Cfo Thought Leader

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

A career stint inside the corporate development realm at Visa – quickly came to mind for CFO Adam Meister when asked about those experiences he believed shaped his CFO mindset. Characterizing his time at Visa as more “a detour” rather than a straight line along his career- building trajectory, Meister recalls the career chapter as one where he had few direct reports or underlings and yet was tasked with motivating a team. “You learn a lot about how to motivate and mobilize a team from a position of collaboration – but without a lot of direct authority,” says Meister, who believes the experience parallels the challenges many CFOs face to day as they step beyond their traditional realm of influence to build new relationships across the enterprise. “There’s a real power in how you lead by example and how you show value to business owners and peers by helping them look and understand the economics of a business,” says Meister. NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50

Thanks to an entrepreneurial itch, Bal Bhullar will never be a conventional CFO. In fact, her CFO resume may be the only one ever to include three-wheel electric cars alongside vitamin supplements. However, when it comes to finance milestones such as the $12 million in new financing on which Electra Meccanica closed last March, Bhullar is clearly marching in step with her professional peers. This being said, when your CEO is a former race car driver and you’re building three-wheel vehicles using Chinese parts in western Canada, a CFO would be more likely to attract the interest of People magazine than Wall Street investors. Nevertheless, Wall Street has been listening, and, as for many CFOs along the front lines, Bhullar has found that communication and relationship-building remain top-of-mind.   NOW SUBSCRIBE: The Quarterly Digest of CFO Strategic Insight http://bit.ly/2Wfv291 (50 CFO Profiles Every Issue).

One of Brett White’s first assignments as a CFO was also one of his toughest. Back in 2001, with 10 years of career-building at Oracle Corp. behind him, White recalls eagerly stepping into his first CFO role–only to be handed a less than exhilarating task. During a meeting in his first week on the job, White was welcomed by the CEO, who then asked him to pull together and execute a plan to eliminate one-third of the company’s workforce, or roughly 850 employees. “It was a palm-to-the-forehead moment,” says White. “I realized that this was just not crunching numbers, and that the decisions that were required to be made would have an enormous impact on people’s lives.” Fifteen years and four CFO tours of duty later, White received a call from a recruiter regarding a health and wellness business located down the coast. “The business was a recurring revenue model and SaaS business, so it meant no more of this end-of-quarter fingernail-chewing stuff. It was all highly recurring with a group of A-list investors,” a

At times, it must seem to Vijay Kumar that his 12-year tenure as a CFO has been spent not at one company but three. This must be a sense that most C-suite members at Sify Technologies likely experience in light of the company’s appetite for continuous reinvention. Back in 2007, when Kumar arrived at the information and communications technology company, Sify was widely known as a consumer business–and one perhaps without the will or resources to attract business customers. As CFO, Kumar was part of a management team tasked with changing that perception both inside and outside of Sify’s existing world. More specifically, Kumar and his finance team were responsible for calculating and tracking the necessary capital expenditures that could provide the new business-to-business infrastructure that business customers would demand. Of course, no sooner was the infrastructure in place then Sify decided to super-size its business services menu, making it a bona fide provider of technology services. Looking forward, Ku

It wasn’t long after David Evans arrived inside the CFO office at Cardlytics that finance team members learned that their office surroundings were about to change. Originally domiciled in the less-trafficked–some would say “quiet” side–of the building, Evans wasted little time in relocating his team to more central (and arguably more social) office space. “Physically speaking, if I’m advancing a mantra that my team is a trusted business partner, they need to be visible, and part of that involves the cadence and frequency with which they operate,” says Evans, who believes that finance team members at Cardlytics have perhaps a plus-size opportunity to play a strategic role in the business. It’s an opportunity that becomes more easily grasped when one considers the company’s unique lines of sight. The Atlanta-based company partners with financial institutions (2,000 of them) to run their banking rewards programs that promote customer loyalty, providing Cardlytics with a coveted view into where and when consumers

Back in 2014, shortly after Arthur Levine first stepped into the CFO office at Sensus Healthcare, the fast-growing medical device company hit a sizable speed bump. A growing number of future Sensus customers were putting their purchases on hold as uncertainty around insurance reimbursements grew in relation to a review being conducted by The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. In order to quickly ease the company’s hefty appetite for cash, Levine and Sensus management executed a sizable layoff largely impacting the company’s sales team–while for the time being the healthcare company opted to leave its research and development team untouched. Ultimately, reimbursements for Sensus offerings remained in place and product demand surged, allowing its 2015 revenues to jump 77 percent. Such news could not have been better timed for an initial public offering, a notion upon which Sensus acted in early 2016. “We became one of the first companies to complete an IPO in 2016. Actually, we were the only Florida-

