The CFO Playbook

Since Anup Singh was hired to his first CFO job in 2006, he’s seen the role evolve from strictly financial-focused to what he calls “GM of the business.” (That’s general manager, non-sports fans.) The CFO’s main role used to be crunching the numbers, publishing reports, building the budget, and controlling spending. They’re still doing all that, but they’re also expected to be more involved in set...

Russ Keefe had never worked at a cybersecurity firm before he became CFO of Corelight in 2017. To prepare, he read “a bunch of books” on the history of the industry, which helped him understand the business more deeply — something Russ believes is essential for finance leaders. Russ learned about non-finance roles first-hand when he was given the opportunity to work in sales ops. This experience m...

Kevin Fleming is the CFO at Elder HQ, a UK-based company working to revolutionize eldercare by providing an alternative to traditional residential care homes. Since starting this position in June 2019, the global pandemic has changed a lot about the world of healthcare and eldercare. It was up to Kevin to make sure Elder HQ was up to the task of handling it. To Kevin, finance is at the heart of a...

When Long Dinh joined Ada as the company’s first finance hire, he was thrilled to build the finance function and kickstart growth for the pre-seed startup. Fast-forward three years and Ada has become a powerhouse player in the customer experience space. In this time, Long has helped grow Ada’s employee base by more than 10X and raised over $200M in funding.  According to Long, the most important f...

Margaux Gregoir started her job as the Vice President of Finance at Luko — a France-based home insurtech startup — right as the COVID-19 pandemic hit.  The worldwide economy ground to a halt, as did Margaux’s plans for building out Luko’s finance team.  As someone who’d just made the jump from advisor to financial director, Margaux could’ve panicked. Instead, she got creative. Margaux used the eme...

Having technical expertise is important, but successful CFOs will tell you that you must go beyond this, to take a step back to see the larger picture. How can you position yourself to solve problems your company is facing? To do this, you must first learn the business.  For Ken MacAskill, it’s a mindset he wishes he could have learned sooner in his 20-year career working with emerging and high-gr...

Joel Stephens’ career at Lyst started in 2015, when the fashion shopping app and website was still a startup and he was its financial controller. Fast forward to 2021, and Joel is now VP2, leading three teams in the finance department. He recently finished heading up the financial part of an $85 million pre-IPO round. Joel has found several strategies that help him get the best from his team. He e...

COVID-19 created unique challenges across a range of industries.  Managers and business leaders had the difficult task of finding ways to keep employees motivated amidst all the uncertainty and new ways of working.  Motivation wasn’t in short supply for Rahul Goel and his team. Moglix, the B2B e-commerce company where Rahul is Vice President of Finance, sells oxygen concentrators and PPE among oth...

After starting his career as a computer programmer, Ronald Hohauser stumbled on a chance to join the entertainment industry, and was excited by the opportunities it presented.  In 2004, Ron became Senior Vice President of Finance and Operations at Marvel Studios. He helped the studio transition from licensing its products to independently turning the then-niche comic book character Iron Man into a...

Catherine Birkett’s career as a CFO started in 2004, when she was promoted into the position at the telecommunications company Interoute. Looking back, she says she sometimes had to struggle to keep her head above water while addressing the large challenges the company was facing.  But Catherine pushed forward, and she now attributes her success as a CFO to these experiences. She sees past mistake...

When Sharon Virag became Chief Accounting Officer of customer service software company Genesys, she had already worked for Fortune 500 companies including General Electric, and served as CFO for NeoGenomics Laboratories. But for Sharon, who loves building out company infrastructure, working with an emerging organization like Genesys was just as intriguing and exciting.  With her help, the company...

Maddy Devine traded consulting with multinational corporations for building startup finance teams from the ground up — and she’s never looked back. Her first finance job was consulting for Accenture, and she’s now VP of Finance at virtual conference software company Bevy. Maddy believes that the two key components of building a finance department that fuels business growth are the tech and the peo...

