CFO THOUGHT LEADER

When asked about his arrival at Dermira, CFO Andrew Guggenhime explains: "I was the 22nd employee, and today we have over 300." Along the way, the company executed an IPO, reached a market value of $1 billion, received FDA approval for its first medication (last June), and brought the offering to market (last October). Not bad for a five-year CFO sprint into the land of leading-edge medical dermatology. Looking back, Guggenhime says: "When I joined Dermira, we had one other person on the finance team. We had no employees on our legal team. We had no employees on our IT team. And those were functions for which I was responsible. So we had to build those teams and begin by bringing in the leaders and building those capabilities so that we could not only serve the growing needs of the company internally, but also satisfy our obligations as a public company." Today, with his finance team in place, Guggenhime prefers to look forward as he and his team awaits the "readouts" from different clinical evaluations. "Preparing the organization for the readouts regardless of the outcome is an important task for us," says Guggenhime, whose remarks seldom stray far from the topic of raising capital. "We have to access capital to continue to execute on our strategy, to continue to fulfill the vision of the company, and to continue to build the portfolio and to develop the treatments that will benefit patients," says employee number 22. –Jack Sweeney NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

There was a time when Glynis Bryan imagined herself someday retiring from Ryder System, Inc.—a company she entered as an intern and would later exit as a senior vice president. Along the way, she credits the transportation logistics giant with having exposed her to complex M&A transactions and innovative capital structures—two areas that she believes have made a hefty contribution to her post-Ryder success as a CFO. However, the Ryder experience she recalls most fondly was inside the FP&A function at what was her first destination on a finance career journey and one that has served her well at Insight Enterprises, Inc. There, shortly after being appointed CFO in 2007, she energized her team's FP&A ambitions and set a course that would forever transform the technology services company's notion of strategic finance. "I think of the FP&A function as being the road map within the finance function that helps each one of the senior leaders across the organization by supplying them with tools and actionable data that they can use to see where the business is going," she observes. Meanwhile, in 2012, Insight overhauled its internal systems, establishing a single platform from which to integrate acquisitions and satisfy its appetite for growth and helping the company to better unite its North American and Asia-Pacific operations. It's a platform that Bryan has gotten to know well as she routinely weighs the obstacles and advantages that future merger partners may bestow. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Near the end of our discussion with CFO Wilco Groenhuysen, he recommends a book while confiding: "It's not a great book—but it has a big lesson." "Opportunities exist for only for a short time. So when you see an opportunity, grab it and make the best of it," says Groenhuysen, revealing the big lesson and adding perhaps a surprise ending to a talk that up until his book recommendation appeared to chart the career path of yet another graduate from the CFO school of strict discipline and resolve. But wait! There were other clues along the way that Groenhuysen was more a CFO of his own making than a familiar reproduction. Certainly, the fact that his professional life spans three continents should have tipped us off. Also, how many finance leaders would ascend to the top of a manufacturing behemoth (Philips NA) only to forfeit the comfort of hard-earned industry knowledge to land fleet of foot inside the always-changing realm of biotech? Asked to explain how he addresses the difference between the two realms, Groenhuysen says, "Driving a car really isn't that difficult. Sometimes the steering wheel is on the left side of the car, sometimes it's on the right side of the car. It's really the challenge, and here at Novocure, it's the commitment to helping patients." And no one doubts that Novocure's CFO likes a challenge. While CFO of Philips Thailand, Groenhuysen challenged himself to achieve a conversational level with the Thai language—one of the few milestones that the finance leader admits with a degree of frustration that he may not have reached. Still, even with a career as sprawling and experience-rich as Groenhuysen's, one senses that the latest chapter may offer the most startling lessons yet for the Dutch-born CFO, who these days seems to enjoy educating others about science as much as about financials. Certainly, explaining how alternating electric fields can disrupt cancer cell division and cause cancer cell death is an altogether different opportunity than explicating the virtues of ultra-HD televisions. – Jack Sweeney

