CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Asked to recall the experience of stepping into a CFO role for the first time, Nicole Anasenes doesn’t mince words. "It’s a very lonely, scary moment,” comments Anasenes, as she considers her early days at technology company Infor—a CFO appointment that preceded more recent CFO engagements at Squarespace and now technology firm Ansys. “If only someone would have told me how lonely it feels to make...

It was nightly business conversations at his parents’ dinner table that first led Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah to consider alternatives to business when it came to building a career. “As most small business owners do, my parents worked all the time—and as with most small businesses, things could at times be financially challenging,” explains Mahendra-Rajah, who vividly recalls business rent increases,...

Billtrust CFO Mark Shifke likes to label himself an “accidental CFO”—a tag that a number of our guests have appropriated from time to time when faced with explaining a past filled with less-than-traditional career experience. However, in the case of Shifke, the term arguably has little to do with career experience, for Billtrust’s CFO spent nearly a decade on Wall Street before entering the C-suit...

Several actions proved key as Waifa Chau advanced from financial planning and analysis (FP&A) roles to chief financial officer positions. Collaborating with other functions, gaining an in-depth understanding of the overall business, and helping his colleagues understand how FP&A benefits an organization have driven his success, says Chau, currently CFO with Nylas, Inc., a provider of productivity...

Of course, every finance leader needs to understand the mechanics of accounting and know how to identify the financial implications of management’s decisions. Their preparation should also include learning from their experiences—and this includes mistakes, says Ian Charles, chief financial officer with Flexe, an on-demand warehousing solution. In particular, identifying the optimal candidate for a...

Nearly 20 years later, CFO Trent York tells us that he can still hear the finance executive’s exact words. “Trent, I don’t need you tell me how  not  to do something—I need you to help me to figure out how to work through the issue and what needs to be addressed in order for us to be able to expand,” recalls York, placing just enough emphasis on the word “not” to expose a degree of anxiety that st...

A brief summary of this episode

When the TreeHouse Foods financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team notice CFO Bill Kelley entering the room, chances are that a number of team members shoot a quick glance at the company’s latest revenue figures. “I’m probably more predictable than I want to be,” explains Kelley, who has made revenue management a top priority for the $4.5 billion private label food and beverage maker. The push f...

When asked about a personal habit that has served him well over the years, finance leader Puneet Pamnani raises his voice slightly and seeks to mimic the delivery of his wife’s tone:  “ This  is what you do for a hobby? You read  company annual reports? ” To which Pamnani defends his favorite pastime with the retort: “I find them interesting!” Although it might seem difficult to imagine this excha...

When it comes time for Harmit Singh to brief Levi Strauss & Co.’s management team regarding the latest performance results, Levi’s CFO will often share a briefing document that features a front page bearing the heading “What’s Working and What’s Not.” “It’s more difficult to understand what’s not working, and it’s the  ‘What’s not’  that helps us to determine the areas on which we have to focus to...

Andrew Kenny still remembers the smell of day-old pizza that lingered in the back of the Cairo conference room as negotiations between his then company, food processing giant ADM, and a future joint venture partner entered day five. “Planting a flag in Egypt was extremely important for us because it was not just about having a presence there—it was about creating an entire supply chain and creatin...

There’s little question that the pandemic has led business leaders to amp up digital initiatives across most industries. In response, CFOs have more frequently been called upon to serve up some detailed answers for investors eager to keep a grasp on all spending tied to such initiatives. However, capital spending numbers were only an appetizer for certain board members and investors who viewed the...

Space is not typically the realm that CFOs point to when we ask about experiences that prepared them for a finance leadership role. However, the first 10 years of Alex Amezquita’s professional life frequently involved celestial spaces. “I was an engineer and chip designer, and some of those chips are floating around space on satellites right now, as we speak,” explains Amezquita, who served in a s...

When Acepodia CEO Sonny Hsiao began developing a list of candidates to fill the chief financial officer role at the biotechnology company that he had cofounded, it may have surprised some to see Jimmy Lai make the list. Certainly, this was not due to any U.S. markets void on Lai’s resume—to the contrary, he had helped to take three companies public and served as chief financial officer for multipl...

It’s no secret that the herculean effort required to keep corporate board meetings on time frequently involves tracking the arrivals of certain board member attendees. Of course, the most anticipated arrival inside the boardroom is often not a board member at all, but a new business measure or yardstick commonly referred to as a  metric . And just as board members often hail from faraway places, s...

Back in 2014—when Guy Blanchard first entered the CFO office at AeroFarms—the indoor vertical farming company had roughly 20 employees and a commercial farm prototype under construction. Seven years and four rounds of private funding later, AeroFarms has recently broken ground on its third commercial farm in Danville, Virginia, and a research farm in Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, this past March, Aerofarm...

When marketing campaigns get old, they’re like polyester leisure suits that seem to fit okay but look awful, explains finance chief Darrell Cox of Vena Solutions, who credits finance with helping Vena to empty its closet. Or, to put it another way, Cox credits finance with helping Vena to fail faster. “The earlier you know that you should stop investing, the more successful you will be at failing...

Featuring the Workplace Champions CFO Arleen Paladino of Crum & Forster CFO Guy Blanchard of Aerofarms CFO Mike Rasic of Synapse CFO Ross Tennenbaum of Avalara

Chances are that CFO Louie Reformina never expected to be in the rolling papers business. Having advanced down a career track populated with different private equity firms, a stint at Goldman Sachs, and a Stanford Business School degree, Reformina could have landed inside any number of industries offering him multiple C-suite doors of entry. However, not unlike the pick-and-shovel entrepreneurs wh...

Not unlike other finance leaders, Nitro CFO Ana Sirbu wants you to know that she’s a “prioritizer.” Both personally and professionally, Sirbu has created a list of objectives that never strays far from her mind’s eye. Meanwhile, she undoubtedly keeps a second list—a listing of key results.   “Effective key results are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic,” wrote John Doerr, the Silico...

Looking back, Mike Rasic says that his entry into the world of tech start-ups got kicked off with a phone call that he almost didn’t answer. “I have a strict policy that if I see a phone number popping up on my mobile that I don’t recognize, I just don’t pick up,” explains Rasic, who goes on to say that the voice on the other end belonged to a head hunter who subsequently gave him the scoop on a C...

In 2008, as the subprime mortgage crisis began turning the Street’s brash dealmakers into a squeamish clan of risk-averse bankers, Tim Murphy, an associate at Credit Suisse, decided that it was time to try some slots. Lots of them. “I took a gamble in the casino space—it was probably one of the best decisions that I have made in my career and one the best decisions that we have made as a family,”...

When Rob Krolik agreed to join us for a CFO (emeritus) episode, we expected to hear about the successful business turnaround chapter that he added to his finance resume while CFO at Move.com. We also anticipated learning about his years at Yelp, where—back in 2011, as the firm’s new CFO—he was credited with helping to lead one of the year’s most successful IPOs. While Krolik was only too happy to...

In the early 1980s, when Arleen Paladino joined Crum & Forster as a 21-year-old internal audit trainee, she was frequently sent to remote office locations to complete audits of financial statements the data from which were then transferred to keypunch cards and fed into a giant mainframe at the insurance company’s Morristown, New Jersey, headquarters “While this might seem like a long time ago, we...

Within 4 months of her 2019 arrival inside BDSI’s CFO office, Terry Coelho had spearheaded a product acquisition and managed a successful equity raise—two finance milestones that would produce generous sales tailwinds for the specialty pharmaceutical firm.   BDSI would experience 100% net sales growth in 2019, followed by 40% net sales growth in 2020.  Such sales momentum recently led BDSI to issu...