CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Latest Episodes:

When Purpose Eases Workforce Stress | A Workplace Champions Episode Dec 28, 2020

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Inside the realm of corporate finance, it’s safe to say that the year 2020 has been unlike any that have preceded it. As more employees have occupied remote workspaces, growing numbers of finance chiefs have told us that they are more carefully monitoring the financial and cultural levers that influence workforce behaviors.

661: Finding Your Finance Port of Entry | Dan Stokely, CFO, Ampio Pharmaceuticals Dec 22, 2020

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Thinking back to his days as a charter boat captain off the coast of Point Loma, San Diego, Dan Stokely marvels at the responsibilities that he shouldered as a young adult.

Serving a mix of customers, Stokely would routinely welcome on board groups of small business owners, executives, and doctors before setting off to sea on 3- to 15-day jaunts.

“Whether it was dealing with people experiencing some kind of medical emergency at sea, or really rough weather, or mechanical failures—you just had to be on top of your game all the time,” recalls Stokely, who says that the experience forever shaped his mind-set when it comes to taking on challenges.

Initially, Stokely had set his sights on acquiring equity in a boat, but conversations with different customers piqued his interest in business and led him to begin a college career alongside his sea captain vocation.

Upon graduation, Stokely feared that the lack of an accounting internship on his oceangoing resume might lessen the odds of him landing a job with a big-name accounting house.

However, Stokely says, the partner in charge of Deloitte’s San Diego office at the time hired him after summing up the college grad’s seafaring days this way: “You had to make quick decisions, and very often with not a lot of information. And you had to live with the outcome.”

Another factor that no doubt contributed to Stokely quickly finding his groove in the accounting and finance realm was that he was accustomed to having gray-haired customers turning to him for answers, a qualification that few hiring officers would likely miss.

Such conditioning perhaps served him well at Sithe Energies, where he was hired as a financial analyst inside one of the firm’s divisions but within weeks found himself working alongside the company’s CFO as they mapped out an aggressive acquisition strategy involving the medical waste industry. This led to Stokely crisscrossing the county to meet and consult with the owners of different medical waste firms being targeted.

Says Stokely: “This might have scared a lot of people. But with my fishing background and having taken some risks before, I knew how to manage it.” As it turned out, the company would acquire nearly 12 new firms over a 3-year period and reformulate its division known as Recovery Corp. of America. –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

660: A CFO Finds Her Career Cadence Inside PE-Backed Firms | Debra Ricci, CFO, Guidehouse Dec 20, 2020

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Back in 2018—when Deb Ricci’s name topped the list of leading candidates to fill the CFO role at Guidehouse, a management consulting firm carve-out—three career distinctions likely set her apart from other candidates.

First, Ricci was a veteran public sector executive whose finance resume included multiple chapters inside the government services sector, Guidehouse’s home turf.

Second, she had worked inside private equity–backed companies—experience that few recruiters could ignore in light of Guidehouse being the offspring of private equity firm Veritas Capital.

Third, she had an EBITDA mind-set—an unyielding orientation that allowed Ricci’s lines of sight to seldom stray very far from the metrics that helped to track, measure, and deliver EBITDA.

Of course, it is just such a mind-set that has likely kept Ricci’s finance leadership credentials on the radar of private equity partners. To date, she has played senior finance roles inside four private equity–backed firms.

“I know what they’re looking for. Often I think like they think. And I find that the objectives that they’re looking to achieve are the same ones that I look to achieve,” explains Ricci.

Since Veritas first acquired the public sector practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2018 and rebranded it as Guidehouse, the professional services firm has made headlines with its acquisition of Navigant Consulting in October of 2019, a deal that expanded Guidehouse’s workforce from 2,000 to 7,000 and planted a trove of commercial clients inside Guidehouse’s customer portfolio.

What’s more, the Navigant organization brought along two-decade–old processes and practices, whereas the Guidehouse organization had still been mapping out its internal approaches and practices.