Of all the finance milestones that CFO Mike Myshrall uses to illustrate Cyren's appetite for success, perhaps few are more enlightening than the one involving private equity titan Warburg Pincus. Two years ago, Warburg Pincus offered to buy out Cyren shareholders at a 35 percent premium over the current price of their shares. However, unwilling to have the firm forfeit its publicly owned shares entirely, Cyren management structured the deal so that Warburg would be eligible to acquire only up to 75 percent of Cyren's outstanding shares. Surprisingly, Warburg found itself battling to capture half of the available shares despite the hefty premium. In the end, the PE firm ended up with only 52 percent of outstanding shares. "Many shareholders chose to stay in the company and ride it with Warburg so that they could potentially get an even bigger return down the road if the company were to go fully private or if we were to sell to a larger company through an acquisition," explains Myshrall, who describes the transaction's structure as being "quite elegant." For his part, Myshrall advanced down the business development path before jumping into the ranks of finance leaders. However, before there was a leap upward in finance there was a sojourn inside the electrical engineering realm and an MBA from Harvard Business School—both of which Myshrall today credits with having helped point the way down the finance leadership path. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Sometime in the next three to six months, Syngenta AG, a Swiss-based agribusiness company, is expecting to welcome a clan of ambitious offspring. Months, even years in the making, these fruit from a forward-looking group are born from a cross-functional team—one tasked with helping the $13.5 billion enterprise correctly measure its expansive sustainability initiatives. To be clear, the aforementioned "offspring" are new metrics, the output of an ambitious metrics "refresh" triggered in part by the firm's determination to routinely evaluate the numbers intended to provide Syngenta management as well stakeholders with a clear-eyed view of its sustainability efforts. "It's all good and well establishing a new metric, but if you can't measure and monitor it, then it has no value in any shape or form," explains Syngenta CFO Mark Patrick, who first mentioned the sustainability "refresh" when asked about metrics that had become increasingly top-of-mind for finance—but were clearly "nonfinancial" or beyond the realm of traditional finance. While Patrick said that he was reluctant to discuss the yet-to-be-released metrics, he suggests that when it comes to finance, the innovation is not what the metrics measure but how they came to be—and how Patrick's finance team operated as part of a larger cross-functional effort where finance partnered with the sustainability group and the company at large. "We're actually the custodians of value, and it's about how do we work with those within those cross-functional teams to ensure that we're moving down the right path and investing in the things that are going to give us the greatest chance for success tomorrow. And this has to be a relationship built on trust," he explains. This trust, according to Patrick, is now being enriched by finance as it seeks to make metrics more visible across the organization and allow individual employees to measure how their work is bringing benefits to the company and contributing to its success. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Among the many flights that CFO Stefan Schulz has taken between Minneapolis and Houston over the years, few are etched in his memory better than a certain return flight to Minneapolis—during which he created an ambitious list of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) action items. The list that Schultz created in the air that day was long and detailed, and while he may not have ever used it as such, the list was the muscle behind an ultimatum. "I was thinking about all that I would need in order to get things fixed. Basically, I was thinking, 'If I don't get these, then you need to find somebody else,'" explains Schulz, who at the time had not yet been a month into a new job with Lawson Software when he determined that it was time to alert Lawson's board and upper management to its snowballing SOX compliance challenge. "To my surprise, they told me, 'We want you to do exactly what you said' and 'We've got your back.' This really changed how I approached problems and how I would recommend solutions going forward," explains Schulz, who had earlier earned his SOX street cred while a controller at BMC Software. Fourteen years and multiple tours of duty as a CFO later, Schulz is still flying back and forth between Houston and Minneapolis and still making lists. These days, his action items are more likely to highlight the priorities of a SaaS CFO for whom the new rules of customer-centric finance loom large and customer success is increasingly top-of-mind. –Jack Sweeney

It was late for a workday (perhaps after 9:00 p.m.) when Seb Martel shared his team's candid findings with a collection of top managers tasked with assessing the economic downturn's likely impact on BRP's business. As a manufacturer of popular vehicles for snow and water, BRP had a management that was naturally concerned that the downturn could wallop BRP's recreation-minded customers, depressing sales and raising doubts about whether BRP would meet its debt covenants. Still, the question that remained top-of-mind for Martel was a question that the downturn posed to industry at large: "Is management prepared to listen?" Today, Martel believes that his forthrightness served him well that night—along with an unflinching confidence in the numbers. BRP's management listened and responded to Martel's clear-eyed message by taking steps to better manage all areas of business, while battening down any unnecessary risk-taking. It's no secret that CFO careers are built on decades of experience that every so often yield unique places in time where an executive is permitted to transform before the eyes of others. So it was, perhaps, for Martel, who entered the CFO office within four years of the fateful night that he says even his CEO still likes to recall: "Remember that night when Seb presented the numbers?" "The beauty that we have in finance is that we get to convince the organization by using a powerful tool called numbers. And if you know how to communicate a message with numbers, you can steer an organization in any direction," says Martel, while highlighting what many agree is the essence of CFO leadership—its very own lightning in bottle. –Jack Sweeney

A brief summary of this episode

TrainingPros CFO Jill Vogin describes her early-career public accounting experience as a “virtual master’s degree” in corporate finance and accounting. It was also something of a good omen, given that Vogin now leads the finance function of a highly specialized staffing company with virtual offices throughout the country and (more recently) around the world. It’s also fitting that Vogin oversaw the implementation of a cloud-based ERP system. Vogin discusses how she’s adapted her leadership style to suit the virtual environment while resetting her team’s expectations concerning performance and collaboration.