When Ken Goldman became CFO of Yahoo in 2012, he had more experience in business administration than accounting. But he used his background to his advantage, approaching the CFO role from a globalist perspective.  To Ken, the relationship between the CEO and CFO of a company is vital to its success. A CFO’s job is to provide objective counsel to the CEO, who can use that information to make inform...

Mark Pettit joined London-based venture capital firm Connect Ventures in 2016 as Head of Finance. Earlier this year, he was made CFO, and sees his new job as assisting the partners in making strong financial and investment decisions, putting the firm on the front line of SaaS, fintech and digital health. “My role was to come in and take as much of that finance slack away from the partners [as poss...

Don Dixon has held finance positions in startups and established organizations, been through acquisitions and IPOs, and is now CFO at DataStax. In his experience, rising to the CFO position requires understanding something much more complicated than finance: people. Once you’re at that executive position, managing numbers is a smaller part of your daily job than managing the people on your team. D...

In October 2020, Malcolm Finn followed his conscience to chemicals company Johnson Matthey, which is transitioning its business model to focus on producing clean energy sources. As Director of Finance Operations and Control, Malcolm has been a key figure in that change. Guiding a company through such a major transition would have been challenging even for a seasoned leader at the best of times. Bu...

Paraag Amin’s route to becoming CFO of omnichannel digital marketing company dotdigital isn’t conventional — but he believes it set him up for success.  Paraag started his career as an analyst working for investment banks, beginning at Goldman Sachs and including Citi and RBS. These jobs taught him what makes a promising investment opportunity — and the best way to present a company as a promising...

Andreas Melzer joined the consumer research company Quantilope two years ago and is the company’s Associate Director of Finance, which is similar to a Chief of Staff role with a finance focus.  An advocate for helping SaaS startups stay on top of their finances, he published a B2B SaaS finance model that has received more than 8,000 downloads.  While determining which KPIs and metrics a company sh...

Now CFO of affiliate marketing network Awin, Virpy Richter has never been the kind of finance professional who prefers to hide in a corner with her spreadsheets. Not only has she worked all over Europe, for startups and big companies, she’s also held positions in human resources and legal departments. Diving into different cultures has taught Virpy the importance of local knowledge, especially in...

Lessons we cover in this episode: Successful CFOs look at the big picture. As the source of financial truth, CFOs need to be able to look at any number and know if it’s “true” or not. Decide where you want to be on the spectrum of strategic vs operational. A good CFO needs to be a thinker and business partner, but they also need to be a doer (able to build a team, get work done, etc.). When you fi...

Lessons we cover in this episode: As you progress in your career, your responsibility is increasingly to ask good questions - not have the right answers You should maintain a humble mindset as you grow in your career When you’re a CFO and have a firm grasp on the numbers, you often have the right answer on decisions. But in feeling that you’re right - there can be a temptation to not listen to wha...

In this brief episode, Rob passes the torch to the new host of The CFO Playbook, Ross MacKay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The CFO Playbook is taking a break until April 29th, but we’ll be back then with an exciting announcement followed by more interviews with some really incredible guests. Until then, we’d love to invite you to catch up on previous episodes at cfoplaybook.com or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, and as always, thanks for listening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After spending more than three decades in finance, Kelly Battles has come to appreciate that the budget isn’t the only balancing act CFOs have to master. The finance team needs to support the growth of the company, while also knowing when to implement limits.  Kelly learned that lesson in her first operational finance role, at internet security company IronPort. Under Kelly’s six-year watch, IronP...

Darrell Cox has 15+ years of senior leadership experience in finance and business development. As a former VP of Finance at FreshBooks, he is no stranger to growth-stage companies.  His recipe for finance leadership success relies upon leveraging “Agile CFO” methodology, an iterative process adopted from software development.  Now, as the CFO at Vena Solutions — a growing company specializing in c...