Shows
CFO THOUGHT LEADER658: The Technology-Driven Turnaround | Sandra Harris, CFO, Tupperware BrandsWhen Tupperware Brands CFO Sandra Harris is asked what set her apart from the other CFO candidates who aspired to fill the finance leadership role at the iconic maker of food storage products, she doesn’t hesitate to mention that her previous leadership turn was not as a CFO, but as chief information officer for outdoor apparel and footwear manufacturer VF Corporation. It was there where Harris first climbed into the company’s leadership ranks from VF’s FP&A function, where she had become increasingly focused on the company’s quickly evolving global supply chain. “VF was...
2020-12-1338 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER657: From the Ground Up | Yevgenia Fink, CFO, HOVERIt was near the end of her 9 years with Intel Corp. that Yevgenia Fink received a bit of advice that today she credits with having helped her to blaze a path that would ultimately lead to the CFO office. As Fink recalls, “Leave Intel before you forget how to open an Excel spreadsheet” was the brief but memorable comment that a respected manager opined. “I felt that I had a lot of influence at Intel, but most of my function became leading and managing people, and I still didn’t feel confident in my pure finance s...
2020-12-0953 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER656: A Taste for Disruption | Russell Burke, CFO, Life360When Russell Burke tells us that his days at Sony Music Entertainment included “huge peaks” such as the release of the hit sound track for the motion picture Titanic as well as huge challenges such as the rise of digital pirates, the two developments quickly converge. Suddenly, in our mind’s eye, we see Burke’s career vessel of choice surrounded by pirates and the finance executive shouting a string of orders to a bewildered seafaring crew. Once again, the instant imaging that our conversations often render appears to be strangely prescient of the finance leader’s f...
2020-12-0636 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER655: Awaiting the Return to Travel | Tom Tuchscherer, CFO, TripActionsTwenty-five to 30 years ago, senior executives seeking CFO roles did not think like Tom Tuchscherer. Many still don’t, which is why CFO roles have increasingly come to executives like Tuchscherer, a gate crasher from the world of corporate development. Such was the case back in 2012, when Tuchscherer entered the CFO office for the first time at Talend, a fast-growing developer of data integration software. At the time, Tuchscherer was accustomed to having long strategy discussions with both Talend investors and board members and was even tasked with helping management to recruit “a prof...
2020-12-0245 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER654: The Path to Being IPO-Ready | Drew Vollero, CFO, Allied UniversalWhen Drew Vollero arrived in the CFO office of Snap (formerly Snapchat) in 2015, the executives occupying the tech world’s traditional IPO talent bench no doubt raised a few eyebrows. Having spent the previous 25 years inside the corporate corridors of Mattel, Inc., and PepsiCo, Vollero had a resume chock-full of strategic planning initiatives that any finance leader would covet. Still, he could not be counted among the familiar CFO all-stars known for their routine rotation into IPO-minded tech companies. Of course, whatever buzz Vollero’s hiring may have stirred, Snap left no room for IPO skepti...
2020-11-2952 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER653: From Real Estate to the Immune System | Chad Cohen, CFO, Adaptive BiotechnologiesOf all of the business discussions that Chad Cohen has had over the years, few are likely as memorable as the 20-second conversation he had with Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff about midway into his 9-year career stint with the online real estate company. Cohen joined Zillow back in 2006 as corporate controller, a position that he says also had the added distinction of being the company’s first full-time finance role. Over the next 4 years, as Zillow’s back-office finance and accounting team took shape, Cohen’s responsibilities grew, allowing him to step into the role of vice presid...
2020-11-2245 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER652: Exposing Gross Margin’s Hidden Levers | Jeff Nichols, CFO, UJETIn 2016, when Jeff Nichols had been a senior member of Glassdoor’s FP&A team for 2 years, he and other members of the finance team were confronting the nagging truth that the firm’s path to going public wasn’t getting any shorter. The online job recruitment firm’s efforts to grow its profit margins had met only mild success, while its cash burn rate was inching upward. According to Nichols, Glassdoor’s path to going public was further complicated due to the unique characteristics of its business model. Points of comparison between Glassdoor and top recrui...
2020-11-1840 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER651: Remedying Your Metrics Disconnect | Ross Tennenbaum, CFO, AvalaraRoss Tennenbaum remembers that back in 2018, when he was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, he had conversations with a number of senior executives from Slack Technologies, Inc. At the time, the fast-growing workplace messaging and communication platform was preparing to go public, and the company was making a special effort to educate bankers and analysts alike about the firm’s business. As his questions became more pointed, Tennenbaum says, he noticed that members of Slack’s senior management team would frequently permit other executives stationed along the conversation’s periphery to supply the answers. “At first...
2020-11-1548 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER650: When Opportunity Comes Your Way | Kieran McGrath, CFO, AvayaIn 2008, as the economic downturn threatened to upend IBM Corp.’s financial well-being, the company’s leadership was considering different candidates to lead a corporatewide restructuring when Kieran McGrath’s name surfaced. McGrath was known as a troubleshooter inside the ranks of IBMers, a seasoned finance executive whose 27 years with the company had produced a zigzag career trajectory tracing a jagged path that signaled to IBM insiders both a breadth of experience and company loyalty. “Early in my career, I got a reputation as a workhorse and a bit of a problem fixer, and while this was...
2020-11-1144 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER649: Entering the Auction Room | Martin Nolan, CFO, Julien's AuctionsHad Martin Nolan studied engineering instead of accounting, his career path would likely never have entered the worlds of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, and Michael Jackson. Still, Irish-born Nolan is quick to point out that it was a Green Card lottery, not his accounting degree, that facilitated his relocation to New York City, where he would meet and ultimately team up with Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions, the world’s leading entertainment auction house. Before the two men met, Nolan had traveled a remarkable distance from his early days in New York, where in the...
2020-11-0843 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER648: A Life Sciences Angler Casts a Sturdy Line | Bill Adams, CFO, NervGen PharmaIt’s a familiar sequence: A strong-minded investor musters the will to lead and steps into the CEO office determined to revitalize a struggling technology company and put it back on the growth track. For Bill Adams, this swift turn of events occurred only a year into his first industry stint as a corporate controller—a career chapter, he recalls fondly, that included a devoted CFO mentor. However, the company’s CFO and CEO had exited the firm just prior the investor’s arrival, and Adams found himself stepping into a finance leadership role. Although stressfu...
2020-11-0445 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER647: Accruing Your Global Acumen | Adrian Talbot, CFO, HotwireWhen Adrian Talbot tells us that he parachuted into Thames Television in the early 1990s, the image of the London skyline—once used to brand the popular British broadcasting company —quickly comes to mind. Suddenly, in our mind’s eye, just to the right of St. Paul’s dome, we spy a 20-something-year-old Talbot floating confidently downward. Along with a boatload of first-class metaphors, this is the type of instant imaging that every conversation renders—at least for those of us on the lookout for them. But Talbot’s successful first jump—not unlike those o...