G1 Therapeutics CFO Barclay “Buck” Phillips set his sights on the CFO position on day one of his very first job back in high school. After he hustled home to share the great news about landing the part-time gig, Phillips’s father, a stock broker, shared some prescient advice: Son, always make sure you’re the guy whose hand is closest to the cash register or the cash flow—that way, you’ll always have the opportunity to add the most value. The advice struck a chord. Today, with close to three decades of capital markets, financial strategy, and business development experience in life sciences and venture capital under his belt, Phillips remains as close to the cash flow as possible. He owns responsibility for all finance operations, including treasury, as well as for investor relations, business development, and strategic transactions at the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that develops therapeutics to treat cancer. Phillips discusses the value that he’s contributed via innovative projects during his career, as well as the joy that he’s gained from those unique experiences.

A Chief Story Officer’s Legacy Given that finance executives are the top number-crunchers in the organization, it’s fascinating to hear Traction on Demand CFO Corinne Hua describe people, conversations, and narratives as crucial factors in her strategic calculations at her consulting and software development firm. Hua views her function’s primary role as crafting a compelling story around the company’s financial results. Her team’s success in doing so has resulted in some interesting assignments, such as leading an effort to assess and rebalance the pace of hiring within an industry where new hires—consultants who produce billable hours—help to drive top-line revenue. The finance group's data-driven detective work produced three metrics that the business now monitors to ensure that the pace of hiring supports revenue growth objectives without negatively affecting organizational collaborations or workplace culture. The work marked a “great moment for us to act strategically” outside of traditional corporate finance boundaries, Hua reports, while helping each hiring manager throughout the entire organization to make better decisions.

Guidance for your C-Suite Ascent A global finance executive with a passion for healthcare, Constellation Pharmaceuticals CFO Emma Reeve offers straightforward advice to aspiring finance chiefs: continually add new experiences to your backpack and take them with you to your next role. She’s certainly demonstrated that her approach works. Reeve’s 20-plus years of industry experiences extends across pharmaceutical, medical device and bio-pharma companies including big-name corporations (like Novartis, Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb) as well as development-stage biotech companies (Inotek Pharmaceuticals and Aton Pharma). While she methodically sought out experience in FP&A, accounting, investor relations and just about every other corporate finance function, Reeve credits her work outside the finance and accounting realm – interacting with patient advocacy groups, partnering with business leaders and collaborating with the marketing function – with helping her reach the CFO office for the first time in 2002.

Chanticleer Holdings CFO Patrick Harkleroad knows how to distinguish between signals and noise. That’s evident when he’s helping colleagues mine an expanding trove of data for customer insights to improve customer experience at the company’s fast, casual, and full-service restaurant brands. It’s also the case when Harkleroad assesses his varied career experiences in investment banking (both capital markets ad mergers & acquisitions), the restaurant industry and while guiding struggling companies through turnarounds as a consultant to CFOs. He’s learned to pair his dogged determination and true-north focus with larger dose of empathy to better understand the unique perspectives of all stakeholders involved in difficult decisions and tough deals. Harkleroad also discusses the value that finance executives can derive by dedicating themselves to the “day-top-day grind” required to perform as an elite CFO.

From a career development standpoint, one of the best things William Acheson did to reach the CFO office was stepping away from corporate finance and accounting for 15 years. After coming up on the public acconting track, the GWG Holdings finance chief immersed himself in investment banking, the residential mortgage industry, capital markets, risk management, credit management and more while taking on a variety of operational roles. He also accepted long-term international assignments for Merrill Lynch and GMAC-RESCAP. Acheson credits his accounting training and skills for helping him add value in his many operations positions. “As I got older and my career progressed, I found myself perfectly suited for the CFO job because I [had gained] that breadth of experience.” Now as the 30-year veteran mentors rising finance and accounting talent at GWG Holdings, a leader in the fast-growing secondary life insurance market, he advises those interested in the CFO track to “leave accounting, but always keep in touch with it.”

Arvinas CFO Sean Cassidy caught the high-growth bug early in his career. Shortly into his stint with Deloitte, Cassidy transitioned from a massive global financial services company to work with middle-market clients. He felt he could make a more tangible difference for those companies by supporting them as they raised capital and made acquisitions. His passion led him to the life sciences industry where Cassidy has served as the finance chief of a number of high-growth biotech and biopharma companies. In a previous stint, Cassidy helped CuraGen subsidiary 454 Life Sciences get its back office in order for a potential IPO. During his two years guiding that effort, the business grew from 20 people to 150 employees and from zero to $70 million in revenue. “It was a very exciting time,” Cassidy asserts. “The company almost went public, but in the end it made more sense to do a strategic transaction.” The experience helped elevate him to CuraGen’s CFO office and, more recently, to Arvinas, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing therapeutics for cancers and other difficult-to-treat diseases. Cassidy discusses how his approach to corporate finance leadership pivots on flexibility. “You can’t be too rigid in your planning,” he adds. “Science changes on a dime.”

When Whirlpool CFO Jim Peters joined the company at the director level 15 years ago, he was thrust into the thick of a pivotal M&A deal that also wound up generating extraordinary value from a career development standpoint. Originally assigned to help manage the accounting facets of the proposed Maytag acquisition, Peters swiftly expanded his assignment to include tax, post-deal integration planning and other dimensions. His ability to take on additional responsibilities “gave me exposure to senior leaders within whirlpool,” Peters recalls. “In a very short period of time, I went from being someone who stepped in at the director-level to interacting with our CEO … on a daily basis.” The intense work, learning and exposure subsequently propelled Peters, a former EY consultant who also worked for Limited Brands prior to joining Whirlpool, into a series of increasingly senior corporate finance positions. His previous roles include serving as the CFO of Whirlpool EMEA and as chief accounting officer for Whirlpool Corporation. Peters talks about the numbers – those related to Whirlpool’s financial performance as well as to the company’s unique commitment to sustainability – he examines over his first cup of coffee each morning

A Cross-Functional Black Belt Vocera Communications CFO Justin Spencer’s strategic-finance breakthrough had little to do with corporate finance and everything to do with the drivers of strategic success. In an earlier CFO role, the tech executive heard just about every ERP horror story there is – sordid scope creep, sketchy implementation firms, unending projects, the organization's brutal rejection of IT-driven initiatives, and more – as he prepared to lead a massive Oracle upgrade. To side-step those nightmarish outcomes, he designed a unique approach. Spencer enlisted the company’s best project manager as the full-time project leader, invested in a rigorous screening process to hire an elite implementation partner, set aside ample budget for unexpected contingencies, seeded the project team with A-players (priming them with performance incentives), and sucessfully branded the endeavor as a C-level mandate. The painstaking upfront work paid off handsomely as the project was completed on time and within budget while swiftly generating higher-than-expected productivity-related returns. “Most strategic work is now conducted through large, cross-functional projects,” Spencer notes. “That experience taught me how to influence and lead on a cross-functional b

Choose Your Words Carefully Zendesk CFO Elena Gomez followed up a top-notch education (a degree from UC-Berkley’s Haas School of Business) with a series of finance executive positions within some highly impressive companies – Charles Schwab, Visa, Salesforce and, since April 2016, Zendesk, a customer experience and help desk platform company that's posted remarkable, largely organic, growth in recent years. Despite the elite credentials, Gomez asserts the importance of forging genuine connections with her bosses, colleagues and direct reports. She shares the inspirational speech her boss gave to her when her confidence wavered as a 29-year-old, newly minted VP. Gomez also delivers a candid account of how a near mutiny by her team taught her the underrated value of authentic expressions of gratitude. “One of my direct reports told me that everyone on my team was going to quit,” she recalls. “I was a brand new VP of finance … he said: You know, you haven’t said ‘thank you.’ It just stopped me in my tracks.”

An Early Dose of Pharma Start-Up Experience When Global Blood Therapeutics CFO Jeffrey Farrow says he took the corporate-finance career path less traveled, he really means it. As an undergraduate biology major, Farrow and a couple of entrepreneurial-minded postdocs hit upon a way to identify a protein thought to cause Alzheimer’s. The group licensed the technology from the University of California system and launched their own company, “which we naively thought we maybe could take public,” Farrow recounts. He and his co-founders instead wound up selling their venture to a larger neuroscience company. The experience helped Farrow, who managed the startup’s business side, shed his naiveté via a potent dose of real-world experience. After a stint in public accounting, Farrow returned to the pharmaceutical industry where he’s subsequently taken on numerous CFO and finance executive positions while leading IPOs, shepherding high-growth companies toward (and through) acquisitions, and guiding early-stage pharma companies through the regulatory approval process and commercial launch of new drugs.