“We were receptive to adopting some established practices, while on the Navigant side I think that they were very accepting of change—so for me, this was the most successful acquisition that I’ve ever been associated with,” remarks Ricci. –Jack Sweeney

659: The Rewards of Taking Inspired Action | Brice Hill, CFO, Xilinx Dec 16, 2020

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In front of the restaurant’s dozen or more cash registers, customers were standing six or seven deep when Brice Hill raised his voice and began instructing the hungry mall shoppers to immediately exit the store.

“No one listened to a single word I said,” says Hill, who opens our discussion by transporting us back to the mid-1980s, when as a teenage recent graduate of McDonald’s management training program he was given a surprise leadership test.

Having made a trip to the mall for some holiday shopping, Hill had poked his head into the mall’s marquee McDonald’s only to find a few of his fellow managers nervously waiting for a return call from McDonald’s headquarters.

The restaurant—at the time one of the busiest McDonald’s locations on the West Coast—had only minutes earlier received a bomb threat, and as Hill digested the blank stares triggered by his shouts to clear the store, he realized that more extreme measures were required.

Leaving the customers in their queues, the young manager dodged the doubtful stares of employees as he maneuvered his way to the back of the store, where he found the location’s electricity source and without hesitation cut it off.

“They had told me that 20 minutes was the countdown on the thing—we cleared the whole place with only 4 minutes to spare,” recalls Hill, who estimates that the location may have held as many as 500 customers and workers that day.

Later, police would determine that there had been no bomb, but this has never led Hill to second-guess his actions.

“When you’re in that type of situation, you have to be able to act and act like an owner. Even if you don’t know whether you have the right answer, you have to act. There cannot be a void of leadership,” says Hill, underscoring what might be a recurring theme for his career.

Fast-forward a few decades, and Hill is a senior strategic planning executive at Intel Corp. The venue is an Arizona conference room where a group of Intel executives—including the company’s CFO—has gathered to hear Hill offer an analysis that could potentially lead Intel to begin building idle factories.

This time, the doubtful stares quickly turned to dissenting voices as Hill’s strategic analysis failed to win over many of his Intel colleagues.

“When I made the recommendation that we should build an idle factory, there was like a melee in the room. All of the CFO staff was arguing, waving their hands, debating different opinions,” explains Hill, who says that in the minds of traditional finance executives, an idle building equals excess cost. To highlight his point Hill repeats the refrain of “You have to heat it, cool it, and guard it!”

Still, what Hill’s analysis had begun to spotlight was the cost of missing out on growth opportunities in a business wielding 60% to 70% gross margins. Suddenly, having idle factories in place to add additional capacity when growth demanded seemed to have merit.

“At the end, the CFO said, ‘Bryce, I want you to go meet with the treasury staff. They’re experts in derivatives and option modeling. I want you to go see if your math holds up,’” remembers Hill, whose analysis received “a clean bill of health” from treasury before getting a thumbs-up from Intel’s CEO, a final affirmation that led Intel to modify its growth strategy as well as its accounting. Going forward expenses associated with serving the idle factories would be listed as strategic investments rather than costs – a change that has perhaps made management think twice before turning off the lights . –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

658: The Technology-Driven Turnaround | Sandra Harris, CFO, Tupperware Brands Dec 13, 2020

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When Tupperware Brands CFO Sandra Harris is asked what set her apart from the other CFO candidates who aspired to fill the finance leadership role at the iconic maker of food storage products, she doesn’t hesitate to mention that her previous leadership turn was not as a CFO, but as chief information officer for outdoor apparel and footwear manufacturer VF Corporation.

It was there where Harris first climbed into the company’s leadership ranks from VF’s FP&A function, where she had become increasingly focused on the company’s quickly evolving global supply chain.

“VF was on a trajectory of going from $6 billion to $12 billion, and in order to do this, they needed to optimize their supply chain,” explains Harris, who along the way found herself overseeing VF’s procurement function—a position that made her the direct report for VF’s sourcing for all of Asia.

“Asia was one of our most complex businesses—it had every kind of retail channel, and it was because of my Asia experience that I was given more financial roles in the retail segment of the business as well as VF’s shared services,” recalls Harris, who credits her retail experience with having helped her to emerge as CIO and IT leader as she helped the company to forge a digital connection with its consumers.

