Cfo Thought Leader

When Maria Manrique stepped into her first role as a CFO, she did so knowing that her finance leader mentor was still in the building—in fact, he was occupying the CEO office. “It would be unfair of me to not say that this was critical—being able to step into the role and have someone there who could help me to bridge the gaps,” recalls Manrique, who prior to entering the CFO office at the start-up had served as vice president of FP&A. Manrique had already occupied similar senior planning roles at multiple companies, having previously worked for Fidelity Investments, where she had lent her FP&A acumen to the financial services firm’s portfolio of venture-backed companies. Still, at the start-up, she found herself along the front lines at the company’s board meetings—an opportunity that she had seldom been afforded at Fidelity. But along with her increased visibility came responsibility, she points out. “I had been supporting venture capital–backed companies for a long time with strategic planning, but

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Asked to recall the experience of stepping into a CFO role for the first time, Nicole Anasenes doesn’t mince words. "It’s a very lonely, scary moment,” comments Anasenes, as she considers her early days at technology company Infor—a CFO appointment that preceded more recent CFO engagements at Squarespace and now technology firm Ansys. “If only someone would have told me how lonely it feels to make certain decisions—you can bounce ideas off people, but you are the ultimate decision-maker,” continues Anasenes, who says that, looking  back, she may have been able to ease some of the decision-making concerns if she had had a broader professional network to which to turn. “I happened to have been lucky that Charles Philips, the CEO of Infor, was a financially savvy person, but since then, I’ve built a much broader network of people and a framework for how to have these type of conversations in which you don’t divulge the specifics concerning your company but get the mentoring and support that you need,” remarks A

It was nightly business conversations at his parents’ dinner table that first led Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah to consider alternatives to business when it came to building a career. “As most small business owners do, my parents worked all the time—and as with most small businesses, things could at times be financially challenging,” explains Mahendra-Rajah, who vividly recalls business rent increases, outstanding receivables, and the dynamics behind supply and demand that pervaded his parents’ dinner conversations. Nevertheless, it was this same scrutiny of supply-and-demand dynamics that Mahendra-Rajah credits with helping him to “come full circle” and ultimately led him to business school. At the time, Mahendra-Rajah was working full-time as a senior process engineer for chemical giant FMC Corp., a career-building stint that afforded him the real-world insights required to enrich a master’s thesis that he needed in order to complete a chemical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins. “It was my first job out of c

Billtrust CFO Mark Shifke likes to label himself an “accidental CFO”—a tag that a number of our guests have appropriated from time to time when faced with explaining a past filled with less-than-traditional career experience. However, in the case of Shifke, the term arguably has little to do with career experience, for Billtrust’s CFO spent nearly a decade on Wall Street before entering the C-suite. Instead, Shifke uses the appellation to help to reveal the pivotal role that a single phone call came to play in his finance career. Back in 2000—near the beginning of Shifke’s Wall Street career and the end of the market frenzy known as the dotcom bubble—Shifke took a phone call from a CEO founder whom he had met through a personal acquaintance. Just as the CEO didn’t hesitate to ask Shifke to invest in his struggling company, Shifke didn’t dither when it came to coming up with some figurative cash. “I made a handshake agreement with him over the phone,” explains Shifke, who notes that the investment did require

Several actions proved key as Waifa Chau advanced from financial planning and analysis (FP&A) roles to chief financial officer positions. Collaborating with other functions, gaining an in-depth understanding of the overall business, and helping his colleagues understand how FP&A benefits an organization have driven his success, says Chau, currently CFO with Nylas, Inc., a provider of productivity infrastructure solutions for software.  Cross-functional collaboration helps in gaining an understanding of a company’s overall business, Chau says. While working at Gap Inc., the company behind Gap, Banana Republic, and other apparel brands, Chau focused on driving higher gross margins—key in the retail industry. Chau’s curiosity about the business also helped him propel his career forward, he says. He spent about two years in a merchandising role at Gap, during which he gained a better understanding of the intricacies of operations. Often, employees in other parts of an organization assume FP&A’s primar

Of course, every finance leader needs to understand the mechanics of accounting and know how to identify the financial implications of management’s decisions. Their preparation should also include learning from their experiences—and this includes mistakes, says Ian Charles, chief financial officer with Flexe, an on-demand warehousing solution. In particular, identifying the optimal candidate for a job is one of a leader’s most difficult and critical responsibilities, Charles notes. It’s also far from straightforward. It’s easy to believe that you’re hiring a star who will move the organization to the next level, only to discover that the individual isn’t as exceptional as he or she appeared as a candidate. In other situations—say, when it’s necessary to fill a role quickly—a candidate who appears less inspiring at the outset can turn out to add tremendous value to the organization. To improve his track record when hiring for critical positions, Charles has beefed up his interview process. He begins by intervi