When it comes to newbie accountants, few clients are more coveted within the realm of public accounting than those preparing for an IPO. So it was back in the early 1990s, when Craig Nickerson found himself knee-deep in CPA envy after having served not one but five of his firm’s IPO-minded tech clients. Today, Nickerson credits his IPO client streak to having aligned himself with a well-connected senior partner widely known in Florida’s tech community for his IPO savvy. Fast-forward to the late 1990s, and Nickerson is living in Beijing after having been tasked with helping to set up a Chinese manufacturing plant for a client company that he had joined as a controller. “It was the Wild West,” explains Nickerson, who recalls the added complexities of business dealings involving large amounts of cash. “As they said in China, an executed contract is just the start of a negotiation.” Nickerson, who would later ascend the finance leadership ladder at a string of private equity–backed companies, observes that “anyon

When Ted Myles is asked to reflect back on his early efforts to land a CFO role – he arguably sounds a little bit like a safe cracker: “Breaking into the c-suite that first time is always hard,” he explains. “I went in and would continue to get beat out by a sitting CFO,” says Myles, who comments: “Understandably – a board or a CEO is always going to look for someone who’s already proven in the seat.” Having to date successfully decoded the c-suite’s entry formula not once but four times – the CFO seat at AMAG Pharmaceuticals is today filled by a seasoned CFO, who is routinely raising the bar for himself as well as AMAG’s finance team. This past January – six days into the new year – AMAG preannounced its 2019 earnings at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco – an energetic gathering where the bio pharmaceutical crowd traditionally kicks off the new year with some blatant chest beating. “Our accounting team had about six total calendar days to provide us with a tight fix on what the ac

From the moment Chris Whitfield stepped into the CFO office at Mana Nutrition, it was clear to him that various snags in the organization’s information flows were keeping the not-for-profit’s board members on edge. To remedy the situation, Whitefield reformulated the not-for-profit’s approach to reporting, beginning with a beefier balance sheet instead of the slimmed down Statement of Financial Position on which Mana had relied to date. “It was clear to me that we had to begin reporting on our performance back to a pretty savvy board of directors just as any for-profit company would,” says Whitefield, who also sought to give the board greater visibility into the ebb and flow of the not-for profit’s working capital. “I realized that we could not behave like a not-for-profit that relied on giving and charitable donations, but instead had to rely on our own wits and ability to raise capital through beneficial investment or normal credit channels,” Whitefield explains. After a few tense meetings–where some pointe

It’s unlikely that this is the first sentence ever to include the phrase “even-keeled” alongside the name Robin Gantt, but this is a pairing that bears repeating here to reveal not only an obvious character trait of our latest guest, but also one that frequently sets apart CFO leadership at large. Gantt, already a seasoned finance leader, arrives at Northwest Pipe as an advisor to the CEO, who is seeking to better align finance with the steel pipe manufacturer’s overall strategy. We don’t learn all of what needs to get done, but Gantt’s subsequent advance to the CFO office makes clear that the alignment is being achieved as the organization responds and is placed on a more even keel. Listeners will enjoy hearing Gantt offer a short, concise overview of the uncommon business of manufacturing steel pipe that ranges from 2 feet to 13 feet in diameter. Meanwhile, her modest appraisal of both her early career and communication abilities informs finance newcomers that they too can learn and achieve along the financ

When Matt Fahy identifies the opportunities that have punctuated his finance career, he credits subscription revenue models as having played a recurring role along the trajectory that has led to multiple CFO tours of duty. For Fahy, it all began with a move to New York City, where he was soon serving one of the media world's most coveted clients: the Newhouse family (owners of a string of newspapers and Condé Nast publishing). "Being a private, family-owned business, their concerns were really about safeguarding their assets and monitoring their taxes," explains Fahy, whose lines of sight into the house of Newhouse were bestowed upon him by his employer, Paul Scherer & Company, a boutique New York CPA firm. Fahy would continue to serve media clients when, in the mid-1990s, he jumped to KPMG's Information, Communications, and Entertainment (ICE) practice, where he acquired an entrepreneurial itch and soon entered the world of dotcom start-ups. He would serve as CFO for Public Access Technologies and Qualit

Before joining Goldman Sachs back in the late 1980s, Mark Lee was a finance manager at Hewlett-Packard Co. Today, Lee fondly recalls being mentored by a senior controller while situated deep inside the technology behemoth's computer support division. The finance executive, explains Lee, viewed controllership as a strategic role where executives could acquire and build their leadership skills that could be applied elsewhere. "He told me that his next job could be the head of marketing," explains Lee, who credits his early mentor for outfitting his finance mind-set with a wide lens rather than a narrow one. After four years inside an HP cubicle, he set off on a finance adventure by entering the investment banking world via a seven -year tour of duty with Goldman Sachs in New York. While the banking chapter of Lee's long finance career is the most robust of his career book (which is nearly 20 years thick), it is perhaps not the most intriguing. This designation arguably belongs to Forge Global where he and his f