A Humble Take on a Hall-of-Fame Career Yext CFO Steve Cakebread’s resume is extraordinary given the preeminent companies he’s worked for (HP, Silicon Graphics, Autodesk, Salesforce.com, Pandora and Yext), the new technology categories he’s helped bring to market, and the staggering growth those organizations posted under his corporate-finance leadership. Cakebread joined Salesforce as employee #67 when the $10 billion company was eking out a quaint $20 million annually. Despite these Lebron-esque achievements, Cakebread humbly peppers his discussion with plenty of phrases like “I was fortunate to…” Luckily for us, he also runs through a compelling set of career-building keys, including: taking promotions to difficult roles that had remained unfilled for months “because everyone else thought they would fail" at the job; amassing international experience (a decade in China and India); and learning how to explain innovative business models and entirely new product categories to analysts and other stakeholders. He also shares his personally fulfilling approach to team-building at Yext, a B2B geomarketing company that provides a software platform for streamlining all of an organization’s online listings.

One of FinancialForce CFO Gordy Brooks’ most valuable early career-building experiences began by butting heads with his CEO. The chief executive insisted on issuing sales commissions on a weekly basis – an ask that would have most finance chiefs pulling their hair out. After the CEO stuck to his guns in the face of counterarguments, Brooks spent two weeks carefully unpacking the problem behind his CEO’s requested outcome. He discovered that the root cause of the request involved ineffective operational processes (sales territory assignments and compensation plan design) and inefficient comp and payroll processes. When Brooks presented those findings with a significant process improvement proposal, the CEO embraced his systemic solution. “The CFO role is not only about metrics and business models,” Brooks notes. “It’s also about the human touch.” Brooks – who possesses two decades of finance executive experience with VMWare, BEA Systems, Citrix, Microsoft and other notables – shares his takes on current comp challenges, the importance of early public-company experience, and the high career returns on international assignments.

A regular on Treasury and Risk Management Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in Finance” list, Smartsheet CFO Jennifer Ceran joined the company, a SaaS platform for managing collaborative work and automating work processes, in 2016 with impressive Silicon Valley bona fides. She’s served as CFO and in senior finance executive roles at Quotient Technology (formerly Coupons.com), Box, Ebay/PayPal and Cisco. Ceran’s current mission is to help lead Smartsheet’s long-term strategy, and she’s thrilled by Smartsheet’s market opportunity. “It’s in the multiple billions of dollars,” she enthuses. “We have a real chance of extending our leadership position, so we’re going after [a goal of] $1 billion in revenue within four to six years.” Ceran is equally enthusiastic about sharing career guidance with future finance leaders. She identifies two crucial propellants to the CFO seat: 1) Amassing as much corporate finance knowledge as possible in all of the realm’s key functional areas; and 2) Understanding the value – and exceedingly positive impact on company performance – that a healthy and candid CFO-CEO relationship engenders. “It’s really important that you and the CEO have mutual respect and alignment,” Ceran adds. “It’s important that you’re in an environment where you feel safe on both sides to discuss the toughest situations at work, debate the issues and then come together on a course of action.”

Props to Anaqua CFO and COO Justin Crotty for allowing us to first zero-in on his early career chapters when the economy showed no mercy. Crotty, who joined the leading provider of intellectual property management software and services, about three years ago, launched his career with a tech consultancy at the height of the dot.com era. In his mid-20s, he took on the role of project lead for a prickly client that all of his colleagues ducked (a professional development approach he advocates). Crotty says he “wound up failing pretty miserably … I drove the project into the ground.” But the failure steeled him to dust himself off, get the project across the finish line, and devote himself to mastering project management, expertise that serves him extremely well in his dual role.” Those skills “have been a key part of my success. I still conduct daily standup meetings with my team and ensure that we’re getting things done, managing our plans … and focusing on delivering good experiences.” This candor and relational creativity probably should be expected from a finance executive who points to the flick Slumdog Millionaire for a career-development comparison. “Throughout that movie the protagonist has all of these experiences that come together in ways that he wasn't expecting – and ultimately for the better,” Crotty adds. “That’s the way my career has unfolded.”

On first glance, Ra Medical Systems CFO Andrew Jackson’s 20 years as a finance executive in life sciences and technology companies seems have progressed in a traditional, orderly manner. A closer inspection of Jackson’s experience reveals that taking early-career risks can pay off handsomely. Jackson joined the manufacturer of laser-based solutions for the treatment of cardiovascular and dermatological diseases two weeks after the company decided to go public, and he filed the company’s initial S-1 with the SEC four weeks after his start date. One high-stakes career decision involved Jackson taking a title demotion, moving from controller to assistant controller. The move was strategic, though, in that it transported him from a privately held firm to a publicly listed company where he rapidly accumulated the SEC reporting skills he knew he would one day need as the CFO of a public company. It was a “a risky move to take a step down,” Jackson says, “but it ended up paying off in the long run.”

