CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Inside the world of retail businesses, Greg Wookey’s CFO career has advanced down a path that parallels the sector’s growing appetite for more sophisticated software. Such was the case roughly 10 years ago, when he stepped into the CFO office at Mindbody—a firm whose well-known software helped fitness centers across the country to manage the demands of their clientele—and such is the case today, a...

In the past, Sue Vestri has told friends that she has achieved CFO success by routinely working herself out of jobs. Vestri is not alone. Certainly, many of her finance leader peers have helped to create some exciting M&A deal-making chapters only to be “written out” of the newly merged business’s future script. “Being put out of a job isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one opportunity can open the...

Back in the early 1990s, with both feet firmly planted on an auditing career path inside Price Waterhouse’s Tampa, Florida, office, Raj Dani decided to take a detour into the accounting house’s M&A advisory practice. Over the next few years, the one-time auditor began providing deal-makers with financial and operational due diligence on their future mergers and acquisitions. “I became focused on c...

CFOTL: What are your priorities as finance leader over the next 12 months?  CFOT:" Here at Eventbrite, my priorities are to bring focus and simplicity. We just went through our planning experience for 2020. We started with 12 different strategic initiatives, and I'm happy to say that eight of them wound up on the cutting room floor. We've got four that everybody is really focused on. These four in...

Step inside CFO Kevin Jacobson’s office at LogicGate, and there’s little question that you’ll think you’ve entered a realm where growth and risk are often two sides of the same coin. In fact, LogicGate’s fast path to achieving “product market fit” was no doubt shortened by early customers who today wield a similar growth/risk mind-set. Four-year-old LogicGate, a provider of governance, risk, and c...

We are nearly at the end of our interview with Scot Parnell when we ask him to explain what led him to accept the CFO position at DailyPay, a company with a pioneering technology inside the human capital management realm. This is a question that we had asked a little earlier in the interview, but this time we want to know what other factors may have contributed to his decision. Although Parnell ha...

Tannenbaum: At Brex, pretty early on, I was kind of familiar with the banking landscape from when I had been in investment banking. The group that I had been in actually served regional banks, so I did a lot of regional bank mergers and acquisitions. Then, at SoFi, I had built a lot of relationships with regional banks. I think that when you start in fintech, there's always this belief that you're...

CFOTL: Having splitout from GE- we would imagine there were certain business processes already in place at Synchrony, while others processes had to be reestablished or developed. Wenzel: The processes that have been developed are probably the core part of our business. We had to build everything from scratch. Even the processes for things like very mundane benefits in HR, and paying people, and fo...

It was back in 2002, Stephen Grist says, when he first punched through a surface of rigid assumptions to grasp the innovative levers that would propel him into the ranks of strategic CFOs. At the time, Grist was the CFO of Viatel, a technology company whose management and sales teams were eagerly seeking to reestablish the company’s footing along a growth path after having recently emerged from a...

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...

Ten years or so ago, the expression “never waste a downturn” became a popular maxim among business leaders who viewed the economy’s downward spiral as an opportunity to trim waste and restructure portions of their businesses. The expression also summed up the mind-set of a unique class of executives who, despite a bleak hiring environment, viewed the period as being potentially transformational fo...

Years from now, if Silicon Valley’s glitterati were ever to gather to celebrate the opening of a National Cloud Computing Museum, CFO Raman Kapur would make an excellent tour guide for the facility’s finance wing. In fact, he could just chart the trajectory of his career from the dot-com bubble forward to help the world at large to better grasp how the cloud opportunity has grown and reshaped the...

Perhaps, unlike most of her professional peers, when Bea Ordonez first interviewed for a CFO role, she got the job. At the time, perhaps no one was more surprised than Ordonez, whose finance resume—while impressive for a 26-year-old—still lacked a number of C-suite prerequisites. Twenty years later, she still resides in the C-Suite, having filled a number of consecutive CFO and COO roles over the...

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

CFOTL: What metrics are top of mind for you? ERTEL: Largely defined, most of Vizient's revenue is—I'm going to put it in air quotes—"subscription-oriented." Some of it is literal subscriptions, whether SaaS or other offerings, but much of it is driven by multiyear contracts that operate as subscription services, such as for clinical data or for a group purchasing organization. While on the one han...

A brief summary of this episode

CFOTL: What are the numbers or metrics that are always top of mind for you?  Shelly: Ninety-five percent of our revenue is driven by the volume that we clear, settle, and risk-manage every day, which is something that we don't control. We charge a clearing fee for our services, and as a low-cost service provider, I can't just charge any old amount. I'm very cognizant of how much volume we clear ev...

Few megadeals within the past decade have received as many recurring kudos as the acquisition of Genzyme, of Cambridge, MA by France’s biggest pharmaceutical company, Sanofi. The marriage of Sanofi and Genzyme appears to have exceeded expectations, allowing all of those involved in minting the newly merged entity to rightfully keep a feather in their postmerger caps. Thus it was for Mike Kaseta, w...

Among the many lessons that David Moss has learned along the trajectory of his 25-year finance career, the one to which he refers simply as “the $3 million sweatshirt” is perhaps the most enduring. Even after 20 years, Moss can’t help but mention the sweatshirt bearing the logo of Pets.com, which he kept as a souvenir from an earlier career chapter involving a $3 million investment in the infamous...

Ravi Chopra has built his career inside finance functions designed to serve growth-minded management. Such was the case in the late ’90s when Chopra joined Cisco Systems, which at the time was experiencing 50% growth annually. Jump forward 10 years, and you’ll find him busy leading the FP&A function for growth-driven Juniper Networks. Asked to reflect back on a 25-year finance career, Chopra doesn...

Had Valerie Burman entered the CFO office a decade ago, you wonder whether the role would be as good a match for the accomplished finance executive as it appears to be today. Back in 2007, after working nearly a decade in M&A as an investment banker, Burman exited a banking career to take on a corporate development role at Business Objects, a French software company that was soon to be acquired by...

When Chris Sands accepted an investor relations position at a midsize health care firm, he did so with the understanding that he would be permitted to occasionally sink his teeth into some of the firm’s growing FP&A challenges. Having a resume rich with investment banking experience, Sands was now determined to add some FP&A, a tour of duty that he viewed as a necessary prerequisite if he were goi...

For every top sales leader who confides to friends that he or she is really a numbers freak at heart, there’s an Andrew Hicks, who, as CFO of Advanced, would be just as apt to boast about a sales funnel innovation as he would about the adoption of a new accounting rule. In fact, it would probably not surprise Hicks’s past and present business colleagues to learn that when asked to identify a mento...

As is the case with many finance leader resumes, Cort Townsend’s reveals a repetition of professional advancement and achievement that allows casual readers to quickly validate his CFO credentials. However, like those of many, Townsend self-tale is only a shorthand rendering of a career path filled with twists, turns, and high-stakes industry drama. Such was the case in 2015 and 2016, a period in...