CFO THOUGHT LEADER

When Alex Triplett is asked to explain where and how he began acquiring his operations knowledge, he tells us that his ops focus began to sharpen as more and more roles demanded greater “specificity” of him.

Back in 2006, Triplett had just completed a stint as an investment banker with Citigroup when he was hired by private equity firm TA Associates as an associate inside the firm’s enterprise software and fintech realms.

“Fintech forced me to get closer to the product itself because I couldn’t be credible otherwise,” recalls Triplett, who notes that very often the company founders across from whom he sat at meetings had other options when it came to sourcing investors, so the ability to demonstrate some depth when it came to product knowledge became essential.  

“I got used to it being about product, product, product,” continues Triplett, who tells us that even today, his TA years bring to mind volumes of product literature and a steady stream of software demonstrations.

Still, Triplett reports that the specificity that he was able to nurture when it came to actual product knowledge was of little aid to him when discussions turned to the different operational challenges that certain founders were confronting. He attributes this void to what might be deemed the familiar investor–operator gap.

“They were great investors, but they didn’t always know how to give specific advice to a company that was trying to understand whether to pivot right or pivot left,” remarks Triplett, who says that it was his growing appetite for operations knowledge that ultimately led him to leave TA and join the corporate development team at financial services software company Ion.

In the years that followed, Triplett was at times tasked with being general manager of various newly acquired businesses—a succession of assignments that eventually would empower him with the specificity required to emerge as an operations troubleshooter.  

“It’s great to be able to analyze the shape of things from 10,000 feet and glean insights using pattern recognition,” Triplett observes, “but do you actually know how a business works?” –Jack Sweeney 

We often like to ask our CFO guests if they remember the first time that they presented to a board of directors. For many, this happened earlier than you might expect—but few of our interviewees have exposed the benefits of “early access” for us better than Rex Jackson.

“I grew up in boardrooms,” comments Jackson, who recalls being invited to his first board meeting when he was about 28.

Jackson had spent 3 years at a Los Angeles law firm before signing on as a corporate attorney for a local real estate management company whose board had a budding appetite for M&A.  

“For any deal that they wanted to do, I became the ‘Get It Done Guy,’” explains Jackson, who notes that his moniker in the boardroom soon began to apply to more than just M&A.

“When an opportunity to land on a clear track northward within an organization presents itself, you just jump all over it,” remarks Jackson, whose early career endeavors swung open the door to a succession of general counsel roles at a variety of companies.

Along the way, his “get it done” mantra helped to add some noticeable addenda to his legal career track.

Jackson explains: “One time, I ended up as a salesperson; another time, I had to head up marketing. I have run R&D, I have run operations, I have run corporate development.”  

It perhaps should come as no surprise, then, that when an interim CFO position opened up at publicly-traded Synopsis, Jackson—then the firm’s general counsel—shot up his hand. While he would occupy this particular role for no more than a year, within 13 months of concluding this interim tour of duty he was stepping into a CFO position at yet another publicly-traded company.

Just as at Synopsis, Jackson’s next chapter began with a CFO exit.

“Within 6 weeks of my arrival as a new general counsel, the company shot their CFO,” reports Jackson, who subsequently was asked by the company’s board to move into the CFO role. This time, Jackson would occupy the office for roughly 3-1/2 years.

“It was at this point that I became visible on recruiter radar screens,” comments Jackson, who has to date served as CFO at four other companies, including ChargePoint, where he has been CFO for the past 5 years.

Says Jackson: “I’ve had good support from CEOs and board members, and if you can get this kind of access and observe the business from a high level, then finance—since it’s horizontal within the business—will serve you well.” –Jack Sweeney

As John Rex tells it, when he first arrived inside the finance function at Microsoft Corp. in 2007, one executive greeted him with “Hey, welcome to Microsoft—if you’re still here a year from now, let’s reconnect.”

A senior finance hire with experience in manufacturing and consumer products at such companies as Novartis (3 years) and Kodak (14), Rex was to find the message behind the conditional invitation particularly prescient only 12 months later, when he “very nearly got the boot.”    

Seated across from his boss, Rex was “read the riot act” for having absorbed what the boss deemed to be only “superficial knowledge” of the developer’s plus-size menu of products and services.   

