CFO THOUGHT LEADER

From his early days in auditing at PwC to his current role as CFO at Prophix, Aaron Levine has had a career that has closely tracked the evolving nature of the financial leadership role. His journey has been marked by a series of strategic transitions and expansions of his skill set that illustrate the broadening demands of being a modern CFO.

An important early chapter of Levine’s professional development was his tenure under Steve Vintz, who at the time was CFO of Vocus, where Levine served as a VP managing both accounting and finance. It was under Vintz’s mentorship that Levine came to appreciate the power of storytelling within financial leadership. Vintz, a very externally focused CFO, adeptly navigated public company landscapes, from investor relations to quarterly earnings calls. His ability to craft compelling narratives that resonated with stakeholders profoundly influenced Levine.

This exposure revealed to Levine that effective CFOs do more than manage numbers: They tell stories through them. This realization has since become integral to his maturing CFO mindset, particularly as he looks to highlight the strategic benefits of Prophix’s software offerings. At Prophix, where Levine was appointed CFO this past January, the goal is to focus on refining the go-to-market metrics and integrating technology to streamline operations, emphasizing the narrative of growth and scalability.

Throughout his career, Levine has learned that a CFO’s role is about not just financial oversight but also constructing a vision that propels the business forward. His aspirations underscore a crucial CFO skill: the ability not only to foresee financial outcomes but also to articulate them in a way that drives the entire company’s strategy. This blend of analytics and narrative, shaped by his experiences, define Levine’s CFO mindset.

The way Dan Murphy sees it the CFO position demands that leaders always be kept on high alert. It’s a mindset that had led him to habitually monitor updates and alerts related to key vendors, including banking institutions. And so it was, in first quarter 2023 when Murphy recalls spotting a vague tweet hinting at possible financial instability at Silicon Valley Bank.

Despite the tweet’s uncertain implications, Murphy recognized the risks inherent in relying solely on one bank. He proposed a strategic move to company management: diversify the company’s financial reserves by transferring a substantial amount of their assets to JPMorgan as a precautionary step. His decision was not based on confirmed financial trouble at Silicon Valley Bank, but rather on a principle of risk management that prefers caution in the face of potential financial upheaval.

The board approved his recommendation, and the funds were shifted in time, safeguarding the company from any financial disruption that followed when Silicon Valley Bank’s issues became widely known. This proactive maneuver not only protected the company from immediate financial jeopardy but also served as a poignant lesson in corporate finance—be prepared for the unexpected by diversifying risk.

Dan Murphy’s quick response to a simple social media indicator is a testament to the vigilance required in the role of a CFO, particularly within the volatile environment of tech startups. His action taken while he was CFO of tech company Unqork reinforced the essential finance strategy of having multiple banking relationships, a practice Murphy tells us he has always championed, proving its worth in a moment of unforeseen crisis.

On this episode of Controllers Classified, host Erik Zhou welcomes Patrick Lynch, Senior Vice President and Controller of the Boston Celtics, who shares his journey from ball boy to financial leader for the team. Patrick highlights the milestones of his career, including his transition from an internship to working closely with the CFO, and the significant growth of the Celtics organization. He also imparts wisdom on how to seize career advancement opportunities and offers advice for those aiming to enter the sports industry. The discussion then does a deep dive into the world of accounting and finance for sports teams. Patrick shares his goals for the upcoming year - accurate reporting, cash management, and cost efficiencies - and then details why those things specifically matter in the sports industry. For example, while a private company, the Celtics are subject to several reporting requirements as a part of the NBA, and Patrick’s team is responsible for the integrity & synthesis of that data. Similarly, the Celtics cash flow reflects the cycle of seasons, and Patrick’s team is focused on managing the ebbs and flows. Finally, Patrick shares how he harnesses the power of technology to handle copious amounts of data, reduce manual work, and establish real time visibility. His goal in all of this is two fold - to give his team more time to do strategic work and to empower employees across the Celtics organization to be able to spend on things that will move the business forward. The episode concludes with Patrick sharing an industry story related to an auditor’s stadium walkaround. Listen now to get an exciting in-depth look at how the accounting & finance team plays a huge role in the success of the Celtics franchise.

Ask any CFO about their career-building years, and they will likely attribute their success to their adaptability and ability to render strategic insight. This tendency was recently amplified for us when we heard about the experience of Naresh Bansal, a seasoned finance executive who during a pivotal chapter early in his early career discovered that his company was about to be acquired by a larger one, Sage.

His company at the time—initially an independent entity focused on aggressive growth and innovation—offered a vibrant but challenging environment that tested the mettle of its leadership. As a finance executive, Bansal was responsible for providing some of the routine financial insight required to steer the firm through rapid growth phases and was instrumental in preparing it for its public offering—a task that involved rigorous financial restructuring and compliance readiness. However, when they were acquired, the trajectory changed—and began to present a new set of challenges.

Post-acquisition, about 80% of the leadership team departed within the first 6 months, which of course is a common scenario in acquisitions that can often lead to significant cultural and operational shifts. Bansal, however, not only stayed on but thrived. He navigated through these turbulent waters by leveraging his deep understanding of the company’s financial backbone and by building strong relationships with the new management. His strategic insight was crucial in bridging the gap between the old and new cultures, ensuring continuity and stability.

The tenets of his approach were twofold: Maintain rigorous financial discipline to ensure the financial health of the company and work diligently to gain the trust of the new leadership. By aligning the company’s strategic objectives with those of the new parent company and demonstrating the intrinsic value of the strategic vision, he not only secured his position but also played a critical role in the integration process.

This chapter of his career highlights a key lesson for finance professionals: Success often depends on the ability to manage not just numbers but also change. In the face of new corporate landscapes, it is the strategic, adaptable CFO who can turn challenges into opportunities for growth and learning.

A little more than 15 years ago, Hilary Norris had the ultimate dream job at a tech company in sunny California, a perfect alignment of professional goals and personal life. However, the idyllic scenario was disrupted when the company was acquired, a common turning point that often spells uncertainty for many executives.

Facing a potential career setback, Norris was initially marked for replacement but was later asked to stay on and lead the finance operations of the combined entity. This twist in her career path wasn’t just a test of her professional capabilities but also a stark introduction to the challenges of navigating corporate cultures across borders—this time, with a German-based company that had different views on diversity and dual careers.

Despite the hurdles, she saw through the integration phase with poise and strategic insight, yet ultimately decided to part ways due to cultural misalignments. The end of one chapter, however, led to a new beginning—a substantial role managing finance across 17 businesses in the Asia Pacific. This move not only highlighted her resilience but also her ability to leap into new opportunities, reshaping her career path on a global scale.

Having relocated from the UK to international opportunities in Asia and the US, Norris doesn’t hesitate to emphasize the role of supportive personal relationships in career development. Norris mentions the challenges and compromises involved in aligning her career moves with her husband’s, highlighting the importance of having a partner who is flexible and supportive of career opportunities across geographies.

Today, as a seasoned CFO, her journey underscores a crucial narrative in finance leadership: resilience, the ability to adapt, and the courage to embrace change define the path to success, far beyond the figures on a balance sheet.

Kicking off his career fresh out of school, Udit Tibrewal joined the audit practice ofPricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in New Delhi, where he set about learning the intricate workings of financial compliance.

The ambition to broaden his horizon and a hunger for new challenges led him to make a bold move to the United States, landing him first New York City. The shift from New Delhi’s familiar chaos to New York’s dynamic hustle coincided with a widening of Tibrewal’s finance lens. It was here, amidst the skyscrapers of Manhattan, that he began to embrace the complexity of technology companies and their menu of projects involving IPOs, mergers, and acquisitions.

After enriching his expertise on the East Coast, Tibrewal ventured west to Silicon Valley, where he blazed a path from numbers cruncher to strategic operations with a goal that never varied: to influence broader business decisions that could affect a company’s growth trajectory.

Throughout his career, Tibrewal has emphasized the need for continuous learning and adaptation. Whether through committing to global moves, shifting from technical to strategic roles, or adapting to new industries, he has undertaken a journey that underscores the dynamic nature of the finance function in modern businesses. 

Long ago, the power of focus was a lesson that Jeff Bray learned early in his career while transitioning from the role of analyst to that of portfolio manager. He recalls a strategic moment when he realized that narrowing his investments from many down to just three to five key stocks would greatly amplify his success. This principle of concentrated effort not only transformed his approach to investment management but also became a guiding principle throughout his career, which includes his latest stint as CFO of Semperis, a leading cybersecurity firm.

At Semperis, Bray is applying this bit of wisdom to navigate the company through a period of hypergrowth and complex challenges. Semperis has not only been expanding rapidly but also doing so with a focus on strategic areas that promise the highest returns—an approach that Bray appears to be uniquely prepared to execute, given his understanding of financial markets that has been honed over decades and now allows him to discern where to allocate resources to fuel growth and where to cut back to maintain efficiency.

Top-of-mind for Bray is a careful analysis of sales productivity and pricing integrity. Semperis's CFO insists on a robust framework within which sales efforts align precisely with company goals and resources are invested in segments that drive the most value. This approach is evident in his resolve to restructure the company’s pricing model in order to ensure transparency and consistency across the firm's quickly expanding number of products.

Here again, Bray once more lets us know that his determined watch on pricing is buttressed by his experience of that one early career moment emphasizing the importance of focus and concentration—which continues to influence his own decision-making, as well as the broader trajectory of Semperis’s success.

In this episode of Controllers Classified, host Erik Zhou is joined by Katie Slattery, VP of Accounting and Corporate Controller at Fivetran. The conversation begins with Katie’s start in Ireland at KPMG Dublin as an auditor, and traces her path from auditor to accountant. Fun fact: Katie has been the first controller/accounting hire at several high growth companies! The conversation then pivots to Katie’s current priorities at Fivetran and how she translates company-wide KPIs into team specific goals around reliable data and control efficiencies. Katie also spends some time talking about how to build a high-performing team, how to make sure an accounting team is structured to deliver on the needs of the business, and how to foster effective communication with teams and leaders outside of accounting. Given Katie’s extensive background in high growth companies, the conversation pivots to the IPO landscape, and how teams should be thinking about IPO readiness amidst the uncertainty. Katie notes that you have to be able to balance day-to-day activities with activities that prepare for the future, because you don’t want accounting to be the blocker when a company is ready to go public. Finally, the conversation ends with a discussion on the challenges and opportunities that come with being a global company. Katie spends time on Fivetran’s global operations and some of the decisions they have had to make as an accounting team as they navigate a complex tax landscape.

Back in 2016, Mitch Peipert stood at a crossroads. With a career foundation deeply rooted in the precision and rigor of public accounting, Peipert had navigated his way through the financial landscapes of various companies, honing his CFO leadership and operational prowess. Yet, nothing could have prepared him for the arrival of a new, enigmatic force at Thomas Publishing—a dynamic CEO with eyes set firmly on the horizon of digital transformation.

The news allowed a small degree of uncertainty to occupy Peipert’s mindset. A seasoned finance professional, he was adept at managing numbers and ensuring fiscal health, but the prospect of working with a leader, unknown and untested by his side, cast a shadow of doubt. Would this be the catalyst for transformation, or would it be yet another detour from the path he and others sought to advance down?

As the CEO began to unfold his vision for the company, a vision that went far beyond the balance sheets and financial statements that were Peipert’s realm, a remarkable transformation began to take place. The walls of the traditional finance role started to give way, revealing a new landscape where numbers were not just figures to be reported but tools for sculpting the future.

Together, they embarked on an audacious journey to steer Thomas Publishing away from the sinking sands of print media decline, towards the fertile grounds of digital innovation. Peipert found himself at the helm of projects that redefined the company’s trajectory, bridging the gap between financial stewardship and strategic innovation. The CEO had not only expanded Peipert’s strategic lens but had also awakened in him the spirit of a change-maker, ready to challenge the status quo and drive the organization towards uncharted territories.

Back in September of 2021, Jeremy Johnson, Senior Vice President of Finance at Ceridian (now Dayforce), decided it was time to test his mettle—a decision that led him far from where he began, only to return with a leadership perspective somewhat different from what he expected. Determined to challenge himself and expand his horizons, Johnson left the familiarity of Ceridian, where he had steadily advanced his career for the past nine and a half years, to accept a CFO position with SmartRecruiters.

Johnson’s test, however, was about to grow exponentially. At SmartRecruiters, circumstances propelled him into an even more demanding role, that of the interim CEO. This unexpected turn of events was not just a mere career stint but a transformational experience—one Johnson tells us has influenced his approach to finance leadership, infusing it with broader strategic insights and a nuanced understanding of the business.

Upon his return to Dayforce as CFO, it felt like a narrative coming full circle. “This return signifies more than just coming back; it represents the culmination of my growth, challenges, and the broader leadership perspective I’ve gained,” Johnson remarks. His journey, including the unforeseen stint as CEO, Johnson tells us, has endowed him with experiences and a visionary approach to the finance leadership role.

His Early Days: Johnson tells us his early career was significantly shaped by his early experiences at Capella University, where he built a relationship with CFO Lois Martin, who became a critical mentor. His responsibilities in SEC reporting and managing disclosure committees provided a strong foundation in financial reporting and regulatory compliance.

This episode our Planning Aces emphasize the importance of leveraging one's breadth of experience, stepping beyond traditional FP&A roles, and focusing on execution to bring significant value to organizations. They also emphasize the evolving nature of finance professional interactions and the idea that strategic insights can serve as catalysts for organizational change, prompting shifts in product development, market strategy, and operational execution.

This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Jeff Woolard or Velocity Global, CFO Aaron Alt of Cardinal Health and CFO Bob Houghton of Pivot Bio.

In the heart of a bustling paper mill, where the scent of fresh pulp intermingled with the hum of machinery, Bob Houghton kicked off his finance career. Fresh out of college and a number of states removed from his Minnesota roots, Houghton understood the intricate dance of departments working in unison to produce everyday paper essentials. It was here, in the domain of plus-size machines, that he began to embrace the value of stepping beyond comfort zones for growth.

His journey from starting within the paper mill’s diligent production ethic to becoming finance leader at Pivot Bio is a testament to the power of diverse experiences. At a later stint at General Mills, he navigated through nine roles in 15 years, each a stepping-stone that would hone his strategic vision and leadership skills. It was a role in investor relations, however, that would mark a turning point ultimately unlocking the path to the CFO office.

Today, as the CFO of Pivot Bio, Houghton is focused on driving the company toward profitability while maintaining a sustainable business model. He emphasizes the importance of having financial acumen across the organization, allocating capital strategically, and articulating a clear value proposition to stakeholders. Meanwhile, Pivot Bio’s CFO doesn’t hesitate to blend his finance leadership with the company’s greater mission.

Says Houghton: “We’re not just providing a product—we’re providing a more profitable, predictable, safer, and sustainable solution for growers.”

Back in 2009, with a law degree in hand along with some frontline consulting experience, Jennifer Loo swung open the door at LegalZoom—where in short order she was tasked with architecting the fast-growing company's FP&A function from the ground up.

For Loo, the responsibilities that would quickly surface at LegalZoom would not only challenge and meet Loo's career ambitions head on, but give rise to an entire career path, bringing with it her education, distinct capabilities, and potential. Suddenly, her diverse background, bridging the analytical rigor of consulting with the strategic nuance of legal training, made her uniquely equipped for the challenges of shaping a nascent finance function in a fast-evolving company.

