Twenty years ago, when Roy Simmons first joined General Electric Company as a rookie financial analyst, it likely would have been difficult to imagine that he would someday occupy the CFO office of GE Lighting. Of course, occupying the CFO office of “GE Lighting, a Savant company” would have required the young analyst to be endowed with not just imagination – but a crystal ball. This being said, in 2019, when a more seasoned Simmons joined the former GE business (now owned by Savant Systems, Inc.) as CFO, he had little trouble imagining a list of finance leader priorities for the coming year. Read More   “We’ve been together for the last 14 months and we together have a vision to bring that brighter life to the people,” explains Simmons, who spent a combined 18 years at GE, a span of time during which he served in a number of senior FP&A roles including one with GE Lighting. “Back in the lighting days, we realized that our customers who bought lights for their businesses were also finance professionals and operating professionals who had goals, so we asked ourselves, ‘How do we sell lights better than anyone else?’ and ‘How do we actually create a meaningful opportunity to provide value to the customer?,’” recalls Simmons, as he begins to outline the thinking behind a strategic pivot from GE’s past. Says Simmons: “Normally, a customer would say, ‘We’re just going to go buy a series of new lighting fixtures for our parking lot, and this will cost me $100,000.’ However, what if instead we went to a customer and said, ‘Rather than spend $100,000 on lights, how about a solution that means that you’re going to save $40,000 a year in energy consumption?’” According to Simmons, the GE team narrowed its lens in order to target CFOs and other operationally minded executives with a commitment to deliver the customer savings within two and a half years. “Sometimes we could get it down to less than a year. Sometimes it was a bit longer, but by doing it this way, we changed the paradigm on selling,” comments Simmons, who credits the solutions approach with helping GE to land a landmark deal valued at $180 million¾a hefty price tag for what Simmons describes as “the largest lighting deal ever closed.” Looking back on the approach Simmons says: “It really brought to life a solution for customers that has survived past those days and which has now gone on to morph into a company that’s today outside of General Electric Company in a different capacity, and it set a paradigm in an industry that had been thinking of things in a singularly focused way and changed them.” – Jack Sweeney  

It was after he had worked 3 years as an investment analyst with Bear Stearns and spent more than 2 years inside the corporate strategy bullpen of The Walt Disney Company that Craig Abrahams decided to head to business school. However, Abrahams says that unlike many of his future classmates, he had made up his mind that hedge funds, investment banks, and strategy consulting firms would not be on his preferred menu of postgraduation career opportunities. “I wanted an opportunity to work really hard and stand out but also to go somewhere a little bit different, where I wasn’t competing with 10 versions of myself,” explains Abrahams, whose earlier experiences at Bear Stearns and Disney had left the MBA student searching for a less traditional route to career success. Observes Abrahams: “I was looking for a place where I personally could have an impact.” That place became Las Vegas, where upon graduation Abrahams joined Caesars Entertainment as a director of broadcasting and new media. “This was about putting myself in a position where I would be in the right place if an opportunity came along,” comments Abrahams, who within 6 months of joining the gaming giant was tapped to help launch Caesars Interactive Entertainment. “I remember when Gary Loveman, the CEO of Caesars at the time, said to me, ‘There’s an opportunity to work on a business plan to create a new entity,’ so that opportunity fell into my lap,” remarks Abrahams, who had served in a number of corporate development roles before advancing into the new entity’s CFO office. It was as CFO of Caesars Interactive that Abrahams first became acquainted with a small Israeli company that had a megahit mobile game known as Slotomania. Caesars was smitten and in 2011 acquired the Israeli firm, Playtika. Over the next 5 years, Caesars Interactive invested more than $300 million into the business, which allowed Playtika to complete a series of acquisitions that led to the sale of the company for $4.4 billion in 2016. “This was just the first step in the evolution of Playtika,” explains Abrahams, who joined the newly private firm as CFO in 2019 and subsequently spearheaded a debt raise of $2.5 billion. The company was able to pay investors a dividend before management became focused on taking the company public, a goal that would be realized early in 2021. –Jack Sweeney

Unlike many of the up-and-comers who populate the corridors of The Chemours Company, CFO Sameer Ralhan spent the balance of his career building years with the company inside its manufacturing plants. It was there where Ralhan says that he observed everyday executives making decisions that routinely impacted the business, and it was there where his M&A activities allowed him to imagine new avenues for value creation. Says Ralhan: “The heart of this company beats at the plants.” Still, the many hours that Chemours’s future CFO spent there made him aware of a growing disconnect between finance and the plant’s decision-makers.  According to Ralhan, Chemours, not unlike many U.S. manufacturers, had undergone decades of reorganizations designed to streamline and centralize its operations. However, one consequence of this was that the bond between the plants and the Chemours finance team had become weakened. “It was really limiting the finance support at the site and undermining decision support that could really drive the right financial outcomes,” recalls Ralhan, who after stepping into the CFO role made reallocating finance resources to support plant decision-making a priority. Ralhan reports that one of a number of Chemours businesses that have benefited from the reallocation has been the chemical company’s Advanced Performance Materials (APM) business, where the finance and the operations teams came together to build new decision-making models as well as return-on-capital models for each manufacturing site. Observes Ralhan: “These models really provided the insights to drive the right decisions, and this is evident in the margin improvement that we're seeing today in the APM business.” Meanwhile, the Chemours manufacturing sites, as well as their bottom lines, are expected to benefit in the coming years from different digital tools and applications that promise to build on APM's recent margin improvement success. Comments Ralhan: “Once you achieve this, you earn the right to do more things, and that's what I'm really excited about.” -Jack Sweeney

It was a complicated transaction that Ingersoll Rand’s then-CEO Mike Lamach challenged his finance and operations people to address by “turning over every rock in the company” to nullify the possibility of unforeseen snags. Recalls Chris Kuehn, who at the time served as Ingersoll Rand’s chief accounting officer: “I remember Mike coming back and telling us that he had never been through an IPO in his career, but this transaction was likely going to be the closest he ever got to one.” Today, Kuehn is CFO of Trane Technologies, the spinoff and resulting offspring of the transaction that involved the merger of Ingersoll Rand’s industrial business, Milwaukee-based Gardner Denver. “Mike didn’t want us to accept the status quo. He wanted us to review every one of the 600 cost centers and every organizational chart and function,” continues Kuehn, who adds that the exhaustive process spanned between six and nine months. Part of engineering the spinoff’s early success, Kuehn explains, involved proactively moving processes that had been managed centrally to regional locations where they would be better suited for the management of the entity’s future operations.    Still, putting a reorganization in motion on the eve of a defining transaction is no doubt a tricky management feat, especially when the dimensions of the proposed spinoff are not yet fully visible to the company’s incumbent employees.   According to Kuehn, the approaching transaction deadlines brought an operational opportunity into view. He comments: “We said, ‘Let’s be courageous enough to change what has not been working, with a bias to moving those processes that are centrally led.’” For Kuehn, the reorganization and eventual 2019 transaction swung open the door to Trane’s CFO office, where the finance and operational opportunity remains front-and-center. “We’re still on the journey today,” he points out. “We’re not done, but this has certainly allowed me to get inside the finance function as well as our other global functions and see what is working well and what we need to change.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Pramod Iyengar returned to school after working for several years as a manufacturing engineer with United Technologies, he was ready to change careers. The young engineer headed back to the University of Michigan, where as an undergraduate he had earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering. However, this time he had a business degree in mind Post graduation with an MBA in hand, Iyengar landed at Intel Corp., where he had the opportunity to join a “very efficient and very well-structured finance team,” he explains. For his part, Iyengar says Intel gave him the opportunity to learn not only the discipline of finance, but also how to use financial data and analysis to influence and improve operations across the company. Intel also offered the opportunity to move into a variety of other areas. "Employees just had to take the initiative and take advantage of them," comments Iyengar. At Intel, Iyengar began as a finance manager with the distribution channel and soon became a senior financial analyst with the microprocessor products group. Looking back, he credits the chip maker with regularly bringing together finance professionals from across the company. Says Iyengar: "They would share best practices and strategies for using finance to improve decision-making in other areas, like accounting and sales."

