Cfo Thought Leader

A brief summary of this episode

We can’t help but cringe when a finance leader tells us that they don’t want to be known as “the CFO of ‘No’”—that shopworn characterization of CFOs who seem to enjoy giving thumbs down verdicts.   So, we were pleased when CFO Jim Morgan of CallRail steered clear of the trite trope when he recently joined us as a return guest.Nonetheless, we were still curious as to what has replaced the iconic “thumbs down” when it comes to finance leaders projecting their diligence onto the monitoring of risk and governance practices.“I probably have it a little bit easier than most CFOs because one of our five culture statements is Mind the business—which is music to a CFO’s ears,” comments Morgan, who adds that the simple phrase is best voiced in a question.“’Are we minding the business?’ is what I ask our team every day,” reports Morgan, as if prescribing for the CallRail corporate culture a regimen of essential vitamins and minerals.Notes Morgan: “It’s naturally easy for me to be the culture carrier of th

When Ambereen Toubassy decided that it was time to start up her own hedge fund, it's likely that no one cast doubt on the experienced investor’s grand plan. That is, no one except Toubassy herself.  After 7years as an investment banker with Goldman Sachs and a dozen running hedge funds, Toubassy says, she told herself, “Okay, this is a moment, I have a track record, I should start my own hedge fund.”Thus with some freshly drafted marketing collateral in hand, she initiated the early round of discussions that would allow her to begin raising capital.  “When I started doing this, I realized my that heart wasn’t in it—I told myself, ‘Okay, if your heart isn’t in this, you have no business asking other people to entrust you with their capital,’” recalls Toubassy, who notes that her outreach had put her in touch with a span of finance professionals from her Goldman Sachs years, including a number who had exited the investing world to take on a variety of operating roles—including CFO positions.“What clic

When Darren Cooper was named CFO of Reveal Group of Melbourne, Australia, in 2019, there was no friendly board member or executive recruiter seeking kudos for having completed a successful a CFO search.Instead, Cooper says, his twist of fate was due to a personal relationship that he had established with Reveal management after his prior company, Adcorp Holdings, had hired Reveal to provide it with services inside the intelligent automation realm.Originally from South Africa, Cooper had been counted among the finance rank-and-file of a Johannesburg staffing company only 5 years earlier. Turn back the clock to those times, and you would find Cooper spearheading a number of the staffing company’s strategic IT projects when Adcorp entered talks to acquire the company.The resulting deal swung open a number of new doors for Cooper, who became a key player in the restructuring of the staffing company’s South African operations. Adcorp, in turn, promoted Cooper into a group financial manager role before asking him t

Gillian Sheeran’s was perhaps 17 years into an illustrious finance career and on her second CFO tour of duty when she finally met the limits of her CFO superpowers.These powers had first guided her into a CFO role at the tender age of 32, where during her tenure she would help to turn a 200-employee IT consulting firm into a global business with 850 workers and eight offices in six countries. Next, she added a turnaround chapter to her CFO resume when she helped to design and implement new processes allowing a company to return to profitability within only 9 months.  It was such stirring feats and results-oriented outcomes that led a mentor impressed by her resume to comment, “You’re going to have to take half of this stuff out because nobody is going to believe that you did all of this in such a short period of time.”To help us better understand the career mind-set that once guided her thinking, Sheeran issues a mock impression of herself: “I work incredibly hard because that’s what I do—I work smart, a

If, as the old maxim suggests, “life” is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans, Adil Syed’s other plans most likely did not include Snap Inc—or at least they didn’t when he first headed east to attend business school.Having spent the previous 3 years at Redpoint Ventures helping to raise capital for such tech gladiators as Stripe and Zendesk and 5 more at Goldman Sachs as a financial analyst, Syed was ready to have a typical business school experience in which he’d spend his days going to class and nights attending gatherings with classmates.Sure enough, this was how Year 1 of Syed’s business school experience unfolded. It was during his second year, that he stepped into a role that would arguably become the most consequential of his finance career.“I was the first summer intern at Snapchat, which at the time had only about 100 or so engineers and appeared to me to be such unique place that eventually I decided to join them full-time,” recalls Syed, who notes that the opportunity to work for

It was after Ross Muken had been gainfully roaming the corridors of equity research for more than a dozen years that the acquisition of his firm administered a dose of operations insight that began to feed his aspirations to become a CFO.  At the time, Muken was a top research analyst for ISI Group, an independent, research-driven trading firm that had begun to attract the attention of a number of the investment banking world’s largest banks—including Evercore, which in August 2014 acquired ISI and its 28 research analysts covering 345 companies in 10 major industry sectors.“It was through this process that I saw what needs to happen when you integrate two businesses and need to drive cost synergies and margin expansion,” recalls Muken, who that point was helping to spearhead the firm’s healthcare and life sciences realm, an area of research that was enjoying some added luster due to a recent boom in biotech.  Along the way, Muken says, it became apparent that the 20-plus-percent operating margins t

Brett & Jack discuss how hiring challenges have led certain organizations to be more tolerant of poor employee behaviors – a development that could be putting growing numbers of businesses at risk. Meanwhile, Brett points out that new hires continue to fetch bigger salaries creating an imbalance with existing employee salaries. Also, performance is not driven by talent alone. Brett says product issues are sometimes thought to be talent issues leading management to put in motion a string of misguided remedies. This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Asil Syed of Rippling, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, CFO Bryan Morris of Demandbase.