Meanwhile, Loo tells us, she benefited from a CFO mentor who demonstrated faith in her potential to spearhead such a critical undertaking. In her ascent, CFO Loo proved that when you're ready to embrace your unique path, indeed, the road does rise to meet you.

In a special episode of CFO Thought Leader, host Jack Sweeney converses with Evan Goldberg, Founder and Executive Vice President of Oracle NetSuite, during this month's  SuiteConnect conference in NYC.  Goldberg reflects on the company's 25 year journey, emphasizing its foundational vision that championed a unified business management suite.

Goldberg also sheds light on the invaluable mentorship from Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder, which uniquely positioned NetSuite for success. As the discussion unfolds, Goldberg candidly shares his evolution from a product-focused executive to a versatile leader, adapting to the multifaceted challenges of a growing company.

Peering into the future, the conversation pivots to artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting its indispensable role across industries. Goldberg envisions AI not just as a tool for tech companies but as a democratized asset NetSuite provides to empower businesses of all types. The dialogue further explores the shifting landscape for finance professionals, underscoring the strategic importance of technology in driving collaboration and innovation within organizations. Through this engaging dialogue, Goldberg's insights offer a compelling glimpse into NetSuite's past achievements and its forward-looking embrace of AI to shape the future of business.

Reflecting on her career choices, Erin Sawyer tells us that one pivotal point stands out—a decision that involved moving her family across the country. This step triggered not only a geographical shift but also a change in Sawyer’s professional life, when her work alongside a CEO ultimately fueled her aspirations to become a chief financial officer.

She had always been so captivated by numbers that by the tender age of 5 she had determined that her destiny lay in accounting. Her initial steps into the corporate world at Honeywell Aerospace as a cost accountant laid the groundwork for years of steady career advancement. Yet, it was her transition from accounting to a more dynamic role in financial planning and analysis (FP&A) that sparked her true passion—driving business forward through strategic finance.

Sawyer’s tenure in the Yellow Pages industry during its transformational phase sharpened her skills in business transformation and strategic partnership, preparing her for the challenges ahead. However, it was an opportunity at insurance software provider Vertafore that finally aligned her with a CEO mentor, whom she greatly admired. This relationship deepened her expertise in operational excellence and marked a decisive step toward achieving her eventual CFO ambitions. 

As Pactum AI embarks on a pivotal phase of commercialization, the arrival of Sarah Alper in the AI-driven company’s CFO office is by no means a coincidence.

Having transitioned from structured finance roles at General Electric to the dynamic environment of UiPath, Alper now brings to the table a blend of experience in operational finance, strategic planning, and transformational technologies that arguably made her an optimal CFO candidate.

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Looking back, Alper tells us, her leap from GE to the high-velocity world of tech start-ups afforded her the opportunity to help to execute a finance transformation while participating in strategic decision-making and investor relations, culminating in a front-row seat at UiPath’s initial public offering (IPO).

Alper is now channeling her expertise toward refining Pactum AI’s go-to-market strategy, which includes the critical task of pricing and packaging the AI company’s negotiation offerings to make certain that they appeal to a broad spectrum of enterprises seeking to enhance their negotiation capabilities.

In this episode of Controllers Classified, Brex CAO Eric Zhou is joined by Daniel Hilli, Head of Business Control at Alstom. Alstom is a multinational company that builds and services trains and signaling systems. In fact, millions of people everyday are transported by Alstom trains and systems. Given the size of the company, this episode focuses on how to implement and manage financial processes across different regions and systems at scale. This includes dialogue around when to centralize vs. decentralize reporting and budgeting processes, how to find efficiencies through digitalization and tool consolidation, and the best way to build lines of communication across global teams. Daniel also does a deep dive into Alstom’s acquisition of Bombardier and the integration implications that followed - including how to bring together disparate teams and technology and how to gain a holistic financial picture of the business and its spend in a post-acquisition environment.

Bob Purcell’s leap into the unknown wasn’t just a step; it was a giant stride toward his future as a CFO. Early in his career, Bob faced a daunting choice: join a distressed company teetering on the brink of failure or play it safe. Driven by an unshakeable belief in his abilities and a desire to test himself, he chose the former. This high-risk, high-return career step wasn’t just about salvaging a company; it was about proving to himself that he could navigate the stormiest of waters.

From his initial misgivings about audit work at Deloitte to his transformative years at Amgen, where he thrived in a culture of leadership development and diversity, CFO Purcell’s journey was anything but linear. It was a patchwork of decisions and strategic moves, each building on the last.

By stepping away from the comfort of well-trodden paths and embracing the unknown, CFO Purcell tells us he was able to test himself in different environments. His story encourages aspiring finance leaders to embrace challenges, trust their capabilities, and never shy away from opportunities to test themselves.

As CFO of Billtrust, Purcell is today focused on creating the right set of metrics (KPIs) for the company, preparing for growth through acquisitions, ensuring efficient operations, and fostering a diverse talent bench within the finance team.

Asked about the early career leap he today credits with landing him on the CFO path, Purcell tells us he recalls experiencing few butterflies.

He adds: “I knew I was right. I knew I was ready.”

In the world of finance, where leadership roles await those who distinguish themselves along a select number of familiar paths, Aaron Alt’s journey to becoming a CFO stands out for its breadth and depth, transcending conventional boundaries.

Starting in law, Alt quickly found his groove inside the legal world’s cornucopia of M&A advisory services. It was here where he would realize the potency of focusing beyond legal parameters—a habit that would spur a pivotal shift in his career from emphasizing legal details to prioritizing relationships and financial strategy.

From the trenches of M&A advisory to the executive suites of public companies, Alt tells us, his foundational philosophy has always revolved around the relentless pursuit of shareholder value creation—a mission that involves uncovering hidden opportunities and fortifying against potential threats.

“It’s allowed me to look under a lot of rocks,” Alt reflects, underscoring his commitment to safeguarding and nurturing corporate value. It’s just such devotion that 15 months ago led him to step into the CFO office at healthcare giant Cardinal Health.

Alt joined the healthcare company shortly after Cardinal had welcomed a larger and more diverse board as the result of an agreement with an activist investor firm. As part of a broader turnaround plan, Alt’s expertise is now expected to be instrumental in navigating the challenges and opportunities ahead at Cardinal, underlining the company’s readiness to embrace change and foster growth for all stakeholders. To date, a comprehensive self-review of the healthcare giant’s business remains ongoing.

“We’re very focused on making sure that we are generating cash flow everywhere that we can—and we believe that if we’re consistent in our strategy and clear on our metrics for success, we can get a lot of things done together,” comments Alt, who during our discussion also offers up a strategic lesson from his tenure at Target, specifically regarding the retailer’s decision to exit the Canadian market gracefully.

Says Alt: “This was one of the hardest working experiences that I’ve had, and its message has stuck with me even as I’ve needed to think about other business problems: You really need to keep an eye on the fact that at the end of the day, even as CFO, it’s not just about the numbers.” –Jack Sweeney 

Twelve years ago, when Matt Wolf was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, he likely would have been alarmed to learn that his future finance career would be largely impacted by drinking and driving.

Such was his destiny, though, as after a 5-year stint with the investment bank in London and New York he began to fill in his itinerary with positions in both the automotive and alcohol industries—most recently, as the CFO at DRINKS, a company at the forefront of e-commerce solutions in the beverage alcohol space.

According to Wolf, his career began on a foundation of data analytics at Economists Incorporated in Washington, D.C., where he navigated the complexities of antitrust matters. This early experience instilled in him a nuanced understanding of the financial world and fueled a trajectory that would seamlessly blend traditional finance with industry regulation.

In the alcohol industry, this regulatory backdrop traces back to Prohibition, which resulted in varied state-by-state regulations. What’s more, Wolf points out, both the automotive and alcohol sectors feature tiered markets with distinct roles for retailers, distributors, and manufacturers, alongside legal frameworks deeply rooted in historical context.

According to Wolf, these similarities have contributed to a slower adoption of digital retail solutions in both fields, as compared to others.

When asked about his “drinking and driving,” Wolf smiles: “The humor is not lost on me, but I think that in fact there are a lot of parallels between the two sectors that enable me to leverage experience from one to the other.” –Jack Sweeney 

Jakson Peters's journey from humble beginnings to becoming a global CFO is a tale adaptability, and continuous learning. Born in Brazil, he had initial career expectations far removed from the finance world that had their roots in the start of his working life as part of the family's milk delivery business. This early experience, so remote from his eventual home in the c-suite, laid the foundation for his future success, he explains..

From 1998 to 2002, Peters worked for DaimlerChrysler in São Paulo, a stint that marked the beginning of a corporate finance trajectory that would eventually lead the young financial planner to embark on a journey of self-improvement that would include mastering English and pursuing an MBA from Wharton in United States. With the latter in hand, Peters returned to Brazil to serve as a member of Mondelēz International's FP&A team before stepping into a number of CFO roles with midsize firms.

Transitioning from his established Brazilian CFO credentials, Peters next embraced the challenge of moving to Malaysia. This move represented not just a change of location but also a leap into a new cultural and business landscape. In Malaysia, tasked with navigating the complexities of merging two competing online businesses, Peters learned how to communicate and lead in a cultural setting where "yes" can mean different things.

After 4 years in Malaysia, Peters resumed his journey by moving to Dubai, where he was appointed CFO of Property Finder, a leading online real estate marketplace. Here, he leveraged his online experience to drive the company forward in the vibrant expatriate community that characterizes Dubai's business landscape. Peters's time in Dubai was not about just professional growth, though—it was about contributing to a thriving business ecosystem and reinforcing to all that his path from Brazil to international shores was continuing to be a narrative of constant learning and leadership evolution.

On this episode of Controllers Classified, host Eric Zhou welcomes Sean Soper, the Head of Financial Operations and Accounting at Alchemy, to shed light on the disruptive technologies shaping the trajectory of accounting and finance. Alchemy provides the leading blockchain development platform and as such, much of the conversation narrows in on the possible applications of blockchain in accounting. Sean begins the discussion highlighting his experience working across companies that have revolutionized whole industries with new technology. He notes that a large part of his success at these companies has been from remaining curious and developing deep industry knowledge that guides how he approaches his accounting processes and procedures. Sean then outlines his priorities in his current role at Alchemy, which include optimizing the financial close process, fine tuning reporting and analytics, and managing cash.

Perhaps no single experience better reveals the breadth of challenges that regularly test even the most stoic of finance career-builders than that which confronted Eric Bouchard a little more than a decade ago at Bombardier, Inc.

Tasked by management with negotiating the establishment of a new aerospace facility, Bouchard navigated through complex discussions with the Moroccan government, balancing the interests of Bombardier and the aspirations of a nation. His role extended beyond mere finance: He became a diplomat, a strategist, and, most important, a bridge between diverse cultures and economic ambitions.

The culmination of his efforts was a groundbreaking agreement for Bombardier that led to the opening of a state-of-the-art facility. This venture, we learn, solidified Bombardier’s global footprint and at the same time contributed significantly to Morocco’s industrial development. Bouchard’s remarkable record of being a mild-mannered technical accountant who transcended the bounds of traditional roles to become a key player in international negotiations highlights how finance can open the door to adventurous chapters seldom accessible to marketers or even sales teams.

Now far removed from the familiar corridors that he once roamed as what you might call an everyday accountant, Bouchard proudly recalls that this was an endeavor that not only challenged him professionally but also paved the way for Morocco to enter the elite circle of countries that have an aerospace industry. –Jack Sweeney 

At the very beginning of our talk with CFO Chermaine Hu, she revealed an irony about the CFO title that we rarely get to expose.

To wit: The very title toward which any executive has invested so many illustrious career years conveys ownership of what might seem to be a less than illustrious role—or at least one requiring little future endeavor.

“I have always struggled with the CFO title,” explains Hu, who notes that the moniker captures only a fraction of what most CFOs actually do.

Hu’s unexpected comments seemed to be appropriate openers for an executive who doesn’t mind—and in fact prefers—being different from the rest of the pack. Or at least this is just one of several takeaways that we garner from Hu’s early career years.

In fact, it turns out that Hu had an independent streak even before she entered the world of finance. Back in 1998, as she was approaching graduation from the University of Cambridge—job offer from Morgan Stanley already in hand—she decided to take job during Easter break serving ice cream at a local McDonald’s. Recalls Hu: “I felt that I needed some real-world experience.”

Hu’s ice cream stint—while seemingly incongruous with her blooming future as an investment banker (including 14 years with Morgan Stanley)—was just one in a number of surprise chapters found in the narrative of Hu’s past that expose a curious mind and a dedication to continuous learning.

One bookmark in her journey, Hu tells us, still rests between the pages recounting the time that she was blindsided by a “missed promotion” during her investment banking years. Not uncharacteristically, though, Hu was wise enough to allow greater reflection to expose a silver lining.

“You need to have setbacks in life,” she admits, revealing her deep understanding of the growth that comes from facing challenges head-on.

Looking back at his 26 years at Intel Corp., Jeff Woolard has more than a few moments of important discernment from which to choose when we ask for a single finance strategic moment.

Nevertheless, without hesitation, he takes us back in time to when the giant chipmaker was experiencing a recurring mismatch between the products that it was developing and the market’s purchasing trends—specifically in the PC sector.

“If you were to map both what people wanted to buy and what we were building, you would see this kind of disconnect,” recalls Woolard, who upon closer observation realized that while consumer buying behaviors had remained consistent, Intel’s product designs and manufacturing processes had evolved without alignment.

Woolard would propose a novel approach: redesigning Intel’s product road map to focus on four specific cost points that matched consumer demand and the company’s margin goals. This strategic insight led to a shift in how Intel approached product development, ensuring that new products were designed with these cost targets in mind from the outset.

A recurring theme in Woolard’s career journey has been the necessity of continuous learning and adaptability. He underscores the significance of making an impact and adding value within an organization. He illustrates how, at Intel, the expectation and opportunity to influence business outcomes were directly pivotal in his career growth. This aspect of being able to see and measure the impact of his work is highlighted by him as a distinctive and rewarding part of his experience at Intel.

Joining Intel Corp. in 1999 as a recent college graduate, David Freeman began his finance career as part of the tech giant’s plus-size finance team that supported various business groups. Looking back, Freeman finds that few aspects of the tech giant’s business were more influential in shaping his early career years than the company’s direct and “confrontational” culture.

“They expected excellence,” he recalls. “They expected details, and they expected you to know your business.”

Along the way, despite the many opportunities that Intel regularly offered him, Freeman came to realize that he wanted to open his next career door somewhere else.

“I didn’t really love being at a large company, so—after 7 years there—I decided that it was time to move on,” continues Freeman, who opted to join a pioneering cloud company known as NetSuite.

At fewer than 500 employees, NetSuite was aiming to be among the first SaaS companies to go public, and Freeman tells us that he ultimately had a hand in drafting the company’s S-1—a hands-on role that ultimately led him to spending 16- to 20-hour days at the printer.

However, Freeman believes that the greatest takeaways from his time at NetSuite may have come from the exposure that he had to the decision-making done by NetSuite’s CFO during the IPO process.    