Back in 2014, when Akash Palkhiwala was first approached to serve as treasurer of wireless technology company Qualcomm, the company’s future CFO was uncertain as to what the role of a treasurer might actually entail. “I’m not making this up: I did a Google search on what a treasurer does,” explains Palkhiwala, who recalls that the approaching retirement of the firm’s incumbent treasurer had led then-CFO George Davis to gauge Palkhiwala’s interest in the role. Palkhiwala had first joined Qualcomm in 2001, and during his early years with the firm had been involved in the wireless firm’s M&A activity. Eventually, he graduated from a succession of financial planning and analysis roles through which he had rendered a steady flow of strategic insights for Qualcomm management as the company climbed from 3G to 4G to 5G along the wireless continuum. “Although I’ve been here for 20 years, I feel like I have changed companies multiple times,” comments Palkhiwala, who notes that the treasurer role ultimately proved to be one of his career’s greatest learning grounds. “It was just a fantastic experience. I did a lot of different things that I had never done before and worked with a whole new set of people, got exposure to the financial markets and the banking system, and created these new relationships that today I see as foundational in being successful as a CFO,” observes Palkhiwala, who adds that while today he knows that he made the right decision, accepting the treasurer position did require a degree of courage. Says Palkhiwala: “I was recently talking to someone who was facing a tough career choice. He explained that you get maybe three windows of opportunity in the course of your career, and your success or failure over time is largely defined by your courage when windows of opportunity show up.” –Jack Sweeney 

Featuring FP&A Insights & Commentary from Planning Aces: Ian Charles, CFO, Flexe, Beth Clymer, CFO, Job Case,  Mark Shifke, CFO, Billtrust, Mike Rasic, CFO, Synapse.

Back in 2011, when Radiant Systems was acquired by NCR Corporation, a door swung open for Radiant Systems controller Geoff Brannon, who received an invitation to join NCR’s plus-size FP&A function as a finance director. The appointment had been made possible by a former Radiant boss who had stepped into a divisional CFO role shortly after the acquisition’s completion. “He took a bet on me,” recalls Brannon, who says that the former boss knew his skillset well and had witnessed firsthand “a willingness to learn.” However, up until his NCR appointment, Brannon had resided mostly in the accounting side of the house. Looking back, the one-time controller tells us that he was also known as a collaborator and problem-solver who had distinguished himself through an easy manner when it came to working with others—a trait coveted by many FP&A leaders. A few years later, when the divisional CFO was recruited elsewhere, Brannon was tapped to be the division’s new CFO. As a new leader, he has come to appreciate the management approach that NCR used when it came to forecasts. Reports Brannon: “On a weekly basis, the division president, the division CFO, and the sales leaders would gather. We’d talk about not just the forecast for the quarter but also ‘weekly commits’ and how that particular week, for example, was going to generate $15 million of new sales. The following week, when you came back to the table, you’d be asked, ‘Did you do $15 million?’—and if not, you’d be asked, ‘Well, why did you only do $12? million? Why did you miss?’” Brannon adds that his division was known for having an enviable distinction: “We were probably the smallest division from a revenue perspective but the most profitable. So, we were something of a shining star at NCR.” –Jack Sweeney   CFOTL: Tell us about Oversight Systems. What does this company do, and what are its offerings today? Geoff Brannon: We’ve been around for, let’s see, 18 years. We’re not a new company, but we’re a growing organization. When I joined back in 2017, we had about 65 employees; now we’re up to 165. Our revenue certainly has continued to grow at a 30% annual CAGR. We’re a software company that serves enterprise customers, and what our software does is essentially to analyze spend. If you look at our customers, we are ingesting their spend, whether it’s in payables, P cards, T&E. We ingest that spend into our system and analyze it for duplicates, noncompliant spend, errors, fraud, waste—you name it. It’s almost like an insurance policy for cash leakage and all of the things that go along with this. When it comes to a metric that is top-of-mind, it’s ARR, annually recurring revenue. This is really what we measure ourselves on at the highest level and the number one metric that matters to us. It’s not the only thing, of course, but, you know, when we talk to our board or internally, it’s always like, Where are we on ARR? The other key metric for us is retention, so retention of customers and the recurring revenue stream are both super important to us. Over the next 12 months, the biggest thing for me and my team will actually be to implement a new ERP system. As we’ve grown over the past few years, we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve outgrown our current ERP system. We’ve already started seeing some demos by providers out there, so I think that this is something that we will probably be taking on in early 2022.

Back in the early 1990s, Laurence Capone was a Paris-based public accountant serving a distinguished list of oil and gas industry clients when she heard about an audit assignment unlike any that she had taken on before. It turned out that a manufacturer of cotton fabrics had engaged Capone’s firm to help to audit the operations of its subsidiaries located in central Africa. As a team was being assembled for the client engagement, Capone did not hesitate to express her interest and shortly found herself departing for a monthlong stay on the continent. From the start, Capone knew better than to expect an indulgent environment. In fact, the region of central Africa—including Chad, where she would be based—was still experiencing waves of casualties from the AIDS epidemic. “I was working with this local CFO, and even just getting together an accounting team was a challenge. Locally, 30% of the individuals had passed away due to AIDS or HIV,” recalls Capone, who says that early in her career she would frequently take on assignments that no one else wanted. However, the audit assignment in central Africa stands out. “The experience really marked me,” comments Capone, who adds that at this stage of her career she would also purposely pursue assignments involving different industries and different world cultures to broaden and test her business acumen. The audit assignment in central Africa included both of these, as well as another realm from which to learn. “You can imagine the social and human facets of the challenges that these companies were facing in the early ’90s,” remarks Capone, who credits the assignment with opening her eyes to the human side of the enterprise. Says Capone: “It was the people and the people story behind everything that I was able to gather and learn from. The personal side and the life experience were very important.” –Jack Sweeney

It was little more than 6 months after Matthias Tillmann first joined Trivago—and shortly after the travel booking company’s December 2016 IPO—when the company’s future CFO decided to step away from his senior IR role in order to head up Trivago’s creative production function. However, the jump to the creative side was not triggered by a sudden creative itch on Tillmann’s part. Instead, he was determined to extract new ROI insights from Trivago’s television advertising dollars, the very allocation that the online travel platform is credited with having converted into a groundbreaking strategic advantage. “I started to develop my own hypotheses but was unable to test them,” reports Tillmann, recalling his frustration when it came to extracting greater ROI from Trivago’s annual TV budget, which by 2019 had grown to more than $600 million, or roughly 70 percent of the company’s annual revenue. “In finance, you see numbers, but if you really understand the decision-making processes behind them, this changes how you identify opportunities and look at risk,” explains Tillmann, who today credits his tour of duty on the creative side with having bestowed upon him detailed knowledge about marketing decision-making. When COVID arrived, Tillmann notes, this knowledge allowed him to confidently respond to the crisis and take steps that would quickly modify the company’s brand marketing strategy, thereby saving the firm millions of dollars. Still, the lingering pandemic has continued to stress test a number of Trivago’s market assumptions.    Says Tillmann: “Pre-COVID, we had a very good idea with regard to how many people were out there and how many were willing to travel, and we knew how much to spend on TV—but this has now all changed.” In certain markets, Tillmann observes, roughly 50 percent of the traveling public may still not be willing to travel just yet. “For a mass channel like TV, this means that the channel is only half as efficient as it used to be,” comments Tillmann, who adds that the current environment has led Trivago to keep a steady eye on the size of each market and its accompanying pool of potential travelers.  “We began looking at what ratio we needed to hit in order to make our economics work on TV,” continues Tillmann, who says that the travel platform has recently turned to alternative channels such as online video when the economics for TV haven’t panned out.  Tillmann explains: “On YouTube, you can target certain audiences. For example, 25- to 30-year-olds may be more willing to travel at the moment, and that channel allows you to target certain groups much more specifically.”  As for whether the TV-driven brand is opening a new brand marketing chapter, Trivago’s CFO says, “The way we do brand marketing now is much more granular. This is the way that it has to be, as we pay more attention to how the markets develop.” ­–Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about Trivago. What sets this company apart today? Tillmann: Yes, sure. This is a topic that I love to talk about. I love travel. We started as kind of a Wikipedia for travel 16 years ago and then only focused on hotel price comparison. The core value proposition is still our hotel metasearch, which is based on a cost-per-click model. We have over 5 million properties through more than 200 booking sites on our platform. It’s a classic marketplace, where travel agencies, hotel chains, and independent hotels bid in our auction and essentially buy refers from us. This is how we make most of our revenue. I would say that we were very early in the game and one of the first focusing on hotels only. In 2008, the founders made the decision to diversify their acquisition channels by building their brand through TV advertisements at a time when most bookings were still happening offline. With this strategy, we became an...

