CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Of all of the places future CFOs could have been employed in the late 1990s, the printing division of RR Donnelley might seem to have been among the least likely.

However, it’s important to note that this period predated the wide deployment of EDGAR, the database system that electronically automates the collection, validation, and acceptance of financial documents by the government’s SEC division.  

Hence the printing division of marketing communications giant RR Donnelley remained one of the country’s largest hubs of activity surrounding the creation, printing, and submittal of financial documents.

“For time-sensitive documents, there would be a deadline to be met each afternoon in order to enable documents to be flown and then hand-couriered to the SEC’s offices,” recalls Celeste Ackert, who tells us that in order to better accommodate any clients who might drop by, the office space that she occupied with others featured a half-door whose bottom was closed and top always open.

For Ackert, who had become an eagle-eyed project manager inside Donnelley’s printing bullpen, the endless flow of financial documents served to satisfy a growing operations appetite before morphing into a portal from which to observe future career possibilities.

“I would be flipping through these SEC documents and thinking to myself, ‘You know what?—perhaps I’d like to see myself in a prospectus someday,’” remarks Ackert, who after 6 years of serving Donnelley clients segued into a series of corporate finance jobs first by leveraging her printing operations expertise and subsequently by climbing the ranks as an FP&A all-star.

Before leaving Donnelley, Ackert—much to her credit—decided to balance her “prospectus ambitions” with some added ballast for the journey ahead: an MBA degree.

Comments Ackert: “I wasn’t really certain how I was going to get there, but these two things equipped me with some fire.” –Jack Sweeney

It’s perhaps appropriate that Scott Healy’s finance career began at an airport. With recently displayed boarding pass in hand, Healy thought that he was ready for takeoff—only to have his new boss board with a mystery box under one arm.

“He was carrying a package that I thought was some sort of welcome gift for me because from the outside you could see some cookies and things to eat,” recalls Healy, who upon closer inspection discovered that while the package did indeed contain a few treats, it also held 15 prospectuses.   

“He expected me to read and analyze each of them during our 6-hour flight from San Francisco to Boston,” continues Healy, who uses the story to illustrate the first of multiple lessons that he believes became invaluable to his career.

“First, I learned how to critically process large amounts of information, regardless of whether it was communicated verbally or in writing,” reports Healy, who tells us that in the years ahead, the processing pace never let up as his ability to consume information became further improved by the the many prospectuses that he himself would come to author.

Another lesson that became critical to Healy’s finance career was learning how to pitch clients.      

“Pitching is a bit like speed dating—generally, you have 5 minutes to capture someone’s interest, and if you don’t, you will not get the transaction done,” comments Healy, who credits his ever-maturing pitching acumen with winning over one client in particular.

“I had this very detailed pitch planned, but when we sat down, the client said to me, ‘There’s absolutely no chance that you’re ever going to do one of my projects,’” remembers Healy, who adds that for the next 30 minutes, the client listed all of the specific terms that he would expect in a purchase agreement.

“I listened, I commented, and slowly I got him to agree to talk further,” remarks Healy, who notes that he countered each specific term being required by the client with a “mini pitch” designed to address each item.

In the end, the client rewarded Healy with the project, a feat that speaks highly of Healy’s ability not only to pitch, but also to negotiate—which the CFO admits might well be his greatest skillset.

Says Healy: “I’ve negotiated in 12 different countries and on four different continents. One time, I even negotiated for 76 hours straight.” –Jack Sweeney

While chief accountant for the SEC’s investment management division, Alison Staloch reports, she found herself being greeted by a degree of inclusive enthusiasm that she had seldom encountered before.

“People would say, ‘Great, the accountants are here!,’” recalls Staloch, who tells us that accountants at divisional meetings were sometimes sparse in comparison to the number of agency attorneys seated at the table.

“Coming from a place where everyone was an accountant, this was new to me,” continues Staloch, who tells us that the commission’s high regard for her expertise and the accounting discipline in general helped to make her 5-1/2-year tenure there a satisfying career chapter.

Having joined the organization as part of the SEC Fellows Program, Staloch found that her experience there seemed to grant her a healthy dose of professional activation—something that she admits that her early career had not always provided in large supply.  

“I wavered a lot early in my career—I took the MCAT but didn’t go to medical school, and I took the LSAT but didn’t go to law school,” remarks Staloch, who as a seasoned KPMG auditor found herself similarly vexed with regard to possible next opportunities behind the doors at that firm.