“I knew that he was right, and I realized that what had gotten me ‘here’ wasn’t going to be enough to take me ‘there’—and that basically I had to go back to college,” explains Rex, who adds that during the months that followed, he spent nights and weekends learning everything that he could about the nuances of the “go-to-market” model  and the licensing approaches that governed the company’s flow of revenues.  

Still, Rex tells us, he understood that in order to succeed as a finance leader at Microsoft, he needed to dramatically overhaul the management approaches and operating style that had served him well for the first 20 years of career.

He continues: “I was accustomed to having information flowing toward me as a key decision-maker, whereas at Microsoft, interestingly, there was a much more egalitarian type of culture. All of a sudden, I couldn’t depend on information flowing to me. Instead, I had to become a very proactive consumer of information.”

To increase the flow and absorption of information, Rex spent more time every day in reaching out to others in sales and product development, while at the same time allowing himself more “alone time” for consuming new information.

In fact, Rex found that “alone time” was an important tenet of the Microsoft culture that underscored its founder’s wish to have the company achieve the feel of a university, where every employee had dorm room—aka office—to which to return.  

Today, Rex views the hypothetical 12-month tryout period that the Microsoft executive attached to his arrival welcome as being not malicious but simply honest, given that the retention rate of Microsoft senior hires at the time was less than 40 percent.

Says Rex: “In the end, I became not just a much more effective leader but also a more credible one because I understood the business much better than I had before.” –Jack Sweeney 

CFOTL: As a former CFO and now ongoing C-suite leadership coach today, how do you feel that CFO leadership has changed over the years?

Rex: Well, I’m going to take the liberty of extrapolating what I’m observing about leadership and applying it to CFOs because I have a very hard time in separating CFOs from other senior leaders. There are some things that they all very much have in common, but let’s look at things from the perspective of the CFO.

Over time, particularly in American business, we reward people for knowing their stuff. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this. You need to know your stuff. I myself really needed to bone up and know my stuff at Microsoft. Doing so is just vital.

The evolution that I see happening in the business world—and this fully applies to CFOs—is that the best leaders are developing this combination of subject matter expertise and deep curiosity. This allows them to show up with what I call “humble confidence.” They are very, very confident in their subject matter expertise, as they should be and as they need to be, because this is required of them. But they are also extraordinarily curious about the vast universe of things that they don’t know. Maybe this is the marketplace; maybe it’s opportunities. They just have insatiable curiosity. As a result, in virtually every instance they show up not as arrogant—even though they know so much—but as humbly confident and curious.

So, whereas the CFO of years gone by would often show up as the know-it-all with a tell-people-what-to-do, tell-people-what-not-to-do kind of attitude, I would say that today’s CFO is hypercurious about what’s possible for their enterprise, for their market, for their customers, for their organization, and for their people. They’re bringing curiosity to every conversation. This leads them to take an approach that is much less interrogatory than it used to be.

When I was growing up in the corporate world, it seemed to me that the job of senior leaders was to interrogate everybody else. Every time I went to a strategy review or quarterly performance review, it felt like a dental visit. The best leaders today have a different approach. They’re just wildly curious about everything and bring this mind-set of curiosity to every conversation. This has a multiplying effect because it encourages people to think beyond their normal boundaries—including those involved with rank and privilege and propriety.

In other words, people used to think, “Oh, I can’t say this because the CFO is in the room” or “I can’t say this because it’s inappropriate for me because I’m too junior” or whatever. The effective CFO today is blowing past this to cultivate a group mind-set of “Let’s talk—let’s explore together.” I’m a huge advocate of this approach that they’re cultivating, which is called “mutual learning.” This doesn’t mean that they abdicate their responsibilities or don’t appropriately wield their authority. They have to continue to do these things, but they don’t do them in an arrogant, know-it-all kind of way. The result is that they just generate so much more out of the people whom they lead.