    In front of the restaurant’s dozen or more cash registers, customers were standing six or seven deep when Brice Hill raised his voice and began instructing the hungry mall shoppers to immediately exit the store. “No one listened to a single word I said,” says Hill, who opens our discussion by transporting us back to the mid-1980s, when as a teenage recent graduate of McDonald’s management training program he was given a surprise leadership test. Having made a trip to the mall for some holiday shopping, Hill had poked his head into the mall’s marquee McDonald’s only to find a few of his fellow managers nervously waiting for a return call from McDonald’s headquarters. The restaurant—at the time one of the busiest McDonald’s locations on the West Coast—had only minutes earlier received a bomb threat, and as Hill digested the blank stares triggered by his shouts to clear the store, he realized that more extreme measures were required. Leaving the customers in their queues, the young manager dodged the doubtful stares of employees as he maneuvered his way to the back of the store, where he found the location’s electricity source and without hesitation cut it off. “They had told me that 20 minutes was the countdown on the thing—we cleared the whole place with only 4 minutes to spare,” recalls Hill, who estimates that the location may have held as many as 500 customers and workers that day. Later, police would determine that there had been no bomb, but this has never led Hill to second-guess his actions. “When you’re in that type of situation, you have to be able to act and act like an owner. Even if you don’t know whether you have the right answer, you have to act. There cannot be a void of leadership,” says Hill, underscoring what might be a recurring theme for his career. Fast-forward a few decades, and Hill is a senior strategic planning executive at Intel Corp. The venue is an Arizona conference room where a group of Intel executives—including the company’s CFO—has gathered to hear Hill offer an analysis that could potentially lead Intel to begin building idle factories. This time, the doubtful stares quickly turned to dissenting voices as Hill’s strategic analysis failed to win over many of his Intel colleagues.   “When I made the recommendation that we should build an idle factory, there was like a melee in the room. All of the CFO staff was arguing, waving their hands, debating different opinions,” explains Hill, who says that in the minds of traditional finance executives, an idle building equals excess cost. To highlight his point Hill repeats the refrain of “You have to heat it, cool it, and guard it!” Still, what Hill’s analysis had begun to spotlight was the cost of missing out on growth opportunities in a business wielding 60% to 70% gross margins. Suddenly, having idle factories in place to add additional capacity when growth demanded seemed to have merit. “At the end, the CFO said, ‘Bryce, I want you to go meet with the treasury staff. They’re experts in derivatives and option modeling. I want you to go see if your math holds up,’” remembers Hill, whose analysis received “a clean bill of health” from treasury before getting a thumbs-up from Intel’s CEO, a final affirmation that led Intel to modify its growth strategy as well as its accounting. Going forward expenses associated with serving the idle factories would be listed as strategic investments rather than costs – a change that has perhaps made management think twice before turning off the lights .  –Jack Sweeney 

Brett and Jack discuss the highs and lows of executive compensation, and  why corporate culture may trump all.  Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Gregg Clevenger of LiveVox, CFO Charles Freund of  FLEETCOR and CFO Jill Klindt of Workiva.

Having previously held a succession of finance leadership roles inside Chicago’s ever vibrant financial services sector, Vicki Dudley was perhaps more surprised than anyone to find herself accepting a CFO position with Yancey Bros. Co. of Atlanta, the oldest Caterpillar dealer in the country.   Nevertheless, the job hop drew Dudley into a world of opportunity that she credits with having helped to open the door to her latest career chapter as CFO of TTX, the largest railcar provider in North America. “That particular experience did help to prepare me for my current role. Not only did we have sales for Caterpillar and Blue Bird bus, but also we had leasing plus repair facilities across the state of Georgia,” remarks Dudley, who gives credits to Yancey for tasking her with the company’s process improvement function “and tying it to my toolkit.” –Jack Sweeney

When Charles Freund was named CFO of FLEETCOR in 2020 – his arrival in the c-suite became the latest chapter of a varied and lengthy career journey that paralleled the rise of the $2.6 billion fintech.   Accepting a position in FLEETCOR’s corporate development department, Freund joined the firm in the year 2000 when it was generating roughly only $30 million in annual sales and struggling to manage its cash flows. “On two separate occasions, the corporate controller called me and said, ‘Charles, I know we normally pay you on a Friday, but we’re not going to make it this week. Can you wait until next week?,’” recalls Freund. In the years that followed, FLEETCOR found its strategic footing and Freund entered a succession of roles that would ultimately advance him into leadership positions overseeing FLEETCOR’s corporate strategy and global sales. What’s more, along the way FLEETCOR’s future CFO served as a general manager for the company’s developing markets. “I know and understand what’s behind the scenes more than others who haven’t had these kinds of experience. This is no knock on anyone—it’s just because I’ve lived it,” reports Freund, when asked whether he had missed out from not having pursued a more traditional finance career path. Asked to provide some insight into how his past experiences might influence his approach to the sales function, Freund explains: “I say ‘Look, I want your business to grow 10% next year.’ I then layer in my retention assumptions and other things to create a model that basically drives this performance, with what types of investments are required and so forth.” Still, Freund’s most pressing challenges as CFO are likely tied to the more than 80 acquisitions that FLEETCOR has completed over the past two decades. According to FLEETCOR’s finance chief, the fintech is embarking on a finance transformation designed to better integrate its operations around the world, beginning with the numbers. “Over the next 12 months, we’ll be implementing a new global chart of accounts. What this means is that we’ll be cleaning up the chart of accounts around the world so that we speak kind of the same language,” remarks Freund, who adds that it’s also time to replace the company’s patchwork quilt of different ERP systems—another legacy of FLEETCOR’s acquisitive past. –Jack Sweeney   Freund: First, FLEETCOR is a FinTech, so we’re a technology driven provider of financial services, but we’re not a bank. I want to make sure people know that. We’re really in what we call the spend management space. What we provide to businesses are tools to control what gets purchased by employees and what gets paid by the AP department, so you can control it on the front end by either allowing a purchase to happen or not. Or if someone has already made a purchase that’s outside of policy, I could control it on the backend with what gets paid or not. What we have found is that these smarter payment methods help our clients to spend less, they have greater insight and greater control over what’s happening. By spending less, they retain more profit. That’s the real value proposition of all of our products around the world. I’d say we are on a multi-year transformational journey over the next 12 months. A couple of things that we’re doing, we’re implementing a new global chart of accounts. We’ve grown a lot through acquisitions. FLEETCOR has done some 80, 90 acquisitions over our 20 year history. I’m cleaning up the chart of accounts around the world, so we all speak the same language, which should be helpful. We are going to implement that global planning tool this year. I’m also transitioning off of a legacy ERP system this year and have plans over the next three years to reduce the number of ERPs. Again, many of which we inherited through acquisitions, sourcing new tax software for next year. And...

Jill Klindt recalls that back in 2008, when she joined Workiva, the software start-up was somewhat removed from the career path that she had envisioned for herself. “It wasn’t that obvious to me at first, and it wasn’t what I was looking for,” explains Klindt, who says that at the time, the Ames, Iowa, company employed six to eight people. Once on board, Klindt found that her accounting skills and willingness to problem-solve quickly made her a go-to executive along the entrepreneurial byways that ruled Workiva’s early years. “I was relied on, which felt really good, and people kept bringing me opportunities, so I never felt passed over,” explains Klindt, who notes that even when an outside CFO was recruited to lead Workiva’s 2014 IPO, she never felt displaced. “I would not have been ready for that role at that point in my career,” comments Klindt, who adds that her predecessor in the CFO office became an outstanding mentor to her, as did other members of Workiva’s C-suite. Meanwhile, a talent-focused culture that took root during Workiva’s early days has continued to thrive during the company’s post-IPO life, says Klindt, who characterizes the culture as one where employees can ask others for help. Having stepped into the CFO office earlier this year, Klindt says that talent is now a primary concern when it comes to unlocking future growth at Workiva, where employees now number nearly 2,000. Says Klindt: “We want to be a much bigger company, and in order to do this, we need to keep hiring.” –Jack Sweeney 

Joe Wolk was about 5 years into his 23-year career with Johnson & Johnson when he was encouraged to take a manufacturing operations position at a newly acquired J&J company in Vacaville, California. One hot July day, Wolk recalls, he and his wife drove up to Vacaville to visit the plant, where he ended up taking a seat across from the newly acquired company’s plant manager. As one of Vacaville’s initial J&J transplants, the young finance executive sensed that his arrival was being viewed less than enthusiastically.   Read More “Within the first 90 seconds, he says: ‘Hey, you know what? I don’t think we need you out here,’” Wolk remembers, citing those words as the plant manager’s first remarks. Thus began one of Wolk’s least favorite but—as he explains—most rewarding career experiences. “The first 4 months in that job were like going to the dentist every day,” says Wolk, who tells us that ultimately the reward from the experience was a lesson in when and how to stand your ground. The lesson began at a team meeting where Wolk tried to offer the plant’s management some practical advice with regard to how to prepare for an upcoming visit from senior J&J executives. At the time, Wolk says, the plant was working to address a number manufacturing issues as it tried to determine how best to meet customer demand. Wolk recalls the plant manager’s response to his advice: “We’d like to meet your wish list, but we don’t have time for this right now.” Instead of just accepting the manager’s feedback, Wolk reports, he arranged a private meeting with the manager, where he boldly elucidated the items occupying his “wish list.” “If they come out here next week and we can’t provide certain answers, we’re going to have a mess on our hands,” were among the words that Wolk says that he used to prod the plant manager’s thinking. In the end, the visiting J&J executives were satisfied with the plant team’s answers, and Wolk’s reputation grew in the plant manager’s eye. “From this point on, he didn’t take a meeting without including me,” concludes Wolk, who uses the story to underscore how finance executives must be ready to summon the courage of their convictions. –Jack Sweeney

