A brief summary of this episode

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

A brief summary of this episode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A brief summary of this episode

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

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

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

Few finance leaders have boiled down the take-aways from their career journeys into as many palatable, bite-size portions as John Pokorney, CFO of LeTip International. Having found his original finance door of entry at Intel Corp. in the early 1990s, Pokorney credits the chipmaker’s collaborative culture for prodding him to speak the language of others and tap the power of narrative. “I wasn’t there to create numbers for the engineering group that I was working with or the logistics organization that I ended up supporting, but I was there to be a business partner—and when you’re a business partner, you have to talk the language of the group you’re working with,” explains Pokorney, who would enter the ranks of entrepreneur CFOs after leaving Intel, where in a span of eight years he occupied the roles of finance analyst, finance manager, and group controller. Reflecting on a number of different CFO tours of duty, Pokorney is able to quickly bring forth detailed memories of different places and times when business challenges were addressed and lessons learned. While certain ilks of finance leaders have reduced their career highlights to a single stock price or capital raise, Pokorney can be counted among the finance realm’s artful communicators who routinely draws people in by sharing wins, failures, and hard-earned insights. –Jack Sweeney Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leaders? GO PREMIUM with CFO Thought Leader and each quarter we will ship you our CFO Thought Leader Quarterly Magazine featuring profiles of 25 different CFOs (4 issues, per yr.). What’s more, become a PREMIUM member before February 1, 2020 and we’ll ship you THE CFO Yearbook 2020  featuring 100 CFO profiles. Go Premium today learn more

After years of careful finance career–building within the healthcare sector, Paul Willson came upon an opportunity inside Austin’s energetic technology start-up community that he found hard to resist. Becoming employee number 23, he was immediately dubbed “the finance guy”—a label that he would wear for only 5 days before the ambitious start-up announced that it was being acquired by BMC Software. At the time, Willson no doubt harbored some frustration concerning the timing of his arrival in the realm of entrepreneurial tech. However, in the weeks and months to come, the conventional wisdom that had fueled the tech community’s bravado would be stood on its head as the dot-com crash of 2000 scorched the entrepreneurial landscape and ended the life of many a start-up. Back at BMC, Willson weathered the storm and joined their finance rank-and-file, where he grew accustomed to the ebb and flow of the technology world before jumping to Convio, a small, Austin-based, technology firm with IPO ambitions. “It was a great experience to build Convio from scratch, and this being 2005 when we started—the early days of SaaS companies—we were looking for any information that we could find on the business model,” explains Willson, who today credits Convio for allowing him to open the entrepreneurial career chapter that he had needed to put on hold a few years earlier. –Jack Sweeney   Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leadership? There’s no shortage of courses out there that promise to help you build a finance career. But the vast majority of these courses are taught by people who’ve never actually advanced into the CFO office.  The reason is pretty simple: CFOs are too busy helping to lead their companies to begin offering courses!  Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE  

­­­When it comes to guessing a person’s email address, most of us would agree that the best way to optimize your odds of success is to first assume that the person was using their actual name as part of the address. From there, your next decision arguably is whether to spell out the individual’s first name or use an initial for it. For Tim Zue, the calculation behind one guess was a bit more nuanced because although the first name of the person he was emailing was Lawrence, the man was widely known as Larry. With little to lose, Zue addressed the email to [email protected]. Sixteen years later, Zue is CFO of the Boston Red Sox, and his “initial decision” sticks with him perhaps as a reminder that every carefully built career contains serendipitous moments. Still, the email that Boston Red Sox then-CEO Larry Lucchino received from Zue did not come from a career-minded controller or accountant, and it was not a job inquiry. At the time, Zue was teaching 8th-grade math in the Boston public school system, and with a summer break quickly approaching, he had a thought: “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to work for the Boston Red Sox as an unpaid intern?” Such a thought is not unlike one widely shared today by Zue’s CFO peers, but in this case, there’s one necessary modification: “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to be CFO of the Boston Red Sox?” Meanwhile, not wanting to overstate the rewards of a correctly addressed email, it’s probably worth mentioning here that Lucchino’s unpaid intern was an MIT graduate with a prior tour of duty at Bain & Company as a management consultant. –Jack Sweeney   Do you want to learn more about the experiences that shaped today’s finance leadership? There’s no shortage of courses out there that promise to help you build a finance career. But the vast majority of these courses are taught by people who’ve never actually advanced into the CFO office.  The reason is pretty simple: CFOs are too busy helping to lead their companies to begin offering courses!  Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE

As an Indian citizen living in the United States and working for a Dutch company, CFO Smital Shah frequently spends her days on conference calls with investors from Asia, Israel, or Europe. On every investor call, at every board meeting, and at every employee gathering, the same question gets asked: “How far is ProQR from serving patients?” Each time she hears this, the firm’s worldly finance leader provides a thoughtful and measured response. This is a question that punctuates the tenure of finance chiefs inside every clinical stage start-up, and one that Shah says has led her to seek out any synergies that she can between the finance function’s accounting and compliance processes and ProQR’s greater goal of creating medicines for patients who suffer from rare diseases. Shah asks: “How do we facilitate—within the confines of finance—what we need to do in order to achieve this?” ProQR expects to have collected the necessary data from its ongoing clinical trials to seek out approval for its new medicine from the Food and Drug Administration by early 2021 or perhaps sooner. As for the “confines of finance,” any functional borders within ProQR have clearly already been breached by Shah, who implores her finance team to regularly listen to those beyond the functional boundaries. “This is about understanding that you as an individual contributor cannot always affect the magnitude of change that you want. Change will depend on your team and all of the stakeholders around it. So I think that this is about stakeholder management and truly listening to all and realizing that you achieve impact as a group,” explains Shah, whose finance leadership mind-set is perhaps the offspring of a borderless career. –Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or buy our latest issue HERE

Like a savvy investor, Lucy Rutishauser built her early career by carefully tracking the activities of different companies. Sometimes, to glean better insights, she would actually cold-call a company and ask for the finance department. But Rutishauser wasn’t looking to invest money—instead, she was looking to invest that all-so-valuable commodity known as career-building years. “The take-away here is that as you are growing your professional career and moving from job to job, it’s crucial that the decisions that you make be valuable to a future employer and not just great for your bank account at that moment,” says Rutishauser, who would join Sinclair Broadcast Group after placing just such a cold call back in 1998. Providing some additional background on what led her to originally place the call, Rutishauser explains: “I had been reading about Sinclair rolling up the industry and driving industry consolidation. They were located here in Baltimore, which is where I live. I figured that they were probably going to need an assistant treasurer, so I cold-called them and created a job for myself.” While Rutishauser had successfully identified a hiring hot spot inside Sinclair, she sensed that the growing company appreciated her willingness to open the door and take some initiative—and would perhaps be open to more job creation down the line. “I selected a job that filled gaps in my background because Sinclair, being a smaller company at the time, really let me do a lot more than what a traditional assistant treasurer would be doing,” she recalls. In 2016—nearly 18 years after she placed her cold call—Rutishauser entered Sinclair’s CFO office, where she has already helped the media company to open a new chapter of growth – one that only last month led Sinclair to triple in size. –Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE  

While tours of duty at struggling companies are seldom viewed as enviable career chapters for most professionals, finance leaders are often apt to savor the lessons that such tours of duty bring forth and even draw attention to such early chapters. Such is the case with CFO Jason Lin, whose career journey includes chapters with a rapidly rising juggernaut (TripAdvisor) as well as with the revitalization of a flickering fallen star (Monster.com). When asked why he singles out his “Monster chapter” as an experience that prepared him for a finance leadership role, Lin recalls the valuable lessons learned from “having to manage people through tough times—to motivate them without being able to offer a bonus or a salary increase and still be able to move the team forward.” “There are challenges in both environments, and I think that having been at both ends of the spectrum has been beneficial for me,” says Lin, while quickly segueing to his days at TripAdvisor, where a cash-rich balance sheet and seemingly unlimited growth summoned finance to remain a calming influence and the guardian of responsible spending practices. At Centage, Lin is opening yet another growth chapter, where scale is now top-of-mind and manual processes are being closely scrutinized as the upstart developer’s new CFO seeks to unclutter the path and prepare the runway for unencumbered growth. – Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE  

