Cfo Thought Leader

When veteran CFO Ivor Macleod first contemplated joining an early-stage pharma company, the condition  known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was not appearing in nightly news headlines and was yet to be ranked as the  number one cause of death among COVID-19 patients. Nevertheless, ARDS captured his attention—or rather, Athersys did.  The Cleveland, Ohio–based company, with fewer than 100 employees, met one of Macleod’s foremost criteria in that the company was  focused on the area of medicine known as “critical care”—a space that Macleod characterizes as having  “high unmet medical needs.” “It was the science that attracted me and not necessarily the capital structure,” explains Macleod, when asked whether he may have preferred to join a privately held firm instead of a public one. As the former CFO of F. Hoffmann–La Roche, Inc., North America, and vice president of finance for Merck Research Labs, Macleod knows better than most the risks being taken and the high rate of failure when it comes t

It was October 2019. Red Hat, Inc., was preparing to submit its latest quarterly results to its new parent, IBM Corp., and Laurie Krebs had just been named Red Hat software’s new CFO. As a senior vice president of finance for Red Hat, Krebs had worked closely with the former CFO and more or less assumed that the acquiring company would likely prefer to fill C-suite spots from its “home team” talent bench of senior executives. In fact, Krebs says that during the course of her career she had never truly aspired to be a CFO: “I often wondered who would want all of that responsibility, especially after Sarbanes-Oxley came in. And then, at the time, I realized that IBM had just acquired us for $34 billion and that it was going to be up to us to deliver the results that were needed.”   Krebs says that the finance team at Red Hat, like many executive teams within newly acquired companies, had experienced some attrition and was perhaps not as highly functioning as it had been prior to its acquisition.   As the first

When Ray Carpenter retraces his steps to the CFO office at Xandr—an analytics and advertising company formed by AT&T’s WarnerMedia—he singles out two earlier roles as having been outside AT&T’s traditional finance track. “I actually got kicked out of finance for one role,” says Carpenter, referring to a stint as a marketer inside a start-up launched by AT&T’s emerging business markets group. “We did things that were uniquely different from what AT&T typically does when it launches a new business,” continues Carpenter, who in addition to marketing was responsible for the start-up’s pricing strategy.    Next, Carpenter joined AT&T’s mergers integration group, where he helped to lead integration planning efforts for different corporate functions, a role that made him keenly aware of the integration challenges such future acquisitions as DirectTV would present. From his stint in the mergers group, Carpenter stepped back inside AT&T’s more traditional finance and accounting ranks and was so

Not unlike the careers of his finance leader peers, the finance career of Dave Jones, CFO of online car seller Vroom, has been shaped and influenced by economic crises of the past two decades. Last month, as the initial shock of the coronavirus waned and the stock market rallied back, Vroom moved quickly to go public. Explains Jones: “We consulted with our board and our investors and decided that the time was right.” After pricing its IPO shares at $22, Vroom saw their value more than double on their first day of trading. This was not the first time that Jones had discovered a window of opportunity in less-than-friendly economic times. Back in 2002, he had found himself in a tight spot while serving as a senior manager for Andersen, the historic accounting house that collapsed in the wake of the Enron scandal of the early 2000s. “The view at the beginning of crisis was that there was no way that Andersen would be taken down. For me, the lesson became to never say ‘never,’” says Jones, who adroitly stepped fro

Dennis McGrath was only recently married and a new home owner when he was invited to a Phillies game by the CFO of AC Manufacturing. At the time, McGrath was working for Andersen as an auditor of a roster of growing companies, among which AC—a maker of industrial air-conditioning units—was perhaps not the most glamorous. “At the end of the night, the CFO told me that he wanted to hire me and would pay me a lot more than I was then making,” recalls McGrath, who doesn’t hesitate to reveal what allowed AC’s offer to trump all other opportunities. Says McGrath: “I went for the money.” However, what distinguished McGrath’s AC career chapter was neither compensation nor, for that matter, a lengthy tenure (McGrath was controller for 22 months). Adds McGrath: “It was not too long before the owner decided that he was going to sell the company and had a private equity group come in.”   Still in his mid-20s, McGrath took a seat across the table from a seasoned group of private equity executives. “For me, my career has j

