CFO THOUGHT LEADER

When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American expats being deployed by digital disrupter SMB printer Vistaprint of Boston, Mass.

For the next 5 years, Quinn would be involved in a string of business acquisitions that would grow the digital printer’s European revenues from nothing to more than $500 million annually.

Based in Barcelona, Quinn spent roughly 3 weeks of every month traveling to other parts of Europe to evaluate the operations of different businesses as he and other executives sought to determine whether there was a solid business case for acquiring a company.

“I had the luxury of seeing into firms at both the executive and middle management levels, so I was able to acquire an understanding of how the executive team was operating and how the decisions that they would make would trickle down within the operation,” explains Quinn, who adds that as deal activity grew, Vistaprint ended up deploying a corporate development team from Paris to complete some of the initial due diligence.  

As the number of acquisition candidates grew, Quinn was tasked with taking a deeper dive into a target company’s operations, so he would often spend a number of days with company’s leadership team in order to better assess whether there could be a cultural fit.

“’Can this be one plus one equals three?’ would usually be the question that you were trying to answer,” continues Quinn, who points out that the answer to this hypothetical query was also dependent on whether his team believed that the acquisition candidate would succeed post-merger under a flat management model.

“We believed that flatter was better and that this was really an efficient way to grow,” comments Quinn, who notes that along the way he acquired a deeper understanding of manufacturing logistics as well as the pre- and post-sale dynamics of go-to-market strategies for both B2B and B2C companies.

However, his central role would always center on supplying the answer to the question of whether there was a strong business case for advancing a potential deal.

“When they brought something to the table through the pipeline, I would vet the business case first from our ability to execute it and then from a cultural perspective,” recalls Quinn, who stresses the significance of understanding and respecting cultural norms as well as local competitors.

Says Quinn: “If you’re going to go international, you must go all in and be prepared to make the investments to win in local markets because you’ll be facing local competition within their own primary market.” –Jack Sweeney

Greg Robbins began his career inside the realm of Big Six accounting houses, an experience that he tells us laid the foundation for a career in financial operations and strategy. However, he credits much of his leadership style to his time at Red Bull, where he learned that real development comes from hands-on experiences, insightful feedback, and formal training, a philosophy that he has carried forward throughout his career.

At Red Bull, Greg participated in several leadership development programs—including the "Scott Spooner Experience"—that profoundly influenced his professional approach. Spooner, a former special forces operative turned consultant, brought with him a unique perspective on leadership and resilience, emphasizing the importance of mental and physical endurance in challenging environments. This experience broadened Robbins's understanding of the qualities of leadership beyond the conventional corporate framework.

Our discussion with Christine Chambers has been going on for only a little more than 5 minutes when she tells us that she remembers sitting on the steps of a London flat years ago while contemplating life’s many twists and turns.  

It seems that the accommodation—which she had only recently acquired and unquestionably counted as a milestone in life—had with little warning come to present a dilemma.

At that time back in 2007, when Chambers was working as a financial analyst inside the UK operations of Seattle, Washington–based RealNetworks, the company suddenly offered her a promotion to work within its US operations.

The treasured flat became toast.

“Six weeks later, I was on a plane headed to the U.S.—and I think that this speaks at least a little to my nature of being adaptable and open in terms of welcoming opportunities that have arisen,” comments Chambers, who would first join RealNetworks stateside in its Washington, D.C.–area outpost before receiving an invitation from the company’s CFO in 2010 to relocate to Seattle to join its corporate offices.  

Eleven years later, Chambers would be appointed CFO of RealNetworks. Of course, career paths are seldom linear, and indeed Chambers’s CFO appointment at RealNetworks would arrive only after a 3-year stint as an FP&A leader with Rosetta Stone and two more as a planning and budgeting executive at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“I have always really leaned into my network for opportunities,” remarks Chambers, as she stops to consider the different doors that she has been able to swing open along the way.  

“By learning within my network," she observes, "I have sought to understand the dynamics within companies and the challenges and opportunities that they bring.”

The power of Chambers’s network was no doubt in play when PetMeds CEO Matt Hulett, a former colleague at Rosetta Stone as well RealNetworks, announced her appointment as PetMeds CFO in August 2022.

Says Chambers: “Matt and I very much understand the dynamics and challenges faced by organizations that have large, addressable markets and may have undervalued assets that need to be turned around. We have seen this both at Rosetta Stone and now at PetMeds.” –Jack Sweeney

If Mark Seidel had told us that he had spent many of his high school evenings peering through a telescope at the stars, we would have likely believed him. However, Seidel—CFO of space security start-up True Anomaly—swiftly short circuits the familiar narrative of a space-loving youth.

Instead, he draws our attention to his early entrepreneurial endeavors on eBay (he achieved power selling status while in high school), and, as for his finance career, he tells us that he has long preferred not to narrow his lens but to widen it.

Indeed, such was the case at Goldman Sachs, where he spent 7 career years as an investment banker.

“At Goldman, I was a generalist, so I got to cover all different types of industries and transactions—which means that the breadth and scope of the types of topics were incredibly wide,” recalls Seidel, who notes that it was this same preference for a wide lens that drew him to the CFO role.

Observes Seidel: “The CFO role is a cross-functional one. While strategy can mean different things to different people, for me it really fits within my scope, my roles, and my responsibilities as a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney 

Among the industries on which the pandemic was most known to have afflicted an extra helping of earnings chaos, most business analysts agree that the home fitness market is perhaps most deserving of special mention.

Indeed, few sectors logged steeper gains and more precipitous losses during COVID’s comings and goings than home fitness—and perhaps few demanded more reflexive, in-the-moment, decision-making inside the management cockpit.

At BowFlex (formerly Nautilus), that cockpit has been “manned” by CEO Jim Barr and CFO Aina Konold, both of whom entered the C-suite during the latter half of 2019—only to have COVID immediately upend their ensuing 2020 flight plan.

Over the past 4 years, Barr and Konold have remained buckled in together as they have educated investors in anticipation of completing a long-awaited turnaround that they predict will arrive in the near future.

Along the way, CEO Barr has demonstrated a willingness to address tough questions—just as has Konold, whose facility for disarming unwelcome news is perhaps worthy of envy among her CFO peers.

Says Konold: “A lot of finance people unfortunately stop after sharing the bad news—and then the CEO, the board, and the rest of the executive team, are left thinking: ‘Okay, so what do we do now?’ It’s important to have those answers.” –Jack Sweeney

When Michael Kennedy first stepped into the CFO office at the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) in 2018, he was surprised to learn that the association was spending $8 million annually on office space across the country.

“Why were we in these offices?,” asks Kennedy, voicing the question that helped to kick off the first of what he now characterizes as a multichapter digital transformation.

As it turned out, the 93 offices occupied by the MDA were a legacy of the organization’s historic Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, a once-massive annual fundraising event for that had lost its mojo in the Age of the Internet.

“MDA wanted to have an office near every local television station that was participating in the Telethon broadcast,” explains Kennedy, who notes that the MDA offices needed to compete with local Girl Scout troops and firefighters to secure fundraising airtime on the local affiliates.   

“But the fact is that we had stopped doing the Telethon 8 years before I arrived,” reports Kennedy, who adds that the $8 million that the MDA had once paid in real estate fees now goes entirely to support MDA’s causes and mission—a development that the pandemic no doubt helped to accelerate.

He continues: “We now have a 100 percent remote office environment.”

Still, the pandemic put much of the transformation at the MDA into a holding pattern, as fundraising events and activities came to a near standstill. According to Kennedy, however, the MDA is now on its way to matching and even surpassing pre-pandemic fundraising levels, as it opens yet another impressive chapter in its healthcare history. –Jack Sweeney

CFO Zhi Li's Career Background: Zhi Li's professional life begin at Bell Canada, where he was involved in operational finance within the Wireless Division. The division, Zhi tells us served as the growth engine for the company at the time. During his time at Bell Canada he worked on a subscription business model, dealing with wireless units and the basics of a subscription business, which later proved helpful in his work within the SaaS space.

Li entered the investment banking realm during the economic downturn, then pivoted to tech; highlights operational finance experience at Bell Canada and investment banking tenure at Credit Suisse's tech group in New York.