At Tupperware, Harris has made “innovation through technology” a central theme of her 20-month CFO tenure.

“Until I arrived, we were really still taking orders by hand and using fax machines,” comments Harris, who says that the company’s rapid adoption of cloud-based tools and solutions paid big dividends in 2020 when, due to the pandemic, increasing numbers of consumers went looking for food safety and storage products as the number of home-cooked meals grew.

“We knew that we had to think more about the consumer and create a supply chain that could support what Amazon brought to the world, which was 2-day delivery,” adds Harris, who credits Tupperware’s technology investment with helping the company to pivot to a more digital world. –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

657: From the Ground Up | Yevgenia Fink, CFO, HOVER Dec 09, 2020

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It was near the end of her 9 years with Intel Corp. that Yevgenia Fink received a bit of advice that today she credits with having helped her to blaze a path that would ultimately lead to the CFO office.

As Fink recalls, “Leave Intel before you forget how to open an Excel spreadsheet” was the brief but memorable comment that a respected manager opined.

“I felt that I had a lot of influence at Intel, but most of my function became leading and managing people, and I still didn’t feel confident in my pure finance skill set,” says Fink, who at the time was a group controller for the chip maker’s mobile platform team.

Fink’s future finance career path would involve a string of start-ups where she got to demonstrate her FP&A skills and along the way acquire broader finance responsibilities that made her a candidate for VP of finance positions and eventually the CFO office at HOVER, an application that helps users to design and estimate home improvement projects.

“The experience gave me exposure to what it is like to be part of a public company on a much more intimate scale than what Intel could have ever given me,” observes Fink, who at the same time credits the giant chip maker with offering its finance professionals a wide berth of opportunities to pursue.

Comments Fink: “There was a realization at Intel that to be a strong finance professional, you needed to be well-rounded across all disciplines, so it wasn’t about hoarding employees and keeping them in a finance box but really about providing people with opportunities that an organization the size of Intel can offer.”

At HOVER, Fink’s attention these days is migrating from Excel spreadsheets back to people.

“When I joined, I built a financial model, and now, as the company is scaling, it’s about hiring people who can improve on what was built,” explains Fink, who says that the transition from “leader and doer” to “people leader” requires a sense of timing.

She adds: “If the transition feels a little premature, it’s probably the right time to do it.” –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

656: A Taste for Disruption | Russell Burke, CFO, Life360 Dec 06, 2020

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When Russell Burke tells us that his days at Sony Music Entertainment included “huge peaks” such as the release of the hit sound track for the motion picture Titanic as well as huge challenges such as the rise of digital pirates, the two developments quickly converge.

Suddenly, in our mind’s eye, we see Burke’s career vessel of choice surrounded by pirates and the finance executive shouting a string of orders to a bewildered seafaring crew.

Once again, the instant imaging that our conversations often render appears to be strangely prescient of the finance leader’s future career chapter.

“Before that piracy, I hadn’t really understood the concept of disruption,” explains Burke, who occupied VP of finance roles at Sony Music in both New York and Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

At first, Burke was tasked with helping Sony to lessen piracy’s bite by leading a series of cost optimization initiatives, including setting up joint venture distribution agreements and putting in place shared services facilities.

“After dealing with that for a time, I decided that I wanted to join the disruption,” comments Burke, who in 2001 was named founding CFO of PressPlay, a music streaming service formed as a joint venture of Sony Music and Universal Music.

“Even though this was a joint venture formed by two massive companies, it was in many respects a true start-up—we sat down and created a business model and executed on it,” explains Burke, who adds that the company would grow to serve 800,000 digital music subscribers before it was sold in 2003 to Roxio, an early streaming service that helped to legitimize the streaming seas as it rolled up streaming assets, including those of pioneering pirate Napster.