2020-11-0145 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER646: Making Finance a Workforce Whetstone | Michelle McComb, CFO, BluecoreJust as Michelle McComb was imagining that she would shortly be joining another Silicon Valley start-up as a finance leader, the CFO of Lucent Technologies helped to upend her plans. Back in the early 2000s, McComb’s first CFO tour of duty was coming to an end with the successful sale of her company to a larger, publicly held software firm. However, within a matter of months, the buyer was itself acquired by the giant telecommunications player, and Lucent’s CFO offered up a question to McComb: “What would it take to keep you?” The coveted...
2020-10-2857 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER645: The Investor Came Knocking | Glenn Schiffman, CFO, IAC/InterActiveThere’s little question that 2020 will long be remembered as a year of crisis for the casino industry. Commercial gaming revenues in the U.S. were down 79 percent during the second quarter when compared to Q2 2019, a fact that made IAC/Interactive’s August announcement that it was purchasing 12 percent of hospitality and gambling giant MGM all the more headline-grabbing. “We think we found a once-in-a-decade opportunity to find a meaningful position in an iconic brand,” explains IAC/InterActive CFO Glenn Schiffman, who says IAC’s balance sheet remains flush with cash (more than $3 billion) after the...
2020-10-2530 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER644: Thwarting COVID By Rethinking Opportunities | Mike Brower, CFO, Office EvolutionBack in the late 1980s, Mike Brower’s list of audit clients included a roster of oil and gas companies as well a local university and a number of different state and local government entities. It was the type of client list that any accountant based in and around Cheyenne, Wyoming, might covet, a fact made all the more undeniable by having Taco John’s International top the list. A restaurant franchisor with over 450 restaurants nationwide, Taco John’s first began serving local Cheyenne customers in the 1960s, before expanding rapidly across the Plains and upper Midwest as it...
2020-10-2148 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER643: The Rise of People-Centric Finance | Katie Rooney, CFO, Alight SolutionsBack in 2015, Katie Rooney was only 7 months into her first industry CFO role at Aon when her boss asked her to exit the office. “He came into my office on November 1 and said, ‘I’m retiring, and I want you to take on my role. I’m leaving in 8 weeks,’” recalls Rooney, who says that the news triggered a mix of surprise and fear, which she recalls outwardly expressing with the words “Oh, my God!” Her boss quickly sought to ease her concerns. “He said: ‘You know what? It will be the best thing for you. If I...
2020-10-1826 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER642: The Virtues of Top Line Growth | Sachin Patel, CFO, ApixioIt’s not uncommon for career-building executives inside the finance realm to obtain an MBA in order to pivot their careers in a new direction. Such was the case for Sachin Patel, who after finding some early success as a systems engineer at IBM Corp. began to study the path before him more closely. “One of the things that you don’t very often get to do as an engineer is to articulate what you did by using the written word or even verbally. Just having this not be a feature of the job was something that began...
2020-10-1430 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER640: Communicating Your Strategic Plan | James Samuels, CFO, EXUMA BiotechJamie Samuels still recalls some of the raised eyebrows that he saw after having completed in short order both the verbal and written portions of an exam that his future employer administered to job applicants. Not unlike most of his fellow applicants, Samuels had been invited to take the exam after responding to a newspaper advertisement, but, unlike his peers, he had been the only foreign applicant—or, more important, the only foreign applicant able to complete both portions of the exam in fluent Chinese. “At that time, my written Chinese was very good because I ha...
2020-10-0739 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER639: Thriving at the Deep End | Catherine Birkett, CFO, GoCardlessBack in the early 2000s, Catherine Birkett found herself being pulled into confidential meetings where her company’s senior management was discussing restructuring plans with the company’s largest investor. The company—a fiber optics telecom firm known as Interoute—was not yet 6 years old, but its days appeared to be numbered as the company sought to weather the telecom industry’s historic collapse. As Interoute’s top FP&A executive, Birkett knew from the ongoing business plan’s numbers that massive changes were urgently needed, and she as well as others were not optimistic about the restru...
2020-10-0437 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER637: Experiencing the Market Economy Spirit | Tom Fencl, CFO, PricefxThe son of two doctors, Tom Fencl recalls that while growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, to him a free market economy was more “an intellectual curiosity” than a possible career destination. “When the Berlin Wall came down, I was midway through high school—it was a very formative experience,” remembers Fencl, who says that the historic happening suddenly released “a market economy spirit.” After studying at Prague’s University of Economics, Fencl says, he was “drawn to the big financial centers” and worked in London for 2 years at Stern Stuart & Co. as a consultant before heading to the Unive...
2020-09-2748 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER636: Being Part of the Team | Marsha Smith, CFO, Siemens, USAMembers of Siemens USA’s finance team would probably not be surprised to learn that when their CFO, Marsha Smith, is asked to reveal the experiences that prepared her for a finance leadership role, the ones that she relates most often originate from being part of a team. Such was the case in 2004, when she had been assigned to a Siemens joint venture as a commercial project manager. “I’ll never forget: It was my first week on the job, and the project manager came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Marsha, we need to ask for...
2020-09-2342 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER635: Finding Your Finance Team's North Star | Markus Harder, CFO, ContentfulThe Berlin headquarters of software developer Contentful occupies an old brick warehouse with heavy metal doors and broad functional corridors and spaces native to its industrial past. Standing six stories high, the structure once accommodated its worker population with a miniature kitchen on every floor, a favorite employee perk perhaps first introduced by a coffee-loving tenant. Still, not everyone at Contentful loves coffee—or at least its CFO, Markus Harder, doesn’t. “My secret is that I hate coffee—I just don’t like it,” says Harder, who shortly after his arrival at the firm put i...
2020-09-2051 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER634: Milestones for M&A Success | Steve Young, CFO, Duke EnergyIt was a little over 40 years ago when Steve Young first joined what would become Duke Energy, the giant electric power holding company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Not only has it been a long tenure, but also it is the only post-college job that I’ve ever had,” says Young, who first roamed the energy giant’s corridors as a finance assistant. In the years that followed, Young says, he became involved in various finance-related projects as different executives sought him out because he had become recognized as a hard worker. One such senior executiv...
2020-09-1643 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER633: Marching to Fintech's New Beat | Matt Briers, CFO, TransferWiseAmong the more transformative chapters of Matt Briers’s finance career was his 3-year stint monitoring and forecasting margin performance inside Google’s UK operations. “The core role was really to understand what was happening in the organization from a revenue and margin performance perspective and then help to operate the organization so that it could better drive that revenue,” explains Briers, who says that his responsibilities included an unyielding effort to expose new drivers of Google revenue “even down to keyword searches.” “My role was to provide a hotline back to product in Mountain View,” says Br...
2020-09-1347 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER632: Exposing the Connection Between Financial and Operational Data | Jacqueline Purcell, CFO, DeputyJacqueline Purcell’s path to the CFO office began inside an Australian law firm where as a young attorney she was advising corporate clients and their bankers on how to best address some of the legal hurdles that their M&A deal-making might confront. At the time, her routine collaboration with different banking executives gave her a point of comparison to the seemingly less energetic legal world. “They seemed to be having a little more fun and a lot more impact on the outcomes,” she recalls. “This is what sparked my interest in moving i...