When Greg Saunders tells us that “having patience” was perhaps the quality that most contributed to his first appointment as a CFO back in the early 1990s, we wonder how many additional years a more impatient Saunders (then only 32) may have needed before stepping into the CFO office. Of course, then again, a railcar leasing and repair business might not have been the first choice of many aspiring Bay Area CFOs, who as a group have for decades preferred to satisfy their C-suite ambitions via the area’s high tech companies. Read More “I remember thinking back in the early ’90s that maybe I should jump into the tech sector, but I stuck it out and I’m glad that I did,” reports Saunders, who 5 months after joining Transcisco Industries as a corporate development executive was helping the company to manage through a bankruptcy. “I was suddenly involved in everything—the attrition at the company was crazy, and I was able to take on more responsibility,” recalls Saunders, who notes that Transcisco’s rapid downturn of fortune had occurred when a much celebrated luxury passenger train project collapsed due in part to the firm’s limited capital resources. “Because of all of the attrition across the company, I was able to take on more and more roles, and guess what? I became a young CFO of a publicly traded company,” comments Saunders, before once more crediting his “patience” with helping him to nurture a mind-set that encouraged “sticking around” and finding solutions.   Along the way, Saunders says, he became tasked with fighting off a hostile takeover and ultimately negotiating a successful merger, which he credits with helping the company’s stock price to jump up to $6 per share—after trading at as low as 12 cents. Says Saunders “For me, it was just a great experience for many different reasons, including learning the rewards of sticking things out.” –Jack Sweeney

Back in the early 2000s, the use of videoconferencing to conduct job interviews remained rather rare in most parts of the world—and India was no different. What made Manish Dugar’s interview experience still rarer was the fact he had participated in 18 different video calls over a period of 3 months for a single job opportunity. Says Dugar: “Over that span of interviews, I became almost as knowledgeable about IT services as any professional in that sector.” Nonetheless, Dugar recalls, he had some reservations about Wipro Technologies, a tech services company based in Bangalore, India, that had recently begun to distinguish itself in a number of areas—including its thorough vetting of job candidates.   “It did not seem so exciting for me to leave a big name company in the north of India and relocate to the south to become part of an industry that was not as well known,” explains Dugar, who at the time was working for Coca-Cola India in Delhi. What’s more, the Bangalore of 20 or more years ago was far different from the dynamic technology hub that it is known as today. “Those who are familiar with India know that the south is much more cosmopolitan today and people can move around freely—but back in those days, the north was the north and the south was the south,” observes Dugar, who ultimately joined Wipro and quickly advanced upward into a series of financial management roles in which he observed firsthand the financial and operational levers required to scale the business to accommodate explosive growth. “From 2001 to 2008, $150 million in revenue grew to become $8 billion,” reports Dugar, who—after several promotions within the company—was named CFO of Wipro Technologies roughly 7 years after his arrival. Reflecting back on some of his early reservations about joining Wipro, Dugar says that he turned to his father, who had thus far seemed reluctant to possibly influence his son’s decisions. Remembers Dugar: “He told me, ‘If the company has done so many interviews, the position must be very important to them. It’s one thing to work for a company that has a big brand, but it’s another to work for a company that really values you.’” –Jack Sweeney 

This Episode Features FP&A Insights & Commentary from: Ross Tennenbaum, CFO Avalara Waifa Chau, CFO, Nylas Brad Kinnish, CFO, Aryaka

“Fire the auditor!” Three words that Quantum CFO Mike Dodson vowed would never cross his lips were now being spoken aloud by Quantum’s board. “Fire these guys!” was the message that Dodson received after weeks of personally rejecting the notion.   “We had been delisted, we were in the middle of a multiyear restatement, and there were lender issues,” recalls Dodson, listing the action items that needed to be addressed to regain credibility with Quantum’s investors and lenders. “In the middle of all of this, the last thing that you want to do is to fire the auditor and start over,” observes Dodson, while summoning up past experiences that seemed to counter the logic behind dismissing Quantum’s auditor. “I was sticking to my guns,” reports Dodson, who, along with Quantum’s chief accountant, doubled back in hope of getting deeper insight into the auditor’s progress or lack of it. “It just started to feel like we were taking two steps forward and three steps back—I remember thinking that we were not getting any buy-in from the auditor on what approach to use with regard to how we were going to get things done,” continues Dodson, who adds that the restatement involved tens of thousands of transactions that went back several years. “Firing the auditor was against everything that I had believed up until that point,” says Dodson, who recalls having a shared moment of insight with his chief accountant when they repeated back and forth to one another: “We are going to fire the auditor.” Concludes Dodson: “This was a defining moment for the company, and it became a lifesaver that made the difference in the entire process.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Back in 2001, after Scott Dussault had been named CFO of StorageNetworks, it’s unlikely that the 30-year-old finance leader was popping any champagne corks. The company’s management had offered him the position when its previous CFO had vacated the office to serve as CEO in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble collapse. “The ride up the roller coaster was exhilarating—the ride down was educational,” explains Dussault, who had joined the firm as a controller in 1999 and been promoted to vice president of finance within 6 months. “We hired 1,000 people in 3 years and grew the company to $150 million in revenue,” recalls Dussault adding some context to the “ride up.” In 2000, when StorageNetworks went public, its stock climbed 234 percent in its first day of trading—a frenzied indicator for a company whose customer portfolio was known to be 80 percent Internet-related application vendors and dotcom customers. The CFO office at StorageNetworks turned out to be where Dussault logged some of the most difficult days of his career as the collapse of the dotcom economy cut short the life of many of his firm’s most loyal customers. “I had a terrific vice president of investor relations and she and I suffered through a quite few meetings with analysts, but I took those learnings with me,” says Dussault, who credits the challenges that he encountered during the “ride down” or the aftermath of the collapse with leading him to build better and stronger relations with investors and analysts during future CFO career chapters. - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s is as good a place in time as any for Gregg Clevenger to use to begin explaining the mix of professional and personal circumstances that made Rochester, New York, his port of entry into the CFO office. At the time, Clevenger recalls, he was a vice president for Goldman’s Sach’s media entertainment and technology group in Singapore and observed $100 million of recently raised funding “go up in smoke.” Having been recruited to join Goldman while overseas, Clevenger returned to the U.S. as something of an unknown. “People didn’t really know me in the U.S. context,” he remembers. “So it was going to be a very tough row to hoe.” What’s more, the travel to which Clevenger was accustomed was no longer a great match for his young family. “My first two children—one born in Singapore and the other in Hong Kong—I never saw them,” comments Clevenger, who began commuting daily to Goldman’s Manhattan office from a new home in Connecticut. It was at about this time that Clevenger began accepting calls from a number of recruiters, one of whom he believes likely brought him to the attention of a publicly traded, midsize telecom located in Rochester. “That whole Rochester thing: I never would’ve thought ‘Hey, let’s move to Rochester,’ but it was kind of a personal reset as well as a career one—to live, work, and have our kids go to school in a community,” explains Clevenger. Having joined the company as head of corporate development, within 3 years he found himself entering the CFO office, where he remained for 4 more years while helping to lead the business through a major restructuring brought on by the telecom sector’s crash. Looking back on his decade as an investment banker, Clevenger says that he has few doubts about his move to the operations side of things: “I’ve now been doing this for 20 years—it’s hard for me to imagine being an investment banker for 30 years.” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Lovers of tortilla chips will swear that the only true ones are made with corn (and never wheat) and that when it comes to sourcing them, the highest-yielding kernel of corn comes from West Texas. Or so explains Joe Euteneuer, who exited an auditor position with Price Waterhouse in the mid-1980s to join a snack-making entrepreneur in a quest to lower the cost of tortilla production—a coveted advantage in what was quickly becoming a highly competitive market. “I flew to West Texas and bought corn crops from those farmers so that I could get the best deal that we could and get the best return on my—on our—invested dollars,” explains Euteneuer, a seasoned finance leader who has to date occupied the CFO office at more than a half dozen companies, including hefty brands such as Mattel, Sprint, Sirius XM Radio and Comcast. Still, it’s Euteneuer’s trip to West Texas that comes to mind when he’s asked what experiences best prepared him for a finance leadership role. Reflecting on his encounters with the Texas farmers, Euteneuer observes, “It was the type of experience that you don’t typically get in an accounting department.” The company’s small size, Euteneuer says, gave him the opportunity to take on more responsibility, which quickly allowed him to step into a chief operating officer role. “It was like doing a practical MBA, inasmuch as we were building a company from scratch,” recalls Euteneuer, who adds that during his COO tenure, the company’s customer base began to spread across the western United States, which required the company to add greater capacity to its Phoenix and Minneapolis hubs. Says Euteneuer: “I learned how to get chips and salsa onto every store shelf west of the Mississippi.” - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Brett and Jack discuss the power of the mission, the CEO return-to-work agenda and covid’s delta variant backlash. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Beth Clymer of Jobcase, CFO Todd McElhatton of Zuora and CFO Scott Dussault of Workhuman