“For the first time, I could see day-in and day-out what the CFO did, and this really gave me kind of a better sense of the role,” he remembers.

We can see that as his career moved forward, Freeman’s pursuit of experience and opportunities left little doubt that he had the CFO office in mind as a destination. Still, when the head of sales at Nutanix invited him to step into a VP of Sales operations position, he didn’t hesitate to stray from what might have been a more traditional finance path.

Says Freeman: “To be honest, I really hadn’t thought about this type of role that much, but I kind of felt like, ‘Hey, if there’s ever a time to do it, why not now?'” –Jack Sweeney

Planning Aces co-hosts Brett Knowles and Jack Sweeney discuss the strategic efforts of two CFOs leading organizational turnarounds, and a third CFO, who offers key organizational insights from an earlier career chapter. Emphasizing simplification, strategic focus, and leveraging both human insight and technology, Marc Suidan of Beachbody, Emma Brown of Medius and David Freeman of Starburst share their experiences in cutting costs, enhancing digital experiences, and repositioning product offerings as key strategies for revival and expansion. They underscore the importance of a deep understanding of business operations and the potential of AI in supporting decision-making processes. Their narratives reflect a common theme of distilling operations to impactful actions, demonstrating the critical role of CFOs in navigating companies through challenging transformations towards sustainable growth.

Lessons from Craig Wert’s finance career reveal the power of adaptability, problem-solving skills, and the ability to seize opportunities in unexpected places.

Having started his career without a clear road map to the future, Wert later found that his liberal arts background and early experiences in investment banking had laid a good foundation for a career that might have led in any number of directions.

What began to set Wert apart, however, was his innate ability to troubleshoot. Throughout his career, he was frequently called upon to solve complex problems, whether operational challenges at RCN or financial crises at Vonage. This knack for troubleshooting didn’t just resolve immediate issues, though: It also began to reveal to upper management his maturing strategic acumen and resilience. Every challenge overcome was a stepping-stone that led to increasing trust and the opening of doors to new opportunities.

Today, Wert’s evolution from troubleshooter to CFO of Jobber has proven to be a journey that has endowed him with the ability to anticipate obstacles and swiftly implement effective solutions. As Jobber seeks to expand its market presence and enhance its financial structure, Wert’s troubleshooter mentality suggests that the firm will likely be taking a proactive approach to growth, risk management, and innovation inside the competitive SaaS landscape.  

When PwC partner and relentless champion of shareholder value Marc Suidan stepped into the CFO office at The Beachbody Company in April 2022, intrigue was bound to follow.

Certainly, a struggling fitness and health company may not be viewed by many as the optimal door-of-entry to the operations side of things. However, for Suidan—a 17-year PwC veteran—Beachbody was without a doubt an enticing challenge. As a seasoned advisor to management, Suidan had contributed shareholder insights to the turnarounds and restructurings of dozens of businesses. However, at Beachbody, he would be executing from inside the organization, where the levers for strategic as well as operational improvement would be within his reach.

“Interestingly enough, half of Beachbody’s business is digital subscriptions, while the other half is the nutritional supplements that people who work out consume,” he reports. “People take energy drinks before working out and protein supplements afterward, so these are all part of part of the health supplements that we offer.” Suidan adds that the current turnaround effort has relied on three core pillars: dramatic cost-cutting, enhancing the digital experience around their top-tier content, and fixing the nutrition business.

So far, Suidan tells us, two of the three pillars are already paying off.

“We’re on track to have created over $200 million in savings in less than 2 years—I mean, it’s just crazy for a company of this size to find this much saving so fast,” comments Suidan, who notes that the company also revamped its digital platforms last March, a development that led CNN to name Beachbody’s consumer app the best in the fitness and workout app space this past December.

During the coming 12 months, according to Suidan, energy drinks, protein supplements, and the diversification of Beachbody’s nutrition channels will be top-of-mind.

“My two big pieces for the coming year are, number one, to finish that third pillar of the turnaround, and, number two, to get the message out—which is not easy, by the way, right?,” he concludes. “There are 4,000 public companies, but we need to talk about the two legs that we’ve already completed, so we should be able to get that message out.” –Jack Sweeney

On this episode of Controllers Classified, Brex’s CAO Erik Zhou is joined by Sowmya Ranganathan, OpenAI’s Controller. The conversation begins with a discussion on Sowmya’s career and her diverse experiences as an auditor and as a finance leader at both public and private tech companies, including Square and Rippling prior to OpenAI. Specifically, she highlights some of her insights for accounting during periods of business hypergrowth (i.e. when OpenAI launched ChatGPT) and the increasing need for technical savviness even as a finance professional (ex: Sowmya learned SQL as a way to manage the processing and analysis of a large data set of transactions at Square). She concludes her career overview with this advice: accounting leaders need to consider where their processes would break down if they were to grow quickly and focus their time and effort on making sure those processes are as scalable and automated as possible (hint: it requires building relationships with engineering).

It’s the type of story that we can’t resist repeating, and one that without question underscores Eric Jenny’s entrepreneurial spirit. Still, the entertainment value of his tale of zapping wasp nests with a homemade rubber band gun for a dollar a pop was at risk of eclipsing the more traditional milestones that populate a career path otherwise defined by strategic decision-making and an innate ability to identify and capitalize on opportunities.

During his stints in public accounting and the tech industry, Jenny tells us, he enjoyed immersing himself in the dynamics of fast-paced technological advancements and entrepreneurial business growth strategies.

At SOCi, CFO Jenny’s data-driven approach has led to pivotal decisions, such as focusing on enterprise clients, that have showcased his adeptness at steering the company through the complexities of the digital marketing landscape. Asked about his finance mind-set, Jenny recounts his commitment to curiosity and unwavering quest for greater efficiency. However, we’d argue that it’s Jenny’s entrepreneurial bent that most resonates with us—forever accented by those wasp nests. –Jack Sweeney

It was during a 9-year tenure at food giant ConAgra Brands that Alejandro Castro became involved in a companywide initiative that would forever alter his approach to leadership and strategic thinking.

Born and raised in Mexico, Castro had begun his professional voyage at Price Waterhouse, where he launched a public accounting career from the accounting house's Mexico City office. After ConAgra came knocking several years later, he accepted a position within its Mexico operations that eventually led to a promotion involving relocation to the U.S. and the firm's Omaha headquarters.

Castro tells us that this move was pivotal, offering him exposure to the food giant's global operations and strategic involvement at a high level that included participation on a board of directors in Asia. Still, Castro's path took somewhat of an unexpected turn when ConAgra's CEO approached him to help spearhead an initiative designed in part to boost efficient decision-making across the company. In short, ConAgra management had sanctioned the companywide adoption of the GE Work-Out methodology, and Castro was to be stationed along the implementation's front lines.

Division presidents, unit leaders, and factory workers alike all now came to be spending face-to-face time with Castro so that everyone together could identify existing behaviors or practices that were undermining efficient decision-making.

Castro recalls: "We were able to fix issues that had existed within the company for years and years. We did this by connecting the people who really knew what was going on—the people who were close to the job—and this quickly made a big difference."

Now, what might have appeared on paper to be but one career assignment among many suddenly began to accelerate Castro's own understanding of business operations while further establishing his reputation across the company as a leader known for fostering collaboration and driving meaningful change.

Says Castro: "For me personally, it was the interaction with the people and talking about the different issues that really altered my whole view of the business." –Jack Sweeney

Not unlike that of many of her CFO peers, Rachel Stack's journey toward becoming a CFO has been punctuated by pivotal transactions.

No single example of this turns out to have been more complicated or rich with lessons than what Stack refers to simply as "the take-private of Zayo."

However, before the path forward for Zayo was made clear, there had been a moment of strategic recalibration that would test her resolve and shape her approach to future challenges.

Reflecting on this period, Stack shares: "One big strategic moment has to have been when the attempted split of Zayo into two separate entities was being considered. We thought about splitting it into a fiber company and an enterprise firm."

The plan, aimed at unlocking value and sharpening strategic focus, did not go as planned. "The market's response was immediate and clear," Stack recalls. "The stock was down, I want to say, by 20%."

This moment of adversity, however, was far from a setback in Stack's eyes. Instead, it became a defining moment that refined her strategic thinking. "It was a clear message from the market that they didn't think that this was the way forward for Zayo," Stack explains. The feedback from the market, which was invaluable, led Stack and her team to reconsider their strategy and ultimately reconsider the take-private transaction.

"The take-private of Zayo was a significant turning point for me," Stack reflects. The complex negotiations, the building of relationships with different potential acquirers, and the ultimate decision to go with Digital Bridge and EQT showcased her ability to navigate through uncertainty and emerge with a strategic victory. "The whole experience was an entire adventure on its own," she muses, on the challenges faced during the transaction.

This episode of strategic redirection, followed by the successful take-private transaction, exemplifies Stack's resilience and strategic acumen. Her journey underscores the importance of being adaptable, learning from the market, and maintaining transparency and honesty in all dealings.

As CFO of Cologix today, Stack tells us, she has brought these lessons to bear, as she helps to steer the company through growth and change, while never losing sight of the fact that in moments of adversity, there always lies an opportunity for growth and strategic recalibration. 

Looking back on his days with GoDaddy, Sam Kemp recalls a pivotal page in the domain registry giant’s strategic M&A playbook.

As he prepared to present to the executive team his analysis of a recent acquisition, he included a simple slide to convey data that would challenge the company’s conventional thinking around acquisitions and how—free from the limitations of this thinking—GoDaddy’s newest acquisition could serve as a strategic lever for the company at large.

This driver, Kemp tells us, would challenge the high regard in which GoDaddy’s management team held new “profit pools” and the transactions that triggered them.

Recalls Kemp: “We decided to do a very counterintuitive thing: to not have a profit pool for the latest acquisition—in order to achieve faster adoption vis-à-vis price competition—and instead to use it to establish profit pools inside other categories that were related to it. This turned out to be a very successful strategy, and something that scaled really nicely.”

As the somewhat revolutionary slide illuminated the room, a collective focus sharpened among those at the table. Kemp then explained how the strategy would no longer be about short-term gains but about leveraging the acquisition to expand the company’s presence and to push profit pools into other connected categories.

For Kemp, who had been appointed chief strategy officer after a stint running Investor relations, the gathering became a moment when strategy and numbers intertwined to offer a clear vision of how to move into the future. Going forward, GoDaddy management became dedicated to the idea that M&A was about not just making an acquisition work financially but also integrating it into a broader strategic framework that would enable the company to capture more significant market opportunities.

Adds Kemp: “This slide, in this very simple format, was simply able to crystallize our perspective with regard to how we wanted to move forward as a business.” –Jack Sweeney

On this episode of Controllers Classified, Brex’s CAO Erik Zhou is joined by Angelina Hendraka, the CAO at Redis. The conversation begins with a recap of Angelina’s diverse experiences across financial services, biotech, and SaaS companies. Angelina notes that while KPIs shift based on business strategy & industry, the transition from one industry to another in her career has felt seamless given finance is the universal language of business. Erik and Angelina also discuss the transition from big 4 accounting firms to controllership, and the evolution of one’s approach with that transition (i.e. from being deep in technical accounting to thinking more broadly and operationally). The conversation then turns to recapping a recent panel discussion that Angelina participated in related to women in the workplace and fostering inclusive work environments. She shares her perspective on what it means to be an inclusive leader, and what more leaders can be doing to ensure diverse representation in finance and accounting. The dialogue pivots to some critical financial topics including how to make strategic and thoughtful spend decisions in the current cost containment environment, the role of a strategic procurement function in enabling smarter spend, and important financial processes for post-IPO success, including SOX readiness.

It’s an all-too-familiar tale among the ranks of senior finance executives: A private equity firm acquires a company, reshuffles the finance team, and reserves the top finance spot for one of its own portfolio CFOs.

At Qlik, though, this story had a less familiar ending—or at least one that did not include a portfolio CFO. Instead, back in 2016, when Thoma Bravo acquired King of Prussia, Pennsylvania’s Qlik, a seasoned veteran of the latter’s own finance team—Dennis Johnson—entered the CFO office.

For Johnson, there’s little question that his appointment validated the 8 career years that he had already invested with the company, a period during which he had sought to routinely contribute to the company’s growth and ongoing strategic transformation. It turns out that his senior finance roles—and in particular his involvement in the transition to a subscription-based model—had demonstrated his strategic vision and capacity for managing change effectively and thus opened a new door.

CFOTL: Tell us about Qlik … what doe

Elizabeth Mann began her career as a mathematician in academia, spending a decade in the field. Her initial plan had been to become a professor, on a path that would start with a Ph.D. and a postdoc.

However, something was missing. Eager to engage more directly with the world at large, she pivoted her career toward finance.

Mann found a door of entry at Goldman Sachs, where after initially filling a quantitative role involving complex financing structures she subsequently transitioned to investment banking and a new focus on M&A and corporate finance in the tech and media sectors.

After more than decade with Goldman Sachs, she moved to S&P Global. Here, after first handling such corporate finance areas as treasury, tax, and capital allocation, she eventually stepped into a divisional CFO role. This was her first experience on a leadership team, which offered her a broader view of running a business and deepened her operational expertise.

Mann’s journey led her to become CFO of Verisk, a provider of data, analytics, and technology to the insurance industry. Here, she focuses on leveraging the company’s foundation in data and analytics to enhance its offerings in the insurance sector, particularly in the face of challenges like climate change and technological advances. Her role now includes overseeing an extensive finance transformation, involving the upgrade of the company’s ERP system.

Looking back, Mann doesn’t second-guess her investment of early career years inside academia—if anything, she seems to value them all the more.  

Says Mann: “Those years were not wasted. I learned a lot about rigor and about how to think about things in a clear way and independent way, have the agency to come up with your own views and perspective, and really pursue an idea to its logical conclusion.” –Jack Sweeney

This episode of Planning Aces sheds light on the critical role financial leadership and strategic planning plays in guiding companies through turbulent times and the importance of balancing short-term opportunities with long-term strategic planning. Each of the featured finance chiefs faced unique challenges related to the pandemic’s impact on their businesses, and their responses offer valuable insights into effective financial leadership during times of crisis and change.

In each case, the CFOs demonstrated strategic foresight and adaptability in their planning, ensuring their companies could navigate through and beyond the pandemic’s challenges.

Resident thought leader Brett Knowles provide insights throughout the discussion, emphasizing the role of CFOs as the “voice of reason” in navigating short-term gains and long-term strategies. He highlighted the need for agility and adaptability in financial planning, acknowledging the complexity and unpredictability of market conditions.

It was the type of introduction that any MBA student would envy, and one at which David Snyder, 35 years later, still marvels.

Back in the late 1980s, a business school classmate introduced him to notable investor and billionaire tycoon Sam Zell, who subsequently offered Snyder a job.

Without hesitation, Snyder accepted Zell’s offer and in short order began working for him in Chicago, where he joined a group of recent young graduates whom Zell had recruited to help inside the realm of corporate acquisitions.

More than any one deal or acquisition target, Snyder recalls, the greatest lessons from his days with Zell came from the sideline conversations.

