Cfo Thought Leader

Chanticleer Holdings CFO Patrick Harkleroad knows how to distinguish between signals and noise. That’s evident when he’s helping colleagues mine an expanding trove of data for customer insights to improve customer experience at the company’s fast, casual, and full-service restaurant brands. It’s also the case when Harkleroad assesses his varied career experiences in investment banking (both capital markets ad mergers & acquisitions), the restaurant industry and while guiding struggling companies through turnarounds as a consultant to CFOs. He’s learned to pair his dogged determination and true-north focus with larger dose of empathy to better understand the unique perspectives of all stakeholders involved in difficult decisions and tough deals. Harkleroad also discusses the value that finance executives can derive by dedicating themselves to the “day-top-day grind” required to perform as an elite CFO.

From a career development standpoint, one of the best things William Acheson did to reach the CFO office was stepping away from corporate finance and accounting for 15 years. After coming up on the public acconting track, the GWG Holdings finance chief immersed himself in investment banking, the residential mortgage industry, capital markets, risk management, credit management and more while taking on a variety of operational roles. He also accepted long-term international assignments for Merrill Lynch and GMAC-RESCAP.  Acheson credits his accounting training and skills for helping him add value in his many operations positions. “As I got older and my career progressed, I found myself perfectly suited for the CFO job because I [had gained] that breadth of experience.” Now as the 30-year veteran mentors rising finance and accounting talent at GWG Holdings, a leader in the fast-growing secondary life insurance market, he advises those interested in the CFO track to “leave accounting, but always keep in touch wi

Arvinas CFO Sean Cassidy caught the high-growth bug early in his career. Shortly into his stint with Deloitte, Cassidy transitioned from a massive global financial services company to work with middle-market clients. He felt he could make a more tangible difference for those companies by supporting them as they raised capital and made acquisitions. His passion led him to the life sciences industry where Cassidy has served as the finance chief of a number of high-growth biotech and biopharma companies. In a previous stint, Cassidy helped CuraGen subsidiary 454 Life Sciences get its back office in order for a potential IPO. During his two years guiding that effort, the business grew from 20 people to 150 employees and from zero to $70 million in revenue.  “It was a very exciting time,” Cassidy asserts. “The company almost went public, but in the end it made more sense to do a strategic transaction.” The experience helped elevate him to CuraGen’s CFO office and, more recently, to Arvinas, a biopharmaceutical com

When Whirlpool CFO Jim Peters joined the company at the director level 15 years ago, he was thrust into the thick of a pivotal M&A deal that also wound up generating extraordinary value from a career development standpoint. Originally assigned to help manage the accounting facets of the proposed Maytag acquisition, Peters swiftly expanded his assignment to include tax, post-deal integration planning and other dimensions. His ability to take on additional responsibilities “gave me exposure to senior leaders within whirlpool,” Peters recalls. “In a very short period of time, I went from being someone who stepped in at the director-level to interacting with our CEO … on a daily basis.” The intense work, learning and exposure subsequently propelled Peters, a former EY consultant who also worked for Limited Brands prior to joining Whirlpool, into a series of increasingly senior corporate finance positions. His previous roles include serving as the CFO of Whirlpool EMEA and as chief accounting officer for Whirl

A Cross-Functional Black Belt Vocera Communications CFO Justin Spencer’s strategic-finance breakthrough had little to do with corporate finance and everything to do with the drivers of strategic success. In an earlier CFO role, the tech executive heard just about every ERP horror story there is – sordid scope creep, sketchy implementation firms, unending projects, the organization's brutal rejection of IT-driven initiatives, and more – as he prepared to lead a massive Oracle upgrade. To side-step those nightmarish outcomes, he designed a unique approach. Spencer enlisted the company’s best project manager as the full-time project leader, invested in a rigorous screening process to hire an elite implementation partner, set aside ample budget for unexpected contingencies, seeded the project team with A-players (priming them with performance incentives), and sucessfully branded the endeavor as a C-level mandate. The painstaking upfront work paid off handsomely as the project was completed on time and within budg

Choose Your Words Carefully Zendesk CFO Elena Gomez followed up a top-notch education (a degree from UC-Berkley’s Haas School of Business) with a series of finance executive positions within some highly impressive companies – Charles Schwab, Visa, Salesforce and, since April 2016, Zendesk, a customer experience and help desk platform company that's posted remarkable, largely organic, growth in recent years. Despite the elite credentials, Gomez asserts the importance of forging genuine connections with her bosses, colleagues and direct reports. She shares the inspirational speech her boss gave to her when her confidence wavered as a 29-year-old, newly minted VP. Gomez also delivers a candid account of how a near mutiny by her team taught her the underrated value of authentic expressions of gratitude. “One of my direct reports told me that everyone on my team was going to quit,” she recalls. “I was a brand new VP of finance … he said: You know, you haven’t said ‘thank you.’ It just stopped me in my tracks.”  

