CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Among the career milestones that CFOs prefer to highlight for us during our discussions, there’s little question that examples of driving business growth are an ongoing favorite. However, for Jason Keen, who built his finance career inside midsize construction firms, management’s growth goals have always needed to be mindful of a company’s organizational culture. Inside the construction realm, where multigenerational, family-owned businesses survive and thrive, growth goals are often tempered by enduring organizational cultures that are apt to cast a cautious eye upon those who choose to champion change. As just such a champion, Jason Keen has had few milestones for driving growth that have resembled the double-digit feats commonly recounted to us by CFOs from other sectors. Instead, Keen tells us of the unique challenges that finance leaders sometimes face within multigenerational firms.   “Part of what I do is to get a foundation in place—which is what I have done three times now—and then structure the company to be ready for growth,” he reports. “This means putting the right type of team in place and preparing them for this smart growth so that both the top line and the bottom line grow together.” It’s an approach that most recently led Keen to step into the CFO office at Mills & Nebraska, a family-owned business specializing in the manufacture and installation of doors.   Says Keen: “We want to be ready for growth in a smart way.” –Jack Sweeney 

Steve and Jack discuss how growing concerns about a possible economic recession are helping fuel CFO aspirations for creating a more agile finance function, and Steve reflects on how different career experiences and backgrounds influence how CFOs lead and make business decisions. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO David Barnes of Trimble, CFO Komal Misra of Starry, Inc. and CFO Jason Keen of Mills Nebraska.

Generally, when legendary CEO Roger Enrico wasn’t happy, just about every PepsiCo executive from junior grades on up knew about it. So it was that when David Barnes was told he would be presenting to Enrico on a subject known to inflame the CEO’s ire, he knew that his presentation—one way or the other—would be career-defining. “Enrico was known to be very impatient with those who would present a bunch of facts but offer no insights,” remembers Barnes, whose tryst with destiny surfaced via the guidance of none other than Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s future CEO, who Barnes tells us was his “great mentor and sponsor” during his Pepsi years. “Pepsi had hired a big consulting firm and they had dumped a lot of data on us, but they couldn’t find any insights, so Indra asked me to work with the consultants and actually get the insights out of the data,” continues Barnes, who had been hired in the mid-1990s to be part of a strategy group within PepsiCo that had been tasked with integrating strategy and finance across the company. As it turned out, Barnes’s presentation succeeded in delivering a number of new insights related to the profitability (or lack thereof) of PepsiCo’s restaurant business in China. “We had a small, money-losing business in China at a time when the Asian economies at large were experiencing deep recessions, so the questions being asked were ‘Do we give up?’ and ‘Do we double down?,’” recalls Barnes, who would soon open a new career chapter in China—an indication that perhaps his presentation had gone well.  “They wanted a known quantity in China—someone with the company’s corporate interests at heart—so I became responsible for finance as well as our development activities around new stores for KFC and Pizza Hut,” explains Barnes, who would subsequently use data to better expose an opportunity for new stores inside China’s smaller tertiary markets rather than in big cities. “We figured out that there was a better way to do capital resource allocation just for these markets,” comments Barnes, who recalls the business leader who ultimately made the call when it came to opening new stores as saying: “Let’s get at it!” –Jack Sweeney 

Among the many strategic changes that finance leader Danielle Murcray has helped to put in motion during her multi-chapter CFO career, perhaps none better reveals her mantle as a strategic leader than the move by cybersecurity firm AttackIQ to adopt a 100 percent–remote U.S. workforce.   With the arrival of the pandemic, Murcray—like many of her CFO peers—became laser-focused on the company’s finance liquidity and operational efficiencies. At the same time, though, she felt compelled to communicate the health and well-being of the company more broadly. “I really sought to promote stability across the organization and looked to instill trust with employees and investors,” comments Murcray, who credits the same aspects of her leadership outreach with helping AttackIQ to leverage the advantages of a remote workforce. “I spend quite a bit of my time making certain that we are overcommunicating and collaborating in different ways so that people feel that we are together even though we are not physically together anymore,” explains Murcray, who moved to Montana from California back in late 2020 after the company announced that its U.S. operations would be moving to a remote model. It subsequently closed its Santa Clara headquarters and San Diego offices. “From the results of our own surveys, we realized that most employees did not want to go back to the office anymore, so we could see that being 100 percent–remote would be a huge competitive advantage,” reports Murcray, who adds that since the decision, more than a dozen AttackIQ employees have relocated out of the state of California. Says Murcray: “I think that leading through the pandemic is now become something of a defining moment in my career. –Jack Sweeney