The SEC Fellows Program, however, was different. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow!—this is just a great way to become ingrained with an understanding of how regulations impact the accounting standards that companies operate under,’” remarks Staloch, who eventually exited the SEC in Spring 2021 to step into the CFO role at Fundrise, a software company that gives investors access to commercial and residential real estate deals by pooling their assets through an investment platform.

Self-dubbed as the largest “direct-to-consumer alternative asset manager,” Fundrise has future investor-related ambitions that no doubt made Staloch’s resume—rich with regulatory smarts and investment management intuition—an attractive match.

Says Staloch: “At the time, I still had thoughts about going back to public accounting. I do have a deep respect for that profession, but this came up somewhat serendipitously after I met Fundrise’s CEO through my network. He was very visionary and inspiring as he explained Fundrise’s mission, and it became very appealing to me.” –Jack Sweeney

Gray-haired late-night fans may remember when David Letterman sought to ingratiate himself with his network’s new owner, General Electric Corp., by hand-delivering a bowl of fruit to GE’s executive brass.

Nearly 20 years later, Simone Nardi became a benefactor of GE’s media aspirations when he traded a senior manager position on GE’s audit team for a unit CFO role inside GE’s plus-size media holdings enterprise, NBCUniversal.  

“While a member of GE’s audit team, I had had the opportunity to work with the head of GE’s audit staff, so when she was named CFO of NBCUniversal, she called me when she had an opening there," recalls Nardi, while referring to GE colleague Lynn Calpeter, who stepped into the CFO role at NBCUniversal in 2003 and then later returned to GE in 2011 upon the sale of the company to Comcast.

That very same year, Nardi was able to take advantage of a new CFO opportunity that surfaced inside NBCUniversal Networks International's TV Production business, which allowed the unit CFO to open his first post-GE career chapter without having to change jobs.   

In the years that followed, Nardi tells us, he stepped into CFO roles at a number of different companies, one of which (fuboTV) he helped to take public.  

Still, few chapters have been as formative for the finance leader as his years at GE, which seemed to achieve a familiar rhythm over time.

Says Nardi: “The approach involved different businesses, different projects, and different teams globally. We’d connect locally, map out the project, deliver it, and go on to the next one.” –Jack Sweeney

By the time Russell Lester landed inside Intuit’s department of analysis in 2009, the unremarkable career path on which he had first set out nearly 10 years earlier had become brimming with possibilities.

Back in the early 2000s, Lester tells us, he was hired by the company Harland Clarke (now Vericast) as an analyst specializing in customer information and insights.

“This was not traditional finance, and I was sort of tiptoeing around what we would broadly call ‘analytics’ today,” remembers Lester, who notes that his adeptness with data analysis eventually resulted in his assignment to a role responsible for pioneering the company’s performance management discipline, which subsequently helped to open the door to Harland’s financial planning and analysis function.

At the time when a recruiter for Intuit called, Lester was responsible for overseeing Harland’s FP&A discipline. It seemed that one of Intuit’s divisional presidents was seeking to hire a senior finance executive with a distinguished data insight and analysis resume.

“I had the FP&A background, and at the same time it was clear that I had been involved with things that touch the customer as well as the go-to-market team,” recalls Lester, whose career at Intuit is notable in part for his inclusion on the due diligence team involved in the headline-grabbing sale of Intuit’s financial services data insight division to private equity firm Thoma Bravo for more than $1 billion.

No longer an anomaly, Lester’s customer-centric, data insight resume was now capable of opening doors to both senior finance and operational roles.

In 2017, Lester accepted a VP of marketing operations position with Keap, a CRM applications vendor that immediately tasked him with establishing a single source of truth for data across the organization. It wasn’t long before Lester’s world was once again intersecting with the finance function, a development that eventually led to broader planning and analysis responsibilities across both operations and finance.

A couple of years later, Keap found itself in search of a new finance leader—a development that Lester was monitoring somewhat passively until a mentor challenged him to throw his hat in the ring.  

“He told me that he thought that I was already ‘doing the work’ and that I should have a conversation with board—so I did,” explains Lester, who would be named CFO of Keap in early 2020.

Reflecting on the career path behind him, Lester can’t help but draw our attention to the quarries of customer information that he once mined daily.