Of the three traditional paths to the finance chief’s seat, Bluesnap CFO Chris Menard took the approach less traveled, and it’s made quite a difference. Most fledgling finance executives begin their journey in public accounting or investment banking, Menard parlayed an undergraduate experience rich with entrepreneurial grooming (along with an MBA) into financial planning and analysis positions at several high-growth software and fintech companies. One early career assignment – where he assisted the finance team in completing an IPO, six acquisitions and a stock buyback before the company’s lucrative sale to Oracle – proved especially valuable. Menard talks about applying his operational finance expertise and commitment to “leading with analytics” to the online payments technology company that he joined in May 2018. He also explains the two-step approach – assess and strengthen the accounting team first and then build up the finance function’s analytical chops – he favors when taking the CFO reins at a new company.

In a sector known for advancing leading-edge risk mitigation strategies, CFO Rejji Hayes offers a risk-minded response to those who ask why he steered his career into the power and energy sector. “I had this epiphany where I said ‘It would be nice to find (a sector) that’s was a little less cyclical and a little less transactional.’ … And people generally need heat and electricity irrespective of economic cycles,” explains Hayes, who exited an investment banking career in 2009 to join the treasury function of energy giant Exelon before blazing a path to the CFO office at CMS Energy of Jackson, Michigan. Today, Hayes illuminates the CMS risk mindset by emphasizing the value of risk mitigation opportunities: “During the course of the year - whether its weather developments, adverse regulatory outcomes or other downside cases - we try to identify enough risk mitigating opportunities to offset those risks,” explains Hayes. Join us when Hayes retraces his steps to the CFO office and lists his priorities for the year ahead.

Tony Tripeny’s remarkable career at Corning can be defined by some impressive numbers: 33 years of service in every aspect of corporate finance at the 167-year-old company whose cutting-edge materials reside in nearly every cell phone and flat screen among so many other products. Yet, the veteran EVP and CFO prefers to describe the keys to successful corporate finance leadership with qualitative measures such as time, location and communications. Tripeny continually exhorts his group to deploy automation and related tools to free up more time to devote to analysis and other strategic contributions –especially those that they provide from a seat at the decision-making table. He also emphasizes that it is vital for incoming finance chiefs to be as prepared as possible to manage the “public aspect of the CFO” role. “It’s just different,” he asserts, “when you’re the person being asked the questions, going to the conferences, or speaking for half the time on the conference calls.”

Cimpress CFO Sean Quinn likes to set increasingly difficult professional goals for himself. His commitment to continual personal growth hasn’t hurt his mass customization company: Cimpress’ annual revenue has soared from $500 million when Quinn joined in the company nine years ago to roughly $2.6 billion today. We catch up once more with Quinn, who assumed Cimpress’ CFO position in 2015 and who was recently named to The Boston Business Journal’s annual ‘40 Under 40’ list honoring Beantown’s best and brightest young professionals. The former KPMG CPA talks about scaling the company’s financial infrastructure to support its rapid growth. He also details the levers he’s put in place to help the publicly listed company replaces its focus on a quarterly horizon with a long-term mindset.

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

Serving as a corporate finance executive for an organization on the perilous journey from “small and private” to “large, publicly listed, and thriving” taught Catalant CFO Anitha Gopalan what to hone in on as a finance chief. That experience and others like it also sharpened her gambling chops. She says that her Silicon Valley start-up experience showed her “how important and relevant it is to completely understand the company story and strategy” along with “the drivers that create value for shareholders.” Aligning corporate finance’s activities with that plan and its related plot points enables CFOs, she adds, to “optimize everything you do depending on what you are betting on and where you are doubling down.” The 20-year corporate finance veteran is now betting on her dynamic leadership skills to help Catalant to accelerate and scale its mission of enabling client companies to revolutionize their human capital strategy.

The executives and staffers profiled on Possible’s web site are described by the non-profit integrated healthcare provider as “possibilists” – “people with the perspective to embrace extraordinary challenge and the grit to get remarkable results anyway.” The term suits Possible CFO Pavan Makhija, a former investment banker who possesses dual undergraduate degrees in math and religion, a master’s in financial engineering from Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, and a passion for social issues. The former Lehman Brothers and Barclays controller is also an avid story-teller. Here, he narrates his anything-is-possible career trajectory while sharing how the Lehman bankruptcy – and his use the firm’s balance sheet as a powerful narrative device at an arduous time – educated him on his CFO path. Makhija also describes the challenge of applying all of his financial engineering and management skills to guiding a mission-driven organization that provides affordable (and often free) high-quality healthcare in the U.S. and Nepal.