“PressPlay was really set up by the record companies to battle the Napsters of the world, and, at the same time, these companies were suing the pirates,” remarks Burke, who recalls that PressPlay opted to sell to Roxio as the firm sought to rebrand Napster as a legitimate streaming service—signaling an end to the music industry’s choppy seas. –Jack Sweeney

655: Awaiting the Return to Travel | Tom Tuchscherer, CFO, TripActions Dec 02, 2020

Show notes

Twenty-five to 30 years ago, senior executives seeking CFO roles did not think like Tom Tuchscherer.

Many still don’t, which is why CFO roles have increasingly come to executives like Tuchscherer, a gate crasher from the world of corporate development.

Such was the case back in 2012, when Tuchscherer entered the CFO office for the first time at Talend, a fast-growing developer of data integration software.

At the time, Tuchscherer was accustomed to having long strategy discussions with both Talend investors and board members and was even tasked with helping management to recruit “a professional” CFO.

However, when a new CFO exited the company only 12 months after being recruited, Tuchscherer agreed to serve as an interim finance leader.

“First it was 3 months, then 6 months, then 9 months, and then a year. Eventually, the board said, ‘Hey, you seem to be doing a good job with this—why don’t you just stay?,’” explains Tuchscherer, who characterizes his arrival in the CFO office as an “accident” rather than a “willful choice.”

In fact, as time passed and Talend began preparing for its IPO, Tuchscherer says his career mind-set remained untethered to the CFO role.

“Had I been in a board member’s shoes, I would have thought that this was pretty dangerous,” explains Tuchscherer, who says that during some “honest discussions” with the company’s CEO and board members, he made clear his willingness to step aside and even to help recruit a CFO with IPO experience.

“Essentially, the message that came back was: ‘We value the relationships that you built and your strategic knowledge of the company much more than the downside of your lack of experience as a public company CFO, and we believe that you can grow and learn those skills … but we will be keeping a close eye,’” recalls Tuchscherer, who notes that by this time he had learned to appease his sizable appetite for high-minded strategy insights—a source of sustenance for many corporate development executives—in order to better digest the company’s accounting and administrative functions.

Looking back, Tuchscherer recalls that his “accidental” arrival inside the CFO office in some ways allowed him to be more clear-eyed about the role of finance leadership.

Comments Tuchscherer: “It forced me to ask a lot of questions and to challenge the role and reinvent it at the same time.” –Jack Sweeney Subscribe to our Newsletter

654: The Path to Being IPO-Ready | Drew Vollero, CFO, Allied Universal Nov 29, 2020

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When Drew Vollero arrived in the CFO office of Snap (formerly Snapchat) in 2015, the executives occupying the tech world’s traditional IPO talent bench no doubt raised a few eyebrows.

Having spent the previous 25 years inside the corporate corridors of Mattel, Inc., and PepsiCo, Vollero had a resume chock-full of strategic planning initiatives that any finance leader would covet. Still, he could not be counted among the familiar CFO all-stars known for their routine rotation into IPO-minded tech companies.

Of course, whatever buzz Vollero’s hiring may have stirred, Snap left no room for IPO skeptics, having earlier in 2015 hired Imran Khan, head of Internet investment banking at Credit Suisse, where he had recently led the IPO for Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

“Whenever we walked into a room together—on the road show or wherever—there were seven or eight people who knew Imran,” explains Vollero, who characterizes his pairing with Khan as “a one, two punch.”

“The founders knew that I had experience in building world-class teams, and they knew that I could hit the ground running,” comments Vollero, who adds that “the match really made sense” in light of the tight time frame involved in Snap’s plans to go public.

During the 18 months in the lead-up to the IPO, Vollero initially committed to a 70-mile commute to Snap’s Venice, Calif., headquarters from his home of 30 years in Orange County—a daily trek that became more daunting as IPO action items began pressing down.

Says Vollero: “I got an apartment up in Los Angeles, and I was there Sunday through Friday, moving the things that we had to get done.”

These days, Vollero has been working closer to home while occupying the CFO office at Allied Universal of Santa Ana, Calif. Despite his shorter commute, Vollero says, his days are once again becoming populated with IPO action items, as the $8 billion privately held supplier of security and facilities begins eyeing the public markets.