• Mike DePrisco is the new CEO of the IMA, taking over from Jeff Thompson who led the organization for nearly 15 years.
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• The IMA recently celebrated its 100th anniversary and aims to support and optimize the accounting profession while helping individuals achieve their career aspirations.
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• Mike DePrisco has a background in higher education and previously worked at the Project Management Institute before joining the IMA.
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• The IMA has over 140,000 members globally and focuses on providing competency, knowledge, and skills to drive business value in the finance and accounting field.
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• AI is expected to have a significant impact on the accounting department, and the IMA aims to help its members navigate and leverage new technologies to create positive outcomes for organizations and society.

Rick Rosenthal had been working as an investment analyst at Bear Stearns for some 3 years when the bank became a casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis.

He remembers sitting in front of his Bloomberg terminal in March 2008 and watching a news conference at which a Wall Street expert was assuring viewers that Bear Stearns was a solid company—just as the bank’s stock began to plummet.  

In a deal reached a few days later, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay a mere $2 a share to buy all of Bear.

“While our fund had been performing well, JPMorgan had its own, so the question became, ‘What is going to happen to our fund?,’” recalls Rosenthal, who became part of a team of Bear veterans who ultimately were spun out by JPMorgan to manage the fund independently.

Reports Rosenthal: “Relative to traditional asset management funds, we actually performed pretty well, but I did come to understand much more clearly how integrated the financial system is into the greater economy.”

Rosenthal remained inside the investment banking realm until 2013, when he was named vice president of finance at CLEAR, the biometrics technology start-up that had introduced a menu of offerings to boost security measures at airports and stadiums.

At CLEAR, Rosenthal was finally able to satisfy an “operations itch” and acquire the operational skills that he now views as being critical to stepping into a CFO position.

To help underscore the career-building value of being able to cite experience in multiple operational and functional tasks, Rosenthal tells us about a productivity metric that he helped to develop while at CLEAR.

Historically, a total sales figure had been tabulated each day, along with a total sales per employee number. However, visibility into the sales function remained limited, and it was felt that management had too few levers to drive new sales.

“Since I oversaw the payroll function, I had visibility into the number of hours that different employees worked each day and could actually see the sales that each made,” explains Rosenthal, whose next step was to engage the operations team responsible for employee scheduling.

“The idea now was to assign the top performers to times when the lanes at the airport were the busiest,” comments Rosenthal, who adds that the experience of having advanced a new metric revealed to him not only the power of the operator’s view but also the risks of continuing to allow one data point to cloud over new opportunities.

Says Rosenthal: “Here was an important segment of employees that we had just not focused on before because they hadn’t been generating a high enough overall volume of sales to merit attention.” –Jack Sweeney 

CFOTL: Tell us about Clara Analytics … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?

Rosenthal: Clara Analytics is an AI-based software platform for claims organizations inside the commercial casualty industry. So, what do I mean by this? Think about an adjuster who’s working at a carrier or maybe even for a self-insured company, as many firms today manage these risks in-house without using an outside carrier. An adjuster may be managing 100-plus claims at any given time. There’s a lot of information on these that’s coming in on a daily basis, and it’s hard for any individual to read and comprehend all of it on sort of a real-time basis. What ends up happening is that they’ll look at each claim periodically. Every 30 days, or even less often, they’ll review what’s transpired since they last looked. What our tools do is to monitor all of the relevant information daily, so that we can alert adjusters as to which of their 100 claims require their immediate attention on any given day.

This allows the adjuster to be more strategic in managing the claims and optimizing outcomes. What drew me to CLARA Analytics was that it was an opportunity. It’s a series B company. The CEO, Heather Wilson, has a tremendous background. She was the former chief data officer at companies like Citi, AIG, and Kaiser. She’s on the board of Equifax. I met her, and we just clicked from Day One. This was a really interesting opportunity on top of that because she was relatively new to the company. We had this opportunity, essentially, to rebuild from scratch some of our team, some of our products, and our go-to-market strategy. We could really think through how to invest capital in a way that was going to get CLARA growing significantly. We’ve made these investments and now, excitingly, have seen revenue grow tremendously. 

Back in 2011, the buzz surrounding the launch of Redbox’s Blu-ray disc rental business was getting increasingly dour.

For Taryn Aronson, who had been hired to help to execute the firm’s digital content strategy, the performance woes of physical discs were not anything to lose sleep over.