2020-09-0935 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER631: Explaining the Business Reason Behind the Number | Steven Springsteel, CFO, betterworksBack in the early 1990s, Steven Springsteel nabbed an interview for a CFO role with a high-flying tech start-up. At the time, he was controller for Apple’s worldwide manufacturing operations, but the buzz surrounding the brash start-up intrigued him, and the young but accomplished executive shortly found himself waiting to be interviewed by the firm’s CEO. According to Springsteel, his interview aspirations quickly became somewhat tempered as he sat listening to a stream of expletives originating from the CEO’s office. Within minutes, the CEO’s door swung open and several long-faced engineers beat a ha...
2020-09-0652 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER630: Building the Business Case | Bennett Thiemann, CFO, ApplicasterIt was the type of role that any recent business school graduate could envy—not because of the position’s title (Chief of Staff) or how much it paid, but because of its proximity to management decision-making. The job is one that Bennett Theimann remembers well as he looks back on the days when he served as chief of staff for the president of Gruner + Jahr’s German magazine division. “It exposed me to that sort of very-high-level strategic thinking. We launched magazines, we sold magazines, we bought magazines,” says Theimann, who very often found himself fi...
2020-09-0258 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER628: Allocating Resources to Achieve the Right Outcomes | Inder Singh, CFO, ArmInder Singh started off his professional life as an engineer, only to learn that the large engineering projects that he aspired to someday lead often faced as many financial obstacles as they did engineering challenges. So, Singh says, he went back to school and earned an MBA in finance, allowing him to redirect his career down a path populated with unique and imaginative financing deals to support engineering feats as well as business transformations. One of the more innovative financing projects that Singh has helped to champion came along in the 1990s, when he was...
2020-08-2648 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER627: Learning the Lyrics to a Finance Career | Mark Sargent, CFO, Westhaven PowerAt the start of his finance career, Mark Sargent says, he could not picture himself working for a large, big-name corporation. He says that he was drawn instead to smaller companies, which he believed would be more accepting of “creative types” or those employees more prone to self-expression. In Sargent’s case, an accounting and finance job was Plan B, or a “safety” occupation in case his aspirations to become a rock musician didn’t pan out. Interestingly, it was Sargent’s deliberate avoidance of big business that undoubtedly allowed him to quickly garner some of the experie...
2020-08-2336 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER625: A Transformative Transaction | Eyal Hen, CFO, Rekor SystemsBack in 2004, on the very day that Ormat Technologies, Inc., began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Eyal Hen began working in as an assistant controller for the geothermal energy company in Israel. The transition to being a public company opened a transformative chapter not only for Ormat but also for Hen, who—after having been with the firm for only a few short weeks—agreed to relocate to company’s new Reno, Nevada, headquarters. “It was a very small office at that time, with only seven people,” recalls Hen, who would for the next 11 ye...
2020-08-1637 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER623: When an Opportunity Rises to Meet You | Sinohe Terrero, CFO, EnvoyWhen Envoy CFO Sinohe Terrero is asked about his career chapter at Etsy, the online marketplace founded in 2005 and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, he begins by explaining how back in 2008 Etsy’s finance function was really just a loose grouping of tools and people. “I'll never forget that I once had to go meet the bookkeeper, and he was like in Coney Island,” explains Terrero, who says that the financial mind-set at Etsy during its early days was that data trumps accounting—or, to put it another way, that data was strategic to the business and therefor...
2020-08-0935 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER621: The CFO as Science Enabler | Ivor Macleod, CFO, AthersysWhen veteran CFO Ivor Macleod first contemplated joining an early-stage pharma company, the condition known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was not appearing in nightly news headlines and was yet to be ranked as the number one cause of death among COVID-19 patients. Nevertheless, ARDS captured his attention—or rather, Athersys did. The Cleveland, Ohio–based company, with fewer than 100 employees, met one of Macleod’s foremost criteria in that the company was focused on the area of medicine known as “critical care”—a space that Macleod characterizes as having “high unmet medical needs.” “It was the science that...
2020-08-0246 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER620: When People Matter Most | Laurie Krebs, CFO, Red HatIt was October 2019. Red Hat, Inc., was preparing to submit its latest quarterly results to its new parent, IBM Corp., and Laurie Krebs had just been named Red Hat software’s new CFO. As a senior vice president of finance for Red Hat, Krebs had worked closely with the former CFO and more or less assumed that the acquiring company would likely prefer to fill C-suite spots from its “home team” talent bench of senior executives. In fact, Krebs says that during the course of her career she had never truly aspired to be a CFO: “...
2020-07-2951 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER619: Using Data to Power Up Ad Inventory| Ray Carpenter, CFO, XandrWhen Ray Carpenter retraces his steps to the CFO office at Xandr—an analytics and advertising company formed by AT&T’s WarnerMedia—he singles out two earlier roles as having been outside AT&T’s traditional finance track. “I actually got kicked out of finance for one role,” says Carpenter, referring to a stint as a marketer inside a start-up launched by AT&T’s emerging business markets group. “We did things that were uniquely different from what AT&T typically does when it launches a new business,” continues Carpenter, who in addition to marketing was responsible for th...
2020-07-2645 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER618: From COVID's Initial Shock to IPO in 60 Days | Dave Jones, CFO, VroomNot unlike the careers of his finance leader peers, the finance career of Dave Jones, CFO of online car seller Vroom, has been shaped and influenced by economic crises of the past two decades. Last month, as the initial shock of the coronavirus waned and the stock market rallied back, Vroom moved quickly to go public. Explains Jones: “We consulted with our board and our investors and decided that the time was right.” After pricing its IPO shares at $22, Vroom saw their value more than double on their first day of trading. This was not the...
2020-07-2235 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER617: Finding Your Seat at the M&A Table | Dennis McGrath, CFO, PAVmedDennis McGrath was only recently married and a new home owner when he was invited to a Phillies game by the CFO of AC Manufacturing. At the time, McGrath was working for Andersen as an auditor of a roster of growing companies, among which AC—a maker of industrial air-conditioning units—was perhaps not the most glamorous. “At the end of the night, the CFO told me that he wanted to hire me and would pay me a lot more than I was then making,” recalls McGrath, who doesn’t hesitate to reveal what allowed AC’s offer...
2020-07-1938 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER614: In Pursuit of Data's Deep Impact | Matt Borowiecki, CFO, BiofourmisWhen asked what led him to open his latest career chapter as CFO of Biofourmis, Matt Borowiecki quickly mentions the 2018 sale of MassMutual Asia Ltd. to Yunfeng FG. After helping to piece together a string of strategic plays for MassMutual, Borowiecki was instrumental in effecting the Yunfeng FG deal, which was a standout for him personally as well as one that many industry analysts at the time deemed transformational for company. Having helped to spearhead the transaction, Borowiecki was subsequently asked to relocate to Hong Kong and lead international strategy and corporate development for the...
