CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Perhaps it would be fair to speculate that were it not for the changing dietary habits of Americans and surprise arrival of a global pandemic, Steven Cirulis would likely not be occupying the CFO office at Potbelly Sandwich Shop.

The pursuit of new alternative proteins inside the land of agtech has in recent years led more than few venture capital firms to seek out the advice of strategy executives familiar with the mathematics behind the evolving menus of fast dining establishments.

Having held a succession of top strategy roles with the likes of McDonald’s and Panera, Steven Cirulis found his budding popularity within the VC community to be little more than a rewarding satisfaction—that is, until late 2019, when he decided to put some of his VC-related activities aside to accommodate an advisory gig with publicly-held sandwich shop Potbelly.  

“They had been looking for a CFO at the time, but I was really enjoying my work on the venture capital side of things,” recalls Cirulis, who adds that the arrival of the pandemic changed everything.

“I ostensibly became the person whom they turned to and asked, ‘Okay, what do we do here?,’” continues Cirulis.

Within the next several weeks, he busily implemented a list of cash preservation edicts, triggered the renegotiation of bank covenants, and—along with Potbelly management—announced a pay cut, instituted an employee furlough, and applied for a PPP loan.

Along the way—perhaps not more than a month into the pandemic—Potbelly proposed to Cirulis that he join the company as CFO and chief strategy officer.

“Why would you join a restaurant business at the start of a pandemic?,” rhetorically reflects Cirulis, in highlighting but one of the queries that crossed his mind at the time.

Nevertheless, Cirulis tells us, “I jumped at it.”  

Three years later, with the virus now in the rearview mirror, Cirulis makes it clear that the pandemic will never fully escape his view: “Getting forgiveness on that PPP loan was a great day in my career as a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney

No matter how many phone calls Matt Gustke receives during the span of his finance career, none will likely be more memorable or important than one he received nearly 22 years ago.

At the time, Gustke, a research analyst for a major bank, was spending his days assessing the carnage piling up in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble burst.

“The times were really weird, and uncertainty was everywhere,” comments Gustke, who despite the tech sector’s dotcom bust chapter assures us that he thoroughly enjoyed his research days—and in fact he may well have remained in research if not for a fateful phone call.

“He was without a doubt my favorite executive at my favorite company,” comments Gustke, recalling the late Rajiv Dutta, who as the CFO of eBay at the time called Gustke to invite him to lunch.

“The lunch turned into a full day, which then became a dinner and a meeting with the whole team, which then a week later led to my joining eBay to build out its IR function,” recalls Gustke, who as a research analyst had already established a rapport with Dutta by having frequently queried the CFO and summoned his comments as part of his regular research coverage.

“At the time that I joined eBay, I honestly viewed it as sort of a 1- to 2-year working sabbatical during which I would get to see a company from the inside, but I eventually ended up being part of the eBay family for 12 years,” continues Gustke, who once more credits Dutta with extending his “leave” and ultimately helping to point him down the CFO path.

Gustke tells us that Dutta was often known to be generous with praise: "I guess it was a couple of years into my eBay journey when Rajiv came up to me and said, 'You know, investors don't want to talk to me anymore because they just want to talk to you, which is freeing up so much of my time to do other things—so I want to say thanks.'”

However, as it turned out, Dutta had more than praise in mind.

“The next thing he said was, ‘And now I need you to go into a different role—what would you think about leading FP&A for eBay International?,'” reports Gustke, who after giving Dutta an affirmative response first began serving in his new international role from California before relocating to Switzerland for additional finance responsibilities that would eventually lead to heading up eBay's European finance team.

As he continued to grow his experience across multiple finance disciplines, Gustke became a candidate for more senior leadership positions. In 2010, he garnered what would be his first CFO appointment when he was named CFO of StubHub, the online ticket broker acquired by eBay in 2007.

Still, Gustke wants us know that one of his most important lessons wasn't gleaned from life among finance's rank-and-file but instead at a research team's conference table—and perhaps the very one where he first met Dutta.

