Cfo Thought Leader

Space is not typically the realm that CFOs point to when we ask about experiences that prepared them for a finance leadership role. However, the first 10 years of Alex Amezquita’s professional life frequently involved celestial spaces. “I was an engineer and chip designer, and some of those chips are floating around space on satellites right now, as we speak,” explains Amezquita, who served in a succession of senior chip designer roles before returning to graduate school for an MBA. “As a designer, it’s all about problem-solving, or, ‘How do I get from point A to point B in a very structured way?,'” comments Amezquita, before making a thoughtful comparison between chip design and finance.   “Finance leadership is about taking unstructured information and figuring out how to make it fit into a budget or P&L or message that we can share with the public or our management team or operators,” continues Amezquita, whose post-MBA career has largely been spent inside the investment banking realm’s mergers and ac

When Acepodia CEO Sonny Hsiao began developing a list of candidates to fill the chief financial officer role at the biotechnology company that he had cofounded, it may have surprised some to see Jimmy Lai make the list. Certainly, this was not due to any U.S. markets void on Lai’s resume—to the contrary, he had helped to take three companies public and served as chief financial officer for multiple U.S.-listed firms. Nor was it due to a presumed lack of boardroom stature on Lai’s part, as he was at that time serving on the boards of multiple NYSE-listed companies). Instead, any surprise that Lai’s name elicited may have been due to the simple fact that he was known to have retired. Read More “I had been working in (Asia) for 17 years, and it was time to change the pace and take my wife to all of the places that I had always promised I would,” explains Lai, who notes that his retirement was upended after he received a call from Acepodia and began learning about the innovative cell therapies that the company w

It’s no secret that the herculean effort required to keep corporate board meetings on time frequently involves tracking the arrivals of certain board member attendees. Of course, the most anticipated arrival inside the boardroom is often not a board member at all, but a new business measure or yardstick commonly referred to as a metric. And just as board members often hail from faraway places, so too do metrics. Or so explains Ross Tennenbaum, a former investment banker, who in 2020 stepped into the CFO office at Avalara, a developer of tax compliance software. “I’m obsessed about what I call, for lack of a better name, the macro-to-micro continuum,” explains Tennenbaum, who notes that his new environs have opened his eyes to the life that metrics lead as they swim upstream to the boardroom. “It’s about how you connect that board-level output to the individual all the way down in the organization,” comments Tennenbaum, who believes that too often there’s a sizable disconnect between the aggregated top-level r

Back in 2014—when Guy Blanchard first entered the CFO office at AeroFarms—the indoor vertical farming company had roughly 20 employees and a commercial farm prototype under construction. Seven years and four rounds of private funding later, AeroFarms has recently broken ground on its third commercial farm in Danville, Virginia, and a research farm in Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, this past March, Aerofarms demonstrated that its appetite for innovation extends beyond farming techniques when it announced a merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp., a SPAC that the company now expects to use as a vehicle to go public. “Spring Valley prefers growth-stage companies that don’t have any technology risk and can just focus on the execution part of the equation,” says Blanchard, when asked how the talks with Spring Valley had first gained traction. "They were a great match for us, and this allowed us to narrow the timeline and announce the merger in an accelerated way," explains Blanchard, who notes that the merger, once cl

When marketing campaigns get old, they’re like polyester leisure suits that seem to fit okay but look awful, explains finance chief Darrell Cox of Vena Solutions, who credits finance with helping Vena to empty its closet. Or, to put it another way, Cox credits finance with helping Vena to fail faster. “The earlier you know that you should stop investing, the more successful you will be at failing efficiently and having your experiments be effective,” comments Cox, who says that such experiments are frequently conducted in collaboration with the sales team, as finance seeks to lengthen its lines of sight into the  sales funnel. Read More “The further up you get in the funnel, in terms of being able to analyze where your sales leads are coming from and what your conversion rate is going to be, the more successful you can be when it comes to failing fast and knowing where you should be spending,” observes Cox. Still, certain finance teams are better prepared than others to ascend the funnel. According to Cox, f

Featuring the Workplace Champions CFO Arleen Paladino of Crum & Forster CFO Guy Blanchard of Aerofarms CFO Mike Rasic of Synapse CFO Ross Tennenbaum of Avalara

Chances are that CFO Louie Reformina never expected to be in the rolling papers business. Having advanced down a career track populated with different private equity firms, a stint at Goldman Sachs, and a Stanford Business School degree, Reformina could have landed inside any number of industries offering him multiple C-suite doors of entry. However, not unlike the pick-and-shovel entrepreneurs who once outfitted troves of Gold Rush  prospectors, Reformina is confident that his arrival inside the CFO office at Turning Point Brands (NYSE:TPB) is well timed for an uptick in cannabis sales due to the industry’s quickly changing regulatory environment as well as public perception.    In addition to cannabis, Turning Point, a marketer and distributor of “alternative smoking accessories,” is now seeking to satisfy its appetite for growth inside a number of product categories such as cigar wraps, hemp paper and paper cones. “The majority of our profits now come from our Zig-Zag brand of rolling papers and wraps prod