When Komal Misra, a software engineer turned asset manager, decided that it was time once again to make a career change, she found herself staring at a computer screen filled with stocks from various portfolios that were being traded based not on business fundamentals but larger macro-driven trends. “It got me to thinking: Here I had invested so much time in understanding these businesses and why they were good or great investments, but none of it mattered in that place in time when things were just selling up,” recalls Komal, who adds that she began thinking about her career as if it were a company stock that over time would be propelled or impeded due to macro-driven trends. According to Misra, “I started with a top-down approach to consider what my options were within business—in just the same way that I would’ve analyzed any stock investment. This led me to the conclusion that in the long run, if I wanted another 10- or 15-year career, I really should be thinking about transitioning to something that had a lot more staying power than what I was doing at that time. “ For Misra, who had spent the previous 15 years as a tech sector portfolio manager, the move to corporate finance was not triggered by ambitions to someday be a CFO. Instead, she tells us, she knew that management teams were seeking to add senior finance executives who could help to propel traditional finance teams into the realm of strategic finance. Misra would join technology services company Cognizant as a vice president of finance and eventually oversee the company’s corporate development.   “Cognizant is where I learned the inner workings of a large, mega-cap company from a finance team point of view,” comments Misra, who a few years later would enter the CFO office at Internet service provider Starry, Inc. Looking back, Misra says that it was not so much the CFO role as the opportunities that the role has afforded her that led her into the C-suite.     Says Misra: “I was very willing to take on risks in life and see where things led me and not be afraid to fail, because from my point of view, whether I became a CFO or not didn’t matter—what mattered was that I was doing something interesting.” –Jack Sweeney 

A dozen years ago, if you had told Ryan Gwillim that within the next decade he would be named CFO of the Brunswick Corporation, he may have laughed. At the time, he was an associate with law firm Baker & McKenzie who was spending his days traveling the globe to advise legal clients as an M&A transaction guru. However, over the next decade, Gwillim and Brunswick would together find a common groove as each embarked on a journey of transformation. For Brunswick—a 155-year-old conglomerate—the evolutionary arc would trigger a flurry of historic M&A activity that included the sale of its marquee bowling center business (2014) while at the same time advancing its steady stroke into marine products. For Gwillim, the transformation chapter would put an end to his vagabond existence while landing the seasoned M&A attorney inside Brunswick’s corporate counsel office in 2012. It would be little more than 5 years later, after a steady progression of internal M&A projects, that Gwillim would be asked by Brunswick’s CFO to step into the role of vice president of investor relations.   “From September 2017 to about the summer of 2019 was one of the most volatile times in Brunswick’s history, and here I was, along with the management team, becoming the face of storytelling for the investment community,” explains Gwillim, who characterizes the period as one when Brunswick once-and-for-all “closed the books on its conglomerate viewpoint.” Determined to focus investor attention on the company’s promising future in marine technology products, Brunswick accelerated efforts to jettison businesses procured during its conglomerate years, such as a struggling fitness operation that had been undermining investor confidence in the company. Along the way, Gwillim would become a primary driver of the Brunswick transformation as he helped to manage investor expectations as well as the financial levers that would allow the company to find its footing while opening its post-conglomerate chapter.    As it turned out, the beginning of Brunswick’s post-conglomerate life coincided with the completion of the seasoned-M&A-attorney-turned-IR-executive’s own transformation chapter. Appointed as Brunswick’s vice president of finance and treasurer in 2019, Gwillim would be named Brunswick CFO only a year later.   “We are completely different from what we were 10 or 15 years ago,” reports Gwillim, sharing a thought that one could argue applies to the CFO as well as to the company. –Jack Sweeney