“Just by my proximity to Sam, I learned a lot—he had sort of a Socratic approach, whereby we would have a dialogue with him in which he would begin sharing the investor’s point of view and how an investor thinks about the operating prospects of a given investment,” remembers Snyder, who adds that from those days onward he has always “come to the table” thinking like an investor.

He reports: “I’ve carried this with me through all of the ensuing 30 years.”

Snyder’s exposure to Sam Zell and his work in corporate acquisitions honed his strategic thinking skills. He emphasized the importance of understanding the investor’s point of view and translating business strategy into financial terms. –Jack Sweeney 

Like many of her CFO peers, Karen Walker had an early career that was guided by abundant opportunities surrounding finance-driven decision-making within organizations.

It was a path that often led Walker to engage more closely with sales and operations, as was the case at CNET Networks, where she tells us that she recognized the limitations of embracing a strictly “rules-based” approach in finance.

It was at CNET that she embraced a more transformative perspective—prioritizing the customer’s objectives and challenges. This shift in thinking, emphasizing a customer mind-set, would continue as she advanced in her career.

At PagerDuty, the philosophy became instrumental in addressing the company’s rapid growth challenges. Now, as CFO at Sysdig, Walker tell us that it’s this commitment to understanding customer needs that guides the company’s approach to cloud security. Her journey reflects a progressive integration of customer-centricity into financial leadership, showcasing its adaptability and efficacy in diverse business environments.

Says Walker: “I think that one of the things that I have really learned over the years—and espouse as a philosophy—is that every employee—which includes, of course, finance—should really have a customer mind-set and really put the customer at the center of every decision that is made.”

This Episode is CFOTL Special Supplement. 

Franklin Templeton Chief Accounting Officer Lindsey Oshita expains how challenges faced during an ERP integration following a merger and the massive IT commitment it entailed. She highlights the significance of a chart of accounts and their potential adaptations, along with her team’s successful implementation of Workday at the start of the fiscal year.

Lindsey Oshita is the Chief Accounting Officer, Americas at Franklin Templeton. She’s spent 14 years at Franklin Templeton in various financial leadership positions, and was at Deloitte prior to that. Lindsey graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and a minor in Accounting.

CFO Michael Perica’s career journey began with an opportunity to work as a junior analyst for a national capital markets firm, where he would find a billionaire mentor. According to Perica, his association with the billionaire would ultimately offer him access to influential networks and unique opportunities. From his early days onward, Perica tells us, he became skilled at building connections with successful individuals—an expertise that would open the door to a diverse range of opportunities.

Perica’s entry into the CFO role during the COVID-19 pandemic—which occurred remotely, meaning that he didn’t meet his colleagues in person until several months later—perhaps highlighting his adaptability. Successfully leading a team without in-person interactions speaks to his ability to navigate challenges and maintain effective leadership—as so many of our finance leader guests have pointed out. –Jack Sweeney

For Emma Brown, it was as though she had just removed the sword from the fabled stone, a moment that would challenge the inclination to persistently question her own judgment when it came to business.

As is often the case, Brown’s moment of insight occurred in a high-pressure situation. Faced with poor financial visibility and the need to prevent a liquidity crisis, she championed the notion that her company’s finance team take a radical approach. Stripping everything back to basics, she delved into the fundamental aspects of cash flow, bank statements, and working capital.

This back-to-basics exercise revealed that the complexity of the business—large ERP systems, convoluted reporting, and complicated forecasting structures—was hindering understanding as well as impeding effective decision-making.

Brown’s strategic approach of simplifying complexity significantly boosted her confidence in navigating challenging situations within her career. The realization that complexity might indicate inherent issues within processes, systems, or structures shifted her perspective, empowering her to tackle problems with a newfound confidence. –Jack Sweeney

Four years ago, when Luigi Testa first joined LinkSquares as CFO, the Boston-area tech firm employed roughly 40 people. Today, with nearly 400 employees, the company is concerned less with growth and more about achieving a balance between growth and efficiency. To achieve this, LinkSquares management has made automation and AI adoption a priority.

According to Testa, the goal was to first identify repetitive and manual tasks that could be automated to reduce the need for hiring additional personnel. This is an approach that makes financial processes more sustainable in the long run, he points out, while also helping to control expenses.

Testa also notes that within the finance function, various routine tasks like billing, payment collection, and payroll processing were ripe for automation and AI implementation. Yet, while these new approaches could handle approximately 75% of these tasks, he emphasized the ongoing importance of human oversight to ensure accuracy and relevance.

It's no secret that Moderna's R&D efforts have expanded well beyond the realm of COVID-19. CFO Jamey Mock tells us that today the company has more than 40 drugs in its pipeline, with targets such as respiratory, latent, and rare diseases. As he explains, this diversity means that the biotech innovator is reliant not solely on one product or therapeutic area, which makes for less risk than would be the case if the company had only a single product focus.

Meanwhile, Mock leaves little doubt that the finance function is included in the firm's appetite for innovation when he details how Moderna's innovative use of mRNA technology has been a key factor in de-risking its R&D investments. Mock emphasizes that mRNA is the body's information molecule, which Moderna can quickly reprogram to target different diseases. This adaptability and flexibility make it easier for the company to adjust its approach if initial trials or results are suboptimal.

More than any other human quality or characteristic, Brandon Nussey is known for his calm demeanor—or so Coveo’s finance leader tells us near the end of our discussion.

It’s an observation that we’re not about to refute. After having spent 40 minutes in trying to identify just what it is that sets Nussey apart from his CFO peers, we had found his composure a trait to flag, even if he hadn’t ended up doing so himself.

This, of course, is an enviable quality always in demand in C-suites, yet at times it’s one that is easy to overlook.

In the case of serial CFO Nussey, the attribute perhaps first became evident during the earliest days of his career. Turning back the calendar to the early 2000s, when he received his first CFO appointment amidst the dot-com bubble burst, Nussey recalls a tour of duty that required him to always stay calm and composed in high-pressure, high-stakes environments.

Indeed, even to this day, he finds the circumstances much the same: “At the office, people use the word ‘calm’ to describe me perhaps more often than they employ any other adjective—at least to my face. At home, my daughters call me many other things.” –Jack Sweeney

Planning Aces Hosts Brett Knowles and Jack Sweeney discuss how AI's integration into FP&A is still in early stages, with many teams 'dabbling' in AI rather than regularly employing it. However, its use has been significant, inspiring creativity and improving team performance.

This episode's conversation emphasizes how FP&A is not just about financial numbers but involves drawing in non-FP&A players into the process. This approach fosters a more comprehensive and collaborative financial planning culture within organizations. They underscored that every member of an organization should consider themselves a 'capital allocator', responsible for contributing to the company's financial health.

Jim Moylan is perhaps our first CFO guest to list the leasing of oil rigs as one of the experiences that best prepared him for a CFO role. Of course, he makes it clear that the experience is worthy of mention not so much because of what he was selling but because he was selling at all.

“The best way to learn what a company does and understand its value proposition is to be a salesperson, and I have told this to people everywhere that I’ve been,” comments Moylan, whose stint as a salesman helped to kick off a 22-year career climb inside the ever-evolving world of energy company Sonat, Inc.

Sonat would provide Moylan with an expansive and varied career narrative. Having become known inside the company for his FP&A savvy, Moylan had a tenure that spanned a variety of leadership roles and included overseeing corporate strategy during a period of time when the company executed four acquisitions and two divestitures. He would also serve as president of one of the company’s largest subsidiaries.

Today, while Sonat resembles a sturdy bookend at one end of Moylan’s career, Ciena—the networking systems company where he has now logged 15 years as CFO—could likely serve as the other.

At Ciena, supply chain challenges have remained top-of-mind in 2022.

“The priority for the company and for me personally is to address our supply chain problem, fix it, and repair our image in the minds of our customers—because not only have we disrupted our business, but also we’ve disrupted their businesses,” remarks Moylan, who notes that Ciena’s product offerings depend on the regular replenishment of parts inventories comprising some 10,000 SKUs.

As with many finance leadership resumes, long tenures as well as the transactional nature of the finance field are what punctuate Moylan’s career. Turn back the clock to 1999, and Sonat was being acquired by El Paso Energy, a move that led Moylan to step into a CFO role at SCI Systems, the first of a succession of four CFO appointments for him within a mere 8 years.

Reports Moylan: “If it didn’t work for me, it didn’t work for me—and if I learned that quickly, l would leave.” –Jack Sweeney

When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American expats being deployed by digital disrupter SMB printer Vistaprint of Boston, Mass.

For the next 5 years, Quinn would be involved in a string of business acquisitions that would grow the digital printer’s European revenues from nothing to more than $500 million annually.

Based in Barcelona, Quinn spent roughly 3 weeks of every month traveling to other parts of Europe to evaluate the operations of different businesses as he and other executives sought to determine whether there was a solid business case for acquiring a company.

“I had the luxury of seeing into firms at both the executive and middle management levels, so I was able to acquire an understanding of how the executive team was operating and how the decisions that they would make would trickle down within the operation,” explains Quinn, who adds that as deal activity grew, Vistaprint ended up deploying a corporate development team from Paris to complete some of the initial due diligence.  

As the number of acquisition candidates grew, Quinn was tasked with taking a deeper dive into a target company’s operations, so he would often spend a number of days with company’s leadership team in order to better assess whether there could be a cultural fit.

“’Can this be one plus one equals three?’ would usually be the question that you were trying to answer,” continues Quinn, who points out that the answer to this hypothetical query was also dependent on whether his team believed that the acquisition candidate would succeed post-merger under a flat management model.

“We believed that flatter was better and that this was really an efficient way to grow,” comments Quinn, who notes that along the way he acquired a deeper understanding of manufacturing logistics as well as the pre- and post-sale dynamics of go-to-market strategies for both B2B and B2C companies.

However, his central role would always center on supplying the answer to the question of whether there was a strong business case for advancing a potential deal.

“When they brought something to the table through the pipeline, I would vet the business case first from our ability to execute it and then from a cultural perspective,” recalls Quinn, who stresses the significance of understanding and respecting cultural norms as well as local competitors.

Says Quinn: “If you’re going to go international, you must go all in and be prepared to make the investments to win in local markets because you’ll be facing local competition within their own primary market.” –Jack Sweeney

Greg Robbins began his career inside the realm of Big Six accounting houses, an experience that he tells us laid the foundation for a career in financial operations and strategy. However, he credits much of his leadership style to his time at Red Bull, where he learned that real development comes from hands-on experiences, insightful feedback, and formal training, a philosophy that he has carried forward throughout his career.

At Red Bull, Greg participated in several leadership development programs—including the "Scott Spooner Experience"—that profoundly influenced his professional approach. Spooner, a former special forces operative turned consultant, brought with him a unique perspective on leadership and resilience, emphasizing the importance of mental and physical endurance in challenging environments. This experience broadened Robbins's understanding of the qualities of leadership beyond the conventional corporate framework.

Our discussion with Christine Chambers has been going on for only a little more than 5 minutes when she tells us that she remembers sitting on the steps of a London flat years ago while contemplating life’s many twists and turns.  

It seems that the accommodation—which she had only recently acquired and unquestionably counted as a milestone in life—had with little warning come to present a dilemma.

At that time back in 2007, when Chambers was working as a financial analyst inside the UK operations of Seattle, Washington–based RealNetworks, the company suddenly offered her a promotion to work within its US operations.

The treasured flat became toast.

“Six weeks later, I was on a plane headed to the U.S.—and I think that this speaks at least a little to my nature of being adaptable and open in terms of welcoming opportunities that have arisen,” comments Chambers, who would first join RealNetworks stateside in its Washington, D.C.–area outpost before receiving an invitation from the company’s CFO in 2010 to relocate to Seattle to join its corporate offices.  

Eleven years later, Chambers would be appointed CFO of RealNetworks. Of course, career paths are seldom linear, and indeed Chambers’s CFO appointment at RealNetworks would arrive only after a 3-year stint as an FP&A leader with Rosetta Stone and two more as a planning and budgeting executive at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“I have always really leaned into my network for opportunities,” remarks Chambers, as she stops to consider the different doors that she has been able to swing open along the way.  

“By learning within my network," she observes, "I have sought to understand the dynamics within companies and the challenges and opportunities that they bring.”

The power of Chambers’s network was no doubt in play when PetMeds CEO Matt Hulett, a former colleague at Rosetta Stone as well RealNetworks, announced her appointment as PetMeds CFO in August 2022.

Says Chambers: “Matt and I very much understand the dynamics and challenges faced by organizations that have large, addressable markets and may have undervalued assets that need to be turned around. We have seen this both at Rosetta Stone and now at PetMeds.” –Jack Sweeney

If Mark Seidel had told us that he had spent many of his high school evenings peering through a telescope at the stars, we would have likely believed him. However, Seidel—CFO of space security start-up True Anomaly—swiftly short circuits the familiar narrative of a space-loving youth.

Instead, he draws our attention to his early entrepreneurial endeavors on eBay (he achieved power selling status while in high school), and, as for his finance career, he tells us that he has long preferred not to narrow his lens but to widen it.

Indeed, such was the case at Goldman Sachs, where he spent 7 career years as an investment banker.

“At Goldman, I was a generalist, so I got to cover all different types of industries and transactions—which means that the breadth and scope of the types of topics were incredibly wide,” recalls Seidel, who notes that it was this same preference for a wide lens that drew him to the CFO role.

Observes Seidel: “The CFO role is a cross-functional one. While strategy can mean different things to different people, for me it really fits within my scope, my roles, and my responsibilities as a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney 

Among the industries on which the pandemic was most known to have afflicted an extra helping of earnings chaos, most business analysts agree that the home fitness market is perhaps most deserving of special mention.

Indeed, few sectors logged steeper gains and more precipitous losses during COVID’s comings and goings than home fitness—and perhaps few demanded more reflexive, in-the-moment, decision-making inside the management cockpit.

At BowFlex (formerly Nautilus), that cockpit has been “manned” by CEO Jim Barr and CFO Aina Konold, both of whom entered the C-suite during the latter half of 2019—only to have COVID immediately upend their ensuing 2020 flight plan.

Over the past 4 years, Barr and Konold have remained buckled in together as they have educated investors in anticipation of completing a long-awaited turnaround that they predict will arrive in the near future.

Along the way, CEO Barr has demonstrated a willingness to address tough questions—just as has Konold, whose facility for disarming unwelcome news is perhaps worthy of envy among her CFO peers.

Says Konold: “A lot of finance people unfortunately stop after sharing the bad news—and then the CEO, the board, and the rest of the executive team, are left thinking: ‘Okay, so what do we do now?’ It’s important to have those answers.” –Jack Sweeney

When Michael Kennedy first stepped into the CFO office at the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) in 2018, he was surprised to learn that the association was spending $8 million annually on office space across the country.

“Why were we in these offices?,” asks Kennedy, voicing the question that helped to kick off the first of what he now characterizes as a multichapter digital transformation.

As it turned out, the 93 offices occupied by the MDA were a legacy of the organization’s historic Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, a once-massive annual fundraising event for that had lost its mojo in the Age of the Internet.

“MDA wanted to have an office near every local television station that was participating in the Telethon broadcast,” explains Kennedy, who notes that the MDA offices needed to compete with local Girl Scout troops and firefighters to secure fundraising airtime on the local affiliates.   