When Melissa Ballenger stepped into a deputy CFO role for TD Bank’s U.S. subsidiary back in 2011, she did so knowing that she had been recruited to be a change agent. Having recently generated business headlines from acquiring two sizable banks in the U.S., TD Bank had U.S. expansion plans that were hardly a secret. “A lot of competitor banks in the U.S. were still back on their heels at the time from credit concerns, capital considerations, and other things like that, and TD had the opportunity to take share profitably from competitors,” recalls Ballenger, whose new role at first involved interfacing with the different management groupings and teams of executives who were expected to help to drive a finance transformation designed to position’s TD Bank’s U.S. subsidiary for the coming decade.    “We had a very interesting mix of people. Some were from the parent company in Canada, others were from the legacy organizations in the U.S., and still others were executives who were available to be brought in from the industry because they had been displaced by the financial crisis,” continues Ballenger, as she draws our attention to what she credits as being a primary lever for helping to put the transformation in motion. “I was resolved to listen to all of the key finance leaders and talk to the executive committee in the U.S. and understand what their business needs were. It sounds pretty basic, but I don’t think that I could have gotten things started otherwise, because I needed to know what their business needs were. They were each kind of uniquely different, and their personalities were different as well,” reports Ballenger. What began as a listening campaign helped to lead to a broadening consensus around the adoption of a new management structure involving the appointment of business unit CFOs who would report to Ballenger but at the same time partner with leaders for each of the lines of business inside the new U.S. entity. Next came the technology platforms and communication processes. “We built analytics that were needed for timely, informed decision-making, and, being a public company, we knew that our forecasting capabilities and our communication with our parent would be critically important,” comments Ballenger, who says that while the finance transformation provided many leadership lessons along the way her biggest takeaway arrived early in the process . Says Ballenger: “Begin by listening” –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

It was one of the last pieces of advice that CFO Beth Clymer left us with—an item that we snagged with one of our favorite questions: What advice do you have for new CFOs?    Her reply—“Don’t skimp on resources”—at first seemed trite, but a groundswell of words shortly followed. “Too often, CFOs will say, ‘I don’t need that extra analyst’ or ‘I don’t need an extra accounting manager.’ But don’t skimp on resources. The impact that a strong finance organization can have throughout the business is massive, and those resources will almost always pay for themselves,” explains Clymer, who perhaps sounds more like a veteran CFO or a finance leader with multiple CFO tours of duty than an executive who entered the CFO office for the first time only in 2019. However, prior to entering the C-suite at Jobcase, a jobs-oriented social media platform, Clymer had invested a decade with Bain Capital, where as an operating partner she had spent her days advising C-suite executives from the venture capital firm’s portfolio of consumer-oriented businesses.   “In my time at Bain Capital, I found that I was very often drawn to the parts of business transformation that had a lot to do with the office of the CFO,” recalls Clymer, who provides us with a lengthy list of typical challenges that frequently summoned her involvement at the firm, including finance team–building, KPI alignment, capital strategy, and business restructurings. Still other items from her past also set her apart from finance’s more traditional corporate rank-and-file, including a nearly 4-year stint as a consultant with Parthenon Group, as well as a number of Ivy League degrees. Perhaps not surprisingly, you get the feeling that it was Clymer’s experience at Bain Capital that today accents the delivery of her responses in a manner more akin to that of an objective outsider than of a CFO who has climbed the more traditional corporate ladder. It’s a delivery that makes her final piece of advice sound all the more compelling. Advises Clymer: “Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. Really focus on surrounding yourself with the quantity and quality of team members who are going to allow your team to really help to drive the business.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

The aspiration to become a CFO was always there,” says Madhu Ranganathan, executive vice president and chief financial officer of OpenText, a leader in information management based in Waterloo, Ontario. “I just didn’t know what the journey would look like.” Along the way, Ranganathan says, she learned that while technical acumen remains critical to a successful career, collaboration and a commitment to understanding business operations is what has ultimately propelled her leadership journey. Ranganathan launched her career as a public accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC and then moved to Liberty Mutual Financial Services. “I did make the decision very consciously to say, ‘I would like to explore multiple industries throughout my career,’” she notes. She also wanted to gain ownership of a business’s financial performance rather than remain in an advisory role. After a stint as vice president and corporate controller with Redback Networks, Ranganathan moved to CFO positions with Rackable Systems, and [24]7.ai. As part of her journey, Ranganathan studied the careers of other successful CFOs. Collaboration had often been at the core, she observes. While CFOs must remain independent custodians of their companies’ plans, they also need to acknowledge the business leaders’ command of their operations and work toward a solution that’s a win for the organization. “The word ‘collaboration’ has never been more important,” Ranganathan reports. Aspiring CFOs also need mentors who will acknowledge their qualifications and experience and guide them toward their goals, Ranganathan says. “Do your homework, understand the business, and read about the products and solutions,” she advises. When collaborating with other departments, be prepared, be respectful, set clear expectations, and allow others to hold you accountable, Ranganathan continues, as doing so fosters a similar response from the business side. “That’s really where collaboration happens,” she adds.   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

When asked when he knew that he wanted to become a chief financial officer, Sean Mulloy tells us that he knew from the time he first became “siloed” within an organization. At the time, Mulloy was a project manager with the financial services company Discover, where his lines of sight seldom extended beyond his immediate projects. “I knew that I wanted to have a bigger impact. I knew that I wanted to tackle operational efficiencies and execute fund-raising and capital structure, but I was stuck sitting in a silo,” explains Mulloy, who subsequently left his confines at Discover to join a consulting firm that specialized in turnarounds and structuring outcomes for distressed companies. Says Mulloy: “This was essentially serving as the interim CFO for distressed companies. I was no longer just doing FP&A—I became responsible for banking relationships, audits, operations, and HR.” No longer fenced in, Mulloy says, he acquired a taste for making an impact and a hunger that eventually would lead him to the CFO office at Level Ex, Inc. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

This Episode Features FP&A Insights & Commentary from: Chad Gold, CFO, SalesLoft Maria Manrique, CFO, O’Reilly Media Harmit Singh, CFO, Levi Strauss & Co. Andrew Kenny, CFO, Scoular

Looking back, Nathan Winters says that his appointment as CFO of GE Healthcare’s global supply chain was in every way a milestone in his career—a high-calorie leadership stint that would ultimately propel him into the CFO office at Zebra Technologies (NASDAQ: ZBRA), a publicly traded provider of digital workflow and tracking solutions. Says Winters: “It gave me the responsibility for delivering productivity, improving working capital, and thinking about how we transform the supply chain to really create value for the company.” It also charged Winters with leading a global team spanning more than 50 manufacturing sites. “I had to quickly learn how to lead differently, drive change, and deliver results,” he explains. After 17 years with GE, Winters joined Zebra in 2018  as vice president of corporate development and business operations. “This was just a great opportunity for me to leverage my operational background in a technology company but move outside my comfort zone,” comments Winters, who adds that his first few years at Zebra also opened the door to new experiences. “I was exposed to investor relations, board communications, and the debt equity markets in ways in which I had not been exposed before,” he comments. “This was really the missing piece that helped to allow me to step into the CFO role earlier this year,” says Winters, closing the loop on his GE-to-CFO journey. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Back in 2008, Chad Gold was working for Home Depot as an FP&A professional when the economic downturn upended the home building market and summoned him to the retailer’s forecasting front lines. “Finance had to be ahead of the business as far as thinking through all the different scenarios went because the housing markets were changing literally day to day,” comments Gold, who observes that the crisis revealed to him how the finance team must always be out in front “looking around corners.” After several years with the giant retailer and multiple promotions, Gold says, he began to grow frustrated as the flow of promotions slowed down despite his willingness to take on big projects in different functions. Then, one day, an issue involving one of his projects “blew up.” “My boss sat me down late at night and on a whiteboard drew some stair steps with a line that went from the bottom to the top of the 10 steps. You’re so focused on wanting to step from the bottom to the top that you’re missing out on all of these incremental learnings,” Gold recalls him saying. Gold says that he took the message to heart and uncovered new opportunities to satisfy his FP&A appetite inside Home Depot’s growing merger-and-acquisition activities. “No one was offering to go work in M&A, and I said that I’d be happy to go do it,” remarks Gold, who estimates that he applied his FP&A acumen over time to 20 different acquisitions, including some postmerger integration work in China. Says Gold: “I said, ‘Well, I’ve never been to China before, so why not?’” Today, as CFO of SalesLoft, Gold says that his Home Depot experiences revealed to him how FP&A functions are built over time and ultimately yield different tools for the organization to leverage to allow Finance to become a more valuable partner. He explains: “There are certain foundational things in FP&A that you simply have to have in order to partner—the business partnership and collaboration are just the last part.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

