CFO THOUGHT LEADER

A Chief Story Officer’s Legacy Given that finance executives are the top number-crunchers in the organization, it’s fascinating to hear Traction on Demand CFO Corinne Hua describe people, conversations, and narratives as crucial factors in her strategic calculations at her consulting and software development firm. Hua views her function’s primary role as crafting a compelling story around the comp...

Guidance for your C-Suite Ascent A global finance executive with a passion for healthcare, Constellation Pharmaceuticals CFO Emma Reeve offers straightforward advice to aspiring finance chiefs: continually add new experiences to your backpack and take them with you to your next role . She’s certainly demonstrated that her approach works. Reeve’s 20-plus years of industry experiences extends across...

Chanticleer Holdings CFO Patrick Harkleroad knows how to distinguish between signals and noise. That’s evident when he’s helping colleagues mine an expanding trove of data for customer insights to improve customer experience at the company’s fast, casual, and full-service restaurant brands. It’s also the case when Harkleroad assesses his varied career experiences in investment banking (both capita...

From a career development standpoint, one of the best things William Acheson did to reach the CFO office was stepping away from corporate finance and accounting for 15 years. After coming up on the public acconting track, the GWG Holdings finance chief immersed himself in investment banking, the residential mortgage industry, capital markets, risk management, credit management and more while takin...

Arvinas CFO Sean Cassidy caught the high-growth bug early in his career. Shortly into his stint with Deloitte, Cassidy transitioned from a massive global financial services company to work with middle-market clients. He felt he could make a more tangible difference for those companies by supporting them as they raised capital and made acquisitions. His passion led him to the life sciences industry...

When Whirlpool CFO Jim Peters joined the company at the director level 15 years ago, he was thrust into the thick of a pivotal M&A deal that also wound up generating extraordinary value from a career development standpoint. Originally assigned to help manage the accounting facets of the proposed Maytag acquisition, Peters swiftly expanded his assignment to include tax, post-deal integration planni...

A Cross-Functional Black Belt Vocera Communications CFO Justin Spencer’s strategic-finance breakthrough had little to do with corporate finance and everything to do with the drivers of strategic success. In an earlier CFO role, the tech executive heard just about every ERP horror story there is – sordid scope creep, sketchy implementation firms, unending projects, the organization's brutal rejecti...

Choose Your Words Carefully Zendesk CFO Elena Gomez followed up a top-notch education (a degree from UC-Berkley’s Haas School of Business) with a series of finance executive positions within some highly impressive companies – Charles Schwab, Visa, Salesforce and, since April 2016, Zendesk, a customer experience and help desk platform company that's posted remarkable, largely organic, growth in rec...

An Early Dose of Pharma Start-Up Experience When Global Blood Therapeutics CFO Jeffrey Farrow says he took the corporate-finance career path less traveled, he really means it. As an undergraduate biology major, Farrow and a couple of entrepreneurial-minded postdocs hit upon a way to identify a protein thought to cause Alzheimer’s. The group licensed the technology from the University of California...

A Humble Take on a Hall-of-Fame Career Yext CFO Steve Cakebread’s resume is extraordinary given the preeminent companies he’s worked for (HP, Silicon Graphics, Autodesk, Salesforce.com, Pandora and Yext), the new technology categories he’s helped bring to market, and the staggering growth those organizations posted under his corporate-finance leadership. Cakebread joined Salesforce as employee #67...

One of FinancialForce CFO Gordy Brooks’ most valuable early career-building experiences began by butting heads with his CEO. The chief executive insisted on issuing sales commissions on a weekly basis – an ask that would have most finance chiefs pulling their hair out.  After the CEO stuck to his guns in the face of counterarguments, Brooks spent two weeks carefully unpacking the problem behind hi...

A regular on Treasury and Risk Management Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in Finance” list, Smartsheet CFO Jennifer Ceran joined the company, a SaaS platform for managing collaborative work and automating work processes, in 2016 with impressive Silicon Valley bona fides. She’s served as CFO and in senior finance executive roles at Quotient Technology (formerly Coupons.com), Box, Ebay/PayPa...

Props to Anaqua CFO and COO Justin Crotty for allowing us to first zero-in on his early career chapters when the economy showed no mercy.  Crotty, who joined the leading provider of intellectual property management software and services, about three years ago, launched his career with a tech consultancy at the height of the dot.com era. In his mid-20s, he took on the role of project lead for a pri...

On first glance, Ra Medical Systems CFO Andrew Jackson’s 20 years as a finance executive in life sciences and technology companies seems have progressed in a traditional, orderly manner. A closer inspection of Jackson’s experience reveals that taking early-career risks can pay off handsomely. Jackson joined the manufacturer of laser-based solutions for the treatment of cardiovascular and dermatolo...

Of the three traditional paths to the finance chief’s seat, Bluesnap CFO Chris Menard took the approach less traveled, and it’s made quite a difference. Most fledgling finance executives begin their journey in public accounting or investment banking, Menard parlayed an undergraduate experience rich with entrepreneurial grooming (along with an MBA) into financial planning and analysis positions at...

In a sector known for advancing leading-edge risk mitigation strategies, CFO Rejji Hayes offers a risk-minded response to those who ask why he steered his career into the power and energy sector. “I had this epiphany where I said ‘It would be nice to find (a sector) that’s was a little less cyclical and a little less transactional.’ … And people generally need heat and electricity irrespective of...

Tony Tripeny’s remarkable career at Corning can be defined by some impressive numbers: 33 years of service in every aspect of corporate finance at the 167-year-old company whose cutting-edge materials reside in nearly every cell phone and flat screen among so many other products. Yet, the veteran EVP and CFO prefers to describe the keys to successful corporate finance leadership with qualitative m...

Cimpress CFO Sean Quinn likes to set increasingly difficult professional goals for himself. His commitment to continual personal growth hasn’t hurt his mass customization company: Cimpress’ annual revenue has soared from $500 million when Quinn joined in the company nine years ago to roughly $2.6 billion today. We catch up once more with Quinn, who assumed  Cimpress’ CFO position in 2015 and who w...

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

Serving as a corporate finance executive for an organization on the perilous journey from “small and private” to “large, publicly listed, and thriving” taught Catalant CFO Anitha Gopalan what to hone in on as a finance chief. That experience and others like it also sharpened her gambling chops. She says that her Silicon Valley start-up experience showed her “how important and relevant it is to com...

The executives and staffers profiled on Possible’s web site are described by the non-profit integrated healthcare provider as “possibilists” – “people with the perspective to embrace extraordinary challenge and the grit to get remarkable results anyway.” The term suits Possible CFO Pavan Makhija, a former investment banker who possesses dual undergraduate degrees in math and religion, a master’s i...

Whenever he’s faced a difficult crossroads in life or business, Varnonis CFO Guy Melamed focused squarely on goals – sticking to them and scoring them. Despite playing for Israel’s under-21 national soccer team and fielding alluring offers to continue his playing career there, Melamed chose to leave his home country. He attended Boston College where he simultaneously played soccer, studied account...

Before joining Tableau four years ago and taking over the CFO seat last July, Damon Fletcher worked through a progression of experiences that could serve as a career roadmap for up-and-coming finance chiefs. After earning his Master of Accounting degree, Fletcher joined PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, where he worked closely with one of the fastest-growing companies in the world during the early 2000s...