Cfo Thought Leader

“It’s the economics, the finance,” says CFO Usama Malik, who quickly adds the words “and the accounting” to his short list of finance leader action items. Malik begins where most CFOs end–with the economics behind the business model. Everything else follows, he explains.   “This role is about applying a broader lens to an entire industry and figuring out a competitive advantage,” adds Malik, who, while bullish on the science behind Immunomedics’ future offerings, makes clear his contention that it’s the economics that will ultimately determine the company’s fate. “Historically, there have been fund-raising CFOs, operational CFOs, and strategic CFOs. … I’ve now started to combine these disciplines, and the culmination of these is really advancing the role,” explains Malik. –Jack Sweeney   

A little more than 13 years ago, when Nathan Feather joined PrimeRevenue–an upstart supplier of supply chain financial services–the 20-member enterprise was just signing up its first direct customers. “We were a complete finance function spanning a person and a half,” explains Feather, who says that despite its sparse resources, finance was from time to time drawn into addressing legal, HR, and IT-related matters. This was what any C-suite executive might expect inside a start-up enterprise, but Feather is not your typical start-up CFO. Put another way: He’s not a serial CFO–the singular species that frequently arrives in the start-up’s C-suite already eyeing a transaction. For Feather, PrimeRevenue was an opportunity to perform an act of creation–one in which the company’s business functions, still in their infancy (or yet to be established), would rely in part on his judgment and ability to see into the company’s future. “We built out the accounting and controllership side of the house first and then built

As CFO Perry Wiggins recounts the different door-opening opportunities that allowed him to advance to the CFO office, APQC’s finance leader doesn’t hesitate to expose the seldom-mentioned sensation that frequently accompanies new responsibility–the feeling of being overwhelmed. According to Wiggins, the sense of being overwhelmed by new responsibilities is an experience that finance career-builders should at times relish because it signals they are being given “room to grow.” “There’s an expression–‘Luck is where preparation and opportunity meet.’ I was prepared when an opportunity came along inside a healthcare company, and that opportunity just opened so many others for me,” says Wiggins, who credits an early mentor for sharpening his career focus and directing him down an accounting track that he routinely widened as he took on different finance roles. –Jack Sweeney

A little more than 18 months ago, when CFO Kelly Steckelberg joined Zoom Video Communications, there were a number of key hires that needed to be made if the company was going to achieve its goal of selling shares to the public in the not-too-distant future. Three months after Zoom’s IPO and one month after its first earnings call, those hires are still top-of-mind for Steckelberg, who, while working alongside CEO Eric Yuan, filled the positions of general counsel, head of investor relations, and head of FP&A. Next, Steckelberg says, she wanted to make certain that finance and sales “had a great cadence” as far as how the teams interacted went and established a level of visibility into the sales pipeline that would allow Zoom to forecast on a weekly basis. Looking back, Steckelberg says that visibility into sales and spending was good when she stepped into the CFO role–but not where it needed to be. “When I arrived here, there was one FP&A analyst. She was doing a great job of holding it altogether wh

As Ronen Faier recalls the career-building ups-and-downs of being entrepreneurial CFO, few memories appear to be more vivid than a meeting with Guy Sella, a seasoned Israeli entrepreneur, who invites Faier to lead the finance team of his solar startup. Not yet a midsize firm, SolarEdge Technologies was only about $9 million in annual sales with roughly 100 employees when Faier receives Sella’s invitation. Having already experienced firsthand the heartache and financial repercussions of climbing onboard a struggling startup, Faier says he was confident this time things would be different. “I saw this amazing entrepreneur with a very deep technological understanding of the field as well as a deep understanding of business and I knew you seldom find these in one (individual),” explains Faier, who accepted Sella’s invitation in 2011. Eight years later, SolarEdge has close to 2,000 employees and last year reported sales of $937 million. Faier says, the company’s impressive growth is perhaps most visible today insi

Back in the early 1990s, while a senior manager at Ernst & Young, Elizabeth Salomon was selected to be an “Accounting Fellow” at the OCC – the nation’s primary regulator of banks. Nominated by E&Y for the prestigious post, Salomon moved to Washington DC and was soon writing policy statements that would provide guidance to bank examiners across the country. Reporting directly to the OCC’s chief accountant, she quickly became a “go-between” with other banking regulatory agencies as she coordinated policy development. “This was something I never expected to do and the big learning for me was that it was okay to get out of my comfort zone.” Up to that point, Salomon says her career was about helping clients apply accounting rules, whereas at the OCC she was developing the rules – an exercise she credits with extending her thought process. Explains Salomon: “It was just a very different way of thinking.” Following her OCC posting, Salomon joined Bank of America where she became controller of the bank’s IT