Nearly 20 years later, CFO Trent York tells us that he can still hear the finance executive’s exact words. “Trent, I don’t need you tell me how not to do something—I need you to help me to figure out how to work through the issue and what needs to be addressed in order for us to be able to expand,” recalls York, placing just enough emphasis on the word “not” to expose a degree of anxiety that still lingers. At the time, York was a newbie controller for Golfsmith, an Austin, TX–based golf specialty retailer that in the 2000s was opening dozens of stores annually as golf enjoyed newfound popularity nationally amidst the Tiger Woods boom.  “We went from 20 retail stores at the time I joined to close to 80, and we actually took it public, so this was really a build-and-scale moment that was quite exciting,” explains York, who advanced into the vice president of finance role as the golf retailer began to prepare for a public offering that ultimately debuted on NASDAQ (symbol: GOLF) in June 2006. Beyond gainful emp

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When the TreeHouse Foods financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team notice CFO Bill Kelley entering the room, chances are that a number of team members shoot a quick glance at the company’s latest revenue figures. “I’m probably more predictable than I want to be,” explains Kelley, who has made revenue management a top priority for the $4.5 billion private label food and beverage maker. The push for organic growth at TreeHouse follows a larger reorganization at the company that roughly coincided with Kelley’s arrival inside the CFO office. According to him, that reorg has since led finance to begin embedding senior finance executives inside different business lines. “There are finance people who are now hard-wired into the business units, and we have created a revenue management function that had not previously existed,” points out Kelley, who notes that the embedded finance professionals are today playing a more strategic role inside the business than ever before. “They are the copilot or the chief of st

When asked about a personal habit that has served him well over the years, finance leader Puneet Pamnani raises his voice slightly and seeks to mimic the delivery of his wife’s tone:  “This is what you do for a hobby? You read company annual reports?” To which Pamnani defends his favorite pastime with the retort: “I find them interesting!” Although it might seem difficult to imagine this exchange taking place on sandy beach vacations and holiday escapes, it nonetheless remains an example that Pamnani uses to illustrate his relentless curiosity for how businesses operate and perform.   According to Pamnani, this curiosity has led him to regularly attend the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the major event for many value investors and fans of Warren Buffett, among whom Pamnani proudly includes himself. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Pamnani’s reading pastime is one that Buffett has long enjoyed and encouraged others to pursue.    “I’ve been to every Warren Buffett annual shareholder meeti

When it comes time for Harmit Singh to brief Levi Strauss & Co.’s management team regarding the latest performance results, Levi’s CFO will often share a briefing document that features a front page bearing the heading “What’s Working and What’s Not.” “It’s more difficult to understand what’s not working, and it’s the ‘What’s not’ that helps us to determine the areas on which we have to focus to take the business to the next level,” explains Singh, who notes that the “front page” is carefully rendered by Levi’s Financial Planning  & Analysis (FP&A) crew – a team of forward-looking financial professionals whose past feats of analytic derring-do have included helping the jeans maker to foresee the leap from “skinny Jeans” to the baggie look among young consumers. It’s here among Levi’s crack team of number crunchers that the “what’s not” often becomes exposed, and it’s here where a new mind-set – one that keeps consumers top-of-mind and favors stakeholders over shareholders – is already visible. And

Andrew Kenny still remembers the smell of day-old pizza that lingered in the back of the Cairo conference room as negotiations between his then company, food processing giant ADM, and a future joint venture partner entered day five. “Planting a flag in Egypt was extremely important for us because it was not just about having a presence there—it was about creating an entire supply chain and creating value for an asset base back in the U.S.,” explains Kenny, who tells us that the 5-day gathering was the culmination of 10 prior trips to Egypt and a burdensome due diligence process.  Still, at times, a positive outcome was in doubt. “We were struggling to come to economic terms on the transaction,” recalls Kenny, who says that the developments that broke the stalemate ultimately had little to do with the happenings inside the conference room. As the day-five negotiations dragged on, Kenny says, he would at times step out of the room with the Egyptian company’s CFO and co-owner to purposely redirect the discussion

There’s little question that the pandemic has led business leaders to amp up digital initiatives across most industries. In response, CFOs have more frequently been called upon to serve up some detailed answers for investors eager to keep a grasp on all spending tied to such initiatives. However, capital spending numbers were only an appetizer for certain board members and investors who viewed their businesses’ growing digital operations as a dependable source of new and timely insights into their firms. “The severity of the risk associated with the pandemic pulled finance executives into a place where they needed to be more comfortable in sharing a degree of detail with investors that was much more foreshadowing or predictive,” says Adam Meister, CFO, Talend, a publicly held cloud data integration company that recently announced its acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. According to Meister, the search for more timely insights by investors was most acute shortly after the pandemic’s arrival in Nort

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