Cfo Thought Leader

While chief accountant for the SEC’s investment management division, Alison Staloch reports, she found herself being greeted by a degree of inclusive enthusiasm that she had seldom encountered before.“People would say, ‘Great, the accountants are here!,’” recalls Staloch, who tells us that accountants at divisional meetings were sometimes sparse in comparison to the number of agency attorneys seated at the table.“Coming from a place where everyone was an accountant, this was new to me,” continues Staloch, who tells us that the commission’s high regard for her expertise and the accounting discipline in general helped to make her 5-1/2-year tenure there a satisfying career chapter.Having joined the organization as part of the SEC Fellows Program, Staloch found that her experience there seemed to grant her a healthy dose of professional activation—something that she admits that her early career had not always provided in large supply.  “I wavered a lot early in my career—I took the MCAT but didn’t go to med

Gray-haired late-night fans may remember when David Letterman sought to ingratiate himself with his network’s new owner, General Electric Corp., by hand-delivering a bowl of fruit to GE’s executive brass. Nearly 20 years later, Simone Nardi became a benefactor of GE’s media aspirations when he traded a senior manager position on GE’s audit team for a unit CFO role inside GE’s plus-size media holdings enterprise, NBCUniversal.   “While a member of GE’s audit team, I had had the opportunity to work with the head of GE’s audit staff, so when she was named CFO of NBCUniversal, she called me when she had an opening there," recalls Nardi, while referring to GE colleague Lynn Calpeter, who stepped into the CFO role at NBCUniversal in 2003 and then later returned to GE in 2011 upon the sale of the company to Comcast. That very same year, Nardi was able to take advantage of a new CFO opportunity that surfaced inside NBCUniversal Networks International's TV Production business, which allowed the unit CFO to open h

By the time Russell Lester landed inside Intuit’s department of analysis in 2009, the unremarkable career path on which he had first set out nearly 10 years earlier had become brimming with possibilities.Back in the early 2000s, Lester tells us, he was hired by the company Harland Clarke (now Vericast) as an analyst specializing in customer information and insights.“This was not traditional finance, and I was sort of tiptoeing around what we would broadly call ‘analytics’ today,” remembers Lester, who notes that his adeptness with data analysis eventually resulted in his assignment to a role responsible for pioneering the company’s performance management discipline, which subsequently helped to open the door to Harland’s financial planning and analysis function.At the time when a recruiter for Intuit called, Lester was responsible for overseeing Harland’s FP&A discipline. It seemed that one of Intuit’s divisional presidents was seeking to hire a senior finance executive with a distinguished data insight a

For business leaders these days, a thoughtful response to customer queries concerning AI is indispensable. As CEO Planful Grant Halloran demonstrated this week at Planful's Perform23 customer conference. CEO Halloran emphasizes the need for caution and thoughtfulness when it comes to AI, noting that while it presents an exciting opportunity, there is still a lot of uncertainty and potential legal and security implications that need to be addressed. He also discusses the speed of change that comes with AI, which he believes will ultimately create more opportunities for better lifestyles, but will require adaptation from society.  

Last October, when it was announced that Bobby Leibrock would become the next CFO of IBM subsidiary Red Hat, finance team members no doubt understood that the open-source developer was coronating not just any IBM veteran but a strategic finance executive who for years had been entrenched along the front lines of IBM’s software acquisition activities.Leibrock’s M&A resume began around 2006, when IBM acquired content management software developer FileNet for $1.6 billion.   “They asked me to be what was known as a ‘product pricer,’ a role that involved figuring out how to merge FileNet’s portfolio into ours from a pricing standpoint,” explains Leibrock, who notes that along the way he would frequently find himself seated across the table from the acquired company’s management while he stared down at a list of pricing-related questions.Fast-forward to IBM’s acquisition of security intelligence software developer Q1 Labs in 2011 and Leibrock’s appointment as CFO of the new security software unit tha