“But the fact is that we had stopped doing the Telethon 8 years before I arrived,” reports Kennedy, who adds that the $8 million that the MDA had once paid in real estate fees now goes entirely to support MDA’s causes and mission—a development that the pandemic no doubt helped to accelerate.

He continues: “We now have a 100 percent remote office environment.”

Still, the pandemic put much of the transformation at the MDA into a holding pattern, as fundraising events and activities came to a near standstill. According to Kennedy, however, the MDA is now on its way to matching and even surpassing pre-pandemic fundraising levels, as it opens yet another impressive chapter in its healthcare history. –Jack Sweeney

Insights from Planning Aces:

AI's Role in FP&A and Security Concerns:

It was back in 2016 when Lauren St. Clair realized that it was time to raise her hand.

Online marketplace giant eBay had just completed a deal to acquire the Spanish online ticket platform Ticketbis, and St. Clair, a 9-year eBay veteran, was itching to get overseas.

eBay had entered the online ticket business in 2007 with its acquisition of StubHub, and the addition of Ticketbis now promised to fatten StubHub’s international revenues, a development that St. Clair realized would likely require eBay’s finance function to beef up its leadership overseas.

“People knew that I wanted to live overseas, and it was just good timing with regard to me leaving the group to which I had been assigned,” explains St. Clair, who arrived in Bilbao, Spain, in early 2017 eager to open a career chapter as CFO of StubHub International.  

Of course, St. Clair had already spent some time overseas as a student and a finance adjunct on various international FP&A assignments. However, an overseas appointment was different, and in fact the opportunity for such a coveted stint called to mind for her some valuable advice that she had once received from one her early mentors.

St. Clair recalls: “He told me, ‘Build your reputation and take time to build a connection to the corporate office, so that when you raise your hand to go abroad, you’ll be top-of-mind there.’” –Jack Sweeney 

When Peter Benevides joined Olo back in 2015, the provider of restaurant technology's CFO office was vacant—as it would remain for the next 4 years, until he ultimately got the position thanks to a nod from the firm's CEO and perhaps a sprinkling of magic dust from Olo board members and investors.

Of course, things may have gone very differently for Benevides, as they so frequently do for many senior finance hires who, like Benevides, join fast-growing firms while knowing full well that there are no guarantees when it comes to C-suite appointments.

Thus, when given the opportunity to have Benevides reflect on his career, we thought it perhaps appropriate on our part to query Olo’s finance leader regarding what he feels that he got right along the way—especially with regard to any attributes or actions that may have made a difference in the career trajectory that for him has led to Olo.

According to Benevides, his success comes down to not having been afraid to ask others for help—a trait that he was to find increasingly beneficial as the company’s 2021 IPO drew ever closer.

It was during these months and years of career investment, Benevides tells us, that he found his attention focused by a number of critical undertakings, including making the transition from supporting a regional accounting firm to being part of a Big Four accounting house.

Besides being able to benefit from the fact that publicly traded firms offer a larger menu of services, the transition put in motion a Big Four “reference check” that afforded Benevides the opportunity to contact clients of the different firms.

Such was the nature of a phone call that he placed to one of the Big Four references.

“What was meant to be a 20-minute reference call turned out to be an hour-and-a-half-long chat,” recalls Benevides, who tells us that the reference happened to be the recently retired CFO of a publicly traded company.       

“Once I got off the phone, I said to our president and COO at the time, 'Gee, it would be amazing to have this person as an advisor to the company as we prepare to go through this IPO process,'” reports Benevides, who adds that the former C-suite executive became one of Olo’s invaluable IPO prep advisors. –Jack Sweeney

The Goldman Sachs “anti-raid” team was between conference calls with an embattled client company when word came that a senior member of the target company’s management team had unexpectedly died.

Looking back, Tom Fennimore says that the next few months of his early career years at Goldman then became a transition point—or period of accelerated learning.

“It was a very sad situation—they were in the process of being raided,” explains Fennimore, who lists the anti-raid transaction as one of two times when Goldman ultimately offered Fennimore an opportunity to “step up.”

The second example came after the resignation of a managing director responsible for the bank’s automotive sector.

“I got a battlefield promotion when they said, ‘Hey, we want you to do this, and—depending how you do—we may not replace you,” recalls Fennimore, who notes that while he savored the opportunity and enjoyed success in the role, certain parts of it had little to do with his skillset.

“I have a little bit of a baby face,” points out Fennimore, who also comments that members of management teams within the automotive sector were known to value seniority and often had lengthy tenures of multiple decades themselves.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Fennimore remembers one bit of related post–board meeting feedback with a little bite: “’Hey, look, you did a great job,’ they told me,” he reports. “‘The board loved you, but they did have one comment: This guy’s too young. They would feel a little more comfortable with somebody with a little more gray hair in the room.’”

As for the embattled client company that had unexpectedly lost a key member of management, Fennimore’s youthful appearance turned out to not be enough to deter an invitation for him to fill the company’s sudden management void by relocating to Toronto for a number of months.

“The person who passed away was in the middle of the transaction, so it reflected in a good way on me that the client had enough faith in me to have me go up there to live and help them to get things done,” explains Fennimore, who more than 20 years later is not yet sporting any gray hair.

In conclusion, he adds: “It’s great to be given a lot of responsibility at a young age, but there will be some unique challenges. You try not to take things personally and to just move on.” –Jack Sweeney

When 21-year PwC veteran Mark McCaffrey decided that it was time to open his post-PwC career, he briefed the firm’s U.S leadership about his plans, diligently outlined 24 months of departure prep, and set aside an extra helping of patience.  

Two weeks later, he had a CFO job offer from publicly traded Internet domain company GoDaddy. 

“At the time, I thought that I’d have a couple of years to figure out what my next step was going to be,” recalls McCaffrey, whose 2021 CFO appointment was notable not just for the speed with which McCaffrey landed the role but also for the substance behind the match that was made.

Phenom CFO Davinder Athwal tells us that he has a personal connection to his company’s mission. Near the beginning of our talk, he shares a touching story about his father, a highly skilled individual who struggled to find a job in the UK. This personal experience fuels his passion for Phenom’s mission: to help a billion people to discover the right work. It’s not just about finding a job; it’s about finding the right job that matches skills with aspirations, as Athwal is eager to explain.

The Phenom platform is not just another job-matching site, he points out. Using pattern recognition technology to match candidates with jobs, Phenom’s approach goes beyond what’s written on a resume to recognize all of the essential skills needed for a particular job—even those not listed on an application.

Athwal joined Phenom during a challenging time in the industry, one that led to a strategic moment when he had to make the decision to prepare the company for cash flow break-even—a move that would turn out to be not only critical but also crucial for the company’s future survival and growth.

The Three Phases of Teresa Chia’s Career: Teresa Chia’s journey to becoming a CFO is divided into three distinct phases. The first saw her honing her skills in investment banking and private equity at Credit Suisse in NYC. The second found her in the insurance industry, where she discovered her passion for the field and learned about its complexity and regulatory aspects. The most recent phase has seen her also serving on the boards of various companies, a testament to her industry connections and expertise. The Shift in Focus: After two decades of focusing on strategy and capital deployment, Chia felt a shift in her interests. She wanted to be more involved in the execution of growth plans and building the infrastructure for such growth. This led her to the role of a CFO, where she could leverage her finance knowledge while also contributing to strategic execution.

For corporate finance executives, few professional experiences are as adeptly converted into social currency as those manifested inside the realm of mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

It seems that regardless of whether a finance executive has been involved in one deal or 40, they are usually able to quickly share a takeaway or two. For finance leader Natalie Laackman, the latter would be the case—or, rather, the latter times two, as she estimates that she has been involved in 75 to 100 such transactions.

Regarding the M&A snapshot, Laackman relates that among her most memorable is one taken around 2001, when her expansion-minded employer asked her to “move a deal along” with a family-owned company in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

“There were two brothers who had built this very interesting business—I was asked to start the negotiations, so I flew down to Sao Paulo by myself,” recalls Laackman, who tells us that as a security precaution, she was assigned two armed guards upon her arrival.

On the occasion of her visit, the two brothers extended to Laackman an invitation to discuss the deal at a family dinner.

“This was their baby, and they wanted to sell it to a company that they felt would grow it and continue to nurture it and love it just as they had,” comments Laackman, who adds that the family dinner was served at 11:00 p.m. at the home of one of the brothers. Gathered around the table that night were children, wives, and a grandparent who was celebrating his 80th birthday, Laackman explains.

“I realized that I needed to demonstrate that I was a person who represented something that could be a great cultural fit for their company,” remarks Laackman, who notes that on that night, she needed to summon all of her “influencing skills” in order to muster an approach that would involve both the technical and human side of doing business.

Roughly 3 months and two or three more trips to Sao Paolo later, a deal was signed, reports Laackman, who today looks back fondly on her food industry days despite having since switched to the healthcare industry—where today she is the CFO of MedSpeed, a provider of same-day healthcare logistics.

Says Laackman: “At the same time that I was asked to join MedSpeed, I was contacted by a $10 billion food company. I knew that I kind of had the playbook for that, but there was this extra appeal about MedSpeed: It had a mission involving a need that was going to be ever critical, and it was a place where I could make a positive impact.” -Jack Sweeney

This episode features insights and commentary from three finance leaders: CFO Michael Linford of Affirm, CFO Ana Chadwick of Pitney Bowse, and CFO Jason Leet of Zylo.

Imagine if the three finance leaders were to meet and have a discussion about their current roles. Each of them has a unique story to tell. Michael Linford, for example, was previously part of HP's M&A integration group and later became the first CFO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise after the split-off. Anna Chadwick played a key role in GE Capital's divestiture chapter, overseeing more than 50 divestitures globally. Jason Leet, on the other hand, has extensive experience in M&A, having been involved in over 40 different acquisitions during his time at Salesforce and Exact Target.

Back in 2017, Donald McClure had only recently been appointed vice president of FP&A at Brinks Home Security when the company’s CFO at the time decided that it was the right time for retirement.

Unbeknownst to McClure—and perhaps even to the firm’s subsequent new CFO hire—a transformative chapter was about to get under way at the security firm that involved a massive restructuring and Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

For McClure, a 6-year Brinks veteran who had already had a hand in multiple debt refinancings, the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process proved to be yet one more experience that would advance him down the CFO path.

“We ended up negotiating a prepackaged restructuring, whereby we utilized the Chapter 11 process but at the same time sort of did all of the work in advance,” recalls McClure, who tells us that he quickly became the newly hired CFO’s “Number Two.”

Whether it was while consulting with the firm’s general counsel or with its CEO, McClure's CFO kept him ringside as they together educated others as to the ongoing process and its desired outcome.

“We were telling the story of the company in an environment where we were not just trying to refinance but also taking the constraints off to ask, 'What is the right capital structure for this business?,'" reports McClure, who notes that multiple financing partners were being engaged at once.

“At one point, we had four different types of debt and various stakeholders at the table trying to help us to figure out how we were going to structure this—it was really eye-opening in terms of understanding the importance of what we were doing and how the stakes were real," explains McClure, who adds that once the restructuring was in his rearview, he felt that it was time to move on.

Says McClure: “I knew that my work would be kind of done at this point, so I had been looking around and was able to find a company looking for a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney 

It’s a question rooted in surprise headlines that has now become one of 2023’s favorite conversation starters for finance executives inside the tech realm: “Where were you when you heard the news about Silicon Valley Bank [SVB]?”

For Tipalti CFO Sarah Spoja, the query instantly summons memories of being seated between two of Tipalti’s financing partners: JP Morgan and Hercules Capital, Inc.

Or perhaps we should say two of its "future" financing partners. Spoja, along with Tipalti’s attorneys, had gathered in a conference room with prospective partners to finalize the terms of a deal designed to secure a $150 million debt-raise for the growing business.

Looking back, Spoja tells us that the date of the gathering will forever be etched in her mind: Thursday, March 9, 2023. Within the next 24 hours, Silicon Valley Bank would be closed by the California Department of Financial Protection & Innovation, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would be named its “receiver.” The public would receive no advance notice of the bank's closing.

Still, the escalating challenges at SBV were no secret, and as Spoja met that Thursday in March with Tipalti’s prospective investors, SVB (which had been solvent only 24 hours earlier) would be broke within hours as depositors rushed to withdraw their funds.

Thus, the terms of Tipalti’s debt-raise were not the only business that Spoja was seeking to finalize as she took a seat at the table. Besides securing the $150 million in debt, Spoja and her treasurer were simultaneously tracking the removal of Tipalti funds from SVB in real time.

“For finance people, the thought was ‘Okay, I need to protect my company, so I need to do X, Y and Z before wire transfers are cut off,'" she recalls. "But at the same time, in the backs of our heads, we were all thinking, 'I really hope that this isn’t going where it looks like it's going.'”

Meanwhile, the terms finalized on Thursday, March 9, ultimately sealed a $150 million debt deal that would be announced by Tipalti in early that May. Why hadn't either of the prospective financing partners experienced cold feet in light of the escalating developments at SVB? Spoja tells us that “tougher diligence conversations” had already taken place to help to placate concerns about a changing economic climate. What’s more, she says, a “mutual trust” had been established that had allowed the deal to not to get stalled.   

Still, you can’t help but hear the winds that were howling outside the doors of Tipalti’s March 9 meeting.

Says Spoja: “It was a moment that a finance professional would always remember, particularly if they were in tech—because we all generally have a story.”

There's little doubt, though, that Spoja’s story is better than most. –Jack Sweeney

The corporate headquarters of Bend All Automotive may have been a mere 30-minute drive from KPMG’s offices in Waterloo, Ontario—but Melissa Howatson had to put in a 6-year career investment at the accounting house before she came to realize that it was time to go the distance.

Not unlike those of many of her peers, Howatson’s years in public accounting were laden with mentorship generously supplied by a partner (and a number of senior managers). KPMG was an enviable launchpad populated by many professionals who remain in Howatson’s life today, as she explains when we make inquiries to better understand the motivations and choices made by this future CFO. 

When Howatson arrived inside Bend All’s corporate offices in late 1999, she used the preferred door-of-entry for accountants far and wide: controllership. She would have a lengthy tenure there (10 years), which leads us to prod her in hope of better exposing what she perceives to be the return on this career-years investment.

In the early 2000s, it seems, auto parts manufacturer Bend All may well have had traditional expectations for whoever filled the role of controller that didn’t necessarily include undertaking menu of strategic finance initiatives. 

Looking back, Howatson tells us that she now wishes that she perhaps had been “more deliberate” when it came to acquiring financial planning and analysis experience during the early years of her career. Still, she lets us know that she satisfied her growing appetite for financial insight by tapping finance expertise that resided with professionals outside Bend All’s existing accounting and finance functions.

“We had a very strong engineering leader who was very financially astute, so I would really lean in to try to understand how his part of the business worked,” recalls Howatson, who notes that she eventually sought to build her own “tight” network of professionals across the company.

“I had to build my own network in order understand how the key inputs could help me to build a financial plan, but this was something that I really had to learn on my own as I went along,” she continues.  

Fast-forward a few years, as Howatson finds herself in a conference room seated alongside Bend All management and a number of bankers. The topic for discussion is the potential sale of the company, and Howatson is expected to participate in a management presentation.