Says Gustke: "Long ago I stopped worrying about asking stupid questions in meetings. I figured that if something wasn't clear to me—and I'm at least of average intelligence—it wouldn't be clear to someone else. It turns out that more often than not, my questions led to better conversations, new insights, and a clearer mandate as to what was to be done after the meeting." –Jack Sweeney 

As listeners to our podcast well know, one of our favorite queries for finance executives who have had a lengthy tenure in one place is, “What kept you there?”

It may go without saying that something with the word “opportunity” in it is perhaps the most popular response. Still, for certain finance leaders—and especially those whose careers span multiple decades with a single company—this question often summons up a degree of self-reflection that few others bring forth.

Such was the case with Cox Enterprises President and CFO Dallas Clement, who afforded our question an extra modicum of contemplation that we had not expected before issuing some of the best career advice that has ever been shared on this podcast.

To be fair, we may have prejudged Clement in assuming that his expansive (33 years) and adventurous career within Cox had unfolded without any degree of uncertainty. However, Clement quickly dispersed our presumptions by unveiling two career snapshots.

The first came from the early 1990s, when Clement was contemplating exiting the environs of Cox’s Atlanta headquarters to practice law while living on the beach in Sarasota, Florida. “I had kept deferring law school, but at the time, I thought that this possibility might make for a pretty good life.”

Another came from nearly 15 years later, when Clement—now a father with four daughters—was touring homes with his wife in Silicon Valley as he evaluated the relocation possibilities associated with an appointment that he subsequently would reject.  “Even if I wasn’t completely happy in my current role, it would have been disruptive to the kids and risky, so I didn’t leave,” explains Clement, who perhaps saves his best observations for those career-builders who like him have elected to stay put.

He advises: “Once you’ve gone through that exercise and decided to stay, don’t second-guess yourself. Be all in—not only in your professional role but also more broadly in your life, your family, your outside work activities—because work is what you do, it’s not who you are. Over time, I have learned to be more mature and thoughtful about this. I really appreciate how lucky I’ve been in a variety of areas.”  –Jack Sweeney

If Paystand CFO Scott Bennion were to break his three-decade-long finance career into different chapters, the software finance leader would likely agree that he and many of his peers have recently opened a new one.

As a starting—or concluding—point, the chapter that has just ended might simply be titled "The Data Set," in order to focus our attention on the means by which Bennion and others of his ilk have over the past decade extended their lines of sight into the business well beyond those of any previous generation of CFOs.   

For Bennion—who remembers tracking CD shipping costs during the desktop computing era—the latest marker or evidence that a new page has been turned has been made visible by Paystand’s product engineering and development team.

“After having deployed AI tools and generative AI, we’re able to actually see a 4x increase in productivity by our product and engineering teams so far,” reports Bennion, who minces no words when asked about AI's impact on company finances.

He continues: “From a finance perspective, I see a massive opportunity for improved ROI through doing more with less. From a legal perspective, I see that we need to be making sure that we do this in a smart way so that we don't accidentally hit any legal third rails.”

Bennion believes that the adoption of AI tools within SaaS organizations is not unlike what he previously observed firsthand in the open-source software environment.

“New tech is often a developer-led initiative that comes into the organization through the side door, but once it's in, you need to embrace it,” observes Bennion, whose resume includes a stint as CFO of an open-source software company.

Moreover, when it comes to some of the legal concerns associated with AI, Bennion suggests that just as happened in the open-source world, commercial licensing will be used to address some of the go-to-market concerns related to potential software infringement.

As far as Bennion is concerned, when it comes to AI, the hands of time have already begun to move.    

“You need to embrace it," he advises. "You can’t not embrace it." –Jack Sweeney

Of all of the career experiences that Robert Goldenberg has acquired on his way to the CFO office, you would think that his stint with a bankrupt landscaping company would not be apt to make his list of all-time opportunity door-openers.

Still, when we asked Goldenberg to look back to share the experiences that first propelled him into the C-suite, the landscaping business came to his mind.

