Cfo Thought Leader

A brief summary of this episode

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

Chances are that CFO Louie Reformina never expected to be in the rolling papers business. Having advanced down a career track populated with different private equity firms, a stint at Goldman Sachs, and a Stanford Business School degree, Reformina could have landed inside any number of industries offering him multiple C-suite doors of entry. However, not unlike the pick-and-shovel entrepreneurs who once outfitted troves of Gold Rush  prospectors, Reformina is confident that his arrival inside the CFO office at Turning Point Brands (NYSE:TPB) is well timed for an uptick in cannabis sales due to the industry’s quickly changing regulatory environment as well as public perception.    In addition to cannabis, Turning Point, a marketer and distributor of “alternative smoking accessories,” is now seeking to satisfy its appetite for growth inside a number of product categories such as cigar wraps, hemp paper and paper cones. “The majority of our profits now come from our Zig-Zag brand of rolling papers and wraps prod

Not unlike other finance leaders, Nitro CFO Ana Sirbu wants you to know that she’s a “prioritizer.” Both personally and professionally, Sirbu has created a list of objectives that never strays far from her mind’s eye. Meanwhile, she undoubtedly keeps a second list—a listing of key results.   “Effective key results are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic,” wrote John Doerr, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, in his ode to OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) Measure What Matters (Penguin Random House, 2018).   Learning how items move from the first list to the second is one of our objectives in talking with Sirbu, a steely-eyed Silicon Valley CFO who’s known to bring a vice-like focus to key results. By way of introduction, she names past affiliations (Google Capital, Silver Lake Partners) to expose her path to the CFO office of fintech BlueVine, which she joined in 2016 as a vice president of finance and capital markets. “When I joined BlueVine, the company had just over 50 people, and when I

Looking back, Mike Rasic says that his entry into the world of tech start-ups got kicked off with a phone call that he almost didn’t answer. “I have a strict policy that if I see a phone number popping up on my mobile that I don’t recognize, I just don’t pick up,” explains Rasic, who goes on to say that the voice on the other end belonged to a head hunter who subsequently gave him the scoop on a CFO position. “It worked out,” reports Rasic, a former PwC partner who is currently the CFO of Synapse, a fintech start-up that can now be counted as Rasic’s fourth CFO tour of duty. Asked what advice he wishes that someone had given him upon entering the CFO office for the first time, Rasic replies “timing matters,” before explaining further: “I joined a mortgage company as CFO at the onset of the mortgage crisis.” Besides some of the more challenging lessons gleaned from the mortgage crisis, Rasic says that he exited the experience with two key takeaways that he has applied to every CFO role since. “First,” he notes

In 2008, as the subprime mortgage crisis began turning the Street’s brash dealmakers into a squeamish clan of risk-averse bankers, Tim Murphy, an associate at Credit Suisse, decided that it was time to try some slots. Lots of them. “I took a gamble in the casino space—it was probably one of the best decisions that I have made in my career and one the best decisions that we have made as a family,” explains the finance leader, who accepted a director of finance position with Cadillac Jack, a fast-growing slot machine manufacturing company based in Georgia.   At the time, Murphy’s wife (the couple had met at business school) was working for The Coca Cola Company in Atlanta, a factor that the finance executive says helped to hedge his career bet. “I had opportunities to join investment banks in Atlanta and other large organizations, but we made a conscious decision that given the fact that she had a job at a very large and stable company, I could take a gamble with mine,” says Murphy. Also influencing Murphy’s de

When Rob Krolik agreed to join us for a CFO (emeritus) episode, we expected to hear about the successful business turnaround chapter that he added to his finance resume while CFO at Move.com. We also anticipated learning about his years at Yelp, where—back in 2011, as the firm’s new CFO—he was credited with helping to lead one of the year’s most successful IPOs. While Krolik was only too happy to share a few thoughts regarding both of these chapters, he also reflected on a place in time about which we never expected to hear—namely, when a speech delivered by the outgoing president of his international youth group turned out to be plagiarized and in fact a word-for-word copy of an address given by another retiring president a number of years earlier. “It was a very moving speech and I had put the guy up on a pedestal, so it taught me not to put anyone up there again,” explains Krolik, who notes that this experience from his teen years led him to enter the professional world with a self-mandate to treat people

In the early 1980s, when Arleen Paladino joined Crum & Forster as a 21-year-old internal audit trainee, she was frequently sent to remote office locations to complete audits of financial statements the data from which were then transferred to keypunch cards and fed into a giant mainframe at the insurance company’s Morristown, New Jersey, headquarters “While this might seem like a long time ago, we just decommissioned the mainframe last year,” says Paladino, who entered Crum & Forster’s CFO office in 2017 after serving as a senior vice president of the company’s internal audit function. Having only recently bid farewell to mainframe technology, Crum & Forster is not likely counted among the industry’s tech savvy innovators. Still, evolution is arguably what Crum & Forster does best. The insurance company will celebrate its bicentennial next year. “Understanding the systems and how the processes worked together really helped me to understand the business model,” continues Paladino, who would adv

Within 4 months of her 2019 arrival inside BDSI’s CFO office, Terry Coelho had spearheaded a product acquisition and managed a successful equity raise—two finance milestones that would produce generous sales tailwinds for the specialty pharmaceutical firm.   BDSI would experience 100% net sales growth in 2019, followed by 40% net sales growth in 2020.  Such sales momentum recently led BDSI to issue a press release praising its “new commercial team” and at the same time announcing that Coelho’s CFO title would now include the designation “executive vice president.” For Coelho, a seasoned finance executive who spent more than a decade serving in a variety of senior positions inside Novartis and Sealed Air Corp., the call to leadership at BDSI afforded her a wide berth from which deliver results that are now arguably visible to all. Still, even this success chapter must compete for our attention when we hear about a promotion that she received from candy and pet food giant Mars Incorporated early in her career.

Back in 2014, when FM Global wanted to entice finance executive Kevin Ingram to move back to the US from England, the UK finance director was offered a position no one at the company had ever heard of before.       “My CEO came to me and said, ‘It’s called sr. vice president of corporate services and that means nothing to anybody, but I love that because that means I can put anything I want there and no one can tell me it doesn’t belong.’" explains Ingram, who says the newly created role would grow to include business analytics, business risk consulting, capital management , risk management as well as other areas. Still, the corporate services title to the outside world was arguably somewhat vague and perhaps not what a top executive may have in mind after 25 years with the same company. Says Ingram: “I was never looking to leave. It was really just a question of when the opportunity was going to present itself and if it didn’t present itself what else would I do instead.” Two years later when Ingram stepped