CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Experienced finance professional Adil Syed shares insights from his career journey, including working at Snapchat and transitioning to Rippling. They discuss the importance of finance leaders as strategic partners, understanding SaaS metrics, and the power of storytelling in finance leadership. The episode also explores Rippling's growth journey and the CFO 500 book featuring profiles of 500 CFOs.

It was after Ross Muken had been gainfully roaming the corridors of equity research for more than a dozen years that the acquisition of his firm administered a dose of operations insight that began to feed his aspirations to become a CFO.  At the time, Muken was a top research analyst for ISI Group, an independent, research-driven trading firm that had begun to attract the attention of a number of the investment banking world’s largest banks—including Evercore, which in August 2014 acquired ISI and its 28 research analysts covering 345 companies in 10 major industry sectors.“It was through this process that I saw what needs to happen when you integrate two businesses and need to drive cost synergies and margin expansion,” recalls Muken, who that point was helping to spearhead the firm’s healthcare and life sciences realm, an area of research that was enjoying some added luster due to a recent boom in biotech.  Along the way, Muken says, it became apparent that the 20-plus-percent operating margins that management was targeting for the newly merged entity would be a bigger challenge than expected.“It couldn’t just be the cost side of the equation—what was going to get us there was new revenue streams,” remarks Muken, who reports that the firm began evaluating possibilities in a number of untapped “adjacent markets” before formulating a strategic investment inside the equity capital markets business.  “We had committed to the Street that we’d meet these margin targets, so putting in additional costs didn’t feel great, but our view was to be tactical and take some cost out but then reinvest those dollars to achieve higher margins,” comments Muken, who doesn’t hesitate to share the outcome.    “This paid back tenfold, and we were able to build a very large revenue base with better margins in this new business, which allowed us to get to our margin targets without shrinking headcount,” says Muken, who today credits the tactical move with more than margin expansion.He explains: “We had to take a strategy that made sense on paper and then have it make sense to shareholders from a numbers standpoint—and it was because of this experience that I decided to move to the operations side of things.” –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss how hiring challenges have led certain organizations to be more tolerant of poor employee behaviors – a development that could be putting growing numbers of businesses at risk. Meanwhile, Brett points out that new hires continue to fetch bigger salaries creating an imbalance with existing employee salaries. Also, performance is not driven by talent alone. Brett says product issues are sometimes thought to be talent issues leading management to put in motion a string of misguided remedies. This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Asil Syed of Rippling, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, CFO Bryan Morris of Demandbase.

Inside the world of trade associations, the135-year-old American Coatings Association’s has never wavered in its dedication to advancing the needs of professionals inside the paints and coatings industry.However, ACA members—like those of many associations these days—are becoming increasingly demanding when it comes to the value that they receive in exchange for their dues.“In the old days, belonging to an industry association was a badge of prestige, and it was something that people felt that they just had to do if they were part of an industry,” comments Ilana Esterrich, who was named ACA’s CFO in 2019 after having served as chief administrative officer for a Washington think tank and spent the previous decade among the financial planning rank-and-file of Thomson Reuters and General Mills Corp.Upon her arrival, Esterrich was told that to better address the escalating demands of ACA’s membership, she needed to clean house—beginning with the accounting department, which seemed to be a province populated by known underperformers.  “I came in thinking that this was going to be a turnaround situation, and it was—but not in the way that I think management thought that it was going to be,” reports Esterrich, who after assessing the “skills and wills” of her accounting team members rendered a verdict of “not guilty” on all counts. It turned out that instead of being based on malfeasance, the accounting department’s laggard reputation was rooted in dated systems and processes—a set of circumstances that she and her team have since taken steps to correct.Meanwhile, Esterrich discovered that a number of the association’s traditional sales practices involving media needed to be updated in order to be able to provide the sales team with better guidance when it came to determining if and when a customer could receive a discount.No unlike most associations, ACA has long published a membership magazine, which Esterrich was told operated profitably.“However, when we took a ‘fully loaded’ look at the costs of the magazine, we were upside down in the red,” recalls Esterrich, who sought to distance ACA from associations that choose to view the price tag of their member magazines as a necessary evil.Says Esterrich: “Finance needed to show where the magazine brought value and where it did not—and at what cost.” –Jack Sweeney

