CFO THOUGHT LEADER

It’s an all-too-familiar tale among the ranks of senior finance executives: A private equity firm acquires a company, reshuffles the finance team, and reserves the top finance spot for one of its own portfolio CFOs. At Qlik, though, this story had a less familiar ending—or at least one that did not include a portfolio CFO. Instead, back in 2016, when Thoma Bravo acquired King of Prussia, Pennsylva...

Elizabeth Mann began her career as a mathematician in academia, spending a decade in the field. Her initial plan had been to become a professor, on a path that would start with a Ph. D. and a postdoc. However, something was missing. Eager to engage more directly with the world at large, she pivoted her career toward finance. Mann found a door of entry at Goldman Sachs, where after initially fillin...

This episode of Planning Aces sheds light on the critical role financial leadership and strategic planning plays in guiding companies through turbulent times and the importance of balancing short-term opportunities with long-term strategic planning. Each of the featured finance chiefs faced unique challenges related to the pandemic’s impact on their businesses, and their responses offer valuable i...

It was the type of introduction that any MBA student would envy, and one at which David Snyder, 35 years later, still marvels. Back in the late 1980s, a business school classmate introduced him to notable investor and billionaire tycoon Sam Zell, who subsequently offered Snyder a job. Without hesitation, Snyder accepted Zell’s offer and in short order began working for him in Chicago, where he joi...

Like many of her CFO peers, Karen Walker had an early career that was guided by abundant opportunities surrounding finance-driven decision-making within organizations. It was a path that often led Walker to engage more closely with sales and operations, as was the case at CNET Networks, where she tells us that she recognized the limitations of embracing a strictly “rules-based” approach in finance...

This Episode is CFOTL Special Supplement.  Franklin Templeton Chief Accounting Officer Lindsey Oshita expains how challenges faced during an ERP integration following a merger and the massive IT commitment it entailed. She highlights the significance of a chart of accounts and their potential adaptations, along with her team’s successful implementation of Workday at the start of the fiscal ye...

CFO Michael Perica’s career journey began with an opportunity to work as a junior analyst for a national capital markets firm, where he would find a billionaire mentor. According to Perica, his association with the billionaire would ultimately offer him access to influential networks and unique opportunities. From his early days onward, Perica tells us, he became skilled at building connections wi...

For Emma Brown, it was as though she had just removed the sword from the fabled stone, a moment that would challenge the inclination to persistently question her own judgment when it came to business. As is often the case, Brown’s moment of insight occurred in a high-pressure situation. Faced with poor financial visibility and the need to prevent a liquidity crisis, she championed the notion that...

Four years ago, when Luigi Testa first joined LinkSquares as CFO, the Boston-area tech firm employed roughly 40 people. Today, with nearly 400 employees, the company is concerned less with growth and more about achieving a balance between growth and efficiency. To achieve this, LinkSquares management has made automation and AI adoption a priority. According to Testa, the goal was to first identify...

It's no secret that Moderna's R&D efforts have expanded well beyond the realm of COVID-19. CFO Jamey Mock tells us that today the company has more than 40 drugs in its pipeline, with targets such as respiratory, latent, and rare diseases. As he explains, this diversity means that the biotech innovator is reliant not solely on one product or therapeutic area, which makes for less risk than woul...

More than any other human quality or characteristic, Brandon Nussey is known for his calm demeanor—or so Coveo’s finance leader tells us near the end of our discussion. It’s an observation that we’re not about to refute. After having spent 40 minutes in trying to identify just what it is that sets Nussey apart from his CFO peers, we had found his composure a trait to flag, even if he hadn’t ended...

Planning Aces Hosts Brett Knowles and Jack Sweeney discuss how AI's integration into FP&A is still in early stages, with many teams 'dabbling' in AI rather than regularly employing it. However, its use has been significant, inspiring creativity and improving team performance. This episode's conversation emphasizes how FP&A is not just about financial numbers but involves drawing in non-FP&...