To wit: It was back in 2015, when software developer 6sense was interviewing to hire its first full-time CFO, that Goldenberg—a career investment banker—nabbed an interview spot with the firm’s part-time finance leader.

“He told me that my investment banking background was great, but that 6sense needed someone who could start at Ground Zero and had more tactical accounting experience,” recalls Goldenberg, who assured the executive that he completely understood—before suggesting that they dedicate the interview’s remaining time to accounting questions.

“He grilled me for 20 minutes and then said, ‘You’re great!—I’m going schedule your next six interviews,’” continues Goldenberg, who was soon hired after having made the rounds with five senior executives and one board member.

When it came to accounting practices, the part-time finance leader no doubt had anticipated that the seasoned banker sitting across the table may have had a blind spot—an addressable affliction, but certainly one that can frequently lengthen the path to the CFO office.  

“In this instance, it was an objective fact that I was better than the average investment banker when it came to accounting,” explains Goldenberg, who credits one banking deal more than any other with sharpening his accounting knowledge—which brings us back to the bankrupt landscaping company that he had been tasked with selling whose books had been susceptible to recurring chaos.

“In my experience, very small landscaping companies in bankruptcy are not known to have solid internal accounting functions,” observes Goldenberg, who adds that for a span of 3 months he had made the company’s dated accounting systems the center of his world. In fact, Goldenberg himself would make journal entries and seek solutions to reconcile old accounts.

Consequently, his deep dive into the company’s books provided him with a base of accounting knowledge that he has continued to retain and build on to this day.    

“When you get exposure to something and it’s critical that you learn it with some measure of competency,” Goldenberg reports, “I find that the resulting learning compounds over time—even when it’s not related to your day-to-day job.” –Jack Sweeney 

The big-city addresses that frequently prettify the office locations of esteemed accounting houses have continued to be a reliable draw for 20-something-year-old accounting grads eager to be counted among urban professionals.     

Thus we would not have been surprised to learn that back in the late 1980s, when recent grad Jim Caci was assigned to Arthur Andersen’s Roseland, New Jersey, office, he experienced what might have been called a “ho-hum” moment.

Not so! Unlike the real estate occupied by his big-city peers, Caci notes, “Roseland” afforded him more access to Andersen partners, who were arguably more approachable outside the accounting house’s big-city confines. What’s more, the New Jersey site tended to operate in a more independent fashion than AA’s marquee offices, a cultural attribute that perhaps made it an ideal location from which to spearhead a pilot program to provide a unique menu of services to small technology companies.

“The idea was that from among these small companies would ultimately come the next Microsoft, but we would have already begun working with them when they were at only $5 million in revenue,” explains Caci, who reports that Roseland became one of only a handful of AA offices to test the program.  

At the same time, the Roseland office had some plus-size neighbors, including AT&T Corp., whose headquarters at the time were a mere 25-minute drive away in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

Caci tells us that this is when his career benefited from both geography and timing.

At the time, Arthur Andersen had been engaged by AT&T to help with the formidable task of splitting up the firm into its Baby Bell operating companies, per its historic agreement with the U.S. government.

The multi-step nature of this undertaking and regular management updates that it demanded led Caci and other Roseland denizens to frequently commute to Basking Ridge.

Says Caci: “Here I was at the beginning of my second year out of school, and I was being asked to help present to the senior leadership of AT&T.” –Jack Sweeney 

Among the learnings that Dev Ahuja has gleaned from his three-decade-long, globe-hopping finance career, perhaps none has delivered a more enduring instruction than that which followed his very first hop.

By his own account, after Ahuja had reached the summit of Novartis’s finance executive ranks in India, the drug giant invited him to occupy an office at its Basel, Switzerland, headquarters. Here, Ahuja was promised, he would be able to apply his flourishing financial acumen on a more global scale.  

“I thought that I knew what it took—I came with a lot of confidence rather than in a mode of humbleness and wanting to learn,” comments Ahuja, who let us know that his first years at headquarters did not always go as planned.