2020-07-0850 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER613: Helping Others Get the Big Picture | Anders Fohlin, CFO, MediusEarly in his finance career, Anders Fohlin discovered that he could ratchet up his capacity to consume information and problem-solve simply by drawing pictures. However, what had originated more as a personal observation would eventually evolve to something more as he discovered that his visuals could serve others. “I started to regularly draw processes on white boards and paper to make things very visual for everybody and help others to get the full picture,” explains Fohlin, whose knack for creating visuals and goal of making things more visible “for everybody” led him to begin viewing routine m...
2020-07-0554 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER612: The Rewards of Customer Insight | David Wells, CFO, ENDRA Life SciencesBack in the mid-1990s, David Wells was a financial analyst for a Bay Area supply chain management company that boasted an impressive list of Silicon Valley marquee customers. Counted among their clients was a large chip maker whose customer relationship upkeep had over time become Wells’s responsibility. Because this was a coveted customer, Wells always sought to be highly responsive to any of the chip maker’s requests for information, but he increasingly found his company’s pricing model out of step with the customer’s needs. “There was a lot of confusion and a lot...
2020-07-0134 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER611: An Acquisitive State of Mind | Jon Nguyen, CFO, KyribaJon Nguyen got his first taste of M&A-related work in the early to mid-2000s when he served as the finance partner for the auto lending unit of HSBC. “In consumer lending, you end up doing a lot of portfolio purchases rather than equity ones, but I have become more involved in the execution of deals over the past 8 years,” says Nguyen, who, distinguishes the past 8 years as a standout chapter -one that has allowed him to certify his M&A credentials and enter the CFO office at Kyriba. Turn back the clock 8 years, and...
2020-06-2833 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER610: Getting a Read on Economic Recovery | Michael Borreca, CFO, LYNX FranchisingFinance leaders who remain skeptical of the prospects for economic recovery inside the 2020 calendar year may want to consult LYNX Franchising CFO Michael Borreca. “I don’t think that it’s going to take us to 2021 to get back to March sales levels,” says Borreca, who doesn’t hesitate to credit three nontraditional metrics for influencing his current thinking on the subject. The first is the volume of disinfectant currently being purchased by franchisees of JAN-PRO—owned by LYNX—which boast of being the largest commercial cleaning franchiser in the country, with over 8,000 small business owners. ...
2020-06-2457 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER609: Minding Your Financial Ps and Qs | Matt Ellis, CFO, VerizonIt’s a story that Verizon CFO Matt Ellis seems to enjoy telling and one that he has undoubtedly related more than once before. One evening while in high school, Ellis was working at the fish counter of a local supermarket when he received some feedback from the store manager. Earlier in the day, the man had asked Ellis to clean a number of shelves beside the counter, but Ellis had soon become busy with fish patrons and hadn’t able to complete the task. More than 30 years later, Ellis easily retrieves the store...
2020-06-2153 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER608: Opening the Acquisition Chapter | Jody Cire, CFO, AllCloudWhen the Sarbanes–Oxley Act was enacted 18 years ago, it required the Securities and Exchange Commission to create regulations to define how companies should comply with it—a mandate that would end up impacting the careers of finance professionals well into the future. CFO Jody Cire was one such professional. Back in 2010, Cire found himself in Boulder, Colorado, after having been relocated from a role in Germany as KPMG’s lead audit manager for SAP AG. In light of his recent large enterprise experience, KPMG had been eager to assign Cire stateside in order to scratch the Sarbox...
2020-06-1751 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER607: Exercising Discipline to Expose Trend Lines | Angiras Koorapaty, CFO, Reversing LabsWhen a new CEO is recruited to lead a company, it’s not uncommon for the incumbent CFO to be replaced. However, there are certain network-savvy CFOs who are able to muster enough influence with their boards to easily discourage incoming CEOs from implementing their displacement as part of sweeping the C-suite clean. Angiras Koorapaty was not one of these well-connected CFOs. Or at least he wasn’t about 20 years ago, when he found himself forfeiting a finance leadership position to a newly arrived CEO’s CFO pick. “This was a pivotal moment for me a...
2020-06-141h 00
CFO THOUGHT LEADER606: Leveraging the Value of Culture | Will Costolnick, CFO, Hire DynamicsYears from now, when Will Costolnick thinks back to the start of his CFO career, he will likely count the 12 months that preceded his appointment as CFO of Hire Dynamics as part of the same chapter, for—not unlike many of his CFO peers—Costolnick first found his footing at his new employer by slipping into a vice president of finance role for a year or two. In Costolnick’s case, the interim role lasted 12 months, or just long enough for Hire Dynamics to reformulate its management ranks and expand its C-suite. Still, Costol...
2020-06-1040 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER605: When Finance Sings a New Tune | John Cappadona, CFO, School of RockUnlike the music artists and instructors recruited by School of Rock to provide music lessons at its 270 locations around the globe, John Cappadona was first hired by the firm to provide a crash course in accounting. “The day I joined, my controller and I walked through the door together not knowing anything,” explains Cappadona, who stepped into the CFO role at School of Rock shortly after its CEO, Rob Price, moved the music lesson provider’s headquarters to the Boston area. Says Cappadona: “For the first couple of months, it took us almost 25 days to...
2020-06-0742 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER604: When It's Time for a Fire Drill | Gordon Stuart, CFO, Unit4In the late 1980s, when Gordon Stuart exited a 4-year stint as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he bid accounting farewell—or at least he did until he stepped into a CFO role roughly a dozen years later. Ever since, he has occupied multiple CFO roles, helping to remove any doubt about his finance and accounting orientation. Still, Stuart’s appetite for broader business experiences during the early part of his career set him apart from many of his finance leader peers. During the 1990s, as a senior engagement manager for strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Comp...
2020-06-0353 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER603: All Eyes on Recovery Indicators| John Bonney, CFO, HarnessWhen John Bonney joined San Francisco–based Harness a little more than a year ago, he became not only the company’s first CFO but also its first finance hire. “For me, this was the first time that I came into a role with a blank slate—it was at Ground Zero,” explains Bonney, who says that the software start-up specializing in the automation of software applications delivery had theretofore been outsourcing its finance, legal and IT functions. Initially, he recalls, he was somewhat doubtful that he was good match for such an early-stage firm—and especial...
2020-05-3141 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER600: Charting Your Course to Survive and Thrive | Amir Jafari, CFO, Reputation.comWhen Amir Jafari looks back and reflects on his path to the CFO office, he includes two character traits that have arguably long distinguished finance leaders from other functional leaders. “We in finance have high levels of accountability and integrity, and these are the things that we’re able to then transpose in terms of what we do and how we are able to lead as CFOs,” explains Jafari, who says that it was his ability to “transpose” these traits during a recent career chapter at ServiceNow that allowed him to ultimately gain the leadership experience required to step int...
2020-05-2428 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER599: Sharpening Your Customer Acumen | David Woodworth, CFO, insightsoftwareAt the age of 31, David Woodworth was offered CFO positions at two different firms. The first offer came from his then current employer, where as vice president of finance he was keenly aware of urgent challenges that the company’s next CFO would need to address. The second offer came unsolicited from a smaller company in the same field, where he could expect to ease into the role and set the pace for his first 100 days. “It was a hard decision, and one where you wish there was a silver bullet,” says Woodworth, who opted to stay where...