An Early Dose of Pharma Start-Up Experience When Global Blood Therapeutics CFO Jeffrey Farrow says he took the corporate-finance career path less traveled, he really means it. As an undergraduate biology major, Farrow and a couple of entrepreneurial-minded postdocs hit upon a way to identify a protein thought to cause Alzheimer’s. The group licensed the technology from the University of California system and launched their own company, “which we naively thought we maybe could take public,” Farrow recounts. He and his co-founders instead wound up selling their venture to a larger neuroscience company. The experience helped Farrow, who managed the startup’s business side, shed his naiveté via a potent dose of real-world experience. After a stint in public accounting, Farrow returned to the pharmaceutical industry where he’s subsequently taken on numerous CFO and finance executive positions while leading IPOs, shepherding high-growth companies toward (and through) acquisitions, and guiding early-stage pharma com

A Humble Take on a Hall-of-Fame Career Yext CFO Steve Cakebread’s resume is extraordinary given the preeminent companies he’s worked for (HP, Silicon Graphics, Autodesk, Salesforce.com, Pandora and Yext), the new technology categories he’s helped bring to market, and the staggering growth those organizations posted under his corporate-finance leadership. Cakebread joined Salesforce as employee #67 when the $10 billion company was eking out a quaint $20 million annually. Despite these Lebron-esque achievements, Cakebread humbly peppers his discussion with plenty of phrases like “I was fortunate to…” Luckily for us, he also runs through a compelling set of career-building keys, including: taking promotions to difficult roles that had remained unfilled for months “because everyone else thought they would fail" at the job; amassing international experience (a decade in China and India); and learning how to explain innovative business models and entirely new product categories to analysts and other stakeholders. H

One of FinancialForce CFO Gordy Brooks’ most valuable early career-building experiences began by butting heads with his CEO. The chief executive insisted on issuing sales commissions on a weekly basis – an ask that would have most finance chiefs pulling their hair out.  After the CEO stuck to his guns in the face of counterarguments, Brooks spent two weeks carefully unpacking the problem behind his CEO’s requested outcome. He discovered that the root cause of the request involved ineffective operational processes (sales territory assignments and compensation plan design) and inefficient comp and payroll processes. When Brooks presented those findings with a significant process improvement proposal, the CEO embraced his systemic solution. “The CFO role is not only about metrics and business models,” Brooks notes. “It’s also about the human touch.”  Brooks – who possesses two decades of finance executive experience with VMWare, BEA Systems, Citrix, Microsoft and other notables – shares his takes on current comp

A regular on Treasury and Risk Management Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in Finance” list, Smartsheet CFO Jennifer Ceran joined the company, a SaaS platform for managing collaborative work and automating work processes, in 2016 with impressive Silicon Valley bona fides. She’s served as CFO and in senior finance executive roles at Quotient Technology (formerly Coupons.com), Box, Ebay/PayPal and Cisco. Ceran’s current mission is to help lead Smartsheet’s long-term strategy, and she’s thrilled by Smartsheet’s market opportunity. “It’s in the multiple billions of dollars,” she enthuses. “We have a real chance of extending our leadership position, so we’re going after [a goal of] $1 billion in revenue within four to six years.” Ceran is equally enthusiastic about sharing career guidance with future finance leaders. She identifies two crucial propellants to the CFO seat: 1) Amassing as much corporate finance knowledge as possible in all of the realm’s key functional areas; and 2) Understanding the value –

Props to Anaqua CFO and COO Justin Crotty for allowing us to first zero-in on his early career chapters when the economy showed no mercy.  Crotty, who joined the leading provider of intellectual property management software and services, about three years ago, launched his career with a tech consultancy at the height of the dot.com era. In his mid-20s, he took on the role of project lead for a prickly client that all of his colleagues ducked (a professional development approach he advocates). Crotty says he “wound up failing pretty miserably … I drove the project into the ground.” But the failure steeled him to dust himself off, get the project across the finish line, and devote himself to mastering project management, expertise that serves him extremely well in his dual role.” Those skills “have been a key part of my success. I still conduct daily standup meetings with my team and ensure that we’re getting things done, managing our plans … and focusing on delivering good experiences.” This candor and relatio