Among the many acquisitions with which Marc Levine became involved during his 25 years at Hewlett-Packard Co., it may surprise few of his former colleagues that he counts HP’s purchase of Compaq Computer as one of the tech giant’s most unusual marriages.     However, Levine doesn’t single out HP’s purchase of Compaq due to the lively behind-the-scenes drama that accompanied it after Walter Hewlett, son of one of the HP founders, loudly voiced his opposition to the deal or the two books that a subsequent proxy battle helped to fatten. Instead, Levine tells us that from his perspective, the unusual aspect of the Compaq acquisition had more to do with the integration of certain pieces of the business. “On my particular team, I was the only person from HP, which was unlike in any of the other HP integrations I had previously been involved with, where there had always been more HP people,” explains Levine, who recalls spending many a night in Houston, Texas, hotel rooms beside Compaq’s headquarters. Looking back, Levine suspects that the lack of HP representation on his team had to do with his group’s focus on the integration of Compaq’s sales team and field organization. Having in the past worked closely with the HP sales team (including a stint as a sales leader in HP’s Southeast Asia operations), Levine was perhaps better prepared than many of his HP peers to join the integration effort. Says Levine: “I think that past experience brought me a little more credibility when I walked into the room, and I could understand better some of the things that the Compaq people were dealing with.” Still, while HP was widely known as an engineering organization rich with technical talent, Compaq was known for having a dynamic sales organization—a standout attribute that may have led the acquiring company to give Compaq greater influence than in other deals when it came to integrating sales talent.   Adds Levine: “It was the biggest and probably the first acquisition that I became involved with at HP. There was a lot of controversy at the time as to whether it was the right move for HP, but the integration was really about making certain that we could bring together the best of both companies.”  –Jack Sweeney

Former IBM Analytics Division CFO Chris Greiner reflects on his transition to Zeta Global CFO, emphasizing talent development differences between midsize companies and large enterprises. He discusses the significance of diverse experiences in the CFO role, leveraging AI for marketing strategies, sales optimization, and balancing internal and external responsibilities. Greiner shares insights on connecting strategy to execution, organizational capabilities, and team development at Zeta Global.

When Al Farrell tells us that finance leaders must never lose sight of the value of a business asset, as well as acquire a strong understanding of how to optimize the returns on it, we sense his frustration. This is not because he’s relating a situation in which management failed both to properly value an asset (which, Farrell tells us, was worth nearly $650 million) and to optimize the asset’s returns (which ended up being increased by 12 percent). Instead, Farrell’s angst was due to the fact that management’s asset utilization improvement feat was achieved on the eve of COVID-19’s arrival in the U.S., and the asset that was so adroitly leveraged to pump up returns was none other than a fleet of rental cars some 35,000 vehicles strong. Certainly, few industries were hit harder by COVID’s arrival than car rentals, and as car rental businesses go, few suffered a more direct hit than Advantage Rent A Car, where Farrell occupied the CFO office from 2016 to early 2022.   “The car rental business is like the airlines because it requires a great deal of capital investment—but unlike with the airlines, you don’t have a firm reservation and people generally don’t prepay,” explains Farrell, who notes that in early 2020, after the U.S. announced a travel ban in response to COVID, Advantage’s reservation snag was in full view.   “That’s when 96 percent of our reservations went up in smoke,” recalls Farrell, who reports that prior to the travel ban, Advantage’s growing utilization rates had begun to increase the prospects for selling the company. Says Farrell: “Unfortunately, we didn’t come out with the outcome that we wanted, but had COVID not hit, I think that we would have had the very successful sale of a business that was significantly more productive and lucrative than it was when we started out.” –Jack Sweeney 

Back in April of 2020, as the consequences of COVID’s arrival in the U.S. sent financial markets reeling, Paychex CFO Efrain Rivera had the temptation “to say nothing.” As the company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts quickly approached, Rivera explains, a number of executive team members had gathered in conference to debate the idea of halting any future guidance in light of things being just so uncertain. “The problem was that we did have data!,” explains Rivera, referring to Paychex’s unique lines of sight into the payroll practices of thousands of middle-market businesses. The subsequent earnings call was unusual for its length (2 hours) as well as the general nature of the discussion, recalls Rivera.    “Half of the analyst questions were really about the general economy and what we were seeing because they knew that we had unique insights into employees,” remarks Rivera, who notes that the prior debate ended with those lobbying for “more guidance” scoring the win. Rivera adds that the prevailing point of view became, “We need to say what we know, and we need to say, ‘This is the limit of what we know.’” Weeks later, when Paychex found it necessary to revise some of the guidance that it had provided on the Spring 2020 call, there was no double-guessing of the earlier debate’s outcome. Says Rivera: “To this day, we still get credit for having said what we said and shared what we shared at a moment when people were very concerned about saying anything.” –Jack Sweeney