Among the recruitment milestones that populate Bryan Morris’s CFO resume, few can match the 6-month talent acquisition binge that he launched during the first quarter of 2015.“In terms of key hires, I never hired faster than I did then,” comments Morris, as he begins to lay out the circumstances that led to his need to speedily attract and hire talent.At the time, Morris was the newly appointed CFO of Xamarin, a creator of software tools used for mobile apps development.  This firm, then led by cofounder and CEO Nat Freidman, had doubled its revenue annually for the previous few years yet had theretofore focused its talent recruitment efforts mainly on nabbing software engineers and intrepid salespeople.“When it came to people, sales, marketing, and R&D were way out ahead of G&A, so I knew that my first few months would be dedicated to recruiting,” recalls Morris, who notes that until his arrival, the developer had outsourced its accounting function while relying on fractional CFO services to patch any management voids.“I made five key hires—head of HR, head of technical recruiting, controller, head of FP&A, and our first corporate counsel—all within the first 6 months,” remarks Morris, who believes that hiring can at times benefit from its own momentum.He explains: “Sometimes, when you’re in a great situation and your company is growing, the press is great and the buzz is good—and what happens is that one great hire begets another. So, I kind of had this pinwheel going.”Still, what happened next made Morris’s energetic hiring spree all the more consequential. During the second half of 2015, as Xamarin was preparing for another capital raise, Microsoft—one of the developer’s strategic partners—acknowledged that not only would it be willing to serve as a reference on behalf of Xamarin for the venture investor community but also it might be interested in partnering with Xamarin to pursue something more strategic.  Subsequently, 12 months into Morris’s CFO tenure at Xamarin, company management signed a letter of intent (LOI) to sell the business to Microsoft. Looking back, Morris doesn’t hesitate to expose some of the drama that preceded Microsoft’s signed LOI.“Here were my team and I—with only some 3 to 6 months of working together—and suddenly we were up against one of the most capable technology buyers in the world,” remembers Morris, who today believes that the timing of Xamarin’s key hires and the timing of the deal were not unrelated events.“I couldn’t have done it by myself,” observes Morris, who points out that there were a number of 20-hour days during the period leading up to the finalization of the deal.Morris notes that the merger provided mostly great outcomes for both investors and Xamarin employees—not excluding CEO Nat Friedman, who until late 2021 served as CEO of GitHub, which Microsoft had acquired in 2018.Looking back on the CEO who hired him and the subsequent “pinwheel effect” that within 6 months transformed Xamarin’s lines of functional management, Morris highlights a shared mission: “Luckily, Nat was completely on board—he knew what I was inheriting, so he gave me the green light to go ahead and hire.” –Jack Sweeney

When JJ Pace tells us that he was hired in 2002 to build and eventually lead a finance team that would create and implement monthly budgets for a four-location building materials company located within Charlotte, North Carolina’s greater metro area, the sense of accomplishment that he exudes never falters even when he eventually confides: “In the end, I was the last employee there.”It turns out that Pace’s 5-year stint as a controller (2002–2007) for Build It With Brick of Greater Charlotte was transformational not necessarily for the company but certainly for Pace, who first joined the company as an operations-minded executive but soon found himself knee deep in Excel spreadsheets and month-end reporting tasks.“My job was to basically build the finance team from scratch for what was at the time an expanding business,” explains Pace, who grew into a finance leader as he contributed to the management insight that made Build It With Brick a successful company—until it wasn’t.“Unfortunately, there was nothing that we could do. We were undercapitalized to ride out the downturn, and the decision was made to close the company,” comments Pace, who despite the bitter outcome refused to exit Charlotte’s building materials and construction corridor and over the next few years found work as a controller for several small to midsize Charlotte firms.Along the way, Pace would also return to school locally and receive an MBA with a concentration in finance from Queens University of Charlotte.It was with an MBA in hand and nearly a decade of controllership experience behind him that in 2013 Pace accepted a CFO role with Service Pros Installation Group, a flooring installation company that today has 68 locations across the 16 states.“It’s been a fun ride: Over the past 9 years, our compound annual growth rate has been 52.9 percent,” remarks Pace, whose finance team today serves Service Pros as well as two other operating companies—each with its own controller and a combined workforce of more than 500 employees. –Jack Sweeney

When Mike Taylor mentions the customer experience during our talk, his intent—unlike that of many of his CFOs peers—is not to boast of some vast reservoir of data from which customer insights are routinely being gleaned.Instead, he brings this up to let us know that there are some things that finance still struggles to see and measure.This is a startling admission from a finance leader who has already drawn our attention to his sharp lines of sight into the CFO role with the comment “Making certain that I am grounded in data is what has helped me to be a better CFO.”Still, Taylor seems to distance himself from this bit of data wisdom for the moment in order to make a broader point about the customer experience and financial analysis.Having served in several CFO roles over the past two decades, Taylor has a rich career portfolio from which to extract CFO lessons. Nevertheless, he quickly turns our attention to his nearly decade-long tenure at electric car manufacturer Tesla, where he held a number of senior finance positions, including vice president of finance and treasurer.  It was during the early years of Tesla’s groundbreaking Model S, Taylor recalls, that a financial analyst shared with him some analysis that revealed how a door handle modification could result in a per-car cost saving of hundreds of dollars.“In the car industry, you’re looking to save quarters and dollars all through the bill of materials, so when you’re talking hundreds of dollars, this is just a fantastic moment,” reports Taylor, who credits the analyst with providing the required analytical firepower to prompt Tesla’s finance team to advocate for the adoption of “identical handles” for the Model S instead of the original ones, which had been designed individually with unique geometric shapes that were flush with each door.Taylor continues: “The idea got shot down, and we scratched our heads. So, I went and talked with some of the designers. They asked, ‘Mike, what’s the first tangible experience that you have with a car?,’ and I replied, ‘Well, you know, I see it and I walk up to it, and then I touch the door handle.’” Thus, Taylor adds, this exchange served up a lesson in product design and how it is often the unseen levers of customer impact that ultimately drive sales.“Your spreadsheets can tell you a whole lot about any business situation but focus first on what the customer impact of your product is,” observes Taylor, who also credits customer impact with having been the key determining factor in his original decision to join the car manufacturer.At the time, Taylor notes, Tesla had sold only a few hundred cars, sight unseen, at more than $100,000 per vehicle.“As part of my due diligence, I spent hours and hours on blogs and inside customer online forums,” he remembers. “I ended up thinking, ‘If this product has this type of customer passion, how can I not take this leap?’” –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack discuss the data tsunami that many organizations are now facing and what steps finance executives can take to replace their historical, backward-looking, "batch mode" thinking with more proactive approaches that will allow finance teams to achieve more predictive outcomes. This episode's distinguished Planning Aces reveal the leadership mindsets and approaches now driving the shift away from batch mode. Featuring FP&A insights and commentary from CFO Claire Bramley of Teradata,  CFO Sandra Rowland of Xylem, CFO Anna King of Mesh Payments and CFO Pat Dillon of Flock Freight.