Among the growing number of finance leaders who can be classified as cloud computing CFOs, few have arguably stayed in step with the parade of cloud opportunities longer and with more brand muscle behind them than CFO Todd McElhatton of Zuora. For the past two decades, McElhatton has been finance’s cloud point man for some of the biggest names in tech as the technology developers have shifted their offerings from on-premise to in-the-cloud solutions. Turn back the clock to 2001, and McElhatton is joining Hewlett-Packard’s finance team, where he serves as a vice president of finance while advancing into the realm of managed services for the first time. Fast-forward to 2007, and he’s joining Oracle, where he invests 7 years and oversees business operations for the developer’s pioneering cloud business. Next, he’s jumping to VMware, where he’s named CFO of the developer’s Hybrid Cloud Business before moving onward to SAP as SVP and CFO of their Cloud Business Group. Today, as CFO of Zuora, McElhatton is tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for a developer whose offerings are designed to help companies manage and grow their subscription businesses. It’s perhaps the obvious next chapter for a finance leader who built his career inside companies set on harnessing the awesome power of subscription businesses.   CFOTL: Tell us about Zuora. What does this company do, and what are its offerings? McElhatton: First of all, Zuora is a subscription management platform company. We help companies to launch and manage their subscription services. A lot of high tech companies operate on us. Companies like DocuSign and Zoom are our clients. We power all of their billing, and we do a lot of their revenue accounting for them. We help them to collect revenue from their customers. We really are helping clients as they’re transforming from a product sale to an ongoing subscription sale. This is really huge change for companies because when you think about a product sale, it’s a one-and-done, but a subscription sale is an ongoing, circular relationship that you constantly have with that customer. The customer signs up, and then you’ve got to make sure that you collect the revenue. You’ve got to make sure that you recognize the revenue correctly, make sure that you fulfill it, make sure that you renew it. Every time you do these different tasks, you might impact 15 or 16 different business processes. Using Zuora as a platform allows companies to do this really seamlessly. The other thing that we know about really good subscription companies is that they’re constantly iterating. Their customers might have some sort of change up to four times a year, so if you have a good subscription business, you’re going to have all of these changes going on. For the most part, homegrown systems and ERP and CRM systems don’t do a good job of helping companies to manage these businesses, and this is where Zuora comes in. We’re really helping to transform a lot of what’s happening in the New Economy. I recently saw that IDC projects that in the future, more than 50% of GDP will be in the form of a subscription. Zuora is absolutely out front-and-center on this and is a recognized leader in helping customers through this transformation. We want to make sure that we’re helping people as they’re engaging in the subscription economy and as they really transform. Our employees want to make sure that we’re building the best products that we can to help our clients accomplish this. We’re also really focused on making sure that our technology and platform are world-leading and that we execute our strategy in a way that makes sense. In some ways, Zuora is where ERP was in the 1990s. We’re really on the cusp of this, and it’s really changing how people operate. Think about yourself. When was the last time that you bought music? And cars … kids don’t have an interest in...

In March of 2009, when the economy was still in the clutches of the global financial crisis, Time Warner spun out its subsidiary Time Warner Cable into an independent company. “As we spun off, we paid a massive dividend to the parent of $18 billion, and our central thought became: ‘How do we survive? How do we survive as a newly public company with lots of debt?’” recalls Christian Lee, who at the time was a Time Warner Cable senior vice president and head of the company’s M&A strategy. Over the next several years, Lee says, he experienced a fast ride of ups and downs that provided a string of lessons when it came to speaking to debt holders and investors inside ever-changing market conditions. Fast-forward to 2014, and Lee and Time Warner Cable (TWC) CFO Artie Minson receive a hostile takeover letter from competitor Charter Communications, which made no secret of its intent to replace TWC’s board of directors with its own selections.  “We spent the next two and half years of our collective lives working through our hostile takeover defense—a merger with Comcast,” explains Lee, who adds that ultimately Charter and TWC were able to put together another deal that would secure the sale of TWC. “In the background of all of this, Artie had gotten introduced to Adam Neuman [WeWork founder], and he said to me, ‘Hey, I’m thinking of going over as COO—you should think about the CFO role,” recalls Lee, who would step into WeWork’s CFO office in 2015. “I had done a lot of deal work and capital-raising in my career, but my first year as CFO of WeWork was really about building out systems—we didn’t have an accounts receivable or accounts payable system, so I was leaning into things that I had never done before,” reports Lee. He exited that role in 2017 in order to move to Asia, where he would help to launch and manage WeWork’s Asia business, an appointment that helped in part to satisfy his long-term career goal of serving in an executive business development capacity overseas.

In the late 1990s, when Stuart Henrickson was CFO for Koch Industries’ Canadian operations, Chase Manhattan made him a job offer unlike any that he had received before. “It was a fork in the road for me. Koch had been consolidating and bringing many of its operations back to their head office in the U.S., and it happened to be at that point in time that Chase brought me the opportunity,” explains Henrickson, who reports that he was asked to spearhead a development bank for Chase in the Middle East. “So, within the course of a week, I had to make a decision regarding whether I went down to the U.S. to be part of a Koch team that was already built or instead started to do something new with a blank sheet of paper,” recalls Henrickson. After 4 years with Chase, he would join the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, where he led investment banking for nearly 5 years before accepting a CEO position with Standard Bank MENA.    In all, Henrickson’s Middle East career chapter would extend across 11 years, a span of time during which the Middle East’s appetite for financial services escalated along with the price of oil, which grew from roughly $9 a barrel at about the time of his arrival to a high of $149 per barrel, according to Henrickson. He recalls: “The Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) went from having a handful of Western-based financial institutions consisting of rep offices of between 2 and 10 people to growing overnight to eventually number some 1,500 employees. Dubai became the hub for the whole region.”    Asked for some pointers when it comes to doing business in the Middle East, Henrickson says that board members and company management need to be treated differently. He remarks: “I remember that one board member from a large local investment house told me, ‘The biggest difference between a European investment banker and an American investment banker is that the European knows full well that he needs to come back every 3 months for a year or two before he would get a deal, while the American comes over, doesn’t get a deal, and leaves in frustration—for good.’”  Still, the biggest differences in business are in the thought processes, he explains.   “Leave your logic at the door—so much of it is knowing what makes the other person tick,” says Henrickson. –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When Maria Manrique stepped into her first role as a CFO, she did so knowing that her finance leader mentor was still in the building—in fact, he was occupying the CEO office. “It would be unfair of me to not say that this was critical—being able to step into the role and have someone there who could help me to bridge the gaps,” recalls Manrique, who prior to entering the CFO office at the start-up had served as vice president of FP&A. Manrique had already occupied similar senior planning roles at multiple companies, having previously worked for Fidelity Investments, where she had lent her FP&A acumen to the financial services firm’s portfolio of venture-backed companies. Still, at the start-up, she found herself along the front lines at the company’s board meetings—an opportunity that she had seldom been afforded at Fidelity. But along with her increased visibility came responsibility, she points out. “I had been supporting venture capital–backed companies for a long time with strategic planning, but I had never had to make the hard decisions,” comments Manrique, who says that more challenging decisions concerning the company’s ultimate valuation and with which investors to partner suddenly became front-and-center. Fast-forward to 2021, and Manrique is today CFO of O’Reilly Media, a 43-year-old midsize firm where as finance leader she has sought to open doors for her finance team members by exposing each member to the broader planning process and allowing them to acquire a deeper understanding of the firm’s strategy. Notes Manrique: “I have a really hard time telling you who on my team is accounting only or controllership only or FP&A only. Everyone has a chain of activity that goes from the general ledger to our monthly operating report to our board report.” It’s an approach to talent development, Manrique says, that is helping O’Reilly to retain talent in an highly competitive market. “This is about giving people meaningful roles that impact the organization,” comments Manrique, who at O’Reilly also wears the hat of Chief People Officer.  - Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