The mass migration of software developers from perpetual licensing to subscription licensing models has allowed quite a few CFOs to enrich their strategy credentials in recent years. It’s a movement that has allowed finance chiefs to rebrand themselves as champions of change, and one that has helped to dismiss the image of CFOs being the C-suite’s most dependable naysayers. Nevertheless, saying “no” to a migratory deadline is what CFO William Edmondson counts as one of his career’s most memorable finance strategic moments. As CFO of 1E—a UK-based IT software and services company—and like other top officers, Edmondson nurtured a sense of urgency for the adoption of the new licensing model but at the same time remained wary of mandatory deadlines.  “Just as I had finally gotten reasonably comfortable with the fact that we were ready to do it—just as we were going to go ‘live’—there was a bit of a downturn in the business and I actually said ‘No, we have to pull it.’ Even though it was the right strategic thing to do, I said, ‘No’—there was just too much risk.” Having spent the previous six months helping reset the mind-set of the organization, Edmondson recalibrated his approach and briefed the company’s board—this time as not only as a champion of change, but also as a regulator of risk. “Typically, under a subscription license, in year one you would get between 30 percent and 50 percent of the value that you would get under a perpetual license, whereas over a period of three to five years, a business can earn a lot more than it would under perpetual—but when you make this transition, there is always a working capital crunch,” explains Edmondson, who says that 1E ultimately pulled the trigger on the adoption nine months later, after the company had put in place a “standby” credit facility. “That way, if things didn’t pan out in the way that we expected them to, we would have the additional line of credit as insurance,” recalls Edmondson, who gives kudos to 1E for completing the migration within only two years—a journey that he says takes most organizations three to five years. –Jack Sweeney  Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE    

When Sharif Metwalli decided that the time was right to accept a CFO position with Vantage Data Centers, he was confident that he had found a company that allowed him to check all of the boxes when it came to his finance leader search criteria. Box #1: Know and respect the management team. Box #2: Know and respect the owner. Box #3: Know the industry and be bullish on the sector. Says Metwalli: “After 19 years of banking, I wanted to apply my skillset on the corporate side, and an opportunity arose to work for a client that I knew very well.” As for the nearly two decades that he spent inside the world of investment banking, Metwalli says that he was fortunate to have latched on to opportunities and roles that shielded him—not once, but twice—from the mayhem brought on by economic downturns. “Back before the dot-com bubble burst, I had started off in a group that was heavily focused on equity and M&A, and I made a proactive effort to move to a different industry group,” explains Metwalli, who may have landed in the bank’s lending business just in the nick of time. “I figured that we’d never get out of the lending business, and I could learn the debt side of the balance sheet. Not only that, but I could become a more well-rounded banker in general.” Fast-forward seven years, and Metwalli says that he was able to successfully weather the Great Recession because by that time he had developed an expertise in telecom infrastructure. The CFO recalls spending his days burrowing down deep into the wireless space, a realm quickly being populated by spectrum towers and data centers. “When the banks began to consider who they wanted to keep inside the different industry groups, even though I wasn’t a senior banker at the time, my expertise allowed me to survive and maintain a career,” explains Metwalli, whose expertise around data center infrastructure only continued to grow in the years to come, allowing him to check the boxes with confidence when the opportunity with Vantage Data Centers came along. –Jack Sweeney Subscribe to CFO Thought Leader Quarterly magazine or let us ship you our latest issue HERE  