Rob Young remembers that back in 2001, when he joined the incoming class of newbie accountants at KPMG’s Short Hills, New Jersey, office, there was a 5- to 6-year age difference between his KPMG classmates and himself.“It was a situation where a 23-year-old was telling me what to do, but at the same time, they had more experience than I then did,” comments Young, whose arrival inside the public accounting realm stands as a professional milestone rarely found on the resume of our CFO guests.   Turn back the clock, and Young, a high school graduate, is proudly receiving an apprenticeship qualification to work as a construction journeyman. Over the next 4 years, he would join a union and oversee a variety projects, while at the same time learning to manage people and the expectations of others.Having started a family and enjoyed some early career success, Young found that a growing sense of purpose led him to enroll in night school for a 2-year college program—where he made an impression on an accounting professor.“Nobody sat in the front row, so I sat there—I’m raising my hand and answering questions, and that intrigued him,” explains Young, who credits the professor with being the most consequential mentor of his finance career.For starters, the educator helped Young to apply his maturing business acumen to writing business plans for the Small Business Administration—a stint that eventually paid well enough to enable him to forfeit his construction pay. When Young eventually completed his 2-year degree, Rutgers University offered him a full scholarship to earn a bachelor’s degree, provided that he attend full-time.“I could have taken another 6 years to go part-time and pay the way myself or gone full-time and just gotten it done,” comments Young, who subsequently accepted the scholarship, graduated from Rutgers, passed the CPA exam, and joined KPMG.As it turned out during his early days at KPMG, the father of two and newly minted CPA once more found himself experiencing a sense of purpose, this time amidst his newfound generation gap.Reports Young: “It was somewhat humbling—but it taught me to manage up.” –Jack Sweeney

Several years ago, when CFO Anna King first began to champion the benefits of real-time data, she recalls a sudden clamor around new customer activity afforded her the consensus-building moment for which she’d been waiting.At the time, King worked for Transactis, a payment processing company that she had first joined in 2011 as a controller. A year later, after having helped to raise the company’s Series C financing, she found herself being appointed CFO.“I was completely shocked—but I was grateful for the board’s confidence in me,” recollects King, who would occupy the CFO office until 2019, when Transactis was acquired by Mastercard.Along the way, King got to work alongside seasoned entrepreneurial CEO Joe Proto, who counted Transactis as his third start-up and had a “playbook” when it came to scaling a business. While King’s C-level appointment gave her new stature within the company, the move to leverage real-time data cross-functionally within the firm demanded something more.“Change management is typically very difficult,” comments King, who observes that frequently during her tenure she came to rely on the power of consensus-building.“I had to get the CTO on board because we needed some ‘dev’ resources—which are always hard to obtain—and I needed to convince our CRO that he would be better able to communicate his needs to management,” remarks King, who notes that the initial stages of the effort involved integrating data from the company’s operations, accounting systems, and sales pipeline.Says King: “We were able to see in real time how much revenue we had made on a given day or month-to- date, and by seeing the pipeline data, we were able to forecast what the rest of the month would look like.”  Still, the value of the data was not immediately apparent to each of the functional groups, and King would sometimes have to demonstrate how to put the data to work.Such was the case with the Transactis sales team, which had been amplifying a request for additional resources in response to reports of new customer activity. However, management had been somewhat reluctant to give approval, given that the reports remained more or less only anecdotal. “We were able to show via new dashboards that there was new customer activity, which allowed them to get them the resources that they needed,” points out King, who adds that one functional area’s experience with real-time data soon led to its spread to other areas.Concludes King” “Change management is really about how you communicate and tell the story and build the consensus.” –Jack Sweeney