Cfo Thought Leader

Asked to reflect on those experiences that she feels prepared her for a finance leadership role, a cash flow statement quickly comes to mind for Anna Brunelle, CFO of Kinestral Technologies. Only months into her first industry finance job, Brunelle was tasked with preparing her company’s cash flow statement, and she didn’t like some of what she discovered about the business. “I realized that there were a couple of businesses that the company had acquired a few years earlier that had some elements that were kind of dragging down our profitability,” explains Brunelle, who after digging a little deeper and more closely studying the businesses realized that the areas negatively impacting profits frequently involved certain offerings of recently acquired European businesses that offered limited cross-selling potential. “Not knowing any better, I went to the CFO and CEO and said, ‘Hey, have we ever thought about transferring some of the elements out of these businesses?,’” recalls Brunelle, who even today as a CFO