Cfo Thought Leader

How should a textbook rental company respond when it discovers that Amazon has just introduced offerings that will make the giant retailer its newest and biggest competitor?   If it’s 2013 and the company is Chegg, Inc., management found a conference room and locked itself inside not for hours but for days and weeks, according to Dave Bernhardt, who sat alongside the company’s CFO and other operations leaders as they together considered some of the grim realities of having Amazon as a competitor. “When Amazon entered the market, pricing on textbooks fell about 40%, so the profit in the business disappeared immediately,” explains Bernhardt, who first joined Chegg as a corporate controller and soon advanced into the vice president of finance role as Chegg tapped into more of Bernhardt’s FP&A acumen. “We needed to find a way to make our business ‘capital light,’ and the question became: ‘How do we get out of where we are and take our money and put it back into something that will basically give it back to us