“This was when I realized that I needed to practice those skill sets,” explains Howatson, who reports that although she had never really feared presenting to groups before, the possibility that she’d be presenting to the future owner of the business presented circumstances altogether different.

She adds: “While our CEO and president covered a lot of  the material, I appreciated the chance to present. I was a little nervous, but it did help that I had the confidence of the CEO behind me.” –Jack Sweeney 

For those executives residing inside the private equity and investment banking realm that aspire to someday occupy the CFO office, it’s not uncommon to seek out an “operator’s role” – one that allows recruiters “to check the box” and confidently present a leadership candidate (operations credentials intact) to a company’s management team or board members.

 “Inspect your chute carefully and jump smart,” might be the abbreviated advice for those looking to land inside an operations role.  Once inside, the goal is to canvas the corridors and collaborate with the company functional areas and managers the banking world seldom sees.  Sometimes such operations stints are little more than a year long, while others last several years and incorporate roles at multiple companies.  

For Michael Linford, whose chute opened wide, the operations tour of duty was at Hewlett-Packard, and the multiyear stint would arguably afford him more operational insights than any aspiring CFO could hope to glean.

“When I joined the decision to separate HP’s consumer business and the enterprise business had been made,” explains Linford recalling his 2015 arrival within the firm’s M&A integration team.   The historic split up of Hewlett-Packard company was structured so that the former company would change its name to HP Inc., spin off Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a newly created company and sell off its enterprise services business.

“As the slpit off was happening we knew we had to continue to grow the company. …There was a duality to it.  If you want to achieve change, you must continue to buy and sell companies at the same time,” comments Linford, who tells us he quickly became involved with helping integrate a recently acquired networking firm that had stumbled since being acquired.

“The networking business had been growing quickly, but as it came into the HP mothership it had just stalled, so we spent a lot of time getting that business back on track – and this was as the larger separation was underway – so we were tasked with building a real business and at the same time shed these other businesses,” explains Linford, who tell us the role taught him to be mindful of distractions.  

“If you didn’t focus on getting the value from the acquisitions that were being made – what is left wouldn’t have any value,” comments Linford, who tell us the networking business would ultimately become a “material part” of the business.  

Roughly two years into his M&A stint, Linford joins HP’s software business where he would serve as finance leader for the newly formed HP Enterprise.  

 “That was where I encountered one of the hardest problems I’ve ever had to solve in my career,” comments Linford, who tells us the succession of business separations within HP led to a talent shortage as employees found themselves attached to one or another entity.   

“By the time we got to the software business separation, there was nothing left in the cupboard. And so, we had to stand up a whole new technology stack to operate the business. And we had to hire a whole new team to support the business,” remarks Linford, who once more emphasizes the stiff price for indulging distractions.  

He explains “Staying focused on the job at hand while all this change is happening around you is a tremendous leadership challenge, and its alongside the technical, operational and finance challenges that were all very real for us.” – Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Affirm .. what does this firm do and what are its offerings today?

Linford: So Affirm’s mission is to build honest financial product that improve lives. We’re a payment network that helps consumers purchase the things they want and need. And we help merchants grow their businesses. Many people, especially millennial and Gen Z consumers, are not happy with the choices they have for their existing credit products. They do not want to be revolving on credit cards. They do not want the ball and chain that comes with compounding debt.

And with Affirm, they don’t have to. We have never charged late fees. We don’t compound interest on interest. We give consumers immutable certainty of the cost of financing when they check out. We can bring 0% as well as interest bearing products to help merchants offer a differentiated set of financing offers to their consumers. And in all of this is with an eye towards attacking what we think is a lot of areas of potential future benefit for consumers and harm that happens today where consumers do fall into a lot of traps.

I have nine siblings. I grew up as one of 10 people. And I like to tell folks that I don’t care how wealthy you are, financially caring for 10 human beings is something that will put an incredible amount of stress on your financial life. And so for me growing up, there was always a constraint on even access to credit. And my parents were certainly not immune from those who fall into the spiral of never ending credit card debt.

And I saw what Max was building and I said, this is going to be something that has the opportunity to change the world. And that was my criteria. To answer your question, I did not want to work. If I was going to get out of bed and I was going to stop my four times a week running routine and going to the gym, I was going to do all that. I wanted it to be on something that I thought had a good chance of changing the world.

And with that audacious statement, which truly, it’s a lot of audacity to say you want to get out of bed and change the world. I wanted to do it somewhere that I thought was going to do it responsibly. And the combination of financial services, technology, solving a real problem for consumers, to never charge late fees, and then to position yourselves with real principles, we like to say that we will never profit off of a consumer’s misfortune or mistake.

When Ralph Leung relocated to Hong Kong from Morgan Stanley’s New York offices, he was a newlywed eager to energize the financial world as one of the bank’s senior deal makers for the Asia Pacific region.

Four years later, when he accepted a call from a U. S. recruiter, he had been credited with having helped led numerous transactions (mostly IPOs) from the region, including Alibaba Group’s historic $25 billion IPO. What’s more, Leung had become the father of two.

“It was time to go back home,” recalls Leung, who would relocate to San Francisco’s Bay Area after accepting a finance leadership role for an online video and entertainment company. 

Looking back on his Hong Kong years, Leung tells us that the experience was a departure from his previous Morgan experience because it involved advising more early-stage founders and entrepreneurs.   

“I learned what Series A, Series B, and Series C meant and how to grow a business from different capital perspectives,” continues Leung, who credits the experience with having helped to open the door to CFO roles within early-stage companies.

Still, Leung tells us that some of the best learning experiences from his banking years came from transactions that never occurred, including one IPO that after 2 years of persistent effort failed to capture the necessary investor attention.   

“It was taking a lot of time to educate investors, and while we thought that we could get over the hump by using industry research and really demonstrating how the company could be a profitable business, we underappreciated the difficulty of advancing the narrative,” explains Leung, who tells us that the IPO was “shut down” when the company opted instead to reposition itself according to investor feedback and give itself an operations boost to make it more attractive to investors.

“So, the business responded and made some changes, rather than just trying to have us sell through certain obstacles,” reports Leung, who adds that ultimately the business went public a year or so later.  

He concludes: “Some obstacles just have to be respected and resolved.” –Jack Sweeney

Of the different acquisitions with which Jason Leet became involved at ExactTarget of Indianapolis, Indiana, there’s little question that the seventh was the most impactful on his finance career.

As it turned out, this would also be his last acquisition—or perhaps we should say his last ExactTarget acquisition, given that this time it was ExactTarget itself that was being acquired.

In 2013, ExactTarget became not only the largest company that tech wunderkind Salesforce had ever acquired but also the first publicly traded one.

Over the next 9 years, Leet would work on more than 40 acquisitions for Salesforce, including an additional four publicly traded firms. What’s more, over this period he would lead the finance team that took charge of what he calls Salesforce’s “best-in-class M&A machine.”

However, turn back the clock to his ExactTarget days, and it’s easy to see that for a number of months, Salesforce did indeed flip Leet’s world upside down. 

“I was involved in some of the diligence, so I was aware of what was going down several months in advance,” explains Leet, who had joined ExactTarget in 2006, as he vividly recalls for us the company’s impressive climb upward—along with its disappointing 2007 decision to pull its IPO due to Wall Street’s economic collapse.

“Never waste a good crisis: Having that IPO door slammed became a pivotal moment in our future success,” comments Leet, who tells us that ExactTarget then turned to private investors for funding, which allowed the company to generously invest in the business at a time when many firms were curtailing their spending.   

After consecutive years of impressive revenue growth, ExactTarget went public in 2012, after which Salesforce came knocking on the door with a $2.5 billion deal in 2013.   

“Since this was Salesforce’s first acquisition of a publicly traded company, there was a sense of being in it together with the Salesforce folks with regard to how this whole thing was going to work,” remarks Leet, who tells us that when word of the deal first surfaced, he fed his enthusiasm for the career chapter that lay ahead by buying a copy of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s book Behind the Cloud.

”To me,” he continues, “the acquisition was an opportunity, first, to support the business—but as you go through an integration, it’s also a chance to follow different lanes of experience, with an eye toward growing with your different teams.”

For Leet, this growth would remain inside the realm of M&A, where his 9 years at Salesforce would be what he describes as always being “fresh,” as he became engaged with the different management teams of the companies that Salesforce acquired and sought out knowledge to help in determining how best to invest in the acquired firm to maximize post-acquisition top-line growth.

From the ExactTarget acquisition on forward, Leet tells us, M&A has consistently broadened his view of the role that finance plays in business and exposed to him how often the “people part” is the most time-consuming yet most vital aspect of the success of an acquisition.

Leet concludes: “My team and I had this sense of ownership, in that we took personally the success or failure of the acquired companies—and because of this, we were able to step up and play a broader leadership role.” –Jack Sweeney

Brett and Jack draw parallels between the challenges faced by our three featured Planning Aces as they seek to optimize the talent resources and processes in their different organizations.

The pressure to align strategy and execution is increasing, and all three CFOs share their responses to these external pressures. Brett also touches on the adoption of AI in finance. With AI, the depth of analysis and speed of feedback are significantly enhanced, leading to faster decision-making and more innovative ideas as revealed by CFO Steven Cirulis of Potbelly

The episode features planning insights and commentary from Tony Boor, CFO of Blackbaud, Michelle, Hook, CFO, Portillo’s and Steven Cirulis, CFO Potbelly.

OUR COHO

Roughly 20 years ago, Neha Krishnamohan arrived as a college freshman on Duke University’s Durham, N.C., campus, intent on pursuing a career that would someday grant her the agency to develop a product or therapy capable of solving a healthcare problem.

Having grown up among family members with different careers in the medical field, Krishnamohan had inherited a deep interest in medicine—although she felt that her tendency to want to be more “hands-on” might make engineering a more suitable field of study.

“As far as I was concerned, I was going to go to work for a Medtronic or a Pfizer, where I would come up with a great new product,” reports Krishnamohan, who after enrolling in Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering chose biomedical engineering as her major.

As Krishnamohan was ratcheting up her engineering studies, one of her professors made a lasting impression on her by enlivening their discussions with tales of past experiences as a Wall Street banker.

“The idea that the financial merits of a company really inform its decision-making and that you as a finance person are at the center of critical decisions that need to be made was intriguing, to say the least,” recalls Krishnamohan, who along the way began thinking of investment banking as perhaps an alternative path along which to achieve her goal of developing a medical product.   

As her college years progressed and Krishnamohan applied to a number of investment bank internship programs, eventually she nabbed a spot at Goldman Sachs, which subsequently offered her a full-time position upon her graduation in 2008.  

“This was a tumultuous time to be starting a career in investment banking, but I think that it helped to lay a foundation for me with regard to the importance of being prepared for the worst,” explains Krishnamohan, who would remain at Goldman Sachs for a period 13 years, 11 of which were spent inside the firm’s healthcare investment banking group. Krishnamohan ended up being named a Goldman vice president in 2015, about midway into her lengthy tenure with the firm.

In this same year, while Krishnamohan was tasked with helping a Boston-based client to prepare for an IPO, a snowstorm prevented her manager and Goldman colleagues from attending the company’s “drafting sessions,” wherein the firm’s management and lawyers would toil for many hours over a period of days to create its IPO documents.

As Krishnamohan remembers, “I knew that the room was going to be looking to me for the right guidance, so I embraced this and found myself having a point of view, asking questions, guiding them through the story—and I saw that people were listening. It was a remarkable 3 days.”

“Leadership doesn’t have to have all the answers,” she adds. “You have to listen and drive toward decisions that have conviction.” –Jack Sweeney

It was late 2020 when Michelle Hook ended 17 years of fruitful career-building at Domino’s to accept a CFO appointment at fast casual restaurant chain Portillo’s.  

“The two things that I was looking for were to be passionate about a new brand and to feel a culture fit,” recalls Hook, who adds that she had long imagined someday leaving Domino’s to join a smaller company that she could help to grow.

“I just didn’t care about going to a bigger company or ‘X,’ ‘Y,’ or ‘Z,’” continues Hook, who tells us that she ultimately took a leap of faith with regard to there being a culture fit at Portillo’s.

“I actually never stepped into our headquarters until my first day on the job and had met in person only with the CEO, since this was during COVID times and the rest of the hiring process had been done on Zoom,” comments Hook.

Fast-forward 15 months to when the Omicron variant was still grabbing headlines and inflation had begun to rattle the economy—and Hook could not escape the notion that the traditional Portillo’s restaurant needed to change for the post-COVID world.

“I thought to myself, I think that we’re overbuilding our restaurants—we need to think about where the puck is going,” remembers Hook, who notes that Portillo’s dine-in customers in today’s post-COVID environment account for only roughly 35 percent of the chain’s volume.

“I had come from Domino’s, which didn’t have these big dining rooms and had built out a heavily digital business,” remarks Hook, who reports that Portillo’s digital business represents only 20 percent of overall sales.

This subject soon surfaced at an executive strategy session at which Portillo’s CEO, Michael Osanloo, tasked Hook and Portillo’s head of marketing with leading an initiative dubbed “Restaurant of the Future.”   

“I think that Michael knew that I’d take on the project by using a data-driven lens,” comments Hook, who points out that the project has involved “time and motion studies” involving specific restaurants and their conveyance activities within the kitchen.      

“Getting the engine right in the car is super important to us,” she says. “This will bring benefits not only on the cost side of things but also for our team members, who will find it easier to complete their work.” –Jack Sweeney

Not unlike that of many of his CFO peers, Derrek Gafford’s career path has been shaped in part by geography—specifically, by having its origins in a city that was at once home to a state college, the corporate headquarters of a marquee company, and a Big Four accounting office populated with new college grads.

In Gafford’s case, the city was Boise; the college, Boise State; the marquee company, grocery giant Albertsons; and the Big Four accounting house, Deloitte.

“I had worked my way through Boise State in an Albertsons grocery store, which actually paid for a lot of my education,” explains Gafford, who upon graduating with an accounting degree would end up nabbing a job with Deloitte’s Boise office.

“Originally, the only job that I had ever really wanted was to work in finance at Albertsons,” he continues, “and guess what company became the first account that Deloitte assigned me to?”

After about 2 years with Deloitte, Gafford joined Albertsons’ internal audit staff, from which he eventually advanced to oversee the company’s audit department while reporting directly to Albertsons’ CFO.

“As an internal auditor, I had traveled the country visiting stores and distribution centers, so I had gotten a feel for the various aspects of the business and how the company operated,” recalls Gafford.

However, after 6 years with Albertsons, Gafford began to consider different finance leadership roles beyond Boise’s city limits.

“The way things were headed,” he remembers, “it seemed like I was going to be a lifelong leader of internal audit—which is not where I wanted to be. There was this small, privately held grocery company in Seattle that was looking for a CFO, and the CEO and I got along, so we packed up and headed north.” –Jack Sweeney

We are near the end of our discussion with CFO Svai Sanford when he permits us to unlock one last door to his past.

Unbeknownst to us, 20 minutes earlier, Sanford had handed us the key to its lock in the form of a short story.

The story had begun with Sanford receiving a job offer, to which he had replied, “Are you sure? I do not have any experience in this sector.”

His future boss had replied: “You will figure it out.”