Jim Moylan is perhaps our first CFO guest to list the leasing of oil rigs as one of the experiences that best prepared him for a CFO role. Of course, he makes it clear that the experience is worthy of mention not so much because of  what  he was selling but because he was selling  at all. “The best way to learn what a company does and understand its value proposition is to be a salesperson, and I...

When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American expats being deployed by digital disrupter SMB printer Vistaprint of Boston, Mass. For the next 5 years, Quinn would be involved in a string of business acquisitions that would grow the digital printer’s European revenues from nothing to more than $500 million annually. Based in Barcelona, Quinn spent roughly 3 we...

Greg Robbins began his career inside the realm of Big Six accounting houses, an experience that he tells us laid the foundation for a career in financial operations and strategy. However, he credits much of his leadership style to his time at Red Bull, where he learned that real development comes from hands-on experiences, insightful feedback, and formal training, a philosophy that he has carried...

Our discussion with Christine Chambers has been going on for only a little more than 5 minutes when she tells us that she remembers sitting on the steps of a London flat years ago while contemplating life’s many twists and turns.   It seems that the accommodation—which she had only recently acquired and unquestionably counted as a milestone in life—had with little warning come to present a di...

If Mark Seidel had told us that he had spent many of his high school evenings peering through a telescope at the stars, we would have likely believed him. However, Seidel—CFO of space security start-up True Anomaly—swiftly short circuits the familiar narrative of a space-loving youth. Instead, he draws our attention to his early entrepreneurial endeavors on eBay (he achieved power selling status w...

Among the industries on which the pandemic was most known to have afflicted an extra helping of earnings chaos, most business analysts agree that the home fitness market is perhaps most deserving of special mention. Indeed, few sectors logged steeper gains and more precipitous losses during COVID’s comings and goings than home fitness—and perhaps few demanded more reflexive, in-the-moment, decisio...

When Michael Kennedy first stepped into the CFO office at the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) in 2018, he was surprised to learn that the association was spending $8 million annually on office space across the country. “Why were we in these offices?,” asks Kennedy, voicing the question that helped to kick off the first of what he now characterizes as a multichapter digital transformation. As...

CFO Zhi Li's Career Background: Zhi Li's professional life begin at Bell Canada, where he was involved in operational finance within the Wireless Division. The division, Zhi tells us served as the growth engine for the company at the time. During his time at Bell Canada he worked on a subscription business model, dealing with wireless units and the basics of a subscription business, which later pr...

Insights from Planning Aces: CFO Lauren StClair talks about leveraging AI for faster analysis, transparency in reporting, and the challenge of maintaining clean, adaptable data. CFO Doug Lindroth emphasizes the shift from closed data structures to open-book management, enabling deeper discussions on profitability and investments. CFO Charly Kevers underscores AI's impact on manual tasks, reshaping...

It was back in 2016 when Lauren St. Clair realized that it was time to raise her hand. Online marketplace giant eBay had just completed a deal to acquire the Spanish online ticket platform Ticketbis, and St. Clair, a 9-year eBay veteran, was itching to get overseas. eBay had entered the online ticket business in 2007 with its acquisition of StubHub, and the addition of Ticketbis now promised to fa...

When Peter Benevides joined Olo back in 2015, the provider of restaurant technology's CFO office was vacant—as it would remain for the next 4 years, until he ultimately got the position thanks to a nod from the firm's CEO and perhaps a sprinkling of magic dust from Olo board members and investors. Of course, things may have gone very differently for Benevides, as they so frequently do for many sen...

The Goldman Sachs “anti-raid” team was between conference calls with an embattled client company when word came that a senior member of the target company’s management team had unexpectedly died. Looking back, Tom Fennimore says that the next few months of his early career years at Goldman then became a transition point—or period of accelerated learning. “It was a very sad situation—they were in t...

CFO Rodrigo Brumana’s career journey began with a position as a computer programmer in Brazil. He would move in his early career years to the United States, where he got his start in investment banking. Soon thereafter, he moved to Fairchild Semiconductor, where he advanced into an investor relations role. Next, Brumana delved into the realm of predictive analytics at eBay, a stint that opene...