Whenever he’s faced a difficult crossroads in life or business, Varnonis CFO Guy Melamed focused squarely on goals – sticking to them and scoring them. Despite playing for Israel’s under-21 national soccer team and fielding alluring offers to continue his playing career there, Melamed chose to leave his home country. He attended Boston College where he simultaneously played soccer, studied accounting and business, and learned English. His stick-to-itiveness helped him earn a B.A and an M.S.A. while becoming the first Israeli to get drafted by a Major League Soccer (MLS) team. After a year with the Colorado Rapids in the U.S. and a stint in the U.K.’s Championship League, Melamed decided to focus exclusively on his business career, joining KPMG as a CPA. Despite lucrative offers from private industry, Melamed opted to remain at KPMG and, later, EY, because, at those points in his career, he says “knowledge and experience were more important to me than making more money.” The pursuit of those goals also paid off by delivering him to Varonis, where he gained valuable experience helping to guide a booming cybersecurity company through an IPO.

Before joining Tableau four years ago and taking over the CFO seat last July, Damon Fletcher worked through a progression of experiences that could serve as a career roadmap for up-and-coming finance chiefs. After earning his Master of Accounting degree, Fletcher joined PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, where he worked closely with one of the fastest-growing companies in the world during the early 2000s. His early-career work included M&A valuations and integrations, extensive travel, valuable guidance from savvy mentors and risk management expertise earned during the depths of the global financial crisis. He has straightforward advice for aspiring finance leaders: Get out of your comfort zone. That means seeking out assignments in new areas of corporate finance and the business, gaining exposure to new industries, and accepting roles that require moves to new regions. Here, he discusses his role with the leading visual analytics company – including a valuable collaboration with the sales team—and the unique payoff of emptying your email inbox at the end of each day.

Cloud ERP + Time = Strategic Influence When Kote Lomidze became World Learning’s CFO four years ago, he immediately began enhancing the functionality of a cloud-based ERP platform the global educational non-profit had implemented six months earlier. The work, which Lomidze oversaw in a very hands-on way, generated valuable returns as measured in dollars, time and influence. Thanks to his technological savvy, Lomidze and his team spearheaded the adoption of applications that streamlined timesheets and improved the collection of vendors' banking information among numerous other benefits. In all, Lomidze and his team spearheaded the adoption of 10 applications, which greatly reduced the time the function spends chasing data and closing the books. “We spend more time analyzing the data and translating that data into actionable outcomes,” he says. Less time on reconciliations also translates to more time supporting decision-making that “influences how the organization is run,” adds Lomidze, who discusses all of the tools and knowledge he deploys while operating with a for-profit mindset to help sustain World Learning’s mission well into the future.

After starting his career in a Big 4 accounting firm and then steadily ascending through numerous (and varied) corporate finance roles over nearly two decades, Michael Hug possessed a clear vision for his CFO tenure at the world’s largest publicly traded timeshare company. “I didn’t want my team to just be the people who come in, count the money and deposit it in the bank,” he notes. “Rather, I want us to be embedded in the business – to have a great relationship with our business leaders … while helping the organization to achieve its goals.” Hug assumed his finance chief role as Wyndham Destinations was spinning off its sister company. That timing gave him the unique opportunity to build a senior corporate finance leadership team – including the heads of investor relations, treasury and internal audit as well as a chief accounting officer – from scratch

Prior to joining Sysmex, a medical diagnostic testing equipment and information systems technology company, five years ago, spent his formative years in Siemens where his varied experience covered every aspect of corporate finance in addition to stints as the head of strategic projects for one of the conglomerate’s companies. One Garini’s guiding principles as a finance executive is to get as far away from his desk as possible and deeply engage with broad and diverse group of stakeholders. Over the course of a career that includes leadership positions throughout Latin America, Europe and North America, the Brazil native has embraced that principle to its extreme. Garini, who speaks four languages, exhorts his rising managers and executives to “train themselves to be global” by seeking roles in new regions to gain exposure to new cultures, languages, market environments and business perspectives. Guest: Alex Garini Company: Sysmex America Headquartered: Chicago, IL Connect: www.sysmex.com