At first, we were left wondering whether there had been something more that the future boss had known about Sanford—perhaps a piece of contributing evidence that had made him feel confident that Sanford could acclimate and succeed.

“There’s something in me that has always allowed me to figure things out,” Sanford had confided.

Sanford’s choice of words—“something in me”—had been interesting. Certainly, there is no shortage of problem-solving exercises along any CFO’s path, but he had already told us that his career track had likely been different from that of other CFOs—and we had sensed that the “something” to which he had been referring had not yet been disclosed to us.

Still, as Sanford had helped us to check off the requisite CFO career milestones via his engaging and modest narrative, we eventually had heard about his arrival in the C-suite—which for a moment had led us to consider how Sanford’s success story is not remarkably different from that of other CFOs.

However, that’s exactly why it’s so remarkable, or so we later realize.

As we enter the final minutes of our discussion, we learn that Sanford had arrived in the United States as a 13-year-old refugee from Laos, who with only a 3rd-grade education had entered a Kansas City high school while not yet speaking a word of English.

How does someone enter the C-suite some 20 years later after having surmounted such adverse circumstances?

Here’s where we find the key that Sanford gave us.

We think of the 13-year-old Sanford and hear the words of his future boss, “You will figure it out.” –Jack Sweeney

When Charly Kevers took his mentor’s advice and swapped a corporate development role at Hewlett-Packard for a tour of duty as a director of HP’s investor relations arm, he looked forward to tackling a variety of IR requisites, including crafting the messaging that follows a change at the top.

Two years and four HP CEOs later, Kevers exited HP knowing that his IR term (with its extra helping of CEO turnover) had afforded him a stint unlike any before it at HP.

“It’s a highly stressful role when you are standing in front of the Fidelitys of the world and they’re asking you a lot of questions beginning with ‘What does it mean for the business and what does it mean for my stock,’” explains Kevers, who subsequently stepped into a corporate development role at Salesforce. 

“That experience has since helped me by allowing me in many cases to rationalize things by saying, ‘Well, this is not as bad as what I dealt with there,’” comments Kevers, who these days, as CFO of Carta, appears to be focused as much on internal communications as he is on external PR.

“Having worked mostly for public companies, I‘ve been trained to not talk about any number that isn’t public information, but here at Carta, we are very transparent,” remarks Kevers, who adds that he is routinely surprised by how Carta employees respond to numbers.

“We’ve been very transparent about where we want to save money and have sought to explain why we care about gross margin and metrics like sales efficiency and other things that contribute to profitability, and I have been surprised by how much people will care about them and then take ownership of them by finding ways to improve these metrics,” reports Kevers, who notes that Carta’s efforts to achieve greater  transparency are visible on the company’s P&L, which now reports the gross margin for different product areas along with product-specific marketing and R&D spending.

“We can now look at how the Rule of 40 applies to every one of our product areas, so the board room discussions can be much more in-depth when it comes to discussing tradeoffs” observes Kevers, who seems to harbor as much enthusiasm for transparency outside the boardroom as he does for clarity inside its doors.

“If you’re transparent and explain what metrics need to be watched,” he says, “doing so really does help to drive productive discussions between finance and the rest of the business.” –Jack Sweeney

Looking back, Jeff Coulter is not exactly certain how he landed a spot on a team tasked with designing and implementing the first-ever budgeting and reporting processes responsible for tracking Procter & Gamble’s marketing dollars on a single worldwide system.

“P&G had hundreds of disparate setups that we had to bring into one system globally,” explains Coulter, recalling the effort behind the information systems upgrade with SAP software that many at the time (the year 2000) deemed to be a historic milestone not only for the packaged goods company but also for industry at large.

Coulter had been plucked out of Procter & Gamble’s Iowa City office, where he had been working as a cost analyst for such products as Pantene and Scope. The new assignment required Coulter to relocate to Cincinnati, where for the next 2 years he became involved in multiple aspects of the implementation, including the rollout of SAP end-user training across P&G globally.

“At the time, any career management at Procter & Gamble was essentially the result of a benevolent dictatorship—you were basically told where you were going to go next,” remembers Coulter, who adds that the experience and training that he gleaned along his P&G way made his time there a very worthy investment.

Still, Coulter was eager to return west. Living close to family had always been a priority for the young finance executive, and Cincinnati turned out to be not so short a stint.  

Consequently, while geography is perhaps not the first reason that people give for having joined Intel Corporation, for Coulter—who would first join the chip maker’s Portland, Oregon, complex—it was certainly among his top three impetuses.

To move from a consumer products company to a technology company may seem unconventional, but Coulter tells us that his love for learning and his growth mindset helped him to adapt quickly at Intel, where he would remain for the next 6 years. He emphasizes the versatility of finance, which allows professionals to work across various industries.

Says Coulter: “I love learning business models and figuring out how they’re making money and how to optimize that.” –Jack Sweeney

The year was 2015, but for Jeff Laborde, a seasoned finance leader kicking off his second C-suite tour of duty, it seemed as though the conference room that he had just entered had transported him back to 2005—or was it 1995?

Across the way, an executive who had noticed Laborde’s presence stopped the meeting and queried: “Jeff, what are you doing here? Why are you in my meeting?”

Caught by surprise and somewhat tongue-tied, Laborde recalls, he registered a less than articulate response to the question that had quickly swallowed up the room’s attention.  

Having only recently joined the company as CFO, Laborde was seeking to sit in on a number of meetings in order to better understand how the company operated. Given that this particular gathering had been expected to discuss go-to-market priorities for the upcoming quarter, Laborde had made it his business to attend.

“I was only following my instincts, and it came as a shock to me to find their swim lanes so impervious to being swapped or crossed,” continues Laborde, who adds that the experience highlighted for him the importance of fully understanding a role’s limitations before accepting an appointment.

It wouldn’t be long, though, before Laborde’s career transported him back to 2015. “I realized that I wouldn’t be happy in the strict silo of finance without understanding what’s around the corner,” he remembers.

Still, Laborde tells us, finance leaders who expect to cross lanes and enter different operational areas of the business must always be approachable, while at the same time being prepared to experience what he refers to as “Oh crap!” moments.  

He doesn’t provide us with much further detail here, but we assume that such instances involve developments that are perceived to put the operations of the business at significant risk. Nonetheless, Laborde’s advisory is less about managing risk per se and more about serving as a reminder to finance leaders to be mindful of the nature of their response to crisis.

“Stay calm, get your facts straight, don’t overreact—and just know that these moments are going to come,” emphasizes Laborde, who characterizes such moments as the status quo for CFOs who make looking around corners a priority.

For those finance leaders who do not, Laborde tell us, time travel remains a viable option.

He observes: “You shouldn’t assume that you’ll be welcome within core areas of the business. There are some CEOs and ownership structures that don’t expect or want the CFO to go there.” –Jack Sweeney

While the leadership journeys of many of our CFO guests began on an upper floor of a glass-and-steel skyscraper affording a wide-angle view of a cosmopolitan metropolis, that of Blackbaud CFO Tony Boor started at street level in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.

Less than an hour’s drive north of El Paso, Texas, Las Cruces is home not only to the main campus of New Mexico State University but also to a crowded schedule of holiday festivals and a varied collection of retailers—including motorcycle shops such as the one that Boor first visited in the mid-1970s.

“When I was 13 or 14 years old, I walked into a motorcycle shop to buy my first bike and they ended up hiring me to sweep floors and haul trash,” recalls Boor, who over the next 10 years segued from maintenance to the service department, to parts management, to sales management, to being general manager of the store.

“Thinking back now on being that young and running a business, I realize that I got a chance very early in my career to experience a firm from the other side of the desk, as I oversaw people much older than me and dealt with things like payroll, books, and accounting,” continues Boor, whose hours at the shop populated his high school and college years.

Nonetheless, in a family with a father who worked at the nearby White Sands Missile Range as a nuclear electrical engineer and other sons who were embarking on engineering careers of their own, the motorcycle shop entry on Boor’s resume did not go unnoticed.

Thus what might be surmised to have been a collective sigh of relief may have been heard when he decided to pursue an engineering degree at New Mexico State, thereby keeping safe the Boor family tradition. Or would it?

“I was actually in my senior year of college when I decided that I didn’t want to be an engineer because I knew from working in the motorcycle shop that I loved business,” reports Boor, who remembers his parents not being at all pleased that the timing of his decision was coming so “late in the game.”    

“It ended up taking me a little longer to be done with school, but I did switch over to accounting,” explains Boor, who would subsequently work for a number of the original Big Eight accounting houses before stepping into the ranks of corporate finance professionals—where the same qualities that had once served him well at the bike shop appear to have propelled his climb upward.

Says Boor: “A lot of what I learned in those very early years of my life and career had a big impact on how things have gone for me, even in these finance leadership roles.” –Jack Sweeney

Evan Goldstein tells us that it was at the end of another long day—after a week of long days—as he was walking to the parking lot adjacent to Genentech’s offices that he received a “gut punch.”

Becoming more self-aware of others is something that many finance leaders have told us that they have needed to lean into during their career, but few have shared with us the pivot to self-reflection as vividly as Goldstein, whose multi-decade finance career boasts an unusual dual-chamber architecture centered on 10 years at Genentech and another 11 at Salesforce.

“I refer to myself as a serial monogamist when it comes to my professional career and the longevity that I’ve experienced at both of these companies,” explains Goldstein, who credits his extended stay at both firms to the power of three: the people, the mission, and the innovation.

Still, Goldberg wants us to know about the long day that ended in Genentech’s parking lot.

For young finance career builders, arriving at the end-of-day parking lot can be somewhat likened to a runner breaking the finish-line tape, not to be awarded a medal, though, but to be met with the refreshingly cool evening air that routinely rewards a long day’s work.

It was in just such environs that Goldstein chose to thank a younger Genentech colleague for their hard work on an important and ultimately successful “deliverable.”

“After having just been promoted to the manager level, I had taken over short-term planning in the corporate organization and had hired this person—whose role I had had in the past,” reports Goldstein, who earlier in the week had presented the “deliverable” to Genentech’s leadership team.

“Here we had had this really successful outcome, and this employee was just doing phenomenally well,” comments Goldstein, who found himself alongside his young report as they made their way to the parking lot together.

“Thank you for all of your hard work,” Goldstein remembers saying—to which the employee then replied: “Yeah, well, I don’t think I want to do this.”

Such a response was like a punch to the gut, Goldstein recalls, and one that not even the fresh evening air could ease.    

The employee explained further: “Evan, you’re telling me what to do, and you’re not letting me figure it out.”

Looking back, Goldstein realizes that he was shortchanging the opportunities that he provided to others by failing to allow them to grow and develop along the way as they “added their own flavor to the process.”

Says Goldstein: “This was one of my turning points from a managerial leadership perspective—when I started to realize that it’s not just about what you deliver but also how you deliver it.” –Jack Sweeney

Marco Torrente kicked off his finance career inside the Milan, Italy, offices of SC Johnson, the household cleaning products giant headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin.

All told, he would end up spending 7 years in various finance roles at Johnson—including that of controller—while relocating first to London and then eventually to Geneva.

Looking back, Torrente tells us that the family-owned company created a “flexible culture” that valued autonomy and direct communication—two qualities that have been instrumental in shaping his approach to finance leadership.

Perhaps it would be fair to speculate that were it not for the changing dietary habits of Americans and surprise arrival of a global pandemic, Steven Cirulis would likely not be occupying the CFO office at Potbelly Sandwich Shop.

The pursuit of new alternative proteins inside the land of agtech has in recent years led more than few venture capital firms to seek out the advice of strategy executives familiar with the mathematics behind the evolving menus of fast dining establishments.

Having held a succession of top strategy roles with the likes of McDonald’s and Panera, Steven Cirulis found his budding popularity within the VC community to be little more than a rewarding satisfaction—that is, until late 2019, when he decided to put some of his VC-related activities aside to accommodate an advisory gig with publicly-held sandwich shop Potbelly.  

“They had been looking for a CFO at the time, but I was really enjoying my work on the venture capital side of things,” recalls Cirulis, who adds that the arrival of the pandemic changed everything.

“I ostensibly became the person whom they turned to and asked, ‘Okay, what do we do here?,’” continues Cirulis.

Within the next several weeks, he busily implemented a list of cash preservation edicts, triggered the renegotiation of bank covenants, and—along with Potbelly management—announced a pay cut, instituted an employee furlough, and applied for a PPP loan.

Along the way—perhaps not more than a month into the pandemic—Potbelly proposed to Cirulis that he join the company as CFO and chief strategy officer.

“Why would you join a restaurant business at the start of a pandemic?,” rhetorically reflects Cirulis, in highlighting but one of the queries that crossed his mind at the time.

Nevertheless, Cirulis tells us, “I jumped at it.”  

Three years later, with the virus now in the rearview mirror, Cirulis makes it clear that the pandemic will never fully escape his view: “Getting forgiveness on that PPP loan was a great day in my career as a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney

No matter how many phone calls Matt Gustke receives during the span of his finance career, none will likely be more memorable or important than one he received nearly 22 years ago.

At the time, Gustke, a research analyst for a major bank, was spending his days assessing the carnage piling up in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble burst.

“The times were really weird, and uncertainty was everywhere,” comments Gustke, who despite the tech sector’s dotcom bust chapter assures us that he thoroughly enjoyed his research days—and in fact he may well have remained in research if not for a fateful phone call.

“He was without a doubt my favorite executive at my favorite company,” comments Gustke, recalling the late Rajiv Dutta, who as the CFO of eBay at the time called Gustke to invite him to lunch.

“The lunch turned into a full day, which then became a dinner and a meeting with the whole team, which then a week later led to my joining eBay to build out its IR function,” recalls Gustke, who as a research analyst had already established a rapport with Dutta by having frequently queried the CFO and summoned his comments as part of his regular research coverage.

“At the time that I joined eBay, I honestly viewed it as sort of a 1- to 2-year working sabbatical during which I would get to see a company from the inside, but I eventually ended up being part of the eBay family for 12 years,” continues Gustke, who once more credits Dutta with extending his “leave” and ultimately helping to point him down the CFO path.

Gustke tells us that Dutta was often known to be generous with praise: "I guess it was a couple of years into my eBay journey when Rajiv came up to me and said, 'You know, investors don't want to talk to me anymore because they just want to talk to you, which is freeing up so much of my time to do other things—so I want to say thanks.'”

However, as it turned out, Dutta had more than praise in mind.

“The next thing he said was, ‘And now I need you to go into a different role—what would you think about leading FP&A for eBay International?,'” reports Gustke, who after giving Dutta an affirmative response first began serving in his new international role from California before relocating to Switzerland for additional finance responsibilities that would eventually lead to heading up eBay's European finance team.

As he continued to grow his experience across multiple finance disciplines, Gustke became a candidate for more senior leadership positions. In 2010, he garnered what would be his first CFO appointment when he was named CFO of StubHub, the online ticket broker acquired by eBay in 2007.

Still, Gustke wants us know that one of his most important lessons wasn't gleaned from life among finance's rank-and-file but instead at a research team's conference table—and perhaps the very one where he first met Dutta.