A brief summary of this episode

Asked to recall the experience of stepping into a CFO role for the first time, Nicole Anasenes doesn’t mince words. "It’s a very lonely, scary moment,” comments Anasenes, as she considers her early days at technology company Infor—a CFO appointment that preceded more recent CFO engagements at Squarespace and now technology firm Ansys. “If only someone would have told me how lonely it feels to make certain decisions—you can bounce ideas off people, but you are the ultimate decision-maker,” continues Anasenes, who says that, looking  back, she may have been able to ease some of the decision-making concerns if she had had a broader professional network to which to turn. “I happened to have been lucky that Charles Philips, the CEO of Infor, was a financially savvy person, but since then, I’ve built a much broader network of people and a framework for how to have these type of conversations in which you don’t divulge the specifics concerning your company but get the mentoring and support that you need,” remarks Anasenes, who prior to entering the CFO office at Infor spent more 14 years at IBM Corp., where she last served as CFO of the tech giant’s middleware group. “I learned very quickly after leaving IBM that you need to be open to networks and different types of networks,” explains Anasenes, who adds that her appetite for networking has grown along with her CFO talent development responsibilities. “You are only good as the talent you attract, retain, and are able to keep engaged, so my relationship with the executive search community is quite broad,” she notes.  –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

It was nightly business conversations at his parents’ dinner table that first led Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah to consider alternatives to business when it came to building a career. “As most small business owners do, my parents worked all the time—and as with most small businesses, things could at times be financially challenging,” explains Mahendra-Rajah, who vividly recalls business rent increases, outstanding receivables, and the dynamics behind supply and demand that pervaded his parents’ dinner conversations. Nevertheless, it was this same scrutiny of supply-and-demand dynamics that Mahendra-Rajah credits with helping him to “come full circle” and ultimately led him to business school. At the time, Mahendra-Rajah was working full-time as a senior process engineer for chemical giant FMC Corp., a career-building stint that afforded him the real-world insights required to enrich a master’s thesis that he needed in order to complete a chemical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins. “It was my first job out of college, and the plant manager’s M.O. was to always beat me up and demand more cost reductions and better process yields,” recalls Mahendra-Rajah, who notes that his immersion into the business side of manufacturing quickly escalated when FMC received a large order for a synthetic that the company no longer manufactured. “I was given the task of refurbishing an old factory and getting it up and running in a matter of weeks,” remembers Mahendra-Rajah, who adds that the production of the once-discontinued synthetic led the plant manager’s mind-set to suddenly pivot. “He was pushing me to spend as fast as I could. I was told not to negotiate with suppliers, and if I needed overtime for the maintenance workers, to ‘go for it’—schedule was paramount, cost was secondary,” explains the career finance leader, who credits the experience with helping him to open a door that he had once shut. Says Mahendra-Rajah: “It kind of brought me back to the table with Mom and Dad and made me realize how so much of our world is really driven by supply and demand and how finance is the oil in the gears." –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Billtrust CFO Mark Shifke likes to label himself an “accidental CFO”—a tag that a number of our guests have appropriated from time to time when faced with explaining a past filled with less-than-traditional career experience. However, in the case of Shifke, the term arguably has little to do with career experience, for Billtrust’s CFO spent nearly a decade on Wall Street before entering the C-suite. Instead, Shifke uses the appellation to help to reveal the pivotal role that a single phone call came to play in his finance career. Back in 2000—near the beginning of Shifke’s Wall Street career and the end of the market frenzy known as the dotcom bubble—Shifke took a phone call from a CEO founder whom he had met through a personal acquaintance. Just as the CEO didn’t hesitate to ask Shifke to invest in his struggling company, Shifke didn’t dither when it came to coming up with some figurative cash. “I made a handshake agreement with him over the phone,” explains Shifke, who notes that the investment did require some visibility into the company’s sales pipeline.   “I told him, ‘If you are successful at selling into this environment and you are able to generate revenue, then on the back of that, I will raise capital’—and I did so,” recalls Shifke, who raised a "family and friends" round of funds that allowed him to become a central angel investor in the company Green Dot Corp., a fintech start-up and pioneer of prepaid debit cards.   Fast-forward 11 years, and Shifke is no longer just a Green Dot investor but a board member, when he opts out of a managing director role at JPMorgan Chase to join Green Dot in a senior corporate development role.  “It’s one thing to invest in a business and it’s another to advise a business, but it’s quite another thing to go operate it—and I had never operated one,” comments Shifke, who would enter the CFO office at Green Dot a few years later in 2015. In the end, Shifke says, the “accidental CFO” label still fits because he originally had zero aspirations to be a CFO and now-midsize fintech firm Green Dot simply became the means to scratch his operations itch.    Says Shifke: “There was an opportunity to either enhance my position as a shareholder or materially harm it—but this tended to play out to the positive.” –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Several actions proved key as Waifa Chau advanced from financial planning and analysis (FP&A) roles to chief financial officer positions. Collaborating with other functions, gaining an in-depth understanding of the overall business, and helping his colleagues understand how FP&A benefits an organization have driven his success, says Chau, currently CFO with Nylas, Inc., a provider of productivity infrastructure solutions for software.  Cross-functional collaboration helps in gaining an understanding of a company’s overall business, Chau says. While working at Gap Inc., the company behind Gap, Banana Republic, and other apparel brands, Chau focused on driving higher gross margins—key in the retail industry. Chau’s curiosity about the business also helped him propel his career forward, he says. He spent about two years in a merchandising role at Gap, during which he gained a better understanding of the intricacies of operations. Often, employees in other parts of an organization assume FP&A’s primary role is to tell them when they’re over or under budget, Chau says. He tried to show how a strong FP&A partner tries to understand their performance so the business can better prepare for the future. After about seven years at Gap, Inc., Chau moved to an FP&A role at Walmart.com. In an ecommerce organization, there were “different levers to pull,” he says. For instance, along with analyzing gross margins, he reviewed margins on grocery delivery apps. Building on his success in FP&A, Chau set a new goal: establishing a finance team from the ground up. He joined BirdEye, a marketing platform, as vice president, finance, and advanced to CFO. Among other accomplishments, he structured the accounting and FP&A functions and determined how finance would interact with other functions. At Nylas, Chau again is leveraging his experience to propel himself forward and establish the finance function, this time for a slightly younger and small company. Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Of course, every finance leader needs to understand the mechanics of accounting and know how to identify the financial implications of management’s decisions. Their preparation should also include learning from their experiences—and this includes mistakes, says Ian Charles, chief financial officer with Flexe, an on-demand warehousing solution. In particular, identifying the optimal candidate for a job is one of a leader’s most difficult and critical responsibilities, Charles notes. It’s also far from straightforward. It’s easy to believe that you’re hiring a star who will move the organization to the next level, only to discover that the individual isn’t as exceptional as he or she appeared as a candidate. In other situations—say, when it’s necessary to fill a role quickly—a candidate who appears less inspiring at the outset can turn out to add tremendous value to the organization. To improve his track record when hiring for critical positions, Charles has beefed up his interview process. He begins by interviewing several dozen individuals. From this group, he chooses two or three finalists. All go through at least several rounds of interviews, with both Charles and other members of his team. To be sure, this can mean balancing rigor with market realities. Given the tight job market at the moment, good individuals can find plenty of great opportunities, Charles adds. Also key to hiring well is adeptly balancing the interests of multiple parties, including the board, management, and employees. Focusing too heavily in one direction can lead to unintended consequences. For example, a goal of maximizing share price will impact the board, investors, management, and employees differently. Charles notes that in the early days of his career, he would lean toward maximizing share price for the board rather than focusing on employees’ needs. “I’ve learned from that mistake as well,” he says. Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Nearly 20 years later, CFO Trent York tells us that he can still hear the finance executive’s exact words. “Trent, I don’t need you tell me how not to do something—I need you to help me to figure out how to work through the issue and what needs to be addressed in order for us to be able to expand,” recalls York, placing just enough emphasis on the word “not” to expose a degree of anxiety that still lingers. At the time, York was a newbie controller for Golfsmith, an Austin, TX–based golf specialty retailer that in the 2000s was opening dozens of stores annually as golf enjoyed newfound popularity nationally amidst the Tiger Woods boom.  “We went from 20 retail stores at the time I joined to close to 80, and we actually took it public, so this was really a build-and-scale moment that was quite exciting,” explains York, who advanced into the vice president of finance role as the golf retailer began to prepare for a public offering that ultimately debuted on NASDAQ (symbol: GOLF) in June 2006. Beyond gainful employment and resume enrichment, Golfsmith provided York with a series of “build-and-scale” moments of insight that allowed him to confidently step into yet another fast-growing Austin phenom of the 2000s, HomeAway. “HomeAway was about scale. There was meaningful organic growth, and we were very acquisitive along the way, too, because the market that we were looking to bring together was fragmented,” remembers York, who would spend 13 years at the company and enter the CFO office a year after its sale to Expedia Group in 2015. Later, HomeAway was rebranded as part of VRBO. “Following the sale, we pivoted our entire business model from being subscription-based to being transaction-driven, which was really more aligned with the marketplace—and to pivot like this was not an easy thing to do,” reports York, who adds that his lesson or takeaway from “the pivot” was coming to understand how making complex tasks simple could help an organization to achieve greater agility.   Says York: “The ability to be agile or stay fluid within a changing environment—and to drive through it—comes back to keeping things simple.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

