Cfo Thought Leader

Purchasing bananas and moving them through a warehouse in less than 24 hours is perhaps not a professional experience widely shared by today’s finance leaders. Still, as Topia CFO Terry Schmid tells it, mastering banana logistics may just be a worthy prerequisite for many of today’s CFO roles. “It taught me to think about the process that you go through to understand how things flow, how things actually work, and how you can improve things,” says Schmid, who first entered the professional world as a software coder specializing in COBOL—a language that landed him a consulting engagement with Safeway, Inc., in the 1990s, where he spent months alongside a team of Safeway buyers building a new logistics and warehousing system. “Being responsible for the produce piece, I had to learn how they buy produce and move it through the warehouse, after which we wrote a system to automate the process to a large degree—particularly the buying part,” explains Schmid, who recalls the Safeway team as being at first somewhat do