When asked about the experiences that prepared him for a finance leadership role, Brian Swartz, CFO of Cornerstone OnDemand, doesn’t hesitate to mention his tour of duty as controller for EaglePicher, a collection of businesses founded in 1842 that stubbornly has reinvented itself from one century to the next. However, as the small conglomerate was entering the 21st century, it found itself burdened with enormous debt, which led to a bankruptcy filing and a transformative restructuring—all of which controller Swartz got to observe firsthand after the company’s CFO and treasurer made a hasty exit. “I kind of stuck around. While I would never want to work in that environment again, in that type of situation you do learn to understand all of the reasons why we have contracts and what all of the provisions in the contracts mean. The reality is that the provisions are not relevant until things do not go as planned, and that is basically what a Chapter 11 is,” explains Swartz, who ultimately helped to lead EaglePicher’s finance function through the Chapter 11 process and out of bankruptcy. Reflects Swartz: “The experience made me think about things differently as I moved on to become CFO of Apollo Education Group.” He would serve as AEG’s CFO for eight and half years before leaving the multibillion-dollar provider of education services to enter the software technology realm. Today, Swartz characterizes his departure from mission-driven AEG as a distinct milestone in his career—one that required him to leave behind a role that he had found enormously satisfying in order to be challenged in new and different ways inside the data-addicted but always inspiring technology sector.

As she approaches her 20th year with BSI Group, Sarah Murphy repeats the word “variety” when asked why she turned a blind eye to other opportunities outside the company known to many as an exemplar of business standards. “There was always something new to move on to,” says Murphy, who, having spent the past decade in the United States as CFO of BSI Americas, is about open yet another career chapter as she returns to the BSI’s headquarters in London. The “variety” that Murphy has long pursued has led her to open different career chapters in Hong Kong, London, and Paris. Prior to arriving in the U.S., she served as a global finance director as well as a finance director of BSI’s Asia Pacific region. Still, there’s little doubt that while BSI has offered Murphy a varied menu of opportunities from which to choose, it’s a passion for driving change across the BSI organization that has routinely opened the door to new opportunities and allowed Murphy to savor greater career satisfaction. “There’s always been a real commitment here and a drive for change,” explains Murphy, who says that finance got to play a central role in helping BSI Americas to “hit the reset button.” After years of flat sales, says Murphy, BSI Americas transformed itself by adopting a new go-to-market strategy and entering the consulting services arena. “Now the question has become ‘How do we maintain the growth?,’” adds Murphy, who doesn’t hesitate to mention BSI’s growing appetite for M&A. -Jack Sweeney

  When a company opts to recruit a finance leader from the “outside world,” it’s not uncommon these days for the future CFO to first serve in a provisional role—one that can provide a wide view of the business while allocating a little extra time for on-the-job learning. So it was for Constance Minc, a veteran investment banker who logged 12 months as head of business operations for IFS before entering the ERP vendor’s CFO office last May. According to Minc, her 12-month stint in operations was as much about building bridges as it was about learning. “I was able to build trust with our key business stakeholders and create a bridge between the business and finance that has enabled us to transform finance,” she explains, while also noting that she used her stint in operations to develop a three-year business plan that now serves as her road map as IFS CFO. “This helped me to understand how our customer strategy needed to evolve and allowed me to build the business model with the business,” says Minc, who also spent time evaluating “the inputs” being used by IFS to formulate its forecasts. “We wanted to make certain that the numbers were driven by very concrete and business-driven inputs,” she adds. Asked about her priorities as a finance leader going forward, Minc emphasized the importance of aligning the organization with a standard set of finance principles, optimizing business process efficiencies, and fostering trust with all business stakeholders.   When a company opts to recruit a finance leader from the “outside world,” it’s not uncommon these days for the future CFO to first serve in a provisional role—one that can provide a wide view of the business while allocating a little extra time for on-the-job learning. So it was for Constance Minc, a veteran investment banker who logged 12 months as head of business operations for IFS before entering the ERP vendor’s CFO office last May. According to Minc, her 12-month stint in operations was as much about building bridges as it was about learning. “I was able to build trust with our key business stakeholders and create a bridge between the business and finance that has enabled us to transform finance,” she explains, while also noting that she used her stint in operations to develop a three-year business plan that now serves as her road map as IFS CFO. “This helped me to understand how our customer strategy needed to evolve and allowed me to build the business model with the business,” says Minc, who also spent time evaluating “the inputs” being used by IFS to formulate its forecasts. “We wanted to make certain that the numbers were driven by very concrete and business-driven inputs,” she adds. Asked about her priorities as a finance leader going forward, Minc emphasized the importance of aligning the organization with a standard set of finance principles, optimizing business process efficiencies, and fostering trust with all business stakeholders. - Jack Sweeney

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