Cfo Thought Leader

1110: When Leadership Mattered | Amanda Whalen, CFO, Klaviyo

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Synopsis

Amanda Whalen’s first unit CFO role began with a question. “You’re not a finance technical person,” her company’s president told her, “but you’re the strongest leader on my team. Will you be willing to be the CFO and help me transform the finance function?” She accepted.Over the following year, Whalen tells us, her team tackled three major initiatives: fixing broken cost accounting at a dairy plant, realigning sales incentives to drive margin, and overhauling the P&L reporting structure to match the new parent company’s expectations. The team was skeptical—“They said, ‘You’re crazy. There’s no way we can do that all in a year,’” she recalls. But they did. The business became 10% more profitable.That experience, Whalen tells us, revealed finance as a powerful lever to drive business transformation—“You get to work with every function… It’s highly quantitative and analytical, and it involves working with a lot of really great people.”Now CFO at Klaviyo, Whalen brings the same philosophy. In three years, the