A brief summary of this episode

If CFO Joe Aho’s career DNA were uploaded to Ancestry.com, he would likely discover a family tree populated with no less than five financial planning analysts and 17 senior sales representatives. Needless to say, his career roots are multifunctional, with numerous titles and different tours of duty inside both finance and sales operations. Having joined Compuware nearly 20 years ago, Aho has served as CFO for the last four – his longest occupancy of any one position at Compuware  — which says a lot about his past appetite for job migration. Asked about his priorities as Compuware’s finance leader, Aho leaves little doubt that acquisitions are top of mind for the mainframe technology company that appears eager to open a new chapter of growth one that opens new doors for Compuware while discovering fruitful synergies with its past. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

It was the type of introduction that finance executives will invest decades of thoughtful career-building to receive. After dwelling nearly 20 years inside the capital markets and investment research corridors that scrutinize and energize the activities of publicly held real estate companies, Michael Knott was perhaps better prepared than most to receive an introduction to the search executive or team of search executives that had begun extensive outreach. Certainly, Knott’s robust professional network was rich with introductions to different executive searches, but unlike others, this was a CFO search and therefore more worthy of his attention. For many of the ambitious professionals Knott had worked alongside over the years, CFO search had long been a preferred doorway to the C-suite, a familiar path for opening a new leadership career chapter. Meanwhile, it was no secret that the search team was working on behalf of The Blackstone Group–the largest owner of commercial real estate in the world. Twelve month

Like many CFOs, one company more than others dominates James Denena’s finance career building years. Denena spent more than ten years at Applied Materials of Santa Clara, California where an executive development program encouraged him to move around inside the chip maker’s sprawling finance organization. While Denena filled traditional FP&A and treasury roles, he also actively sought out different operational roles that could provide him with a more wide-eyed view of the manufacturing side of the business. However, it was his involvement in the expansion of a corporate development function that Denena today singles out as having perhaps made the greatest contribution to his CFO mind set. “I was one of the early team members that actually built the function out,” recalls Denena, who says the newly minted team quickly became involved in M&A activities and was soon being sought out as an adviser on different strategic decisions across the company.  NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic In

Asked to supply us with a finance Strategic moment, CFO Sean Sobers recalls an acquisition completed during an earlier chapter of his career. Convinced the the acquired company was only capable of yielding a meager profit, Sobers and the finance team set out to expose the company’s shortcomings only to discover the opposite. “It was probably the most profitable business unit we had,” explains Sobers, who says the discovery came as part of a broader effort on the part of finance to require management to apply R.O.I. measures to their investments across the company. Meanwhile, certain opportunities that had garnered steady investment over the years would lose their luster as finance fine tuned its R.O.I. lens and began tracking returns more closely. “As we went forward, if you were going to ask for funding you had to supply an R.O.I. measurement that was approved by finance,” explains Sobers, who says the R.O.I. performance of investments would be tracked annually and frequently quarterly. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Qu

The young man’s smile is broad and welcoming. It’s the type of photo that colleges and universities frequently use to attract young applicants. However, when featured on the home page for Tri-County Mental Health Services, Inc., the image’s message seems less manufactured and perhaps more ambitious as it seeks to signal hope to families seeking mental health and substance abuse services. As the primary safety-net provider of behavioral health services to a community of more than 346,000 people, Tri-County, of Kansas City, Missouri, keeps hope in large supply, along with treatments, therapies, and professional guidance. Just what role finance leadership plays in delivering Tri-County’s services may not have been entirely evident if not for the untimely death of the organization’s CFO. New leaders are often tasked with driving change, and there was little question that newly hired CFO Michelle Naus was well prepared to drive it. Still, Naus would first need to address a number of nagging obstacles, including a

Inside the middle market today, it’s not uncommon to find a seasoned private equity executive serving as CFO of one his or her firm’s portfolio companies. Such an arrangement provides the business leader with a coveted split-screen view that buffers the investor’s demands with real-world operational insights. CFO Steve Coughran, who last year entered the C-suite at EMJ Corporation, of Chattanooga, TN, enjoys a similar split-screen of the business. However, this time the other half of CFO Coughran’s screen belongs not to a private equity executive but a strategy adviser and author. ” I was initially hired by EMJ to help them to develop and execute a client experience strategy. I entered their offices and helped them to develop tools and processes to help its leaders understand how they could enhance the client experience, but as I got into the engagement, I realized that the corporate strategy was not aligned with the customer and that there was a big disconnect,” explains Coughran, who stepped into the CFO of