Inside the world of trade associations, the135-year-old American Coatings Association’s has never wavered in its dedication to advancing the needs of professionals inside the paints and coatings industry.However, ACA members—like those of many associations these days—are becoming increasingly demanding when it comes to the value that they receive in exchange for their dues.“In the old days, belonging to an industry association was a badge of prestige, and it was something that people felt that they just had to do if they were part of an industry,” comments Ilana Esterrich, who was named ACA’s CFO in 2019 after having served as chief administrative officer for a Washington think tank and spent the previous decade among the financial planning rank-and-file of Thomson Reuters and General Mills Corp.Upon her arrival, Esterrich was told that to better address the escalating demands of ACA’s membership, she needed to clean house—beginning with the accounting department, which seemed to be a province populated by kn

Among the recruitment milestones that populate Bryan Morris’s CFO resume, few can match the 6-month talent acquisition binge that he launched during the first quarter of 2015.“In terms of key hires, I never hired faster than I did then,” comments Morris, as he begins to lay out the circumstances that led to his need to speedily attract and hire talent.At the time, Morris was the newly appointed CFO of Xamarin, a creator of software tools used for mobile apps development.  This firm, then led by cofounder and CEO Nat Freidman, had doubled its revenue annually for the previous few years yet had theretofore focused its talent recruitment efforts mainly on nabbing software engineers and intrepid salespeople.“When it came to people, sales, marketing, and R&D were way out ahead of G&A, so I knew that my first few months would be dedicated to recruiting,” recalls Morris, who notes that until his arrival, the developer had outsourced its accounting function while relying on fractional CFO services to pat

When JJ Pace tells us that he was hired in 2002 to build and eventually lead a finance team that would create and implement monthly budgets for a four-location building materials company located within Charlotte, North Carolina’s greater metro area, the sense of accomplishment that he exudes never falters even when he eventually confides: “In the end, I was the last employee there.”It turns out that Pace’s 5-year stint as a controller (2002–2007) for Build It With Brick of Greater Charlotte was transformational not necessarily for the company but certainly for Pace, who first joined the company as an operations-minded executive but soon found himself knee deep in Excel spreadsheets and month-end reporting tasks.“My job was to basically build the finance team from scratch for what was at the time an expanding business,” explains Pace, who grew into a finance leader as he contributed to the management insight that made Build It With Brick a successful company—until it wasn’t.“Unfortunately, there was nothing th

When Mike Taylor mentions the customer experience during our talk, his intent—unlike that of many of his CFOs peers—is not to boast of some vast reservoir of data from which customer insights are routinely being gleaned.Instead, he brings this up to let us know that there are some things that finance still struggles to see and measure.This is a startling admission from a finance leader who has already drawn our attention to his sharp lines of sight into the CFO role with the comment “Making certain that I am grounded in data is what has helped me to be a better CFO.”Still, Taylor seems to distance himself from this bit of data wisdom for the moment in order to make a broader point about the customer experience and financial analysis.Having served in several CFO roles over the past two decades, Taylor has a rich career portfolio from which to extract CFO lessons. Nevertheless, he quickly turns our attention to his nearly decade-long tenure at electric car manufacturer Tesla, where he held a number of senior fi

Steve and Jack discuss the data tsunami that many organizations are now facing and what steps finance executives can take to replace their historical, backward-looking, "batch mode" thinking with more proactive approaches that will allow finance teams to achieve more predictive outcomes. This episode's distinguished Planning Aces reveal the leadership mindsets and approaches now driving the shift away from batch mode. Featuring FP&A insights and commentary from CFO Claire Bramley of Teradata,  CFO Sandra Rowland of Xylem, CFO Anna King of Mesh Payments and CFO Pat Dillon of Flock Freight.