Not unlike other finance leaders, Nitro CFO Ana Sirbu wants you to know that she’s a “prioritizer.” Both personally and professionally, Sirbu has created a list of objectives that never strays far from her mind’s eye. Meanwhile, she undoubtedly keeps a second list—a listing of key results.   “Effective key results are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic,” wrote John Doerr, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, in his ode to OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) Measure What Matters (Penguin Random House, 2018).   Learning how items move from the first list to the second is one of our objectives in talking with Sirbu, a steely-eyed Silicon Valley CFO who’s known to bring a vice-like focus to key results. By way of introduction, she names past affiliations (Google Capital, Silver Lake Partners) to expose her path to the CFO office of fintech BlueVine, which she joined in 2016 as a vice president of finance and capital markets. “When I joined BlueVine, the company had just over 50 people, and when I

Looking back, Mike Rasic says that his entry into the world of tech start-ups got kicked off with a phone call that he almost didn’t answer. “I have a strict policy that if I see a phone number popping up on my mobile that I don’t recognize, I just don’t pick up,” explains Rasic, who goes on to say that the voice on the other end belonged to a head hunter who subsequently gave him the scoop on a CFO position. “It worked out,” reports Rasic, a former PwC partner who is currently the CFO of Synapse, a fintech start-up that can now be counted as Rasic’s fourth CFO tour of duty. Asked what advice he wishes that someone had given him upon entering the CFO office for the first time, Rasic replies “timing matters,” before explaining further: “I joined a mortgage company as CFO at the onset of the mortgage crisis.” Besides some of the more challenging lessons gleaned from the mortgage crisis, Rasic says that he exited the experience with two key takeaways that he has applied to every CFO role since. “First,” he notes

In 2008, as the subprime mortgage crisis began turning the Street’s brash dealmakers into a squeamish clan of risk-averse bankers, Tim Murphy, an associate at Credit Suisse, decided that it was time to try some slots. Lots of them. “I took a gamble in the casino space—it was probably one of the best decisions that I have made in my career and one the best decisions that we have made as a family,” explains the finance leader, who accepted a director of finance position with Cadillac Jack, a fast-growing slot machine manufacturing company based in Georgia.   At the time, Murphy’s wife (the couple had met at business school) was working for The Coca Cola Company in Atlanta, a factor that the finance executive says helped to hedge his career bet. “I had opportunities to join investment banks in Atlanta and other large organizations, but we made a conscious decision that given the fact that she had a job at a very large and stable company, I could take a gamble with mine,” says Murphy. Also influencing Murphy’s de

When Rob Krolik agreed to join us for a CFO (emeritus) episode, we expected to hear about the successful business turnaround chapter that he added to his finance resume while CFO at Move.com. We also anticipated learning about his years at Yelp, where—back in 2011, as the firm’s new CFO—he was credited with helping to lead one of the year’s most successful IPOs. While Krolik was only too happy to share a few thoughts regarding both of these chapters, he also reflected on a place in time about which we never expected to hear—namely, when a speech delivered by the outgoing president of his international youth group turned out to be plagiarized and in fact a word-for-word copy of an address given by another retiring president a number of years earlier. “It was a very moving speech and I had put the guy up on a pedestal, so it taught me not to put anyone up there again,” explains Krolik, who notes that this experience from his teen years led him to enter the professional world with a self-mandate to treat people

In the early 1980s, when Arleen Paladino joined Crum & Forster as a 21-year-old internal audit trainee, she was frequently sent to remote office locations to complete audits of financial statements the data from which were then transferred to keypunch cards and fed into a giant mainframe at the insurance company’s Morristown, New Jersey, headquarters “While this might seem like a long time ago, we just decommissioned the mainframe last year,” says Paladino, who entered Crum & Forster’s CFO office in 2017 after serving as a senior vice president of the company’s internal audit function. Having only recently bid farewell to mainframe technology, Crum & Forster is not likely counted among the industry’s tech savvy innovators. Still, evolution is arguably what Crum & Forster does best. The insurance company will celebrate its bicentennial next year. “Understanding the systems and how the processes worked together really helped me to understand the business model,” continues Paladino, who would adv

Within 4 months of her 2019 arrival inside BDSI’s CFO office, Terry Coelho had spearheaded a product acquisition and managed a successful equity raise—two finance milestones that would produce generous sales tailwinds for the specialty pharmaceutical firm.   BDSI would experience 100% net sales growth in 2019, followed by 40% net sales growth in 2020.  Such sales momentum recently led BDSI to issue a press release praising its “new commercial team” and at the same time announcing that Coelho’s CFO title would now include the designation “executive vice president.” For Coelho, a seasoned finance executive who spent more than a decade serving in a variety of senior positions inside Novartis and Sealed Air Corp., the call to leadership at BDSI afforded her a wide berth from which deliver results that are now arguably visible to all. Still, even this success chapter must compete for our attention when we hear about a promotion that she received from candy and pet food giant Mars Incorporated early in her career.