However, the negative notions surrounding Blu-ray’s lackluster performance drew Aronson’s curiosity.

According to the buzz, the root cause of Blu-ray’s performance blues at Redbox was that Blu-ray was “a low-margin business.”

“This just didn’t make sense to me because as a rental business, the driver of your profit is inventory turns,” explains Aronson, who notes that data showing robust turns of Blu-ray discs by Redbox competitors had exposed that demand was not the issue.     

Meanwhile, a senior content leader at Redbox had recently broadened Aronson’s role, allowing her to troubleshoot for both digital and physical content. Having started her career as a financial analyst at Blackstone Group, Aronson first jumped into the media world at NBCUniversal, where she had become involved with the launch of streaming service Hulu. She would subsequently join Redbox’s strategy team after having completed an MBA degree.

In the ensuing months at Redbox, Aronson dug into the numbers and began to educate others on the true economics of Blu-ray versus SD and the practices that optimized the buying and allocation of Blu-ray discs at Redbox.

Reports Aronson: “I got people on board, and we were able to drive a ton of incremental profit for Redbox.”

Aronson’s key takeaway from the Blu-ray experience was the importance of understanding the role of finance and leveraging data to make better decisions across the business. As finance leaders, Aronson tells us, it’s crucial for us to work in partnership with colleagues and to make smart trade-offs to increase value for the company. –Jack Sweeney

Sruthi Lanka is clearly not the only CFO who began her professional career at blue chip investment house Goldman Sachs.

However, she may be one of the only CFOs—if not the only one—who can trace her career roots to Goldman’s technology engineering team.

Back in 2009, as the economic downturn dispatched a daily dose of bad news, Lanka was tasked with separating Goldman’s nervous bankers from their long-tenured messaging device of choice:  the BlackBerry.  

“Most banks would not even entertain the idea of switching because the BlackBerry was so locked down and considered to be ironclad,” explains Lanka, who notes that while Apple’s iPhone had become a popular alternative to the BlackBerry inside a number of different industries, bankers were known for clutching their BlackBerrys—and Goldman was no exception.

According to her, “We found that most Goldman employees were already living on the iPhone, but meanwhile they would still carry this clunky BlackBerry.”

After 3 years with Goldman Sachs, Lanka found herself being led into another realm by the same curiosity that had once caused her to become an engineer and subsequently drawn her to all things tech.

A typical self-question of the time was “How did bankers make the decisions that they made about about whether to invest or not invest?” “This was all lost on me as an engineer,” recalls Lanka, who would return to school for an MBA and subsequently open her next career chapter as an investment banker.

With Royal Bank of Canada, Lanka advised clients during pivotal moments of their company’s trajectory. She found investment banking to be empowering, as she was able to work with seasoned CEOs and CFOs, but at the same time it was frustrating for her. Lanka tells us that it was then when she realized that she wanted to build a company rather than just advise others about theirs.

This experience led her to MoneyLion, where as head of strategic finance she leveraged both her finance acumen and tech engineering skills to build a data team to help to realize the early-stage start-up’s data-driven vision—a combination of skills and collaborative approaches that she would once more rely upon after stepping into the CFO office at Public.com in 2020.     

Says Lanka: “It’s not about having all of the answers but about knowing the right questions to ask.” –Jack Sweeney 

Even today, Dayton Kellenberger marvels at his good fortune in having landed inside the corporate finance department of The Coleman Company, Inc..

Of course, like a lot of career success stories, this tale had timing as a large contributor, especially inasmuch as and a little more than 10 years ago, Coleman was experiencing declining gross margins across its business.

To Kellenberger, a recently hired business analyst, Coleman’s shrinking gross margins seemed to present not only a problem-solving challenge but also an opportunity to help to rewire a renowned brand’s customer best practices.   

“When you’re part of a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, you basically have one shot at the beginning of the year to do an annual line review with a customer,’” explains Kellenberger, who adds that at the time, the process might have involved having a “seller” from, for example, Cabela’s freely thumbing through different Coleman catalogs while casually signaling to a Coleman representative, “Okay, we’d like to sell this product.”  

