large. Gantt, already a seasoned finance leader, arrives at Northwest Pipe as an advisor to the CEO, who is seeking to better align finance with the steel pipe manufacturer’s overall strategy. We don’t learn all of what needs to get done, but Gantt’s subsequent advance to the CFO office makes clear that the alignment is being achieved as the organization responds and is placed on a more even keel. Listeners will enjoy hearing Gantt offer a short, concise overview of the uncommon business of manufacturing steel pipe that ranges from 2 feet to 13 feet in diameter. Meanwhile, her modest appraisal of both her early career and communication abilities informs finance newcomers that they too can learn and achieve along the finance career track. Along the way, Gantt refuses to sugarcoat the inbred challenges that the business faces. “This is a very heavy working capital-intensive business, with a long cash flow cycle. Anyone who works with governments and municipalities knows that you’ll get paid, but sometimes it can be quite a while,” she explains. Just like the pipe Northwest manufacturers, Gantt’s words run deep beneath the surface. — Jack Sweeney NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

When Matt Fahy identifies the opportunities that have punctuated his finance career, he credits subscription revenue models as having played a recurring role along the trajectory that has led to multiple CFO tours of duty. For Fahy, it all began with a move to New York City, where he was soon serving one of the media world's most coveted clients: the Newhouse family (owners of a string of newspapers and Condé Nast publishing). "Being a private, family-owned business, their concerns were really about safeguarding their assets and monitoring their taxes," explains Fahy, whose lines of sight into the house of Newhouse were bestowed upon him by his employer, Paul Scherer & Company, a boutique New York CPA firm. Fahy would continue to serve media clients when, in the mid-1990s, he jumped to KPMG's Information, Communications, and Entertainment (ICE) practice, where he acquired an entrepreneurial itch and soon entered the world of dotcom start-ups. He would serve as CFO for Public Access Technologies and QualityClick.com, Inc., before logging a lengthy CFO tenure at AgilQuest, a workplace management SaaS software company. It was at AgilQuest that Fahy would fine-tune his approach to customer-centric finance by standardizing the collaborative cross-functional practices that today underpin the customer-serving platform that many call "customer success." ¤ NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Before joining Goldman Sachs back in the late 1980s, Mark Lee was a finance manager at Hewlett-Packard Co. Today, Lee fondly recalls being mentored by a senior controller while situated deep inside the technology behemoth's computer support division. The finance executive, explains Lee, viewed controllership as a strategic role where executives could acquire and build their leadership skills that could be applied elsewhere. "He told me that his next job could be the head of marketing," explains Lee, who credits his early mentor for outfitting his finance mind-set with a wide lens rather than a narrow one. After four years inside an HP cubicle, he set off on a finance adventure by entering the investment banking world via a seven -year tour of duty with Goldman Sachs in New York. While the banking chapter of Lee's long finance career is the most robust of his career book (which is nearly 20 years thick), it is perhaps not the most intriguing. This designation arguably belongs to Forge Global where he and his finance team are focused on cultivating a fresh class of investors outside the traditional venture capital ecosystem. To be clear, Forge is one of a number of trading platforms that help employees sell their shares in pre-IPO companies. It's no secret that the number of IPO delays has been steadily growing as venture firms keep funneling more money into large private companies as they seek bigger payoffs down the road. As more “unicorns” supposedly worth billions of dollars—at least on paper—delay going public, Mark Lee and his team are seeking to ease an appetite for liquidity among Silicon Valley's IPO-hungry entrepreneurial rank-and-file. It's an opportunity where customer retention and talent retention are one in the same, and one that places Forge's finance team along the outer reaches of the finance function's evolutionary path.