The CFO Playbook

During her tenure as CFO, Jeannie De Guzman has seen 1Password grow from 180 employees to over 520. That organizational growth has meant large-scale changes for the finance team. And it still means leaders have the ability to have extensive influence across the company. HR, for example, falls under Jeannie’s banner, and it’s helped her learn a lot about the value of soft skills and clear communication. Whether it’s partnering closely with HR or making strategic leadership decisions, Jeannie believes finance’s role is to be a business partner, serving the rest of the organization with a customer service mindset. Viewing her team through this lens means Jeannie values technical, analytical, and soft skills in her team members. She believes finance professionals should embrace opportunities to wear multiple hats and become well-rounded in their financial expertise. She also values clear, concise communication, especially when it comes to budget, and champions the idea that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough. In addition to being a business partner to the rest of the org, Jeannie also understands the complexities of managing a remote team and cultivating an employee-first culture. She believes that implementing as much technology and automation as possible minimizes repetitive, menial tasks and helps people do more impactful, meaningful work.On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Jeannie discusses the importance of finance as a business partner, the balance of soft skills vs. technical skills, and the value of being a well-rounded finance professional.Connect with Jeannie on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, check out Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lena Loiberg joined Melio as Head of Finance in February 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic changed everything. Lena arrived with a background in finance at companies like PwC, Mobileye, and Jelly Button, ready to build out a team and help lead Melio into its next phase of growth. Within weeks, however, she was forced to adjust every plan she had for the business to account for the external circumstances changing the world as we knew it. During her tenure, Melio’s B2B payments processing platform has increased its monthly processing volumes by 5,000% and she has spearheaded four separate funding rounds totaling more than $480M and culminating in a $4B valuation.Lena is extremely passionate about finance, and she derives a tangible joy from being in the unique position of working for the finance department within a hyper-growth FinTech company. She believes firmly in the value of data, automation, and integration of tools for finance teams, and invests heavily in technology and people to help Melio continue its upward trajectory. Tune into this episode of The CFO Playbook to hear Lena discuss how Melio has matured its finance processes, where she’s finding opportunities to integrate and automate her processes, which tech tools she’s investing in, and the advice she has for aspiring finance executives.Connect with Lena on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, check out Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 setting business goals, and helping orchestrate growth. One point on which Anup has never wavered is his commitment to building a culture of trust and transparency. That includes among the people he works with closely. Every quarter he gives someone in the finance department his CFO Excellence Award, for going the extra mile to achieve one of the company’s business objectives. Anup also makes himself available to people working In the rest of the business, through an “Ask Me Anything” Slack channel, and small Q&A sessions he calls The Bottom Line.On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Anup explains why he takes the time to explain Illumio’s finances to his non-finance colleagues, what he hopes to use artificial intelligence (AI) for, and why he relies on KPIs to guide business decisions.Connect with Anup on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, check out Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 made him appreciate that financial calculations should be collaborative. It’s not just Russ who’s started to think about finance roles as more than just a numbers game. Today, the brightest finance graduates expect to exercise some entrepreneurial muscle. This puts pressure on the finance leaders who want to hire them, to create a role that allows for input into the business.On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Russ explains why he believes transparency is key, his collaborative approach to budgets, and who the finance team's customers are (they’re nearer than you might think.)Connect with Russ on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, check out Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 well-running business with a strong value system. Especially in rocky times, where the future of the eldercare industry — not to mention the worldwide economy as a whole — is in flux, a company with a finance team that’s ready to take the lead is going to have a better shot at success.On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Kevin talks about the importance of a knowledgeable CFO, how to make financial technology systems work for you so you can leave the menial tasks to the automation systems, and the importance of agility when working in an industry that’s as mercurial as the healthcare system is right now.Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, checkout Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 factor in being a successful finance leader is the ability to understand not what the business needs immediately, but what it will need in the quarters and years to come. This forward-looking lens served him well when the unimaginable happened: COVID-19. The start of the pandemic stalled growth for companies everywhere and like many leaders, Long had to make some tough financial decisions. Rather than stalling, however, the AI chatbot company took off as more businesses needed to scale remote customer support operations. In May 2021, the company announced a $130M Series C financing round. In this episode of The CFO Playbook, Long shares how he broke into finance, his main considerations when building out a finance team from scratch, and his top two pieces of advice for finance leaders early in their careers. Connect with Long on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, check out Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 emergency to take a deep-dive into every aspect of the company, and familiarize herself with its operations. Through this company-wide audit, she learned what Luko could afford to give up for a while, if it meant that the company could eventually achieve the kind of growth Margaux knew it deserved. Having led the Luko finance team through periods of both stalled and intense growth, Margaux now has a better understanding of what she values in her colleagues and in her own work. In this episode of The CFO Playbook, Margaux talks about what she thinks is important in a finance leader, the necessity of following a detailed roadmap, and how people who work in the operational sides of a company can stay motivated in their ultimate goal of making customers happy.Connect with Margaux on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, checkout Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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-growth companies. Over his career, he held CFO positions at five companies before landing as CFO of tech company Snyk in 2019.Understanding the business that you’re in takes patience, according to Ken. Don’t rush the process. He describes his journey as an evolution. With each project, he learned something new from it and used it to inform how to approach the next. Learn not only your own role, but also the role of others, and how they intersect on a large scale.This growth mentality has been integral to Ken’s development over the course of his career, and it’s one he encourages the emerging CFO to keep in mind.On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Ken shares his mindset shift, expertise on methodology to achieving success as a CFO, and what to look at when funding growth in the business.Connect with Ken on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, check out Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 encourages them to use the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) framework — a concept he learned from the book “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. This encourages everyone to focus on the larger picture, rather than getting lost in the details from the beginning. In this episode of The CFO Playbook, Joel explains how his time at Lyst has shaped his leadership style, how the models he used to fundraise during the pre-IPO round were changed by the pandemic, and some of his favorite goal-setting methodologies.Connect with Joel on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, check out Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 other medical and industrial supplies. Knowing that the company provided important medical equipment to fight the pandemic was a great source of motivation for his team and employees across the Asia-based company. Apart from motivating a team, Rahul says being fearless and transparent are key traits when you’re managing people. On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Rahul shares insights into how technology and automation can streamline processes, and why you should look beyond financial KPIs. Connect with Rahul on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team’s spend, checkout Soldo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices