CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Latest Episodes:

Expecting the Unexpected | A Planning Aces Episode Mar 25, 2022

Show notes

Steve and Jack discuss how finance professionals must give more thought to how they communicate “the news” inside their organizations in order to avoid being cast by other functional teams as “the bearer of bad news.” Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Russ Porter, CFO, IMA, CFO Nipun Soni of BillionToOne and CFO Gina Mastanuono of ServiceNow.

786: The Purpose-Driven CFO | Hilary Maxson, CFO, Schneider Electric Mar 23, 2022

Show notes

Hilary Maxson’s path to the CFO office of French multinational and energy automation behemoth Schneider Electric began at a kitchen table in upstate New York. Or at least that’s what comes to mind for us when she tells us about her “purpose-driven” parents, including a father who is a professor of agronomy at Cornell University.

“We didn’t live internationally, but my parents are very tied to what can be achieved internationally and I think that this is how I got that mind-set,” reports Maxson, as we search for answers that might better expose how within a span of 12 years she pursued and realized gainful career experiences in places as far-flung as Douala, Cameroon (3 years), the Philippines (3), Hong Kong (2), and Paris (4).

Says Maxson: “I really believe that doing good business is the key to changing the world, and by ‘good’ business I mean that you can still make profits, still do right by your employees, and still do right by your country—this is how we can bring about change.”

Turn back the clock to 2003, and even as Maxson was exiting a 4-year banking career in New York City to get an MBA from Cornell— a familiar gateway for ambitious bankers—she was already looking past Wall Street.

Comments Maxson: “One of the reasons I wanted to change was that I also wanted to build things—not just in the U.S., but internationally.”

Sometimes building things necessitated some banking diplomacy. For instance, while living in Cameroon as CFO (Africa) for electric power giant AES Corporation, Maxson became charged with leading negotiations to help AES restructure €300 million in debt between AES, eight multilateral lenders, and the Cameroon government.

She would eventually join Schneider Electric in Hong Kong before transferring to SE’s Paris headquarters, where she assumed the role of group CFO in May of 2020.

Maxson’s CFO tenure now falls during a transformational chapter for Schneider, as the company has made no secret of its plans to double down on its commitment to sustainability initiatives and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles.

“ESG is not just something companies do—it is a real value driver in terms of both mitigating risk and reporting actuals, so you really want to embed your ESG thinking into your financial planning,” explains Maxson, who—despite her years abroad—appears to not have ventured very far from the kitchen table. –Jack Sweeney

785: Let Learning Blaze the Path | Vanessa Kanu, CFO, Telus International Mar 20, 2022

Show notes

When Vanessa Kanu is asked to provide some professional advice to her younger self she responds quickly and without hesitation: “Be more patient.”

It’s advice Kanu says she summons even today as she passes the 18th month mark of her CFO tour of duty with technology services company Telus International.

“I’m perpetually impatient and I drive myself bananas,” says Kanu, who stepped into her first CFO role at Mitel Networks Corporation, after a steady 15-year climb inside the company she first joined as a financial reporting manager.

“As the company grew, it gave me an opportunity to learn and stretch myself through various roles. Whether it was external reporting, complex technical accounting, FP&A, or M&A and other planning functions, all these things combined kept me with the organization,” says Kanu, whose career climb at Mitel spanned a period during which the company grew from $400 million to $1.3 billion.

“I had a great mentor at Mitel, who was the previous CFO Steve Spooner,” comments Kanu, who would join Mitel’s reporting team shortly after Spooner was appointed CFO and would ultimately succeed him as Mitel’s finance chief.

Along the way, Mitel management would execute an IPO and multiple strategic acquisitions before transitioning back to a private company.

“My thinking was as long as I'm learning and growing, there was no need to leave and that’s what culminated in a 16-year (career) tenure at that organization,” says Kanu, whose CFO appointment by Telus in 2020 upended her 18-month CFO tenure at Mitel – a chapter shortened perhaps by the same appetite for learning and stretching she has always relied on to propel herself forward. - Jack Sweeney

784: The Levers of Long-Term Value | Brandon Maultasch, CFO, MOLOCO Mar 16, 2022

Show notes

Last October, shortly after being named CFO of machine learning start-up MOLOCO, Brandon Maultasch decided to forgo yet another welcome coffee to instead engage with a wide flock of MOLOCO employees on the virtues of discounted cash analysis.

“The last thing you want a new people leader talking to the entire company about!,” confesses Maultasch, before launching a stirring defense of the fall discussion that he refers to as a “teach-in.”

“We have 65 data scientists and machine learning engineers at the company. If they can build the things that they build, they are smart enough to understand finance, which isn’t all that complicated,” remarks Maultasch, whose approach is notable as much for what it does focus on as for what it doesn’t.

By exploring a framework for discounted cash analysis, Maultasch rejected the more traditional point of engagement for incoming CFOs: the company’s future IPO.

“The IPO is an important milestone, but it’s not the destination,” notes Maultasch. “The destination is building a generationally important company that adds value in the long run. I wanted to make people understand that the durability of cash flows is what drives long-term value creation.”

Once armed with a deeper understanding of discounted cash flows, Maultasch says, employees at large can bring forth more of the insights, processes, and technical solutions that are needed to move the levers of value creation.

“I want to line align our conversations around durability and long-term margins. These are the levers that move our revenue, move our profitability, and move our position in the value chain,” he adds.

According to Maultasch, an added benefit from “teach-in” discussions is that they sometimes expose what the finance team has gotten wrong.

“Some of the things that we thought were inputs turn out to be outputs,” he observes, “so it’s this process of discussion, argument, and learning that aligns everyone toward building a great company.” –Jack Sweeney

783: Making a Career Investment | Sarah Spoja, CFO, Tipalti Mar 13, 2022

Show notes

It was 2018, and shortly after payables start-up Tipalti had raised its Series C funding round, Sara Spoja recalls, she sat down with Tipalti CEO and cofounder Chen Amit.

Having spent the previous 8 years as a senior operating executive for private equity firm KKR Capstone, Spoja was known for asking C-suite management tough questions, and she was no less probing when it came time to reviewing Tipalti’s Series C model.

“I tore that thing apart and asked questions about every assumption,” comments Spoja, who recollects a 4-hour-long meeting with Amit, who encouraged her to grill him on every aspect of the business.

During the meeting, Spoja no doubt turned over as many rocks as any of Tipalti’s Series C investors had, but Amit wasn’t looking for an investment from KKR.

Indeed, he wanted an investment from Spoja—but not in dollars. Tipalti had achieved the requisite number of start-up milestones that normally precipitate the hiring of a chief financial officer, and it turned out that Spoja had quickly advanced as the tech firm’s leading candidate.

“I had hit a patch at KKR where I wasn’t as excited as I might have been about what my next role was going to be,” remembers Spoja, whose seat on KKR’s operating executive talent bench had in the past propelled her into a rotating variety of portfolio company operational roles—each with an expiration date.

“I decided that it was time to go and take my first real job at a company,” reports Spoja, who would join Tipalti as CFO in August of 2018. –Jack Sweeney

782: When Operations Came First | Lou Arcudi, CFO, Amolyt Pharma Mar 09, 2022

Show notes

To those well familiar with the career milestones that typically mark the path to the CFO office, Lou Arcudi’s resume at first may appear to be upside down.

Or at least it could be said that the same operational projects and roles that frequently populate the tops of the resumes of aspiring CFOs are instead found at the bottom of Arcudi’s.

To put it another way: Arcudi acquired his operations experience early.

Arcudi spent his college summers working at a General Motors chemical plant in Framingham, Mass., where he was encouraged to apply to a training program offered by the General Motors Institute of Technology (now Kettering University). The school accepted Arcudi’s application, and after 6 months of training, the young recruit was offered a position at one GM’s many plants.

“It was kind of like the military, where you usually get to choose your posting and specialty, so I picked the Framingham plant and manufacturing accounting and inventory control as my discipline,” recalls Arcudi, whose GM experience soon helped to advance him into a divisional controllership role at chemical company Millipore.

At the time, Arcudi was responsible for consolidating the financials for two chemical plants within the United States and two others in Japan and Ireland.

“The role helped me to understand what really happens out in the field—it wasn’t about keeping a balance sheet but about being P&L-driven, and it became foundational for my career,” observes Arcudi, as he flags the origins of an operations mind-set that would help to propel him upward and accompany him as he served in a subsequent succession of CFO roles. –Jack Sweeney

781: The Frequent Flyer | Josh Siegel, CFO, CyberArk Mar 06, 2022

Show notes

If you were to casually meet CyberArk CFO Josh Siegel for the first time at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), you might quickly assume that he has spent the balance of his career-building years in nearby Silicon Valley. Certainly, on paper his resume lists the requisite number of finance job titles and entrepreneurial milestones that you might expect the bio of an accomplished Silicon Valley CFO to itemize.

Later, as you reflect on the mild-mannered “Cyber CFO” whom you briefly encountered, you make one last entry in your mental manifest: CFO Siegel was queuing up for a flight to Tel Aviv.

In the end, it’s this entry that’s most telling. Or at least it’s the mental note that perhaps exposes the most about Siegel’s present as well as his past.

The fact is that Siegel first began frequenting Tel Aviv departure and arrival gates back in the mid-1990s, when he felt compelled to divert his finance career-building into a more entrepreneurial lane. However, instead of zigging to Silicon Valley, Siegel purposely zagged to Israel—a move that he executed while brandishing a resume with modest accounting feats but deep treasury experience.

“When I first got to Israel in the mid-1990s, they were really Old School, and the fact that I was not an accountant meant that I would never be hired as a controller,” comments Siegel, who prior to moving to Israel had held the position of director of capital markets at Sallie Mae, the erstwhile government-sponsored lending enterprise.