Ahuja reports: “The Swiss don’t mince words."

Confronted with his shortcomings, Ahuja set out to get things back on track—beginning with a hefty dose of self-scrutiny.   

“I had done a miserable job because I really had not made the effort to build relationships and take the time and make the effort to understand the cultural nuances,” remarks Ahuja, whose track change paid off with a Swiss stint in the roles of group controller and head of Basel’s finance operations that stretched to 5 years.

Still, Ahuja’s Swiss experiences would prove to grow even more valuable in the years ahead, as he would come to occupy the CFO offices of Novartis Korea (3 years) and Novartis Japan (2 years).

“Novartis was very active when it came to developing people across geographies, but my case—where I would end up living in five different countries—was not very normal,” observes Ahuja, whose fifth nation became the U.S. after the drugmaker’s $46 billion acquisition of Alcon opened the door to a number of opportunities for him.

Announced in 2010, the Alcon deal was to present post-merger integration challenges that in part led Novartis to relocate Ahuja from Korea to Japan, where the Alcon integration tasks were more pressing.

“We accomplished a lot in Japan in a short period of time, and it seems that Alcon U.S.—which was twice the size of Alcon Japan—was in need of some of what we had learned,” recalls Ahuja, who tells us that at the time, a son had recently relocated to the U.S. for studies.

With little delay, it seems, Ahuja was headed to Fort Worth, Texas, to serve as CFO North America for the drug giant’s Alcon division—a business that years later would nab business headlines when Novartis opted to spin it off.

According to Ahuja, he has been able to apply his Swiss “lessons” at each career move, including his change when he departed from Novartis in 2016 to accept the CFO position at aluminum products giant Novelis.

It seems that regardless of whether a move has involved geographies or industries, Ahuja has been able to apply the benefits of his time in Switzerland.

Says Ahuja: “When you fail, you must make up your mind to take every lesson from that failure and act on it.” –Jack Sweeney

It’s perhaps no secret that this podcast can be rather rigid when it comes to our policy for welcoming guests: Invitations are reserved for CFOs and CFOs alone. In fact, we regularly turn away book authors, consultants, and even CEOs. Such was the case for David Pennino, CEO of LogicSource, who recently was “pitched” to us as a potential guest. As always, we issued a templated email reply specially crafted to politely inform a dutiful communication professional of our “CFOs-only” mantra.

This being said, LogicSource’s CEO has arguably nabbed a plus-size supporting role on our latest episode without having recorded a single word. Although unexpected, this was perhaps an eminently understandable development, given the central role that Pennino has played in the career of Niki Heim, LogicSource’s CFO, who easily met our necessary criteria and subsequently accepted our invitation.

Still, when it comes to Pennino, CFO Heim does not serve up the familiar cadence of CEO kudos, any more than she attempts to tell us that Pennino is some kind of all-knowing C-suite Yoda forever imparting career wisdom.

Instead, she swings open the door to a conference room of the past. The year is 2014, and Heim, a newly hired controller, is fielding questions from LogicSource’s private equity investors.

Pennino is confident that she has the makings to be the company’s next CFO, but not all those gathered feel as certain—including Heim, who now tells us that at the time, she felt that she was not yet ready.

“I’m very grateful that I had Dave Pennino, who was honest and open with me—he’d say, ‘Listen, here’s what I’m hearing—I believe in you, but you have to believe in yourself and you have to keep going,’” explains Heim, who adds that the company’s CFO had exited the company only days before her arrival, prompting the company’s investors to scrutinize the firm’s recent finance hire all the more.

“During every single presentation that I gave to the board and to investor meetings, I was on edge—I needed to prove myself but always make sure that I was doing what Dave believed that I could do,” remarks Heim, who would shortly begin serving in an interim CFO role despite having her own misgivings about her CFO readiness.

“Along the way, I would hear people say, ‘The work is going to come before the belief in yourself,’ and that was me—it was almost like my self-confidence wasn’t fully there yet,” comments Heim, who besides receiving confidence-boosting support from her CEO also began to extract feelings of self-worth from each new board encounter.