On first glance, Ra Medical Systems CFO Andrew Jackson’s 20 years as a finance executive in life sciences and technology companies seems have progressed in a traditional, orderly manner. A closer inspection of Jackson’s experience reveals that taking early-career risks can pay off handsomely. Jackson joined the manufacturer of laser-based solutions for the treatment of cardiovascular and dermatological diseases two weeks after the company decided to go public, and he filed the company’s initial S-1 with the SEC four weeks after his start date. One high-stakes career decision involved Jackson taking a title demotion, moving from controller to assistant controller. The move was strategic, though, in that it transported him from a privately held firm to a publicly listed company where he rapidly accumulated the SEC reporting skills he knew he would one day need as the CFO of a public company. It was a “a risky move to take a step down,” Jackson says, “but it ended up paying off in the long run.”

Of the three traditional paths to the finance chief’s seat, Bluesnap CFO Chris Menard took the approach less traveled, and it’s made quite a difference. Most fledgling finance executives begin their journey in public accounting or investment banking, Menard parlayed an undergraduate experience rich with entrepreneurial grooming (along with an MBA) into financial planning and analysis positions at several high-growth software and fintech companies. One early career assignment – where he assisted the finance team in completing an IPO, six acquisitions and a stock buyback before the company’s lucrative sale to Oracle – proved especially valuable.  Menard talks about applying his operational finance expertise and commitment to “leading with analytics” to the online payments technology company that he joined in May 2018. He also explains the two-step approach – assess and strengthen the accounting team first and then build up the finance function’s analytical chops – he favors when taking the CFO reins at a new co

In a sector known for advancing leading-edge risk mitigation strategies, CFO Rejji Hayes offers a risk-minded response to those who ask why he steered his career into the power and energy sector. “I had this epiphany where I said ‘It would be nice to find (a sector) that’s was a little less cyclical and a little less transactional.’ … And people generally need heat and electricity irrespective of economic cycles,” explains Hayes, who exited an investment banking career in 2009 to join the treasury function of energy giant Exelon before blazing a path to the CFO office at CMS Energy of Jackson, Michigan. Today, Hayes illuminates the CMS risk mindset by emphasizing the value of risk mitigation opportunities: “During the course of the year - whether its weather developments, adverse regulatory outcomes or other downside cases -  we try to identify enough risk mitigating opportunities to offset those risks,” explains Hayes. Join us when Hayes retraces his steps to the CFO office and lists his priorities for the y

Tony Tripeny’s remarkable career at Corning can be defined by some impressive numbers: 33 years of service in every aspect of corporate finance at the 167-year-old company whose cutting-edge materials reside in nearly every cell phone and flat screen among so many other products. Yet, the veteran EVP and CFO prefers to describe the keys to successful corporate finance leadership with qualitative measures such as time, location and communications. Tripeny continually exhorts his group to deploy automation and related tools to free up more time to devote to analysis and other strategic contributions –especially those that they provide from a seat at the decision-making table.  He also emphasizes that it is vital for incoming finance chiefs to be as prepared as possible to manage the “public aspect of the CFO” role. “It’s just different,” he asserts, “when you’re the person being asked the questions, going to the conferences, or speaking for half the time on the conference calls.”

Cimpress CFO Sean Quinn likes to set increasingly difficult professional goals for himself. His commitment to continual personal growth hasn’t hurt his mass customization company: Cimpress’ annual revenue has soared from $500 million when Quinn joined in the company nine years ago to roughly $2.6 billion today. We catch up once more with Quinn, who assumed  Cimpress’ CFO position in 2015 and who was recently named to The Boston Business Journal’s annual ‘40 Under 40’ list honoring Beantown’s best and brightest young professionals. The former KPMG CPA talks about scaling the company’s financial infrastructure to support its rapid growth. He also details the levers he’s put in place to help the publicly listed company replaces its focus on a quarterly horizon with a long-term mindset.

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

Serving as a corporate finance executive for an organization on the perilous journey from “small and private” to “large, publicly listed, and thriving” taught Catalant CFO Anitha Gopalan what to hone in on as a finance chief. That experience and others like it also sharpened her gambling chops. She says that her Silicon Valley start-up experience showed her “how important and relevant it is to completely understand the company story and strategy” along with “the drivers that create value for shareholders.” Aligning corporate finance’s activities with that plan and its related plot points enables CFOs, she adds, to “optimize everything you do depending on what you are betting on and where you are doubling down.” The 20-year corporate finance veteran is now betting on her dynamic leadership skills to help Catalant to accelerate and scale its mission of enabling client companies to revolutionize their human capital strategy.