2020-05-2033 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER598: A Bank for Your Financial Health | Thibault Fulconis, CFO, Varo MoneyEarlier this year, when the FDIC approved fintech start-up Varo Money’s application to become a national bank, Thibault Fulconis’s latest CFO career chapter suddenly appeared to make perfect sense. Still, it was only two years ago that Fulconis’s entry into the land of fintech start-ups no doubt raised a few eyebrows among his former colleagues at BancWest Corp., where he most recently served as vice chairman and COO. “I was coming from a position where I had about 3,000 direct reports when I was COO to an entity where I had three people reporting...
2020-05-1739 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER597: Why RPA is Attracting More Than Capital | Tomer Pinchas, CFO, KryonLast February, following his arrival on a flight to Israel, Tomer Pinchas recalls receiving a startling text from the Israeli government. Having recently visited Italy, the text explained, passenger Pinchas must now agree to enter self-quarantine for a period two weeks. As CFO of Kryon—a Tel Aviv start-up specializing in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)—Pinchas, like most business travelers, was well aware of the recent spread of COVID-19. Still, the order to self-quarantine seemed aggressive to Pinchas, who at the time could not have imagined that in a few short weeks he would be sheltering in place with the...
2020-05-1343 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER596: Optimizing Your Core Offerings Beneath 2020's COVID Haze | John Theler, CFO, AvettaWhen John Theler stepped into the CFO office at SaaS developer Avetta last summer, among his list of priorities was the daunting task of better articulating supply chain hazards to management teams and industry at large. Nine months later, Theler has no doubt added a number of items to his list of finance leader priorities, but his articulation task has become far less daunting. Not surprisingly, it seems that his thoughtful comments on the perils of poorly managed supply chains have paled in comparison to the high-wattage exposure that COVID-19 has suddenly brought to supply chains—an ill...
2020-05-1058 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER595: The Flight to Digital | Virpy Richter, CFO, Awin GlobalIt was supposed to be the type of introduction that would help to break the ice between a new business leader and her direct reports. However, the words spoken by the managing director (MD) became frozen in time. Or at least this was the case for Virpy Richter, who at the age of 27 had only recently relocated from Germany after having accepted a promotion to oversee the finances of her company’s Dutch operating unit. “This is the German girl from our central unit. Be nice to her. She is just visiting us,” Richter recalls the MD...
2020-05-0627 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER594: The Art & Science of Raising Funds | Chris Mausler, CFO, PeerNovaWhen it comes to raising money from the investor community, finance executives often find themselves standing in line for job assignments that promise to make them active participants in the process. Such roles allow aspiring finance leaders to check off one of the more essential items on the demanding list of prerequisites required of high-growth–firm CFOs. For those executives who have climbed the accounting career ladder or toiled for years in an FP&A cubicle, the “money box” is often one of the last ones to get checked off. Such was the case fo...
2020-05-0347 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER593: Energizing Your Customer Borders | Jim Emerich, CFO, NarvarFor many future finance leaders, the year 2020 is destined to provide the dark moments of doubt that sweeten the upsides to be savored in years to come. Certainly, few business lessons are more widely cherished than those related to challenging economic times—and few are summoned more by finance leaders when it comes to explaining their business-building philosophies. Such is the case with Narvar CFO Jim Emerich, who in recounting the experiences that have prepared him for a finance leadership role always singles out the year 2001, when the September 11 terrorist attacks disrupted an economy still re...
2020-04-2947 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER592: Beyond Disruption, Capitalizing on New Opportunities | Sameer Bhargava, CFO, Clark Construction GroupHaving built a successful career in private equity—including 13 years with formidable Carlyle Group—Sameer Bhargava was probably not the most likely candidate to fill a CFO position at Clark Construction Group of Bethesda, Maryland. The two businesses belonged to strikingly different worlds. Whereas Carlyle populated its world with leading-edge investment vehicles and innovative global assets, Clark has left its mark with signature skyscrapers and civic projects that are credited with transforming public spaces in a big way. Still, both Washington, DC, area–headquartered businesses share what arguably remains industry’s greatest hiring determinant: a common g...
2020-04-2646 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER591: Why CFOs Must Ask the Difficult Questions | Andrew Casey, CFO, WalkMeYears from now, when Andrew Casey reflects back on his CFO career and seeks to make sense of its various chapters, he may want to title the mythical volume Timing Is Everything. Certainly, few expressions might better summarize the career path of a finance executive who for years diligently checked off each CFO prerequisite only to arrive in the CFO office in March 2020—the very month when industry faced the seismic consequences of COVID-19. No matter what lies ahead for Casey—or how he chooses to label his arrival in the C-suite at SaaS digital adoption enabler WalkM...
2020-04-2248 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER590: The Art of Fixing What's Broken | Terry Schmid, CFO, TopiaPurchasing bananas and moving them through a warehouse in less than 24 hours is perhaps not a professional experience widely shared by today’s finance leaders. Still, as Topia CFO Terry Schmid tells it, mastering banana logistics may just be a worthy prerequisite for many of today’s CFO roles. “It taught me to think about the process that you go through to understand how things flow, how things actually work, and how you can improve things,” says Schmid, who first entered the professional world as a software coder specializing in COBOL—a language that landed him a consulting...
2020-04-1943 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER589: Builder, Fixer, Finance Chief | Bob Feller, CFO, Workforce SoftwareLast November, CFO Bob Feller achieved a career milestone of sorts when he celebrated his fifth anniversary as Workforce Software’s finance leader. “Prior to this, the longest that I have ever stayed anywhere has been four years,” explains Feller, who says that the cadence of his CFO career transitions is normally in step with those of other tech sector CFOs, who are known to job-hop every three to four years. Still, Feller mentions his recent anniversary to draw our attention to his resolve to help build Workforce into a formidable SaaS challenger inside the realm...
2020-04-1553 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER588: FinTech Goes Beyond the Paycheck | Brian Whalen, CFO, BranchBack in 2008, when auction giant eBay acquired Bill Me Later (BML), a Maryland-based payment credit company, Brian Whalen and his BML colleagues breathed a sigh of relief. “We had just enough liquidity and options to give us the runway to sell to eBay and PayPal, so—from a learning perspective—it was really about asking the questions ‘How do you keep those options open?’ and ‘How do you keep your liquidity choices available to you so that you can capture the moment?’” says Whalen. Having served in a number business development roles at BML, he recalls as if it...
2020-04-1231 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER587: Looking Around the Next Corner | Bill Koefoed, CFO, OneStream SoftwareWhen asked whether a new sales enablement hire would be a “direct report,” Bill Koefoed, CFO of OneStream Software, replied: “Organization matters only when your processes and relationships don’t.” It’s an observation not shared widely perhaps among newbie CFOs, who upon their arrival are known to rely more on organizational reporting lines than relationship potential to assert their influence. Nevertheless, four months and one pandemic into his latest CFO tour of duty, Koefoed has his relationship-building skills in high gear as he works alongside OneStream’s sales leaders to better identify those factors contributing t...
2020-04-0840 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER585: A Taste for Opportunity | Ankur Agrawal, CFO, Cooks VentureAs the newly appointed CFO of agtech start-up Cooks Venture, Ankur Agrawal lists one of his favorite duties as designing menus. Of course, we are referring to the menu of performance measurements featured on the poultry company’s maturing business dashboard. “One of the beauties that comes with joining a new company is that you get to build from scratch,” explains Agrawal, who says that he’s relied on some of his earlier experiences using dashboards at Pepsico and Blue Apron to help Cooks Venture to build a better one. According to Agrawal, a successful dashboar...
2020-04-0135 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER578: The Awesome Power of FP&A | Jason Child, CFO, SplunkLess than a year after his arrival at Splunk—a fast-growing, San Francisco–based software developer—CFO Jason Child appears to have been fully repatriated to his native land. To be clear: The “land” to which we refer is not the code-crunching zone of software development but the turf of business growth and scale—a locale in which Child resided for more than a decade while serving in multiple finance leadership roles at Amazon. Child first joined that company in 1999 as a corporate controller before being reassigned to the firm’s FP&A function. During his 12 years a...
2020-03-0854 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER577: Rethinking Sales Productivity | Carolyn Koehn, CFO, BoomiWhen finance leader Carolyn Koehn looks back on her career to identify the experiences that she feels best prepared her for a CFO role, she shares a candid observation: “I went to places no one else wanted to go.” Such was the case in the late 1990s, when she moved to Bogotá, Colombia, for Nortel Networks, after having helped the company’s finance leadership understand why she was a good match for a sudden job opening. “I was the only interested candidate who wanted to go,” recalls Koehn, who says that her initiative and willingness to relocate...
2020-03-0432 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER576: Finance & the Beat of the Drum | Guido Torrini, CFO, CelonisIt doesn’t take long for CFO Guido Torrini of Celonis to draw our attention to the burden of the growing pools of data within organizations and the great irony that is afflicting many corporate finance departments today. He’s referring to the fact that while at no time have finance organizations had more data to help them better expose the opportunities that lie ahead, at no time has finance been at greater risk of losing the focus required to help their organizations benefit from the opportunities. “You can’t just throw new dashboards at people a...
2020-03-0156 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER575: The Benefits of Openness | Anup Singh, CFO, IllumioAmong the more novel approaches that CFO Anup Singh has recently used to help advance a more open working environment at Illumio, of Sunnyvale, California, was the creation of a channel inside the instant messaging application Slack through which employees can access Illumio’s finance leader by tagging their queries with an unassuming “#CFO ask me anything”. “They will ask me my views on things. This is about high employee engagement and being really accessible to the employees. I’m letting them know that they’ve got an avenue where we can be straightforward and very transparent with sharing...
2020-02-2644 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER574: The Age of the Real-Time CFO | Mike Ellis, CFO, FlywireKnowing that Mike Ellis has been the CFO of several growth companies, we can’t help but ask him about his tour of duty at the Massachusetts Port Authority, where the experienced finance executive served as controller from 2006 to 2009. Although the Port Authority is not exactly the type of employer that you would expect to find on the resume of an accomplished “growth CFO,” Ellis is more than happy to answer our question. “The Port Authority was not tax-funded—it was a bona-fide business with multiple revenue streams generating profits,” he explains, while characterizing the government a...
2020-02-2336 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER573: CBD: Sizing Up the Opportunity | Alan George, CFO, Ojai Energeticsmong the different experiences that Alan George credits with having prepared him for a CFO role, one office meeting looms large. After he had spent days and nights preparing his first presentation for the president of a portfolio company, George recalls, the meeting came to an abrupt end when the executive reached across the table and shut George’s laptop. “Come with me!” was the curt command he recalls being issued as he followed the executive out of the office. Over the next few days, George says, he toured the company’s manufacturing facility alongside the exec...
2020-02-1934 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER572: Measuring the Efficiencies of Customer Acquisition | David Burt, CFO, ServiceTitanYears from now, when finance leader David Burt is reminiscing about his varied career chapters, you might imagine a captivated listener politely interrupting the veteran CFO with the question, “Excuse me, but what exactly was your profession?” This is a query perhaps more likely to be asked of veteran CFOs than other seasoned business leaders, in light of how finance leaders are less tethered than others to any one industry or opportunity throughout their careers. Such is the case with Burt, who, as CFO of ServiceTitan, is busily applying his patchwork of business and industry expe...
2020-02-1650 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER571: Optimizing Your Pipeline's Velocity |Greg Wookey, CFO, BoulevardInside the world of retail businesses, Greg Wookey’s CFO career has advanced down a path that parallels the sector’s growing appetite for more sophisticated software. Such was the case roughly 10 years ago, when he stepped into the CFO office at Mindbody—a firm whose well-known software helped fitness centers across the country to manage the demands of their clientele—and such is the case today, as Wookey serves as CFO of Boulevard, a SaaS developer whose offerings are specially tailored to high-end salons and spas. This arena—in what Boulevard and other software developers...
2020-02-1235 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER570: Discovering What Makes Customers Happy | Sue Vestri, CFO, Greenphire, Inc.In the past, Sue Vestri has told friends that she has achieved CFO success by routinely working herself out of jobs. Vestri is not alone. Certainly, many of her finance leader peers have helped to create some exciting M&A deal-making chapters only to be “written out” of the newly merged business’s future script. “Being put out of a job isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one opportunity can open the door to the next—or at least it has for me,” says Vestri, whose latest career post as CFO of Greenphire opened up just as her...
2020-02-0941 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER566: Building Your P&L Culture | Scot Parnell, CFO DailyPayWe are nearly at the end of our interview with Scot Parnell when we ask him to explain what led him to accept the CFO position at DailyPay, a company with a pioneering technology inside the human capital management realm. This is a question that we had asked a little earlier in the interview, but this time we want to know what other factors may have contributed to his decision. Although Parnell has already put forth a compelling explanation of DailyPay’s unique offerings, he is happy to share a bit more with us. “This role...
2020-01-2632 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER563: Energizing Your Entrepreneurial Mind-set | Stephen Grist, CFO, Bohemia Interactive SimulationsIt was back in 2002, Stephen Grist says, when he first punched through a surface of rigid assumptions to grasp the innovative levers that would propel him into the ranks of strategic CFOs. At the time, Grist was the CFO of Viatel, a technology company whose management and sales teams were eagerly seeking to reestablish the company’s footing along a growth path after having recently emerged from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. With its bankruptcy in the rearview mirror, the company emerged with an unbridled appetite for growth—but one that was perhaps lacking in long-term vision.
2020-01-1544 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER562: A Window Into the Future | Anna Brunelle, CFO, Kinestral TechnologiesAsked to reflect on those experiences that she feels prepared her for a finance leadership role, a cash flow statement quickly comes to mind for Anna Brunelle, CFO of Kinestral Technologies. Only months into her first industry finance job, Brunelle was tasked with preparing her company’s cash flow statement, and she didn’t like some of what she discovered about the business. “I realized that there were a couple of businesses that the company had acquired a few years earlier that had some elements that were kind of dragging down our profitability,” explains Brunelle, who afte...