Back in 2010, when the flow of hiring by investment banks had been reduced to a meager trickle of new faces in the wake of the economic downturn, Aneal Vallurupalli walked through the doors of San Francisco’s Union Square Advisors.    For Vallurupalli—a recent graduate of a Bay Area college not necessarily known as a feeder school for investment banks—the job offer from Union Square seemed to validate the notion that banking was meant to be his career lane.Still, Vallurupalli tells us that from his early banking days forward, he always viewed investment banking as a place to learn but not necessarily his ultimate career destination: “Investment banking, to me, was kind of like a physician’s residency—it put the foundation in place.”  At the same time, the firm’s unmitigated drive to serve its clients provided him with many “learning moments,” including one client assignment that remains particularly salient.According to Vallurupalli, a private equity client with an appetite for leveraged b

Back in 2006, when Paul Sheriff had only recently been named group financial director for a midsize banking business based in the United Kingdom, his team noticed that the profit margins of a certain banking product were experiencing a steady decline.What’s more, the customers being drawn to the product were deemed to be at “higher risk” than the bank’s other customers.  While Sheriff tells us that he helped to put an end to the product’s life, he also wants us to know that the numbers behind the problematic product appeared to be hidden in the bank’s overall financial statements.“The numbers from the backward-looking book of customers were dwarfing those of new customers such that everything looked okay,” explains Sheriff, who notes that an effort to study the bank’s new customer data separately was what suddenly flagged the troubling trend.Sheriff relates that once the numbers made clear that the product was not sustainable for the business in the long run, canceling the product ultimately prevent

By the time the general manager of Intel’s data center chipset business parted ways with the company, Julie Swinney had already advanced into one of their coveted business unit CFO positions.To Swinney—who had already served in a series of senior finance roles—the GM’s departure seemed to leave a startling void in a business that served as a key enabler for Intel’s server business at large.The unexpected opening prompted Swinney to raise her hand and issue what perhaps was a bold proposal to be coming from an executive who had thus far resided within Intel’s career ropes—the functional restraints that gingerly guide the chip maker’s finance career builders.  To jump beyond finance, Swinney tells us, with little hesitation she put forth her solution to the challenge at hand: “We absolutely need a GM. We don’t have one, and I want to step in and run this business.” It perhaps goes without saying that Intel management accepted Swinney’s bid, allowing her to establish a career point for comparison with

Among the keepsakes that Craig Conti collected during the more than two decades of his finance career, the item to which he refers simply as “the list” remains one of his most prized career souvenirs.Having graduated from General Electric’s Financial Management program in 2001, the 20-something Conti had only recently been assigned to GE’s corporate audit staff when he was dispatched overseas for a 5-year tour of duty.It was during the first 12 months of Conti’s years abroad that he received a job review from a manager who asked him to create a list of the skills and experiences that he expected to accrue during his years abroad.Recalls Conti: “The manager was literally my own age, but he was very forward-looking.”For the next 5 years, Conti’s geography was in regular rotation from Brazil to Mexico to Eastern Europe, and, as his location changed, he would add to his list of experiences.“All of the skills that I had originally put down were definitely realized, but the experience was a lot richer than that and

When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American expats being deployed by digital disrupter SMB printer Vistaprint of Boston, Mass.For the next 5 years, Quinn would be involved in a string of business acquisitions that would grow the digital printer’s European revenues from nothing to more than $500 million annually.Based in Barcelona, Quinn spent roughly 3 weeks of every month traveling to other parts of Europe to evaluate the operations of different businesses as he and other executives sought to determine whether there was a solid business case for acquiring a company.“I had the luxury of seeing into firms at both the executive and middle management levels, so I was able to acquire an understanding of how the executive team was operating and how the decisions that they would make would trickle down within the operation,” explains Quinn, who adds that as deal activity grew, Vistaprint ended up deploying a corporate development team from Paris to complete some of the initi

Planning Aces Guest Host Brett Knowles, an expert in FP&A and planning realm, suggests that GPT can be used as an extra member at the planning table, providing a catalyst for exploring ideas and expanding horizons. By generating scenarios and validating strategies against them, planners can identify environmental and situational factors that need to be true for a strategy to work. But the true power of GPT lies in its ability to test a plan through the eyes of different stakeholders, such as investors, regulators, competitors, and employees, before presenting it to the executive committee. This allows planners to pretest their plan against a vast knowledge base, beyond the limited experience of the leadership team.

