Create More Value

Karl Pichler, CFO of Sourceability Global Holdings and former CFO of Rackspace, shares insights from more than 25 years as a public company executive, investor, and educator. We discuss Karl’s evolution from corporate finance expert to enterprise leader, covering his role in scaling Rackspace from $80 million in revenue to over $2 billion, through an IPO and eventual sale to Apollo Global Management. This episode features a practical discussion of capital allocation and value measurement best practices—exposing the limitations of EBITDA and ROIC—and discussing how corporate leaders can truly balance growth and return on capital to optimize long-term value creation.

J. Michael Bruff, CFO of Envision Healthcare and a veteran finance and operating executive, joins us to discuss the core attributes of effective CFOs. We discuss internal controls, Michael’s broad functional and operational experience, and the importance of a deep understanding of how financial statements work together to drive lasting value. Michael shares insights from his time at Varian Medical Systems, where the company shifted its capital allocation priorities from buybacks to life-saving R&D, ultimately quadrupling its compounded revenue growth rate and nearly doubling its share price in just three years. The conversation covers how value-based incentive and allocation frameworks lead to agile and disciplined decision-making. This episode offers practical guidance for leaders seeking to improve capital allocation, strategic clarity, and value creation.

Aswath Damodaran, a distinguished finance professor at NYU Stern, dives deep into the intricacies of valuation and corporate finance. He challenges traditional metrics like ROIC, emphasizing the need for innovative approaches to capturing real value. Damodaran highlights the significance of intertwining company narratives with numerical analysis and critiques the pitfalls of relying on accounting measures. He discusses the impact of bias in forecasts, the role of R&D as a genuine investment, and offers insights on navigating the emerging AI landscape—all while underlining the importance of realistic valuation strategies.

Fortuna partners Greg Milano and Marwaan Karame explore how an ownership culture fuels long-term shareholder returns in the final instalment of a five-part series on economic-profit-based value management. The discussion centers around an updated take on economic profit that shows a stronger relationship to shareholder returns, known as Residual Cash Earnings (RCE). By focusing on RCE, companies gain better insights into where value is created or destroyed, enabling smarter resource allocation and incentive compensation. The episode explains how this value management approach fosters five key traits of an ownership culture, as illustrated through real world case studies featuring corporate clients. This conversation offers valuable lessons for executives, investors, and business leaders aiming to enhance decision-making and build a true ownership culture within their organizations.

Expert in pricing strategy and value-based management, Patrick Furtaw, joins the podcast. Patrick shares insights from his background in strategy, corporate finance, and organizational change, explaining why pricing is one of the most powerful levers for driving shareholder value. The conversation covers common pitfalls such as overreliance on cost-plus pricing, insufficient executive ownership, and misaligned sales incentives, while highlighting solutions like value-based pricing, price realization metrics, and smarter sales compensation structures. We also explore the rise of subscription and outcome-based models across industries, with examples from tech companies, John Deere, and Caterpillar, as well as lessons from Amazon’s approach to price testing. The discussion reinforces a simple but critical truth: customers don’t buy your costs—they buy your value.

Valuation expert, author, and leader of McKinsey & Company’s strategy and corporate finance practice, Tim Koller, joins the podcast. Greg and Tim explore the critical drivers of long-term value creation, the risks of short-termism, and the essential role of CEOs and CFOs in overriding human and organizational bias to drive optimal corporate strategy. We cover the importance of granular resource allocation, organizational biases like inertia and groupthink, and the process-based discipline and data needed to sustain value creation. The discussion also covers the role of artificial intelligence in business—distinguishing between its potential as a tool for efficiency versus an enabler of competitive advantage. 

Most incentive plans fail to drive true value creation—they reward mediocrity, encourage short-term thinking, and reward sandbagging and gaming of the system. In the fourth instalment of a LinkedIn Live series, Fortuna partners Greg Milano and Marwan Karame share a better incentive compensation design using a modern take on economic profit: Residual Cash Earnings. We cover why traditional bonus plans fall short, the key traits of an ownership culture, and how true value-based incentives align management’s interests with those of long-term investors. We also feature real-world examples and simulations that demonstrate why this approach is so effective at creating an ownership culture at large public companies.

Consider a hypothetical company in 2012 with two business units—Amazon and Walmart. Our latest episode considers the question: which business would you rather own and prioritize reinvestment in? Traditional financial metrics would have made Walmart look like the obvious winner—profitable, disciplined, and cash-rich. But what happens if you use a modern economic-profit lens to value these disparate business models? This thought experiment explains why so many high-growth, high-potential businesses get starved of capital at large, public companies that rely on outdated metrics to allocate resources. How you measure matters.

This podcast features the third installment of our LinkedIn Live series on how economic profit drives long-term value creation. Fortuna partners Greg Milano and Marwaan Karame discuss strategic resource allocation: how companies can better allocate capital and other resources to unlock more shareholder value. They explore common pitfalls like erroneous objectives, lack of focus, and decision paralysis that lead firms to invest in value-destroying projects while underinvesting in their best growth opportunities. Through real client case studies, they explain how residual cash earnings, a modern, cash-based economic profit measure helps leaders identify where value is truly created across business units, segments, and products—even down to the SKU level. The episode emphasizes the importance of a fact-based, focused approach to investment decision-making. 

Dan Sansone, former CFO of Vulcan Materials Company, joins the podcast to share how EVA focused forecasting, planning, and incentives on a singular goal of value creation. Drawing on nearly three decades at Vulcan and as a board member, the conversation covers why traditional lookbacks often stifle investment, why rolling targets and economic profit improve accountability, and the importance of designing consistent, transparent incentives that foster an ownership mindset. This episode can help corporate leaders seeking to embed a value framework into everyday business decisions.