2020-01-1250 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER561: Identifying the Levers for Efficient Growth | John Evarts, CFO, MediaflyTen years or so ago, the expression “never waste a downturn” became a popular maxim among business leaders who viewed the economy’s downward spiral as an opportunity to trim waste and restructure portions of their businesses. The expression also summed up the mind-set of a unique class of executives who, despite a bleak hiring environment, viewed the period as being potentially transformational for their careers. Such was the case with CFO John Evarts, who entered the downturn as a CFO for a not-for-profit and exited as CFO of Mediafly—a small content asset management company that in the c...
2020-01-0839 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER560: When Your Tactic Becomes Your Strategy | Raman Kapur, CFO, MoogsoftYears from now, if Silicon Valley’s glitterati were ever to gather to celebrate the opening of a National Cloud Computing Museum, CFO Raman Kapur would make an excellent tour guide for the facility’s finance wing. In fact, he could just chart the trajectory of his career from the dot-com bubble forward to help the world at large to better grasp how the cloud opportunity has grown and reshaped the finance business function. Our tour could begin at Intuit, the accounting software developer that Kapur joined in 2001 while seeking shelter from the dot-com bubble burst, where he q...
2020-01-0542 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER559: Establishing Your Work Ethos | Bea Ordonez, CFO, OTC Markets Group, Inc.Perhaps, unlike most of her professional peers, when Bea Ordonez first interviewed for a CFO role, she got the job. At the time, perhaps no one was more surprised than Ordonez, whose finance resume—while impressive for a 26-year-old—still lacked a number of C-suite prerequisites. Twenty years later, she still resides in the C-Suite, having filled a number of consecutive CFO and COO roles over the years. Nonetheless, she credits her first CFO tour of duty with having opened the door for everything that has followed. “On paper, at least, I was woeful...
2020-01-0139 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER555: Two Worlds One Career | Mike Kaseta, CFO, Aerami TherapeuticsFew megadeals within the past decade have received as many recurring kudos as the acquisition of Genzyme, of Cambridge, MA by France’s biggest pharmaceutical company, Sanofi. The marriage of Sanofi and Genzyme appears to have exceeded expectations, allowing all of those involved in minting the newly merged entity to rightfully keep a feather in their postmerger caps. Thus it was for Mike Kaseta, who in the wake of the merger found himself tasked with integrating the finance and IT functions of the two companies. “It’s probably the achievement that I’m most proud of in my...
2019-12-1135 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER554: Achieving a Strategic Capital Structure | David Moss, CFO INmune BioAmong the many lessons that David Moss has learned along the trajectory of his 25-year finance career, the one to which he refers simply as “the $3 million sweatshirt” is perhaps the most enduring. Even after 20 years, Moss can’t help but mention the sweatshirt bearing the logo of Pets.com, which he kept as a souvenir from an earlier career chapter involving a $3 million investment in the infamous dot-com retailing upstart. Pets.com began operations in November 1998 and shut down in November 2000, becoming one of the more high-profile victims of the dot-com bubble. However, looking back, Moss says t...
2019-12-081h 00
CFO THOUGHT LEADER553: Rebuilding a Spin-off's Missing Parts | Ravi Chopra, CFO, SonicWallRavi Chopra has built his career inside finance functions designed to serve growth-minded management. Such was the case in the late ’90s when Chopra joined Cisco Systems, which at the time was experiencing 50% growth annually. Jump forward 10 years, and you’ll find him busy leading the FP&A function for growth-driven Juniper Networks. Asked to reflect back on a 25-year finance career, Chopra doesn’t hesitate to cite his former employer. “I learned most of everything that I know today at Juniper,” says Chopra, who quickly names Robyn Denholm, Juniper’s former CFO and current Tesla chairman, as a present...
2019-12-0439 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER552: Making Customer Outcomes Top of Mind | Valerie Burman, CFO, GuidesparkHad Valerie Burman entered the CFO office a decade ago, you wonder whether the role would be as good a match for the accomplished finance executive as it appears to be today. Back in 2007, after working nearly a decade in M&A as an investment banker, Burman exited a banking career to take on a corporate development role at Business Objects, a French software company that was soon to be acquired by SAP. Post acquisition, Burman quickly found a groundswell of opportunities coming her way inside SAP, where she would serve in a variety of...
2019-12-0141 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER551: Capitalizing on Efficiencies to Unlock New Value | Chris Sands, CFO, MineralTreeWhen Chris Sands accepted an investor relations position at a midsize health care firm, he did so with the understanding that he would be permitted to occasionally sink his teeth into some of the firm’s growing FP&A challenges. Having a resume rich with investment banking experience, Sands was now determined to add some FP&A, a tour of duty that he viewed as a necessary prerequisite if he were going to advance down the CFO path. Unbeknownst to Sands, his FP&A plate would shortly be overflowing following the acquisition of his new employer by Th...
2019-11-2436 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER550: The Funnel: Where Sales & Finance Meet | Andrew Hicks, CFO, AdvancedFor every top sales leader who confides to friends that he or she is really a numbers freak at heart, there’s an Andrew Hicks, who, as CFO of Advanced, would be just as apt to boast about a sales funnel innovation as he would about the adoption of a new accounting rule. In fact, it would probably not surprise Hicks’s past and present business colleagues to learn that when asked to identify a mentor from his past, Advanced’s CFO chooses the head of sales for a former employer. “It was because of this rel...
2019-11-2037 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER549: Stay the Course | Cort Townsend, CFO, Kofax SoftwareAs is the case with many finance leader resumes, Cort Townsend’s reveals a repetition of professional advancement and achievement that allows casual readers to quickly validate his CFO credentials. However, like those of many, Townsend self-tale is only a shorthand rendering of a career path filled with twists, turns, and high-stakes industry drama. Such was the case in 2015 and 2016, a period in Townsend’s career annals with enough M&A high jinks and boardroom intrigue to fill an entire volume. Subsequently, though, in July 2017, Townsend landed neatly inside the CFO office of Kofax via an appointment that...
2019-11-1737 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER546: When Speed to Market Matters Most | Richard Steinhart, CFO, Bioxcel TherapeuticsWhen asked what sets BioXcel Therapeutics apart from other clinical-stage biopharmaceutical companies, CFO Richard Steinhart doesn’t mention a specific drug or therapy. Instead, he describes a system that the company developed to advance the speed with which drugs are commercialized. According to Steinhart, the biotech company’s system uses artificial intelligence to reveal “hidden connections” that, once exposed, can multiply opportunities for the application of certain drugs. “Good drug developers can see first connections between drugs and diseases and they are pretty apparent to everyone out there, but second- and third-degree connections are not apparent,”...
2019-11-0639 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER545: Get in Gear with ARR | Ken Stillwell, CFO, PegasystemsThe way Ken Stillwell tells it, his career as a CFO can be divided into two distinct worlds: the world before ARR and the world after ARR. ARR, of course, is the acronymic identifier for the widely used SaaS metric known as annual recurring revenue. Stillwell prefers to put his own twist on the acronym by declaring its actual meaning to be annual recurring relationships—as in client relationships. Says Stillwell: “Whatever metric you use to measure recurring relationships is really misunderstood in the marketplace until you start to track it.” What happens next has led ma...