Transition to CFO Role: Discusses the pivotal moments in transitioning from banking to tech in Seattle, eventually landing the CFO role at Customer.io.

Customer.io Overview: A startup providing customer communication platform services to various businesses, emphasizing personalized engagement and scalability.

Role and Responsibilities as CFO: Focuses on strategic initiatives, fundraising, M&A, financial operations, and providing guidance across departments to drive growth and operational efficiency.

• Insights from Planning Aces:
• 
  
• CFO Lauren StClair talks about leveraging AI for faster analysis, transparency in reporting, and the challenge of maintaining clean, adaptable data.
• 
  
• CFO Doug Lindroth emphasizes the shift from closed data structures to open-book management, enabling deeper discussions on profitability and investments.
• 
  
• CFO Charly Kevers underscores AI's impact on manual tasks, reshaping organizational charts to prioritize higher-level thinking.
• AI's Role in FP&A and Security Concerns:
• 
  
• Discussion on AI's learning mechanisms, potential security risks, and the importance of Microsoft's approach with co-pilot in maintaining security.
• 
  
• Insights on how AI-driven tools adapt and evolve based on user interactions, driving advancements in decision-making processes.

It was back in 2016 when Lauren St. Clair realized that it was time to raise her hand.

Online marketplace giant eBay had just completed a deal to acquire the Spanish online ticket platform Ticketbis, and St. Clair, a 9-year eBay veteran, was itching to get overseas.

eBay had entered the online ticket business in 2007 with its acquisition of StubHub, and the addition of Ticketbis now promised to fatten StubHub’s international revenues, a development that St. Clair realized would likely require eBay’s finance function to beef up its leadership overseas.

“People knew that I wanted to live overseas, and it was just good timing with regard to me leaving the group to which I had been assigned,” explains St. Clair, who arrived in Bilbao, Spain, in early 2017 eager to open a career chapter as CFO of StubHub International.  

Of course, St. Clair had already spent some time overseas as a student and a finance adjunct on various international FP&A assignments. However, an overseas appointment was different, and in fact the opportunity for such a coveted stint called to mind for her some valuable advice that she had once received from one her early mentors.

St. Clair recalls: “He told me, ‘Build your reputation and take time to build a connection to the corporate office, so that when you raise your hand to go abroad, you’ll be top-of-mind there.’” –Jack Sweeney 

When Peter Benevides joined Olo back in 2015, the provider of restaurant technology's CFO office was vacant—as it would remain for the next 4 years, until he ultimately got the position thanks to a nod from the firm's CEO and perhaps a sprinkling of magic dust from Olo board members and investors.

Of course, things may have gone very differently for Benevides, as they so frequently do for many senior finance hires who, like Benevides, join fast-growing firms while knowing full well that there are no guarantees when it comes to C-suite appointments.

Thus, when given the opportunity to have Benevides reflect on his career, we thought it perhaps appropriate on our part to query Olo’s finance leader regarding what he feels that he got right along the way—especially with regard to any attributes or actions that may have made a difference in the career trajectory that for him has led to Olo.

According to Benevides, his success comes down to not having been afraid to ask others for help—a trait that he was to find increasingly beneficial as the company’s 2021 IPO drew ever closer.

It was during these months and years of career investment, Benevides tells us, that he found his attention focused by a number of critical undertakings, including making the transition from supporting a regional accounting firm to being part of a Big Four accounting house.

Besides being able to benefit from the fact that publicly traded firms offer a larger menu of services, the transition put in motion a Big Four “reference check” that afforded Benevides the opportunity to contact clients of the different firms.

Such was the nature of a phone call that he placed to one of the Big Four references.

“What was meant to be a 20-minute reference call turned out to be an hour-and-a-half-long chat,” recalls Benevides, who tells us that the reference happened to be the recently retired CFO of a publicly traded company.       

“Once I got off the phone, I said to our president and COO at the time, 'Gee, it would be amazing to have this person as an advisor to the company as we prepare to go through this IPO process,'” reports Benevides, who adds that the former C-suite executive became one of Olo’s invaluable IPO prep advisors. –Jack Sweeney