When asked to share a few of the experiences that he feels prepared him for a CFO role, Ashim Gupta recalls what he characterizes as a significant accounting problem. However, it was not the nature of the accounting snag that Gupta wants us to know about but instead how his initial response to the problem was somewhat clumsy and ineffective. The event occurred more than 10 years into his finance career and did not lengthen the path to his next promotion because he had only just arrived in a new role as a divisional CFO for GE Water, a General Electric Corp. operating unit specializing in water processing solutions. Gupta remembers the accounting problem as being “the first thing to pass across my desk.” Realizing the gravity of the challenge, Gupta picked up the phone and called the more senior finance leader who was responsible for a wide swath of GE businesses, including Gupta’s group. “I was nervous about it, and I did not articulate the issue in the way that I should have. I didn’t really treat it as a bu

In the mid-1990s, when Jeff Epstein was busy satisfying the M&A appetites of media clients for First Boston, one of his smaller, but more boisterous clients asked him to join the firm as its CFO.   “It was the type of situation where if they had gone to a recruiter, I would never have made the resume cut because I had never been a CFO and I had never even worked for a CFO,” explains Epstein, who was 32 when he entered the lively entrepreneurial realm known as King World Productions. A one-time family-owned company, King World had seen its stature grow inside New York’s competitive media landscape as the firm began producing  giant hit TV shows such as Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and The Oprah Winfrey Show.  “It was actually a small company with only about 300 employees, but they had three of the highest-rated, most profitable shows on television, with about $300 million of revenue and $60 million of operating income,” recalls Epstein, who would go on to add consecutive CFO career chapters at DoubleClick, N

When asked what led him to open his latest career chapter as CFO of Biofourmis, Matt Borowiecki quickly mentions the 2018 sale of MassMutual Asia Ltd. to Yunfeng FG. After helping to piece together a string of strategic plays for MassMutual, Borowiecki was instrumental in effecting the Yunfeng FG deal, which was a standout for him personally as well as one that many industry analysts at the time deemed transformational for company. Having helped to spearhead the transaction, Borowiecki was subsequently asked to relocate to Hong Kong and lead international strategy and corporate development for the company. With his deal-making realm vastly expanded, Borowiecki might have been expected to rocket down MassMutual’s transformational M&A track for several more years.    However, the move to Hong Kong challenged him in ways that he had not necessarily anticipated. Seeking to discover new strategies for MassMutual to extend its reach in the region, Borowiecki frequently found himself in meetings with local Hong

Early in his finance career, Anders Fohlin discovered that he could ratchet up his capacity to consume information and problem-solve simply by drawing pictures. However, what had originated more as a personal observation would eventually evolve to something more as he discovered that his visuals could serve others.   “I started to regularly draw processes on white boards and paper to make things very visual for everybody and help others to get the full picture,” explains Fohlin, whose knack for creating visuals and goal of making things more visible “for everybody” led him to begin viewing routine meetings as opportunities for visualization. Says Fohlin: “I found that process maps and gathering people in the same room was a really good way to spark energy and collaboration and have people feel that they were important and doing something more than just shoveling coal.”    Fohlin adds that his early efforts to create greater collaboration and inclusion ended up opening the door for him to various senior financ

Back in the mid-1990s, David Wells was a financial analyst for a Bay Area supply chain management company that boasted an impressive list of Silicon Valley marquee customers. Counted among their clients was a large chip maker whose customer relationship upkeep had over time become Wells’s responsibility. Because this was a coveted customer, Wells always sought to be highly responsive to any of the chip maker’s requests for information, but he increasingly found his company’s pricing model out of step with the customer’s needs. “There was a lot of confusion and a lot frustration over what the prices for our services and products should be. Basically, we needed a much more sophisticated pricing model that the customer would accept,” recalls Wells. Faced with growing customer unrest, Wells and a colleague created a new pricing model that was carefully tailored for the chip maker’s business. Says Wells: “It was very intricate and more specific, but it was modeled exactly the way the customer saw their business.”

