Cfo Thought Leader

Shana Veale had been working in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, office of Arthur Andersen for only about 8 months when the 88-year-old stalwart accounting house collapsed.  Being a recent college graduate at the time, Veale tells us, she really didn’t grasp all of what the news headlines attempted to convey as the turn of events surrounding the Enron scandal unfolded.    “We began having these weekly calls internally to discuss the circumstances, but then the cuts came in May and I no longer had a job,” recalls Veale, who as a newbie accountant had little to lose when compared to those colleagues with households to support and decades of equity about to vanish.Still, having been an eyewitness to the collapse of a firm that had once populated corporate parks and urban centers across the country, Veale found that her first career chapter would administer a lesson that many finance and accounting professionals often learn much later in their careers.“When in business, you should always expect th

After Chip Zint jumped two levels in NCR Corp.’s retail division finance hierarchy, he couldn’t help but savor the moment while reflecting on the fact that his career years thus far—including nights and weekends studying for an MBA—had all been put to good use.Still, while altitude matters when it comes to career leaps, where you land in an organization—and when—sometimes matters more. In Zint’s case, his arrival as sales finance head for NCR’s retail division coincided with the completion of one of the largest acquisitions ever undertaken by that group.“The moment I raised my hand, I was jumping into the fire,” recalls Zint, who reports that NCR faced multiple challenges when it came to assimilating the newly acquired business, not least of which were the newly merged organization’s revenue expectations.  Says Zint: “It was about grinding it out every single day and going to bed at 2:00 a.m., only to wake up and be 50 emails behind.”  As the problematic transaction took its toll on the division’s f

Brett & Jack discuss the workforce rantings of Elon Musk and the new Twitter owner's November 16th deadline for employees to decide whether to leave or stay. Is Musk's leadership style solely responsible for the turmoil at Twitter or are there other contributing factors? This episode's featured Workplace Champions expose how leaders seek to optimize work environments to empower people to do their best work. While Jack views the talent mind set of each of the three featured finance leaders as the upshot of extensive leadership experience, Brett points out there may be a method behind the Musk "madness." This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Anat Ashkenazi of Eli Lilly, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, and CFO Evan Goldstein of Seismic.

When Jonathan Carr first walked through the doors of the Stryker Inc. plant in Arroyo, Puerto Rico, the boyish newbie accountant no doubt turned the heads of a few managers.  Having finished college only about 18 months earlier, Carr was now the accounting and finance “lead” for a major software implementation under way at the medical device manufacturer’s Puerto Rican plant.To succeed in his new role, Carr would need to have local managers as well as senior IT executives walk him through the manufacturing plant’s transaction processes so that he could understand how the software’s promise of automation could be leveraged to streamline the plant’s accounting close cycle.Looking back, Carr can see that it was his inexperience at the time that made the assignment so enriching to his early career.“You have to find things that you have absolutely no idea how to do because it’s those things that will help you to grow exponentially,” remarks Carr, who credits his boss at the time, a Stryker divisional controll

Few finance leaders have better revealed to us the career-transforming powers of IPOs than CFO Tony Tiscornia.Turn back the clock to 2015, and Tiscornia is the accounting-minded VP of finance for spend management software company Coupa.“I was really a controller—a business controller, but still a controller,” explains Tiscornia, who notes that his world began to change following the appointment of Todd Ford as CFO.Read More Ford, a finance leader with a rich IPO resume, would join Coupa as CFO in June of 2015 and quickly begin to assemble an IPO-ready team.“When Todd first came to Coupa, he asked me what I wanted to do with my career, and I told him, ‘I want to be a CFO,’” recalls Tiscornia, who adds that Ford quickly tagged him for an investor relations role.Over the next 16 months, Tiscornia says, he learned all of what was required to achieve the milestones that led up to the company’s October 2016 IPO. During its first day of trading, Coupa’s shares would reach a high of more than $41, to more than d

In March 2020, when Eli Lilly announced that it would begin providing drive-through COVID testing services to the state of Indiana’s healthcare workers, more than a few hospital administrators likely scratched their heads.After all, the giant pharma company was not in the business of providing healthcare services, any more than it was a medical device manufacturer.  Still, drive-through testing turned out to be just the most recent offshoot of an effort under way inside a specialized facility at Lilly Research Laboratories. As months turned to years, as much as 40 to 50 percent of all samples being tested within Indiana were to end up being processed by the Lilly facility.   “A CFO may look at this and rightly ask, ‘What are the costs that are going to be required to establish this? What are the sets of risks associated with deciding to move forward with something like this?,’” observes Anat Ashkenazi, who at the time served as head of strategy and transformation for the pharma behemoth as

When Brett Powell is asked what distinguishes his day-to-day role as a finance leader inside the world of academia from that of his CFO peers residing within industry, Powell without hesitation says, “Complexity.”Aware that such a one-word answer would likely summon only more questions, Powell continues: “Essentially, when you think about it, we’re running a city … we house people, we feed people, we provide them with utilities. Everything that’s required to run your hometown needs to be replicated on a university campus.”Still, Powell points out that one of the fundamental differences has to do with an organizational mind-set when it comes to cost allocation and subsidization. “Corporations will look at each of their product lines and try to understand the profitability of the product, and if one is losing money, then they just end that product line and move on to something else—but we don’t think about academic programs in the same way,” comments Powell, who adds that during a previous CFO tour of

Evan Goldstein tells us that it was at the end of another long day—after a week of long days—as he was walking to the parking lot adjacent to Genentech’s offices that he received a “gut punch.”Becoming more self-aware of others is something that many finance leaders have told us that they have needed to lean into during their career, but few have shared with us the pivot to self-reflection as vividly as Goldstein, whose multi-decade finance career boasts an unusual dual-chamber architecture centered on 10 years at Genentech and another 11 at Salesforce.“I refer to myself as a serial monogamist when it comes to my professional career and the longevity that I’ve experienced at both of these companies,” explains Goldstein, who credits his extended stay at both firms to the power of three: the people, the mission, and the innovation.Still, Goldberg wants us to know about the long day that ended in Genentech’s parking lot.For young finance career builders, arriving at the end-of-day parking lot can be somewhat lik

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