A brief summary of this episode

When the TreeHouse Foods financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team notice CFO Bill Kelley entering the room, chances are that a number of team members shoot a quick glance at the company’s latest revenue figures. “I’m probably more predictable than I want to be,” explains Kelley, who has made revenue management a top priority for the $4.5 billion private label food and beverage maker. The push for organic growth at TreeHouse follows a larger reorganization at the company that roughly coincided with Kelley’s arrival inside the CFO office. According to him, that reorg has since led finance to begin embedding senior finance executives inside different business lines. “There are finance people who are now hard-wired into the business units, and we have created a revenue management function that had not previously existed,” points out Kelley, who notes that the embedded finance professionals are today playing a more strategic role inside the business than ever before. “They are the copilot or the chief of staff to the business unit presidents, with whom they help to make decisions on how to allocate capital and how to grow the organization,” explains Kelley, who adds that the central finance function remains responsible for the training and development of all finance professionals. Meanwhile, Kelley says, in addition to helping to drive organic growth, finance helps the company to flex its working capital muscles.   “Our investment thesis about which we talk to investors is that we have a unique ability to generate an outsized amount of cash flow,” reports Kelley. “We are committed to driving free cash flow in excess of $300 million annually, and we want to grow our EPS 10% a year.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

When asked about a personal habit that has served him well over the years, finance leader Puneet Pamnani raises his voice slightly and seeks to mimic the delivery of his wife’s tone:  “This is what you do for a hobby? You read company annual reports?” To which Pamnani defends his favorite pastime with the retort: “I find them interesting!” Although it might seem difficult to imagine this exchange taking place on sandy beach vacations and holiday escapes, it nonetheless remains an example that Pamnani uses to illustrate his relentless curiosity for how businesses operate and perform.   According to Pamnani, this curiosity has led him to regularly attend the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the major event for many value investors and fans of Warren Buffett, among whom Pamnani proudly includes himself. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Pamnani’s reading pastime is one that Buffett has long enjoyed and encouraged others to pursue.    “I’ve been to every Warren Buffett annual shareholder meeting in the past 10 years,” says Pamnani, who quickly adds: “But not the last one, that was hard”—signaling the environment related to COVID. Of course, Buffett is renowned not just for the investment and business insights themselves that he serves up but also for how he serves them up using clear, concise language that every investor can understand—and it’s here where Pamnani’s relentless habit and professional life are perhaps about to converge as at no other previous time. “The CFO arrives at the center of the process when a company goes public,” explains Pamnani, who back in 2018 entered the CFO office at KORE Wireless, a provider of mobility and network connectivity solutions that is expected to go public later this year. Helping KORE to realize its IPOs ambitions is just latest chapter of a transaction-driven career in which at times Pamnani has worn multiple hats, including those of CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer. “As a privately equity–backed firm, KORE has been very commercially focused, but it’s now time to balance that out, and as we maintain our focus on revenue and profits, we need to be more focused on compliance in order to become one of the best publicly listed companies of our size,” observes the increasingly investor-minded Pamnani, who tells us that he keeps a volume of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders on a shelf nearby. “These are his actual letters, word for word, compiled as a book. You also can also find a summary on Amazon—but this is not a plug,” remarks Pamnani, who, perhaps like Buffett, just wants to share his methods. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

When it comes time for Harmit Singh to brief Levi Strauss & Co.’s management team regarding the latest performance results, Levi’s CFO will often share a briefing document that features a front page bearing the heading “What’s Working and What’s Not.” “It’s more difficult to understand what’s not working, and it’s the ‘What’s not’ that helps us to determine the areas on which we have to focus to take the business to the next level,” explains Singh, who notes that the “front page” is carefully rendered by Levi’s Financial Planning  & Analysis (FP&A) crew – a team of forward-looking financial professionals whose past feats of analytic derring-do have included helping the jeans maker to foresee the leap from “skinny Jeans” to the baggie look among young consumers. It’s here among Levi’s crack team of number crunchers that the “what’s not” often becomes exposed, and it’s here where a new mind-set – one that keeps consumers top-of-mind and favors stakeholders over shareholders – is already visible. And just as soldiers are known by the things that they carry, so, too, are finance professionals known by the metrics that they wield – and at Levi’s, these metrics are increasingly consumer-driven. Explains Singh: “As the pivot to the consumer mind-set happens, the metrics that have become critical are: How many new customers are we signing up? What is the repeat rate of the customer? And, What is the lifetime customer value?" Read the complete article on Forbes.com Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

Andrew Kenny still remembers the smell of day-old pizza that lingered in the back of the Cairo conference room as negotiations between his then company, food processing giant ADM, and a future joint venture partner entered day five. “Planting a flag in Egypt was extremely important for us because it was not just about having a presence there—it was about creating an entire supply chain and creating value for an asset base back in the U.S.,” explains Kenny, who tells us that the 5-day gathering was the culmination of 10 prior trips to Egypt and a burdensome due diligence process.  Still, at times, a positive outcome was in doubt. “We were struggling to come to economic terms on the transaction,” recalls Kenny, who says that the developments that broke the stalemate ultimately had little to do with the happenings inside the conference room. As the day-five negotiations dragged on, Kenny says, he would at times step out of the room with the Egyptian company’s CFO and co-owner to purposely redirect the discussion away from the pressure cooker of deal-making mechanics to other areas of shared interest, both personal and professional. After 10 trips to Cairo, Kenny found that there was a willingness to reach a deal based on some of the relationships that had taken root over the lengthy due diligence process. “We spent a lot of time exploring each other’s common concerns and life ambitions,” comments Kenny, who adds that stepping out of the conference room allowed the executives to change the mood and once more find common ground. “On my first flight to Cairo, I was thinking like a finance person, but by the end of the experience, my mind-set had shifted and my thinking had become more commercial and relationship-based,” remembers Kenny, whose role would eventually grow to oversee ADM’s commercial business in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021   

There’s little question that the pandemic has led business leaders to amp up digital initiatives across most industries. In response, CFOs have more frequently been called upon to serve up some detailed answers for investors eager to keep a grasp on all spending tied to such initiatives. However, capital spending numbers were only an appetizer for certain board members and investors who viewed their businesses’ growing digital operations as a dependable source of new and timely insights into their firms. “The severity of the risk associated with the pandemic pulled finance executives into a place where they needed to be more comfortable in sharing a degree of detail with investors that was much more foreshadowing or predictive,” says Adam Meister, CFO, Talend, a publicly held cloud data integration company that recently announced its acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. According to Meister, the search for more timely insights by investors was most acute shortly after the pandemic’s arrival in North America. “For the first time, a lot of CFOs were starting to describe things like ‘pipeline,’ which would never have typically been up for discussion,” comments Meister. Asked how Talend first responded to the demand for more predictive information, Meister says, “On our Q1 call for 2020, we described a little bit of what we were seeing from real-time sales trends. These were not hard metrics at that point but were qualitative and added color to help contextualize the guidance that we had set.”    Meanwhile, investors were not the only stakeholders demanding greater data insights. Meister observes that in the past few years, Talend had introduced a broader framework of performance measures designed to answer the growing demand for performance indicators from departments and functional areas. “We asked the question: ‘How do we instill these measures as a framework across every department, even beyond sales—a common framework that can help us to achieve common ways of thinking about economic trade-offs in our business?,’” reports Meister. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021