2019-11-0331 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER544: Tales of a Finance Journeyman | John Pokorney, CFO, LeTip InternationalFew finance leaders have boiled down the take-aways from their career journeys into as many palatable, bite-size portions as John Pokorney, CFO of LeTip International. Having found his original finance door of entry at Intel Corp. in the early 1990s, Pokorney credits the chipmaker’s collaborative culture for prodding him to speak the language of others and tap the power of narrative. “I wasn’t there to create numbers for the engineering group that I was working with or the logistics organization that I ended up supporting, but I was there to be a business partner—and when you...
2019-10-301h 02
CFO THOUGHT LEADER543: Whetting Your Firm's FP&A Appetite | Paul Willson, CFO, CompeatAfter years of careful finance career–building within the healthcare sector, Paul Willson came upon an opportunity inside Austin’s energetic technology start-up community that he found hard to resist. Becoming employee number 23, he was immediately dubbed “the finance guy”—a label that he would wear for only 5 days before the ambitious start-up announced that it was being acquired by BMC Software. At the time, Willson no doubt harbored some frustration concerning the timing of his arrival in the realm of entrepreneurial tech. However, in the weeks and months to come, the conventional wisdom that had fueled...
2019-10-2730 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER542: Now See This: One CFO's Data Visualization Mantra | Tim Zue, CFO, Boston Red SoxWhen it comes to guessing a person’s email address, most of us would agree that the best way to optimize your odds of success is to first assume that the person was using their actual name as part of the address. From there, your next decision arguably is whether to spell out the individual’s first name or use an initial for it. For Tim Zue, the calculation behind one guess was a bit more nuanced because although the first name of the person he was emailing was Lawrence, the man was widely known as Larry. With li...
2019-10-2343 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER541: Energizing Your Stakeholder Network | Smital Shah, CFO, ProQRAs an Indian citizen living in the United States and working for a Dutch company, CFO Smital Shah frequently spends her days on conference calls with investors from Asia, Israel, or Europe. On every investor call, at every board meeting, and at every employee gathering, the same question gets asked: “How far is ProQR from serving patients?” Each time she hears this, the firm’s worldly finance leader provides a thoughtful and measured response. This is a question that punctuates the tenure of finance chiefs inside every clinical stage start-up, and one that Shah says has le...
2019-10-2036 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER540: When the Whole is Greater | Lucy Rutishauser, CFO, Sinclair Broadcast GroupLike a savvy investor, Lucy Rutishauser built her early career by carefully tracking the activities of different companies. Sometimes, to glean better insights, she would actually cold-call a company and ask for the finance department. But Rutishauser wasn’t looking to invest money—instead, she was looking to invest that all-so-valuable commodity known as career-building years. “The take-away here is that as you are growing your professional career and moving from job to job, it’s crucial that the decisions that you make be valuable to a future employer and not just great for your bank account at that...
2019-10-1634 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER539: Own Your Next Challenge and Your Career | Jason Lin, CFO, CentageWhile tours of duty at struggling companies are seldom viewed as enviable career chapters for most professionals, finance leaders are often apt to savor the lessons that such tours of duty bring forth and even draw attention to such early chapters. Such is the case with CFO Jason Lin, whose career journey includes chapters with a rapidly rising juggernaut (TripAdvisor) as well as with the revitalization of a flickering fallen star (Monster.com). When asked why he singles out his “Monster chapter” as an experience that prepared him for a finance leadership role, Lin recalls the...
2019-10-1337 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER538: When Saying "No" is a Strategic Imperative | William Edmondson, CFO, 1EThe mass migration of software developers from perpetual licensing to subscription licensing models has allowed quite a few CFOs to enrich their strategy credentials in recent years. It’s a movement that has allowed finance chiefs to rebrand themselves as champions of change, and one that has helped to dismiss the image of CFOs being the C-suite’s most dependable naysayers. Nevertheless, saying “no” to a migratory deadline is what CFO William Edmondson counts as one of his career’s most memorable finance strategic moments. As CFO of 1E—a UK-based IT software and services company—and...
2019-10-0940 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER537: When Every Megawatt Matters | Sharif Metwalli, CFO. Vantage Data CentersWhen Sharif Metwalli decided that the time was right to accept a CFO position with Vantage Data Centers, he was confident that he had found a company that allowed him to check all of the boxes when it came to his finance leader search criteria. Box #1: Know and respect the management team. Box #2: Know and respect the owner. Box #3: Know the industry and be bullish on the sector. Says Metwalli: “After 19 years of banking, I wanted to apply my skillset on the corporate side, and an opportunity arose to work for a client that I kn...
2019-10-0626 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER535: Wiring Your Customer Centric Organization | Sarah Murphy, CFO, BSI AmericasAs she approaches her 20th year with BSI Group, Sarah Murphy repeats the word “variety” when asked why she turned a blind eye to other opportunities outside the company known to many as an exemplar of business standards. “There was always something new to move on to,” says Murphy, who, having spent the past decade in the United States as CFO of BSI Americas, is about open yet another career chapter as she returns to the BSI’s headquarters in London. The “variety” that Murphy has long pursued has led her to open different career chapters in Hong Kong, Lon...
2019-09-2944 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER534: Finding Your Operational Footing | Constance Minc, CFO, IFS When a company opts to recruit a finance leader from the “outside world,” it’s not uncommon these days for the future CFO to first serve in a provisional role—one that can provide a wide view of the business while allocating a little extra time for on-the-job learning. So it was for Constance Minc, a veteran investment banker who logged 12 months as head of business operations for IFS before entering the ERP vendor’s CFO office last May. According to Minc, her 12-month stint in operations was as much about building bridges as it was a...
2019-09-2528 min
CFO THOUGHT LEADER532: How the CFO Office Cured an Operations Itch | Erik Ostrowski, CFO, AVROBIO“A CFO role was something that I had not yet really envisioned for myself,” explains CFO Erik Ostrowski when asked about the investment banking chapter of his early finance career. Still, Ostrowski says that he always found the challenges facing smaller or high-growth firms more interesting than those encountered by large enterprises. “I had a choice as to whether I wanted to work for a larger bank that worked with larger, established companies or for a boutique working with smaller firms, and I found that I was pulled to emerging-growth companies,” he explains. Today, as CFO of b...
2019-09-1844 min
Middle Market Thought Leader | Priorities for Growth117: Inside Coast to Coast | Our Featured Workplace ChampionJack Sweeney & Brett Knowles Spotlight Strategies From Talent-Minded Business Leaders
2016-12-0926 minMiddle Market Thought Leader | Priorities for GrowthBonus Episode: Assessing the Capital Needs of Your Business: Elliot Jaffee, Head of Commercial Banking, U.S. BankIn the first of a series of occasional interviews, Middle Market Thought Leader host Jack Sweeney speaks with Elliot Jaffee, Head of Commercial Banking, U.S. Bank, about economic uncertainty, Brexit and how middle-market firms can achieve greater financial flexibility.
2016-06-3016 min