As Siegel acquired different finance experiences and titles over time, he says, Israel-based businesses and the country’s widening entrepreneurial corridor recast their notions of finance leadership.

“Today, the ideas around what makes a strategic finance executive in Israel have really changed,” reports Siegel, echoing a view widely shared among his Silicon Valley peers.

Still, more than departure gates may today expose a difference in Siegel’s finance leadership upbringing.

As he says, “A goal that I have shared with our CEO is answering the question of how to scale up this company with profitable growth—and that’s just not the standard modus operandi of a lot of Silicon Valley companies.” –Jack Sweeney

780: Punching Above Your Weight Class with ESG | Gina Mastantuono, ServiceNow Mar 02, 2022

Show notes

Back in early 2020, Gina Mastantuono had only recently stepped into the CFO role at ServiceNow when the subject of intangible assets surfaced during a company board meeting. For months, growing numbers of the company’s investors had been signaling their advocacy for the company to amplify its collective conscientiousness when it came to social and environmental concerns.

Traditionally, the company had relied on its marketing and communications teams to project its corporate mind-set when it came to such issues, but a number of events during the previous 12 months had led investors and board members—as well as company CEO Bill McDermott—to conclude that a more codified approach had now become necessary.

“This was a pretty significant change for both me and the organization,” explains Mastantuono, who notes that her list of priorities for her first 12 months as CFO suddenly began to shift in real time as the magnitude of adopting ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles became increasingly evident.

“It enabled me to make necessary changes not only within finance but also across the enterprise and externally,” comments Mastantuono, who relates that the impact that she could have as a leader became clear to her when the company’s vice president of treasury pitched to her the idea of ServiceNow forming a racial equity fund to help underserved communities.

Recalls Mastantuono: “I was really able to drive this throughout the organization, and now we have put a $100 million fund that was fully funded into the communities that need it most.”

However, what’s perhaps more revealing when it comes to Mastantuono’s finance leadership has been the addition of an outward-facing pitch that she regularly makes to ServiceNow customers—and particularly to those attracted to similar ESG-oriented opportunities.

“Our products can help our customers in their ESG journeys in a way that those of many other companies just can’t. We have the ability to differentiate from a product perspective and from an ecosystem,” says Mastantuono, who seldom ignores an opening to amplify ESG’s growing influence.

“It is just this incredible opportunity that has allowed us to really punch quite a bit above our weight class,” adds Mastantuono, who leaves us wondering whether she’s speaking on behalf of the company or for CFOs at large. –Jack Sweeney

779: The Graduate | Casey Woo, CFO, Landing Feb 27, 2022

Show notes

Back in 2017, Casey Woo decided it was time to graduate from early-stage companies.

“What I like to tell people is that as an operator you will be characterized and judged by the age of your businesses,” remarks Woo, who from 2011 to 2017 had served in a succession of finance leadership roles at a number of early-stage “A-B-C series”–funded companies.

“At that point, I had three A-B-Cs under my belt, and for me, the concern was that if I took a fourth, I’d be labeled a ‘Van Wilder,’” recalls Woo, naming the Ryan Reynolds character whose seventh year of college served as the backdrop for a National Lampoon movie.

“I understood what hypergrowth and product market fit were, but I was not able to say that I had seen ‘scale,’” Woo reports, as he explains what led him to nab the position that he now credits with having opened his next CFO chapter—and enabled him to add “scale” to the list of descriptors in his professional portfolio.

The role to which Woo refers was noteworthy as much for its transformative effect on Woo’s future as it was for the company itself: WeWork.

“They needed a regional CFO, but this was a huge step up for me, as the size of my P&L on Day 1 was 10 times greater than that of any other business I had ever been a part of,” reports Woo, who from 2017 to 2019 oversaw finance and operations for the flexible workspace company’s U.S. western region and Canada.

At the same time, Woo’s timing placed him inside the headline-grabbing WeWork saga that would ultimately lead to the ouster of the firm’s founder and CEO, Adam Neumann, and withdrawal of the company’s IPO.

“We were asked by some of the biggest investors in the company to go fast, so in a weird way we were doing what we were told … and following orders,” comments Woo, whose tour of duty at WeWork gave his real estate credentials the boost needed to allow him to soon thereafter step into the CFO office at Landing, a company specializing in flexible-lease apartments.

Asked what lessons he may have gleaned from his days at WeWork, Woo observes: “After Adam left, everything changed—the culture went from ‘Go, go, go!’ and ‘We’re top of the world!’ to the reverse and layoffs.”

It sounds like Van Wilder may have finally graduated. –Jack Sweeney

Employee Engagement & the Less Social World - A Workplace Champions Episode Feb 25, 2022

Show notes

Brett & Jack discuss how learning and development is one of five key elements of employee engagement – and explore reasons why L&D too often gets overlooked. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Dave Bernhardt of SentinelOne, CFO Joan Hilson of Signet Jewelers and CFO Herald Chen of Applovin.

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