Back in 2014, when FM Global wanted to entice finance executive Kevin Ingram to move back to the US from England, the UK finance director was offered a position no one at the company had ever heard of before.       “My CEO came to me and said, ‘It’s called sr. vice president of corporate services and that means nothing to anybody, but I love that because that means I can put anything I want there and no one can tell me it doesn’t belong.’" explains Ingram, who says the newly created role would grow to include business analytics, business risk consulting, capital management , risk management as well as other areas. Still, the corporate services title to the outside world was arguably somewhat vague and perhaps not what a top executive may have in mind after 25 years with the same company. Says Ingram: “I was never looking to leave. It was really just a question of when the opportunity was going to present itself and if it didn’t present itself what else would I do instead.” Two years later when Ingram stepped

Each Wednesday morning, as the CEO prodded his team for business projections and troubleshooting ideas, the midsize company’s top managers would huddle around a white board inside a glass-enclosed office. For 20-something Ken Kaufman, the management huddle was a silent spectacle—except for the occasional bouts of laughter that burst out from behind the glass. “The managers would always leave with this positive energy and always have new guidance for how the business could move forward,” explains Kaufman, who says that for him, over time the meeting became not just a source of weekly intrigue but also a career destination.   Years later, Kaufman recalls, when he was invited to join the huddle at another middle market company, the gathering generated little energy and was far less productive than what he had expected. “I finally made it into the room, and then we spent the entire time arguing over why certain numbers were wrong,” remembers Kaufman, who—now with a business degree in hand—then began to dig into t

Long before growing numbers of digital nomads freely roamed the planet, Hamza Benamar had achieved a borderless professional life inside the world of internal audit.   “I went through a phase in my career when I was not even planning the next year—I was too busy getting my work noticed and getting proposals to go somewhere else,” explains Benamar, who recalls that the question “Why not?” became the familiar response with which he greeted each new opportunity. Having grown up in multilingual Morocco, Benamar found that crossing international borders came naturally to him, which gave him an edge when SAP came looking for young professionals to serve a growing roster of clients interested in scaling their processes globally. “I knew that I was actually going to be able to learn from these marquee companies and discover how to design, implement, and run the processes of A/R, A/P, and general ledger,” remembers Benamar, who joined SAP’s Houston operation in 1999 before in short order garnering Platinum frequent fl

Featuring the CFOs: Tom Berquist, CFO, TIBCO, Terry Coelho,CFO BioDelivery Sciences , Kevin Ingram,CFO, FM Global, Robert Linder, CFO, Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar

For Rebecca Mahadeva, the late 1990s audit of a minor league baseball team was the type of rare career assignment that never failed to intrigue both accountants and non accountants alike. At the time, Mahadeva had been serving a variety of technology audit clients as a young associate for  Coopers & Lybrand when she added to her docket a major league baseball team otherwise known as the New York Mets.  “The Mets controller at the time engaged me to do a site visit and some compliance work on the financials of a single A team up in Canada known as the St Catherine’s Stompers,” explains Mahadeva, who says her visit’s findings were used to help bolster confidence behind the purchase price the Mets owners had divvied up for the single A team. Following the close of the deal, St. Catherine’s Stompers relocated to Brooklyn, and was subsequently renamed The Brooklyn Cyclones . The newly rebranded Cyclones became the first professional baseball team to play in the borough of Brooklyn since the Dodgers left for L

When Paul Ottolini is asked to share a personal trait—one that a family member might divulge to us— the seasoned finance leader tells us that he likes to cut his own lawn and that he is known for being “cheap.” Still, Ottolini makes clear to us that it’s more the satisfaction of completing a job and not the cost savings that regularly fuels his pursuit of manual tasks. “I’m smiling when I spread 10 yards of mulch,” says Ottolini, whose words perhaps provide a clue to his past as well as to a work life cadence with which one suspects that he has rarely if ever fallen out of step during his more than three decades of  career-building. The son of a chemist employed by General Motors Corp., Ottolini graduated from General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) after completing a co-op undergraduate degree that permitted students to pay for their education by alternating 3 months of classes with 3 months of work inside General Motors. Upon graduation, Ottolini joined GM, where he worked 2 years as a software

When Stéphane Berthier joined Uniphore of Palo Alto, CA, as CFO this past January, the move no doubt raised more than a few Silicon Valley eyebrows. For more than two decades, Berthier had served a list of prestigious Bay Area tech companies as a top audit partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers, where his impressive tenure had originally been kicked off by his relocation from France to better serve one of the firm’s most coveted Silicon Valley clients: Hewlett-Packard. During the next two decades, Berthier would become inducted into Silicon Valley’s coterie of familiar advisors and consultants known to provide sound advice to IPO-minded technology start-ups as well as software firms struggling to replace “on premise” customer revenue with new cloud-driven funds.   “I stayed 20 years and loved every aspect of client service—this was a tough decision for me, but I think that it was the right time,” says Berthier, who describes Uniphore as being uniquely positioned to pursue the fast-growing tech opportunities in co