Jon Nguyen got his first taste of M&A-related work in the early to mid-2000s when he served as the finance partner for the auto lending unit of HSBC. “In consumer lending, you end up doing a lot of portfolio purchases rather than equity ones, but I have become more involved in the execution of deals over the past 8 years,” says Nguyen, who, distinguishes the past 8 years as a standout chapter -one that has allowed him to certify his M&A credentials and enter the CFO office at Kyriba. Turn back the clock 8 years, and Nguyen is vice president of finance for Mitchell International, a $600 million software and service business. As the company’s FP&A leader, Nguyen was tasked with supplying key insights to management decision-making behind the sale of Mitchell to KKR in 2013. Meanwhile, 5 years later, Nguyen was once more in the M&A diligence mix when KKR sold Mitchell to Stone Point Capital. Along the way, Nguyen’s M&A resume quickly expanded. “At Mitchell, we were very acquisitive, and during

Finance leaders who remain skeptical of the prospects for economic recovery inside the 2020 calendar year may want to consult LYNX Franchising CFO Michael Borreca. “I don’t think that it’s going to take us to 2021 to get back to March sales levels,” says Borreca, who doesn’t hesitate to credit three nontraditional metrics for influencing his current thinking on the subject. The first is the volume of disinfectant currently being purchased by franchisees of JAN-PRO—owned by LYNX—which boast of being  the largest commercial cleaning franchiser in the country, with over 8,000 small business owners. “The more our franchise network is buying disinfectants, the more this means that more businesses are starting to reopen. They are doing a deep clean ahead of time, and then customers are being welcomed in,” says Borreca, who counts the lengthening commuting times surrounding LYNX’s hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, as yet another unconventional metric pointing now toward a recovery. The third metric influencing Borreca’s

It’s a story that Verizon CFO Matt Ellis seems to enjoy telling and one that he has undoubtedly related more than once before.  One evening while in high school, Ellis was working at the fish counter of a local supermarket when he received some feedback from the store manager. Earlier in the day, the man had asked Ellis to clean a number of shelves beside the counter, but Ellis had soon become busy with fish patrons and hadn’t able to complete the task. More than 30 years later, Ellis easily retrieves the store manager’s words: “I’m not disappointed that you didn’t get it done—I know that you were busy with your normal stuff. What disappoints me is that if you had only told me, I could have arranged to have someone else to do it.” This is a classic management lesson that many business leaders have communicated before, but when Ellis presents it, the message is endowed with renewed relevance for finance. It is easy for us to imagine Ellis retrieving the store manager’s lesson to enlighten a young finance analy

When the Sarbanes–Oxley Act was enacted 18 years ago, it required the Securities and Exchange Commission to create regulations to define how companies should comply with it—a mandate that would end up impacting the careers of finance professionals well into the future. CFO Jody Cire was one such professional. Back in 2010, Cire found himself in Boulder, Colorado, after having been relocated from a role in Germany as KPMG’s lead audit manager for SAP AG. In light of his recent large enterprise experience, KPMG had been eager to assign Cire stateside in order to scratch the Sarbox itch of some of its largest customers. Within a year, Cire found himself knee-deep in massive Sarbox compliance projects with a number of prestigious clients. Still, something was missing. Says Cire: “It just wasn’t where my personality or my curiosity really thrived. I just didn’t enjoy it and began to express that.” Meanwhile, his appetite for assignments involving start-ups and high-growth firms had never wavered, allowing him to c

When a new CEO is recruited to lead a company, it’s not uncommon for the incumbent CFO to be replaced. However, there are certain network-savvy CFOs who are able to muster enough influence with their boards to easily discourage incoming CEOs from implementing their displacement as part of sweeping the C-suite clean. Angiras Koorapaty was not one of these well-connected CFOs. Or at least he wasn’t about 20 years ago, when he found himself forfeiting a finance leadership position to a newly arrived CEO’s CFO pick. “This was a pivotal moment for me at the time, and it led me to do some reflection and to think about my career,” explains Koorapaty, who says that he later realized that as a CFO he had been too focused on the company’s internal operations and had failed to build important relationships with board members, investors, and other stakeholders. Says Koorapaty: “As a result, there was a change in finance leadership.” The eviction prompted Koorapaty to take action. Eager to put the experience behind him an