“The process change that we made was to get finance involved from the very beginning and have us run the line reviews so that we would create one catalog of feature products,” recalls Kellenberger, who notes that the new catalog proved particularly invaluable for what it displayed internally.  

Comments Kellenberger: “Because we could see what a product’s margin was from the previous year and compare it to the current one, we could flag low-margin products, consider replacement products with higher margins, and sometimes even sunset certain SKUs.”

Kellenberger believes that the resulting price volume analysis exposed the previous risks of making business decisions based on analysis that had historically seldom penetrated beyond the customer or product category level.

“What we learned at Coleman was that a single SKU at a single customer could be responsible for dragging an entire product category down,” remarks Kellenberger, who reports that the analysis also exposed the alarming fact that Coleman had at times unintentionally been replacing high-margin products with lower-margin newer ones.

Looking back, Kellenberger observes that Coleman’s margin decline turnaround might have had a different outcome had the manufacturer not rejected certain popular theories.

At the time, Kellenberger remembers, one management team member attributed the decline to “rising prices in China,” while another suggested that the downturn was due to “manufacturing snags in the U.S.”

Says Kellenberger: “This all began with a debate that was rooted not in fact but in emotion.” –Jack Sweeney

Are you tired of sitting through unproductive monthly meetings that turn into show-and-tell sessions? Do you want to shift your focus to key metrics that matter and move away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach?

In this episode of the Planning Aces podcast, Cohosts Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles feature the commentary and insights of three finance leaders who don’t mind displacing the status quo as they seek to optimize their business metrics and drive performance.

Episode #23 kicks off with the hosts featuring recent commentary from Dayton Kellenberger, CFO of Vendavo, who shares his experience with implementing a metrics-based approach to monthly business unit reviews. He explains that they shifted their focus to key metrics that matter and moved away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach. Dayton also discusses the importance of optimizing SAS gross margins, which is a cross-functional effort that involves finance, sales, cloud ops teams, and customer success teams.

Later in the episode, Celeste Ackert and Jason Quinn share their insights on creating cross-functional dashboards and raising the profile of metrics within an organization. Brett emphasizes the importance of using planning tools to build cross-functional dashboards, as it allows for better integration between the planning and operational cycles. He also highlights the significance of customer contribution analysis in optimizing resources and identifying areas of sub-optimization.

Jason Quinn also discusses the importance of cultural norms in achieving desired outcomes. He emphasizes the need for fairness, transparency, kindness as a service, pursuit of truth, and trust through transparency. Brett summarizes Quinn’s points into three categories of measures for FP&A professionals: the overall scoreboard, success potential (leading indicators), and experiences.

Overall, the episode aims to highlight the takeaways and provoke listeners to think about other ways of monitoring how their businesses are performing.

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While April 2020 may forever bring to mind corporate corridors newly silenced by COVID 19’s arrival in the United States, CarParts.com CFO Ryan Lockwood will likely always remember it as the month when opportunity knocked.

Having spent the previous 10 years in investment management, Lockwood, a portfolio manager for a Southern California investment house, was looking to move to more of an operational role when he got a call from David Meniane and Lev Peker of the management team at U.S. Auto Parts, the car parts retailer that was about to rename itself CarParts.com.

“They said, ‘Why don’t you come out to our offices, and we’ll talk?,’ which I was a little nervous about because COVID had arrived only maybe 4 weeks earlier,” remembers Lockwood, who notes that in the past he had offered the business leaders friendly advice as a “capital markets buy-side professional.”

“They told me, ‘Look, it will just be the three of us in 25,000 square feet of office space—just come by and talk,’” explains Lockwood, who adds that the two men were in the midst of executing an ambitious turnaround plan for the business. Ultimately, they offered Lockwood the position of senior vice president of finance.

Lockwood accepted, and in the months that followed, the business found new traction along its turnaround journey as the auto industry’s struggling supply chains helped to spike car prices for both new and used cars and CarParts.com found itself serving a swelling population of online customers.

For Lockwood—who would be named CFO in Spring 2022—the focus became data insights and profitability for every customer transaction in order to ensure that the company’s upward trajectory would continue.

Says Lockwood: “We needed a lot more data insights about our customers, and fulfilling this need has pretty much informed our every decision.” –Jack Sweeney