Cfo Thought Leader

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

When asked about his arrival at Dermira, CFO Andrew Guggenhime explains: "I was the 22nd employee, and today we have over 300." Along the way, the company executed an IPO, reached a market value of $1 billion, received FDA approval for its first medication (last June), and brought the offering to market (last October). Not bad for a five-year CFO sprint into the land of leading-edge medical dermatology. Looking back, Guggenhime says: "When I joined Dermira, we had one other person on the finance team. We had no employees on our legal team. We had no employees on our IT team. And those were functions for which I was responsible. So we had to build those teams and begin by bringing in the leaders and building those capabilities so that we could not only serve the growing needs of the company internally, but also satisfy our obligations as a public company." Today, with his finance team in place, Guggenhime prefers to look forward as he and his team awaits the "readouts" from different clinical evaluations. "Pre

There was a time when Glynis Bryan imagined herself someday retiring from Ryder System, Inc.—a company she entered as an intern and would later exit as a senior vice president. Along the way, she credits the transportation logistics giant with having exposed her to complex M&A transactions and innovative capital structures—two areas that she believes have made a hefty contribution to her post-Ryder success as a CFO. However, the Ryder experience she recalls most fondly was inside the FP&A function at what was her first destination on a finance career journey and one that has served her well at Insight Enterprises, Inc. There, shortly after being appointed CFO in 2007, she energized her team's FP&A ambitions and set a course that would forever transform the technology services company's notion of strategic finance. "I think of the FP&A function as being the road map within the finance function that helps each one of the senior leaders across the organization by supplying them with tools and act

Near the end of our discussion with CFO Wilco Groenhuysen, he recommends a book while confiding:  "It's not a great book—but it has a big lesson." "Opportunities exist for only for a short time. So when you see an opportunity, grab it and make the best of it," says Groenhuysen, revealing the big lesson and adding perhaps a surprise ending to a talk that up until his book recommendation appeared to chart the career path of yet another graduate from the CFO school of strict discipline and resolve. But wait! There were other clues along the way that Groenhuysen was more a CFO of his own making than a familiar reproduction. Certainly, the fact that his professional life spans three continents should have tipped us off. Also, how many finance leaders would ascend to the top of a manufacturing behemoth (Philips NA) only to forfeit the comfort of hard-earned industry knowledge to land fleet of foot inside the always-changing realm of biotech? Asked to explain how he addresses the difference between the two realms, G

Of all the finance milestones that CFO Mike Myshrall uses to illustrate Cyren's appetite for success, perhaps few are more enlightening than the one involving private equity titan Warburg Pincus. Two years ago, Warburg Pincus offered to buy out Cyren shareholders at a 35 percent premium over the current price of their shares. However, unwilling to have the firm forfeit its publicly owned shares entirely, Cyren management structured the deal so that Warburg would be eligible to acquire only up to 75 percent of Cyren's outstanding shares. Surprisingly, Warburg found itself battling to capture half of the available shares despite the hefty premium. In the end, the PE firm ended up with only 52 percent of outstanding shares. "Many shareholders chose to stay in the company and ride it with Warburg so that they could potentially get an even bigger return down the road if the company were to go fully private or if we were to sell to a larger company through an acquisition," explains Myshrall, who describes the trans

Sometime in the next three to six months, Syngenta AG, a Swiss-based agribusiness company, is expecting to welcome a clan of ambitious offspring. Months, even years in the making, these fruit from a forward-looking group are born from a cross-functional team—one tasked with helping the $13.5 billion enterprise correctly measure its expansive sustainability initiatives. To be clear, the aforementioned "offspring" are new metrics, the output of an ambitious metrics "refresh" triggered in part by the firm's determination to routinely evaluate the numbers intended to provide Syngenta management as well stakeholders with a clear-eyed view of its sustainability efforts. "It's all good and well establishing a new metric, but if you can't measure and monitor it, then it has no value in any shape or form," explains Syngenta CFO Mark Patrick, who first mentioned the sustainability "refresh" when asked about metrics that had become increasingly top-of-mind for finance—but were clearly "nonfinancial" or beyond the realm

Among the many flights that CFO Stefan Schulz has taken between Minneapolis and Houston over the years, few are etched in his memory better than a certain return flight to Minneapolis—during which he created an ambitious list of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) action items. The list that Schultz created in the air that day was long and detailed, and while he may not have ever used it as such, the list was the muscle behind an ultimatum. "I was thinking about all that I would need in order to get things fixed. Basically, I was thinking, 'If I don't get these, then you need to find somebody else,'" explains Schulz, who at the time had not yet been a month into a new job with Lawson Software when he determined that it was time to alert Lawson's board and upper management to its snowballing SOX compliance challenge. "To my surprise, they told me, 'We want you to do exactly what you said' and 'We've got your back.' This really changed how I approached problems and how I would recommend solutions going forward," explains Schu

It was late for a workday (perhaps after 9:00 p.m.) when Seb Martel shared his team's candid findings with a collection of top managers tasked with assessing the economic downturn's likely impact on BRP's business. As a manufacturer of popular vehicles for snow and water, BRP had a management that was naturally concerned that the downturn could wallop BRP's recreation-minded customers, depressing sales and raising doubts about whether BRP would meet its debt covenants. Still, the question that remained top-of-mind for Martel was a question that the downturn posed to industry at large: "Is management prepared to listen?" Today, Martel believes that his forthrightness served him well that night—along with an unflinching confidence in the numbers. BRP's management listened and responded to Martel's clear-eyed message by taking steps to better manage all areas of business, while battening down any unnecessary risk-taking. It's no secret that CFO careers are built on decades of experience that every so often yield

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