Says Gustke: "Long ago I stopped worrying about asking stupid questions in meetings. I figured that if something wasn't clear to me—and I'm at least of average intelligence—it wouldn't be clear to someone else. It turns out that more often than not, my questions led to better conversations, new insights, and a clearer mandate as to what was to be done after the meeting." –Jack Sweeney 

As listeners to our podcast well know, one of our favorite queries for finance executives who have had a lengthy tenure in one place is, “What kept you there?”

It may go without saying that something with the word “opportunity” in it is perhaps the most popular response. Still, for certain finance leaders—and especially those whose careers span multiple decades with a single company—this question often summons up a degree of self-reflection that few others bring forth.

Such was the case with Cox Enterprises President and CFO Dallas Clement, who afforded our question an extra modicum of contemplation that we had not expected before issuing some of the best career advice that has ever been shared on this podcast.

To be fair, we may have prejudged Clement in assuming that his expansive (33 years) and adventurous career within Cox had unfolded without any degree of uncertainty. However, Clement quickly dispersed our presumptions by unveiling two career snapshots.

The first came from the early 1990s, when Clement was contemplating exiting the environs of Cox’s Atlanta headquarters to practice law while living on the beach in Sarasota, Florida. “I had kept deferring law school, but at the time, I thought that this possibility might make for a pretty good life.”

Another came from nearly 15 years later, when Clement—now a father with four daughters—was touring homes with his wife in Silicon Valley as he evaluated the relocation possibilities associated with an appointment that he subsequently would reject.  “Even if I wasn’t completely happy in my current role, it would have been disruptive to the kids and risky, so I didn’t leave,” explains Clement, who perhaps saves his best observations for those career-builders who like him have elected to stay put.

He advises: “Once you’ve gone through that exercise and decided to stay, don’t second-guess yourself. Be all in—not only in your professional role but also more broadly in your life, your family, your outside work activities—because work is what you do, it’s not who you are. Over time, I have learned to be more mature and thoughtful about this. I really appreciate how lucky I’ve been in a variety of areas.”  –Jack Sweeney

If Paystand CFO Scott Bennion were to break his three-decade-long finance career into different chapters, the software finance leader would likely agree that he and many of his peers have recently opened a new one.

As a starting—or concluding—point, the chapter that has just ended might simply be titled "The Data Set," in order to focus our attention on the means by which Bennion and others of his ilk have over the past decade extended their lines of sight into the business well beyond those of any previous generation of CFOs.   

For Bennion—who remembers tracking CD shipping costs during the desktop computing era—the latest marker or evidence that a new page has been turned has been made visible by Paystand’s product engineering and development team.

“After having deployed AI tools and generative AI, we’re able to actually see a 4x increase in productivity by our product and engineering teams so far,” reports Bennion, who minces no words when asked about AI's impact on company finances.

He continues: “From a finance perspective, I see a massive opportunity for improved ROI through doing more with less. From a legal perspective, I see that we need to be making sure that we do this in a smart way so that we don't accidentally hit any legal third rails.”

Bennion believes that the adoption of AI tools within SaaS organizations is not unlike what he previously observed firsthand in the open-source software environment.

“New tech is often a developer-led initiative that comes into the organization through the side door, but once it's in, you need to embrace it,” observes Bennion, whose resume includes a stint as CFO of an open-source software company.

Moreover, when it comes to some of the legal concerns associated with AI, Bennion suggests that just as happened in the open-source world, commercial licensing will be used to address some of the go-to-market concerns related to potential software infringement.

As far as Bennion is concerned, when it comes to AI, the hands of time have already begun to move.    

“You need to embrace it," he advises. "You can’t not embrace it." –Jack Sweeney

Of all of the career experiences that Robert Goldenberg has acquired on his way to the CFO office, you would think that his stint with a bankrupt landscaping company would not be apt to make his list of all-time opportunity door-openers.

Still, when we asked Goldenberg to look back to share the experiences that first propelled him into the C-suite, the landscaping business came to his mind.

To wit: It was back in 2015, when software developer 6sense was interviewing to hire its first full-time CFO, that Goldenberg—a career investment banker—nabbed an interview spot with the firm’s part-time finance leader.

“He told me that my investment banking background was great, but that 6sense needed someone who could start at Ground Zero and had more tactical accounting experience,” recalls Goldenberg, who assured the executive that he completely understood—before suggesting that they dedicate the interview’s remaining time to accounting questions.

“He grilled me for 20 minutes and then said, ‘You’re great!—I’m going schedule your next six interviews,’” continues Goldenberg, who was soon hired after having made the rounds with five senior executives and one board member.

When it came to accounting practices, the part-time finance leader no doubt had anticipated that the seasoned banker sitting across the table may have had a blind spot—an addressable affliction, but certainly one that can frequently lengthen the path to the CFO office.  

“In this instance, it was an objective fact that I was better than the average investment banker when it came to accounting,” explains Goldenberg, who credits one banking deal more than any other with sharpening his accounting knowledge—which brings us back to the bankrupt landscaping company that he had been tasked with selling whose books had been susceptible to recurring chaos.

“In my experience, very small landscaping companies in bankruptcy are not known to have solid internal accounting functions,” observes Goldenberg, who adds that for a span of 3 months he had made the company’s dated accounting systems the center of his world. In fact, Goldenberg himself would make journal entries and seek solutions to reconcile old accounts.

Consequently, his deep dive into the company’s books provided him with a base of accounting knowledge that he has continued to retain and build on to this day.    

“When you get exposure to something and it’s critical that you learn it with some measure of competency,” Goldenberg reports, “I find that the resulting learning compounds over time—even when it’s not related to your day-to-day job.” –Jack Sweeney 

The big-city addresses that frequently prettify the office locations of esteemed accounting houses have continued to be a reliable draw for 20-something-year-old accounting grads eager to be counted among urban professionals.     

Thus we would not have been surprised to learn that back in the late 1980s, when recent grad Jim Caci was assigned to Arthur Andersen’s Roseland, New Jersey, office, he experienced what might have been called a “ho-hum” moment.

Not so! Unlike the real estate occupied by his big-city peers, Caci notes, “Roseland” afforded him more access to Andersen partners, who were arguably more approachable outside the accounting house’s big-city confines. What’s more, the New Jersey site tended to operate in a more independent fashion than AA’s marquee offices, a cultural attribute that perhaps made it an ideal location from which to spearhead a pilot program to provide a unique menu of services to small technology companies.

“The idea was that from among these small companies would ultimately come the next Microsoft, but we would have already begun working with them when they were at only $5 million in revenue,” explains Caci, who reports that Roseland became one of only a handful of AA offices to test the program.  

At the same time, the Roseland office had some plus-size neighbors, including AT&T Corp., whose headquarters at the time were a mere 25-minute drive away in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

Caci tells us that this is when his career benefited from both geography and timing.

At the time, Arthur Andersen had been engaged by AT&T to help with the formidable task of splitting up the firm into its Baby Bell operating companies, per its historic agreement with the U.S. government.

The multi-step nature of this undertaking and regular management updates that it demanded led Caci and other Roseland denizens to frequently commute to Basking Ridge.

Says Caci: “Here I was at the beginning of my second year out of school, and I was being asked to help present to the senior leadership of AT&T.” –Jack Sweeney 

Among the learnings that Dev Ahuja has gleaned from his three-decade-long, globe-hopping finance career, perhaps none has delivered a more enduring instruction than that which followed his very first hop.

By his own account, after Ahuja had reached the summit of Novartis’s finance executive ranks in India, the drug giant invited him to occupy an office at its Basel, Switzerland, headquarters. Here, Ahuja was promised, he would be able to apply his flourishing financial acumen on a more global scale.  

“I thought that I knew what it took—I came with a lot of confidence rather than in a mode of humbleness and wanting to learn,” comments Ahuja, who let us know that his first years at headquarters did not always go as planned.

Ahuja reports: “The Swiss don’t mince words."

“I had done a miserable job because I really had not made the effort to build relationships and take the time and make the effort to understand the cultural nuances,” remarks Ahuja, whose track change paid off with a Swiss stint in the roles of group controller and head of Basel’s finance operations that stretched to 5 years.

Still, Ahuja’s Swiss experiences would prove to grow even more valuable in the years ahead, as he would come to occupy the CFO offices of Novartis Korea (3 years) and Novartis Japan (2 years).

“Novartis was very active when it came to developing people across geographies, but my case—where I would end up living in five different countries—was not very normal,” observes Ahuja, whose fifth nation became the U.S. after the drugmaker’s $46 billion acquisition of Alcon opened the door to a number of opportunities for him.

Announced in 2010, the Alcon deal was to present post-merger integration challenges that in part led Novartis to relocate Ahuja from Korea to Japan, where the Alcon integration tasks were more pressing.

“We accomplished a lot in Japan in a short period of time, and it seems that Alcon U.S.—which was twice the size of Alcon Japan—was in need of some of what we had learned,” recalls Ahuja, who tells us that at the time, a son had recently relocated to the U.S. for studies.

With little delay, it seems, Ahuja was headed to Fort Worth, Texas, to serve as CFO North America for the drug giant’s Alcon division—a business that years later would nab business headlines when Novartis opted to spin it off.

According to Ahuja, he has been able to apply his Swiss “lessons” at each career move, including his change when he departed from Novartis in 2016 to accept the CFO position at aluminum products giant Novelis.

It seems that regardless of whether a move has involved geographies or industries, Ahuja has been able to apply the benefits of his time in Switzerland.

Says Ahuja: “When you fail, you must make up your mind to take every lesson from that failure and act on it.” –Jack Sweeney

It’s perhaps no secret that this podcast can be rather rigid when it comes to our policy for welcoming guests: Invitations are reserved for CFOs and CFOs alone. In fact, we regularly turn away book authors, consultants, and even CEOs. Such was the case for David Pennino, CEO of LogicSource, who recently was “pitched” to us as a potential guest. As always, we issued a templated email reply specially crafted to politely inform a dutiful communication professional of our “CFOs-only” mantra.

This being said, LogicSource’s CEO has arguably nabbed a plus-size supporting role on our latest episode without having recorded a single word. Although unexpected, this was perhaps an eminently understandable development, given the central role that Pennino has played in the career of Niki Heim, LogicSource’s CFO, who easily met our necessary criteria and subsequently accepted our invitation.

Still, when it comes to Pennino, CFO Heim does not serve up the familiar cadence of CEO kudos, any more than she attempts to tell us that Pennino is some kind of all-knowing C-suite Yoda forever imparting career wisdom.

Instead, she swings open the door to a conference room of the past. The year is 2014, and Heim, a newly hired controller, is fielding questions from LogicSource’s private equity investors.

Pennino is confident that she has the makings to be the company’s next CFO, but not all those gathered feel as certain—including Heim, who now tells us that at the time, she felt that she was not yet ready.

“I’m very grateful that I had Dave Pennino, who was honest and open with me—he’d say, ‘Listen, here’s what I’m hearing—I believe in you, but you have to believe in yourself and you have to keep going,’” explains Heim, who adds that the company’s CFO had exited the company only days before her arrival, prompting the company’s investors to scrutinize the firm’s recent finance hire all the more.

“During every single presentation that I gave to the board and to investor meetings, I was on edge—I needed to prove myself but always make sure that I was doing what Dave believed that I could do,” remarks Heim, who would shortly begin serving in an interim CFO role despite having her own misgivings about her CFO readiness.

“Along the way, I would hear people say, ‘The work is going to come before the belief in yourself,’ and that was me—it was almost like my self-confidence wasn’t fully there yet,” comments Heim, who besides receiving confidence-boosting support from her CEO also began to extract feelings of self-worth from each new board encounter.

“The board would be asking me to do something, and I would need to just go and figure out how to do it—I always found a way, and there were a lot of times early on when I was in the office at [6:00] in the morning and left at midnight,” recalls Heim, who tells us that once the work came, her confidence began to arrive soon thereafter.

Says Heim: “More and more people and investors would call me up personally, and I’d be able to answer their questions.” –Jack Sweeney

For many professionals, the period stretching roughly from March 2020 to December 2022 will forever be known simply as “COVID,” as in “I changed jobs during COVID.”

Thus it was for Erin Colgan, who in July 2020—after having invested 9 years within the finance rank-and-file of pharma giant Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and 8 years with PwC—opted to become the 20th employee of a promising biotech start-up.

Still, Colgan’s game change was prompted not by COVID’s well-earned reputation for employment displacement nor by the allure of start-up dreams but by what recruiters have long referred to as “the call to leadership.” For Colgan, this meant joining Boston-based Sensei Bio as senior vice president of finance, a title that guaranteed her the status of being the firm’s senior most finance executive.

At the time of her appointment, the pandemic had already begun to be recognized as having certain accelerant qualities for business, which were perhaps nowhere on display more than inside the biotech realm, an industry that was experiencing a COVID-fueled adrenaline rush.

“It was only about 6 weeks after I joined the company that we found ourselves meeting with banks to talk about how we could go public to capitalize on the market being especially hot for biotechs,” explains Colgan, who alongside her CEO spearheaded an IPO process that ultimately raised $152 million for Sensei Bio in February 2021.

However, as Colgan was to learn, a more formidable leadership challenge still lay ahead, as a Phase 2 drug trial rendered disappointing results and the biotech market at large suddenly began to cool.     

“Six months past our IPO, some data on a Phase 2 program came in that wasn’t what we had hoped for, so we huddled,” recalls Colgan, who reports that the company’s cash runway then became top-of-mind as management debated whether the capital markets for small-cap biotech firms might turn around in 6 to 9 months.

“I said, ‘Let’s assume that this period lasts a lot longer and see how long we can stretch our cash while still enabling ourselves to achieve what we feel is most important,’” continues Colgan, who tells us that Sensei Bio ultimately advanced down her preferred path, which allowed the firm to extend its cash reach by a year and a half.

In the 6 months that followed, Colgan remarks, the finance, science, and medical areas of the business achieved a shared mind-set that allowed them to work together in the new, capital-constrained biotech environment.  

In January 2022, nearly a year after Sensei Bio’s IPO and 6 months after Colgan had made her compelling argument to extend the firm’s cash coverage calendar, she was named CFO—an appointment that we would wager she had sealed up a half-year earlier when certain hard decisions had been called for.  

Colgan observes: “You can’t make those types of decisions ‘later.’ You have to make them early and often.” –Jack Sweeney

This episode of Planning Aces features the FP&A insights and commentary of  CFO Dev Ahuja of Novelis, CFO Alex Triplett of Appfire and CFO Rick Rosenthal of Clara Analytics.

One of the key topics co host Brett Knowles drills down on is the difference between complicated and complex problems. Brett uses the examples of manufacturing a car, which is complicated, and raising a child, which is complex. The distinction is crucial in understanding how to approach problem-solving in an organization.

While complicated problems can be solved with the right formulas or spreadsheets, complex problems require more. They demand strong interpersonal relationships and effective communication. It’s not just about having the right tools or processes, but also about having the right people who can use these tools effectively.

Planning Ace CFO Dev Ahuja brings some perspective on the role of people in finance transformation. CFO Ahuja shared insights into the structure of his finance organization at Novelis. Despite being well-established, the organization needed a renewed focus on the role of finance in driving decisions and adding value.

Dev emphasized the importance of finance being a thought partner and actively shaping strategy. He also highlighted the need for a strong talent pipeline and succession planning. This ensures the organization has the necessary depth of talent to drive its vision forward.