For every top sales leader who confides to friends that he or she is really a numbers freak at heart, there’s an Andrew Hicks, who, as CFO of Advanced, would be just as apt to boast about a sales funnel innovation as he would about the adoption of a new accounting rule.

In fact, it would probably not surprise Hicks’s past and present business colleagues to learn that when asked to identify a mentor from his past, Advanced’s CFO chooses the head of sales for a former employer.

“It was because of this relationship that I first experienced an inkling of how people can think about the business differently and think differently about what drives value in the firm,” explains Hicks, who found his mentor after being transferred to Austin from London by Misys, a UK-based software developer that today is part of Finastra.

“I had moved across the world, and the sales leader took me under his wing a bit as someone new in the U.S. who didn’t really have family or friends nearby. Talking to him really piqued my interest in learning more about how the business worked,” recalls Hicks, who would remain in the U.S. for nine years before being recruited for a CFO role back in London.

Along the way, Hicks’s professional network became energized via a budding relationship with private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, which enlisted him as an advisor after Vista bought a portion of Misys’s healthcare business. “Vista is continually working its network to find talent, and I was found by that means,” says Hicks, whose CFO career chapter has to date been populated by multiple Vista-owned companies. –Jack Sweeney 

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