Back in 2008, when Jim Cox was controller for investment management software company Advent Software, he was invited by that firm's founder and CEO, Stephanie DiMarco, to accompany her to an investor meeting. “I just sat there smiling and hoped that nobody would ask me a question,” comments Cox, recalling one of a number of experiences that he credits with helping him to step beyond his accounting career roots. The meeting’s biggest take-away, Cox tells us, was about repetition. He explains: “Guess what? All 20 investors asked six of the same questions and two questions that were unique to them.” Looking back, Cox believes that DiMarco was providing him with an opportunity to not only develop a rapport with investors but also polish his communication skills. “When Stephanie brought me along, I think she was like, ‘Let’s try this out,'" continues Cox, who stepped into Advent’s CFO office in 2009, only 3 years after joining the company.    Cox had been recruited to Advent by a VP of finance who had fo

In 2011, after Chris Halpin had rejoined his colleagues back at Providence Equity Partners’ New York offices at the completion of a 3-year stint in Hong Kong, he found himself being confronted by something he had rarely experienced before: boredom.“I had this kind of existential angst—that I didn’t want to die and have my obituary say that I had worked 40 years at Providence Equity,” recalls Halpin, who notes that it was at this point that he began to think about different operating roles in business and the possibility of landing a CFO position.Still, Halpin tells us that he reviewed and pretty much rejected the different introductions and job opportunities that quickly surfaced: “I was like, ‘No, I really don’t want to do this’—and then I almost joined another private equity firm, but that would have been just changing politics for politics.”Then, October 2012, Halpin added to his calendar an entry that seemed to all but eclipse previous possibilities and instantly loomed large on his autumn agenda: “Coffee

When Ben Chrnelich tells us that the banking sector’s recent unrest is the third period of disruption that he’s “cycled through” during his finance career, we can’t help but wonder about the other two.Of course, they are hardly a secret. As did that of many of his CFO peers, Chrnelich’s early career appears to have weathered no shortage of economic hijinks, thanks to the dotcom bubble (2002) and Wall Street’s subprime mortgage crisis (2008).“The opportunity to be sort of at the epicenter of these events really allowed me to form my risk assessment as a CFO and be able to better assess where we are on any given business cycle,” comments Chrnelich, who was working for Lehman Brothers when the investment house collapsed in 2008.Unlike many of his Lehman colleagues, Chrnelich was able to find a silver lining in Wall Street’s economic turmoil—in his case, this took the form of employment as CFO of a technology business created by NYSE to serve Wall Street clients.Known as NYSE Technologies, the business was establ

Paolo Poma is uncertain how many times he met with bankers and investors during the first 6 months of 2009.The steady string of phone calls and conference rooms that once demanded the management of Ducati Motors Holding’s rapt attention, Poma tells us, have now blurred into a single, heart-pumping conversation.“I had to go in front of them and calculate for how long we were going be able to service the debt and comply with covenants without breaking any rules—despite the plummeting markets,” explains Poma, who had joined Ducati 2 years earlier as finance director.  An Italian motorcycle manufacturer, the firm had been acquired by a private equity investor in 2008 as part of a leveraged buyout on the eve of the banking sector’s 2008 financial crisis.Reports Poma: “The debt had been negotiated before Lehman’s collapse and now had to be serviced during this very challenging time.”On one side of the table, Ducati’s investors were expressing their eagerness to keep things moving forward, while on the other, t