A number of years after he first joined the lodging and hospitality industry, Ryan Hymel recalls being confronted by a fork in the road. Having labored deep inside his company’s M&A growth engine, he realized that his native tongue would curtail his career opportunities as the company’s appetite for growth became increasingly focused on Mexico and Latin America. “While I can get by conversationally in Spanish, I knew that there was no way that I would excel when it came to speaking with potential acquisition targets and partners, ” says Hymel, who opted instead to master the language of finance and entered the ranks of FP&A professionals, where he set about learning the intricacies of the company’s forecast model while carefully observing the decision making criteria behind capital allocation and how a decision made in one part of the organization could impact all parts. “For me, it was important to learn how these different worlds bridge each other internally–because in large organizations, it’s hard

Twenty four months ago CFO Mark Guerin had a pretty clear notion of what he wanted Onconova’s financial footing to look like during the second half of 2019. However, the question that lingered was whether the plan Guerin and his team were putting in motion had the vigor to overcome the obstacles along the way. Beginning with a strongly worded May 2017 message from NASDAQ claiming that Onconova’s stockholder equity was no longer sufficient to meet its listing standards. While Guerin’s plan included two new stock offerings and growing the firm’s stockholder equity – NASDAQ rejected Onconova’s initial response triggering a NASDAQ hearing where Onconova’s plan ultimately received a nod from the stock exchange. “It was an arduous task all the way through May of 2018. To do two offerings and raise a total of about $40 million in order to have the cash we needed to get to the end of 2019, and also to have the stockholders’ equity that we needed to retain our NASDAQ listing,” explains Guerin, who says the plan’s succ

Many CFOs have told us that storytelling is a big part of being a successful CFO today. However, quite a few finance leaders have told us that this did not come naturally to them and that in fact it was only by virtue of an “A-ha!” moment that they did finally lock on to the notion that as a CFO they had better be able to tell the story in a compelling and engaging manner. When it came to the importance of finance telling the story, Steve Gaven, unlike quite a few of his peers, did not require an “A-ha!” moment. Instead, Gaven arrived inside the CFO office at Boston Private well schooled in communicating both good and at times not-so-good news to investors and analysts. This involved a skill set that he had begun acquiring during the earliest days of his finance career, when he worked for a boutique consulting firm that specialized in helping publicly traded firms craft their messaging to help better drive their capital planning strategies. Along the way, Gaven joined the ranks of equity research analysts, a

Years from now when Katherine Edenbach looks back on her CFO career, 2019 might be remembered as a pendulum year – or a year when her priorities as finance leader swung from growth to profitability. “Smaller companies are much more focused on revenue and revenue growth, which is very important, but we need to drive a lot more reporting around our profitability, and more understanding on that side,” explains Edenbach, whose finance team appears poised to administer a dose of investigative medicine to Certify’s organization. “We want to drive more robust reporting to focus on different areas of the company and dig into product profitability to get a better feel for different profitability levels.”  NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (25 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

When asked what his priorities are as a finance leader over the next 12 months, CFO Nadeem Moiz supplies an answer that uses the phrase “shareholder value” not once, but three times. Needless to say, shareholder value appears to be top-of-mind at Select Interior Concepts, a diversified building products and services company. Explains Moiz: “In a public company reporting becomes very important. Governance becomes more important and investor relations and shareholder base management are always priorities. And so this requires some thought when it comes to the time allocation required for these added functions.”  NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Asked to reflect on his path to the CFO office, Dan Fletcher characterizes his years in private equity as being more operationally focused than transaction focused. Or at least, he recalls being drawn more to the challenges facing CFOs and other senior members of management teams, rather than the deal making mechanics of the banking side. As CFO of Host Analytics, Fletcher’s operational view is now fully unobstructed and meanwhile, HA’s finance leader has managed to keep one foot inside the private equity realm. Today in addition to being HA’s CFO, Fletcher remains a vice president at Vector Capital, the private equity firm that acquired HA last January. It’s a finance leadership tour of duty that is expected to unlock new value for both HA and Vector as Fletcher decodes the synergistic benefits of growth capital and technology enriched performance. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

Three years ago, Tim Adams probably never imagined that today he would be taking spin classes in Geneva, Switzerland. At the time, the seasoned finance leader could be found queueing up at Logan Airport to board yet another flight to San Francisco. Of course, one could argue that a certain Logan departure gate ultimately helped to put Geneva spin classes on the horizon, since it played no small role in transporting the CFO to a round of talks that helped to seal the sale of the finance leader’s earlier company Demandware of Woburn, MA, to Salesforce of San Francisco back in 2016. As Demandware’s CFO, Adams says, he was involved when an unsolicited offer arrived from Salesforce after the e-commerce platform had achieved consecutive years of 30% growth. “It’s sometimes hard to sell a company when you enjoy what you are doing and there’s a personal aspect, but you have to put that aside to do what is right for the company’s shareholders,” explains Adams, who today is CFO of ObsEva, a clinical-stage biopharmaceut