Eagle-eyed vision may be Mphasis Executive Vice President and CFO V. Suryanarayanan’s most valuable leadership skill. His ability to zero in on crucial but obscured factors – market conditions affecting the timing of an IPO or the surprisingly high cost of indirect materials used in the motorcycle manufacturing process, for example – has helped him add substantial value to the companies he’s worked for while earning him impressive recognition. Honored as one of India’s 100 Best CFOs for 2017-18, Suryanarayanan also received CFO India’s First Annual CFONEXT100 honor in 2012 (and was a repeat winner the following year). That said he would rather talk about how he and his finance team’s analysis of market forecasts spurred them to accelerate the timetable for taking a company public – a move that “resulted in a fantastic valuation” and a successful listing completed weeks before a major market swoon. Suryanarayanan views those types of accomplishments as part of the strategic CFO’s core role. “Ideally, the CFO should track the pulse of the business,” he adds. “If the business is going to have problems, the CFO [should know] well in advance of anyone else in the organization.”

Wasabi CFO Michael Bayer’s career ah-ha moment struck early. He was a college math whiz in the early days of PCs when a professor enlisted Bayer to move all of his paper-based finance and accounting records to a computerized system. “He took me under his wing and taught me a lot,” recalls Bayer, whose 25-plus year professional career includes various finance, operations, technology and business development roles primarily for venture-backed technology companies. “Only recently have I realized the magnitude of the risk that he undertook … He allowed some college kid to build out his business systems [and] he trusted the trading of his fairly sizable investment portfolio to computer models that I built around my emerging understanding of options.” The experience has served as a leadership beacon for Bayer throughout his career as he managed IPOs, co-founded a mobile social network and served as a CFO in a number of companies: “I really think the most powerful thing you can do as a CFO and a business leader is to articulate the business strategy in measurable terms, hire great people and be a great coach.”

When he started his career, Western Union CFO Raj Argawal never expected to wind up leading a global finance function. That seems appropriate today considering he defines his role – first and foremost – as “driving and executing the strategy of the company.” Trained as an electrical engineer at General Motors, Argawal also earned an MBA and then set out in pursuit of a variety of job roles (in the treasury function at General Mills, running one of Western Union’s business units) and diverse experiences (managing foreign exchange risks, taking overseas assignments). Those activities ultimately helped groom him as a finance chief with a broad perspective and a highly strategic lens. “I really look at myself as being a strategic CFO because I’ve had so many experiences in the field interacting with our customers, our agents, our business partners and our employees,” he says. “I’ve always brought the business perspective to my thinking and my decision-making.”

Tim Saunders seems like the kind of leader you’d absolutely follow into battle. He thrives in high-pressure situations, remains cool under pressure and truly values his troops’ expertise. Saunders also fully commits to taking on new -- and seemingly overwhelming – challenges, like the one that greeted him in his first finance executive role following his time in public accounting. During his first week on that job, Saunders discovered his telecommunications company had lost $25 million the previous year, received news that the New York Stock Exchange was threatening delisting, and received a letter that had been languishing on his CEO’s desk for days. The note, from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, contained more than three dozen comments requiring prompt remediation. “Dealing with 44 SEC comments is a good way to learn about the company during your first week on the job,” Saunders deadpans. But he’s not entirely kidding. That unflappable demeanor has served Saunders well while pursuing a varied procession of daunting challenges in a diverse blend of industries, including telecom, semiconductors, clean-tech, private equity and, now, the burgeoning cannabis industry.

Circle CFO Naeem Ishaq’s Forrest Gumpian career trajectory has given him extraordinary exposure to most of Silicon Valley’s touchstone technologies – the semiconductor, cloud computing, mobile payments and, most recently, cryptocurrency. After a stint as a dot.com-era entrepreneur he launched as an undergraduate, Ishaq has invested the past 18 years accumulating a trove of experience within some of the technology industry’s most iconic companies, including Intel, Salesforce, Square, Box and Circle. Along the way, he learned crucial leadership lessons from a remarkable collection of CEOs and CFOs, including former Intel finance chief and current Intel chairman Andy Bryant. Ishaq says Bryant demonstrated what it takes to cultivate a thriving “strategic finance culture.” Today, as head of Circle’s finance team, Ishaq views the ability to quickly “shift context” as key to nurturing his team. He honed that agility at Salesforce when its market capitalization (now $100 billion) was a plucky $3 billion. As head of finance for Salesforce’s emerging businesses group, Ishaq managed the finance functions of 13 different divisions. “It was definitely great training to be a CFO and to really context-shift between different businesses,” he adds. “The reality of being a CFO is that you are often shifting context between many different parts of the business.”

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

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NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).