“The board would be asking me to do something, and I would need to just go and figure out how to do it—I always found a way, and there were a lot of times early on when I was in the office at [6:00] in the morning and left at midnight,” recalls Heim, who tells us that once the work came, her confidence began to arrive soon thereafter.

Says Heim: “More and more people and investors would call me up personally, and I’d be able to answer their questions.” –Jack Sweeney

For many professionals, the period stretching roughly from March 2020 to December 2022 will forever be known simply as “COVID,” as in “I changed jobs during COVID.”

Thus it was for Erin Colgan, who in July 2020—after having invested 9 years within the finance rank-and-file of pharma giant Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and 8 years with PwC—opted to become the 20th employee of a promising biotech start-up.

Still, Colgan’s game change was prompted not by COVID’s well-earned reputation for employment displacement nor by the allure of start-up dreams but by what recruiters have long referred to as “the call to leadership.” For Colgan, this meant joining Boston-based Sensei Bio as senior vice president of finance, a title that guaranteed her the status of being the firm’s senior most finance executive.

At the time of her appointment, the pandemic had already begun to be recognized as having certain accelerant qualities for business, which were perhaps nowhere on display more than inside the biotech realm, an industry that was experiencing a COVID-fueled adrenaline rush.

“It was only about 6 weeks after I joined the company that we found ourselves meeting with banks to talk about how we could go public to capitalize on the market being especially hot for biotechs,” explains Colgan, who alongside her CEO spearheaded an IPO process that ultimately raised $152 million for Sensei Bio in February 2021.

However, as Colgan was to learn, a more formidable leadership challenge still lay ahead, as a Phase 2 drug trial rendered disappointing results and the biotech market at large suddenly began to cool.     

“Six months past our IPO, some data on a Phase 2 program came in that wasn’t what we had hoped for, so we huddled,” recalls Colgan, who reports that the company’s cash runway then became top-of-mind as management debated whether the capital markets for small-cap biotech firms might turn around in 6 to 9 months.

“I said, ‘Let’s assume that this period lasts a lot longer and see how long we can stretch our cash while still enabling ourselves to achieve what we feel is most important,’” continues Colgan, who tells us that Sensei Bio ultimately advanced down her preferred path, which allowed the firm to extend its cash reach by a year and a half.

In the 6 months that followed, Colgan remarks, the finance, science, and medical areas of the business achieved a shared mind-set that allowed them to work together in the new, capital-constrained biotech environment.  

In January 2022, nearly a year after Sensei Bio’s IPO and 6 months after Colgan had made her compelling argument to extend the firm’s cash coverage calendar, she was named CFO—an appointment that we would wager she had sealed up a half-year earlier when certain hard decisions had been called for.  

Colgan observes: “You can’t make those types of decisions ‘later.’ You have to make them early and often.” –Jack Sweeney

This episode of Planning Aces features the FP&A insights and commentary of  CFO Dev Ahuja of Novelis, CFO Alex Triplett of Appfire and CFO Rick Rosenthal of Clara Analytics.

One of the key topics co host Brett Knowles drills down on is the difference between complicated and complex problems. Brett uses the examples of manufacturing a car, which is complicated, and raising a child, which is complex. The distinction is crucial in understanding how to approach problem-solving in an organization.

While complicated problems can be solved with the right formulas or spreadsheets, complex problems require more. They demand strong interpersonal relationships and effective communication. It’s not just about having the right tools or processes, but also about having the right people who can use these tools effectively.

Planning Ace CFO Dev Ahuja brings some perspective on the role of people in finance transformation. CFO Ahuja shared insights into the structure of his finance organization at Novelis. Despite being well-established, the organization needed a renewed focus on the role of finance in driving decisions and adding value.

Dev emphasized the importance of finance being a thought partner and actively shaping strategy. He also highlighted the need for a strong talent pipeline and succession planning. This ensures the organization has the necessary depth of talent to drive its vision forward.