Years from now, when Will Costolnick thinks back to the start of his CFO career, he will likely count the 12 months that preceded his appointment as CFO of Hire Dynamics as part of the same chapter, for—not unlike many of his CFO peers—Costolnick first found his footing at his new employer by slipping into a vice president of finance role for a year or two. In Costolnick’s case, the interim role lasted 12 months, or just long enough for Hire Dynamics to reformulate its management ranks and expand its C-suite. Still, Costolnick hit the ground running by using his interim credentials to begin putting in place processes that would accommodate new growth, which was indeed a priority for satiating the staffing firm’s newfound appetite for acquisitions. Four years ago, Hire Dynamics had but 10 offices in the Southeast; today, this number is 47. The growing office numbers follow a recent spurt of deal-making by Hire Dynamics, which today boasts of being the Southeast’s second largest commercial staffing firm. Clear

Unlike the music artists and instructors recruited by School of Rock to provide music lessons at its 270 locations around the globe, John Cappadona was first hired by the firm to provide a crash course in accounting. “The day I joined, my controller and I walked through the door together not knowing anything,” explains Cappadona, who stepped into the CFO role at School of Rock shortly after its CEO, Rob Price, moved the music lesson provider’s headquarters to the Boston area. Says Cappadona: “For the first couple of months, it took us almost 25 days to close the books—and we needed to shorten that number in order to start making decisions sooner.” Next, Cappadona set out to enhance the management team’s visibility into the business. “We wouldn’t have known that we were going to run into an iceberg until we hit it,” comments Cappadona, who adds that while his team did not come across any icebergs, the company’s sales reporting numbers were just not visible enough. After making a number of accountant hires, Ca

In the late 1980s, when Gordon Stuart exited a 4-year stint as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he bid accounting farewell—or at least he did until he stepped into a CFO role roughly a dozen years later. Ever since, he has occupied multiple CFO roles, helping to remove any doubt about his finance and accounting orientation. Still, Stuart’s appetite for broader business experiences during the early part of his career set him apart from many of his finance leader peers. During the 1990s, as a senior engagement manager for strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Company, he found job satisfaction across a variety of industries. Asked what originally led him to join McKinsey rather than take on a more traditional corporate finance role, Stuart says that “the opportunity that I saw would allow somebody who’s naturally curious about business to build a better set of capabilities, frameworks, experiences, and connections to further their career.” Looking back, Stuart says that his biggest take-away from his 6 years

When John Bonney joined San Francisco–based Harness a little more than a year ago, he became not only the company’s first CFO but also its first finance hire. “For me, this was the first time that I came into a role with a blank slate—it was at Ground Zero,” explains Bonney, who says that the software start-up specializing in the automation of software applications delivery had theretofore been outsourcing its finance, legal and IT functions. Initially, he recalls, he was somewhat doubtful that he was good match for such an early-stage firm—and especially one with such meager internal operations. However, he became intrigued by the challenge that Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal put before him. Looking back, Bonney says that he knew that “we could become really big, and here was a chance to set the foundation right.” Within 5 months, Bonney relates, he had fielded a team of roughly eight people, including a controller, an FP&A leader, and department heads for legal and IT. “Generally, when companies are really sm

Mair: It was  probably in the first week of March, we had to close our Seattle office and have people work remotely. And it was about the second week in March that we did the same for our Portland office. We have the good fortune of having had a lot of experience working remotely as an agency. A lot of people have flexible schedules, a lot of the work we do is digital. But (COVID) is impacting us. It's still unclear as to what the second quarter's revenue is going to look like, but we're projecting it it'll be down probably by 25% at least. We know from a couple of large events that our clients we're sponsoring have been canceled, so that has a direct impact on some of the projects we were doing. But we also see there are some opportunities for us to use our services, to help in this sort of environment and get the messaging out in paid and social media, in ways that don't require a physical conference or event. So it's going to be interesting. We were... I got to say this in the nicest way, we strive to not