After Galit Yaakobovitz relocated from Israel to the United States back in the mid-2000s, there was little question that the move had given her career a boost.Still, it was the next relocation—the one that would move her and her husband from New Jersey to California—that ultimately allowed her to place both feet on a finance career path.Back in 2006, Yaakobovitz was a technology implementation consultant living in Israel when she was hired by M-Systems to oversee the implementation of an ERP system for its finance function around the world. However, within 12 months, M-Systems was sold to its flash memory rival SanDisk—which left Yaakobovitz to wonder whether she would have a future at the newly merged firm.In short order, the management of SanDisk eased her concerns by offering her a spot on the global implementation team for the company’s finance organization, an appointment that required her to relocate to SanDisk’s New Jersey offices.“At the time, different geographies had their own requirements, so it wa

One key takeaway from Gainsight CFO Alka Tandan’s career journey is the importance of being open to new opportunities and pivoting when necessary.Tandan started in investment banking, transitioned to media, and then vectored again to the SaaS industry.Looking back on the first move of her career, Tandan says that she “came to a decision” and quickly became focused on the best way to execute it. “Investment banking gave me incredible exposure to a range of business models and industries, but after 5 years, I realized that I really wanted to be on a company’s journey, so business school became the tool that I used to transition to industry,” Tandan reports.To better highlight her industry career-building years, Tandan discusses with us the 4.5 years that she spent with IGN Entertainment, an Internet media company that at the time was operating as a division of News Corp. “I came in as they were separating IGN’s finance organization from News Corp., which required us to build the finance function from the ground

In this Planning Aces episode, host Jack Sweeney and guest host Ben Murray discuss the collaborative organizational effort behind generating business intelligence (BI) and the different places BI resources may reside within a business, with reference to an episode featuring Gary Zyla, CFO of AssetMark. The hosts also discuss the role of finance in enabling sales, the challenges faced by sales teams, and the importance of financial discipline and visibility in a company’s financials, regardless of market conditions. The episode features insights from other finance leaders, including Teodora Gouneva, CFO of Next Insurance, and Wailun Chan, CFO of Grafana Labs.

Robert Mitchell had been sizing up new venture opportunities for PayPal for roughly 3 years when the door to an operations role swung open.Impressed by his financial modeling know-how, Mitchell tells us, PayPal’s credit bosses “handpicked” him to create a framework for launching and monitoring new credit offerings.For Mitchell, there was no turning back.“They just told me that I was a smart guy and that I could figure things out,” recalls Mitchell, who adds that the fact that the new position was in Brussels didn’t even give him pause.From the start, Mitchell viewed the position as a critical career rung that would allow him to climb above his financial modeling stints.“I was the guy who could whiteboard an idea or financial model, present it, size it, and do anything that you wanted to it,” continues Mitchell, who observes that prior to the Brussels post he had mostly been an “individual contributor” and not someone who empowered teams.“The role really taught me how to think through processes end-to-end and

Finance leader Betsy Ward wants you to know that she doesn’t have an itchy trigger finger—but she does have an inner trigger and knows when it’s been set off.There’s no doubt that few professional colleagues would ever think to associate the time-tested gunslinger trope with the exponentially mild-mannered Ward, who has led insurance giant MassMutual through a string of strategic transactions since her arrival in its CFO office in 2016.Still, as Ward seeks to help us to better understand the unique mix of skills that distinguishes her from her CFO peers, her words alert us to a confidence that comes from experience not found on a more traditional corporate finance resume.  “I have a trigger that lets me know when I need to look into something and ask myself ‘Do we keep that? Do I need to manage it? Do I need to sell?,’” explains Ward, who spent 10 years in asset management before joining MassMutual in 2007 as chief risk officer.“I’ve always looked at outcomes—baseline outcomes, which in finance we typica