Comments the CFO and now IPO veteran: “We’re a founder-led company, just as Snap was founder-led—these companies tend to take on the personalities of the founder, and they drive hard.” –Jack Sweeney Signup for our Newsletter

In Search of a Culture Metric | A Workplace Champions Episode Nov 25, 2020

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"Talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it—today, I spend around 20% of my time on it." - Ross Tennenbaum, CFO, Avalara

CFOTL: What are your priorities for the coming year?

Tennenbaum: One is building out our finance and accounting talent to take us to a billion dollars’ worth of revenue and beyond. We’re at close to half a billion of revenue, and we’re looking to go well beyond that. You really need the talent that has experienced a larger scale, knows how to achieve it, and can take you there. So, talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it—today, I spend around 20% of my time on it.

CFOTL: What does the phrase “workforce culture” mean to you?

Tennenbaum: Beginning in my investment banking days, I’ve studied many companies and management teams. I’ve seen teams that were really high-functioning, really strong, great cultures. I’ve also seen management teams and executive teams that were not cohesive. There was a lot of distrust and backstabbing. Each of these scenarios could generate great numbers and be performing well, but I would only want to invest my money in the one that has that trust and has a cohesive team—and where this is really being driven forward in a cultural way. I don’t think that Wall Street really has a view of this. There is really no metric internally—and certainly not externally—that gives this view on culture. But I think that investors are increasingly trying to get this view into talent and culture.

Drew Vollero, CFO, Allied Universal

When Drew Vollero arrived in the CFO office of security and facilities company Allied Universal in 2018, he understood that the primary constraint to Allied’s future growth remained human capital. Like so many other meaty challenges, Vollero had helped to remedy during his finance career– Allied’s new CFO understood finance must play an active role when it came to optimizing the company’s “employee funnel”. Then Covid 19 arrived - overnight elevating Allied’s hiring hurdle to Vollero’s top of mind status.

We recently asked Vollero to explain how the company’s hiring priorities may have been altered due to the pandemic.

Vollero: I would say that we hire 3,000 people a week. We see a million resumes a year here at Allied Universal. There's 150 million or so people employed in this country. So, you're talking about a meaningful number of resumes that this company sees. Our ability to hire the right people is really important. How do you do this at scale is really our challenge. Our strategy team has adopted a couple of new tools that helped us do that through the field. We now have an artificial intelligence vehicle that we're testing that will help us identify what are the key metrics when it comes to hiring and what are the key personality traits or key answers that applicants can give us that (signal) they will fit well with our culture, as well as indicate that they might be successful employees.

We're also using an automated workflow to really help us get through some of our staffing bottlenecks. Our challenge here today is we may get a resume, but we may not be able to call you for six to eight weeks. Managing that workflow better is very important to us and something that we spend a lot of time studying the employment funnel. How do we find 150,000 of the best employees?

We hire based on customer needs. Customers continue to need services and some have used less during the pandemic like the retail channel, or some of the local office buildings, but a lot of customers have asked for more hours. State governments have wanted more hours. Hospitals have wanted more hours.

As we manage through the pandemic we've really focused on three important pieces. First, and foremost, we focus on our employees. We've instructed all of our employees to follow the CDC and WHO guidelines, social distancing, very important. … We've supplied over 650,000 cloth masks to employees during that time. We've also been very active with virtual events, hiring people, so lot of kind of drive-through hiring events to practice social distancing, and meet the demand for security services and we still have a significant number of open posts and we've been trying to fill those.

The customers, we've got 30,000 customers. And these 30,000 customers have 13,000 different ways that they've attacked this situation. Different customers have done it different ways and we’ve tried to be responsive to their every step. From a financial perspective, obviously during the pandemic, we've been focused on really the liquidity of the company. On the financial side, there's a couple of things that we've been trying to do to make sure that the company can continue to do well and to frame the magnitude, our payroll here is a $100 million a week, and we have to make sure that we have the ability to continue to pay the people who are working hard through this.

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