Rob Young remembers that back in 2001, when he joined the incoming class of newbie accountants at KPMG’s Short Hills, New Jersey, office, there was a 5- to 6-year age difference between his KPMG classmates and himself.“It was a situation where a 23-year-old was telling me what to do, but at the same time, they had more experience than I then did,” comments Young, whose arrival inside the public accounting realm stands as a professional milestone rarely found on the resume of our CFO guests.   Turn back the clock, and Young, a high school graduate, is proudly receiving an apprenticeship qualification to work as a construction journeyman. Over the next 4 years, he would join a union and oversee a variety projects, while at the same time learning to manage people and the expectations of others.Having started a family and enjoyed some early career success, Young found that a growing sense of purpose led him to enroll in night school for a 2-year college program—where he made an impression on an accounti

Several years ago, when CFO Anna King first began to champion the benefits of real-time data, she recalls a sudden clamor around new customer activity afforded her the consensus-building moment for which she’d been waiting.At the time, King worked for Transactis, a payment processing company that she had first joined in 2011 as a controller. A year later, after having helped to raise the company’s Series C financing, she found herself being appointed CFO.“I was completely shocked—but I was grateful for the board’s confidence in me,” recollects King, who would occupy the CFO office until 2019, when Transactis was acquired by Mastercard.Along the way, King got to work alongside seasoned entrepreneurial CEO Joe Proto, who counted Transactis as his third start-up and had a “playbook” when it came to scaling a business. While King’s C-level appointment gave her new stature within the company, the move to leverage real-time data cross-functionally within the firm demanded something more.“Change management is t

When Andrew Gehrlein is asked about experiences that prepared him for a finance leadership role, one week from his 25-year career climb quickly comes to mind.  Back in 2008, Gehrlein was a controller with ERICO International Corp., a manufacturer of specialized electrical components engineered to better foster a building’s safety.“Construction companies used us to ensure the safety and integrity of their buildings, and, as a result, we commanded premium margins in the manufacturing industry,” reports Gehrlein, who recalls that as the economic downturn began to grab headlines, he found himself sequestered in a conference room for at least a week with his CFO, poring over ERICO’s different budgets.“The overall lesson for me was that when you have the data and understand the business, you can then apply it to whatever situation may face you,” remarks Gehrlein, who notes that during the sequestered week, the company’s FP&A was deployed to execute and analyze alternative scenarios.“We ended up not having

We are nearly at the end of our talk with CFO Tracy Curley when she mentions her two adult children.“I’m really blessed that they knew how important my career was to me when I was raising them,” remarks Curley, who recalls that during their younger years, it was not unusual for the children to find their mother in bed late at night answering emails on her laptop.Suddenly, the questions populating the margins of our handwritten notes no longer seem to nag at us.Why did she work for KPMG as long as she did (6 years)? Why did she move to Honolulu? Why did she not arrive in the CFO office sooner?Certainly, Curley is not the only finance leader and parent who has confessed to us a woeful email habit. However, she may be the first to allow us to witness the habit through the eyes of children.  With one stray comment, the career path that we’ve been discussing for 40 minutes comes more sharply into view.Like many of the women finance leaders with whom we’ve spoken, Curley has taken longer to reach the CFO offic

Turn back the clock to the mid-1990s, and Aaron Hartwig is standing behind the front desk of a Las Vegas hotel, checking in guests and welcoming them to the always spirited city.“I always loved hospitality—I love the idea of having people come to your property to enjoy themselves,” reports Hartwig, who first landed in “guest services” as a recent college graduate with a degree in hotel administration.Still, at the time, he remained uncertain with regard to within which functional area in hospitality he should try to build his career. Then came word that MGM Grand Hotel & Casino was looking to hire a number of accountants—or, rather, a number of accounting interns. Hartwig signed on, envisioning that the program could lead to something more permanent with MGM’s accounting department—a notion that soon became a reality.“I did accounts receivable at $8.65 an hour, and from there I worked for a number of different people—some of whom became my mentors—which allowed me to learn and move forward in my career,”

When Kate Bueker first left the world of investment banking for a corporate finance role, she was ready to savor the fabled congruity that a business finance career often offers.“I felt that what would be more interesting and motivating to me would be more consistent,” recalls Bueker, who shortly after joining Akamai Technologies in 2007 became the first business finance executive to become “embedded” with the technology company’s network team.“At the time, Akamai’s cost of goods sold—which was mostly their network costs—was growing faster than revenue, so the CFO at the time asked me if I could like figure out what was going on, or ‘what was driving this,’” explains Bueker, who reports that she and her team quickly zeroed-in on the company’s spiraling co-location costs, the fees being paid to operate the physical facilities that housed the company’s network servers.“We worked together on an operational change that would basically rebuild the existing co-location facilities and free up capacity from within th

Brett & Jack discuss why organizations must have a value proposition for their employees.  This episode each of our featured Workplace Champions gives us different perspectives on what they've done to help attract human capital to their organizations. Again, the question management teams need to be asking:  What's the value proposition that will help us attract the best talent? This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Claire Bramley of Teradata, CFO Rajesh Gupta of OakNorth Bank, and CFO Mark George of Norfolk Southern.