Says Lester: “We all perhaps have heard the advice ‘Connect yourself to numbers, and you will always have a job.’ Well, someone once told me: ‘Connect yourself to the customer, and you will never go hungry.’” –Jack Sweeney 

For business leaders these days, a thoughtful response to customer queries concerning AI is indispensable. As CEO Planful Grant Halloran demonstrated this week at Planful's Perform23 customer conference. CEO Halloran emphasizes the need for caution and thoughtfulness when it comes to AI, noting that while it presents an exciting opportunity, there is still a lot of uncertainty and potential legal and security implications that need to be addressed. He also discusses the speed of change that comes with AI, which he believes will ultimately create more opportunities for better lifestyles, but will require adaptation from society.

Last October, when it was announced that Bobby Leibrock would become the next CFO of IBM subsidiary Red Hat, finance team members no doubt understood that the open-source developer was coronating not just any IBM veteran but a strategic finance executive who for years had been entrenched along the front lines of IBM’s software acquisition activities.

Leibrock’s M&A resume began around 2006, when IBM acquired content management software developer FileNet for $1.6 billion.   

“They asked me to be what was known as a ‘product pricer,’ a role that involved figuring out how to merge FileNet’s portfolio into ours from a pricing standpoint,” explains Leibrock, who notes that along the way he would frequently find himself seated across the table from the acquired company’s management while he stared down at a list of pricing-related questions.

Fast-forward to IBM’s acquisition of security intelligence software developer Q1 Labs in 2011 and Leibrock’s appointment as CFO of the new security software unit that IBM established to house its newly acquired security offerings.

“IBM would buy some 12 to 15 software companies a year, and while the security software sector wasn’t the biggest involved, it was strategic in that it connected IBM’s identity security with its data security portfolio,” recalls Leibrock, who adds that his 19 years at IBM remained largely inside the software lane and seldom if ever crossed over into the tech company’s hardware or professional services businesses.  

Thus Leibrock’s call to leadership wasn’t immediate, and his career appetite seems to have been driven perhaps not so much by titles as by challenges. 

Still, as he advanced upward within IBM, the CFO path began to come more into focus.

Reports Leibrock: “I wasn’t always planning to be a CFO, but from having had the opportunity to sit across from CFOs, I sort of learned what I wanted to be as a leader through observing both the good and the bad.”  –Jack Sweeney

Back in 2010, when the flow of hiring by investment banks had been reduced to a meager trickle of new faces in the wake of the economic downturn, Aneal Vallurupalli walked through the doors of San Francisco’s Union Square Advisors.    

For Vallurupalli—a recent graduate of a Bay Area college not necessarily known as a feeder school for investment banks—the job offer from Union Square seemed to validate the notion that banking was meant to be his career lane.

Still, Vallurupalli tells us that from his early banking days forward, he always viewed investment banking as a place to learn but not necessarily his ultimate career destination: “Investment banking, to me, was kind of like a physician’s residency—it put the foundation in place.”  

At the same time, the firm’s unmitigated drive to serve its clients provided him with many “learning moments,” including one client assignment that remains particularly salient.

According to Vallurupalli, a private equity client with an appetite for leveraged buyouts asked Union Square to provide a rundown on 30 different companies and brief its investment committee on the results when it met 4 days later.     

“Over those 4 days, we literally did not go home—I slept under my desk for a total of 2 hours and worked straight through in order to try to meet this deadline,” recalls Vallurupalli, who after 2-1/2 years with Union Square joined Guidewire Software to start up the developer’s post-IPO corporate development team.

 Along the way, Vallurupalli became increasingly interested in the day-to-day operations of the company and began to seek out opportunities beyond corporate development in order to ease his growing operations itch.

Says Vallurupalli: “I’ve never thought about titles, to be honest. I always asked myself: ‘Where could I go next? What would be interesting? How do I take my prior experience to the next opportunity and allow it to be leveraged?'” –Jack Sweeney

Back in 2006, when Paul Sheriff had only recently been named group financial director for a midsize banking business based in the United Kingdom, his team noticed that the profit margins of a certain banking product were experiencing a steady decline.

What’s more, the customers being drawn to the product were deemed to be at “higher risk” than the bank’s other customers.  

While Sheriff tells us that he helped to put an end to the product’s life, he also wants us to know that the numbers behind the problematic product appeared to be hidden in the bank’s overall financial statements.

“The numbers from the backward-looking book of customers were dwarfing those of new customers such that everything looked okay,” explains Sheriff, who notes that an effort to study the bank’s new customer data separately was what suddenly flagged the troubling trend.

Sheriff relates that once the numbers made clear that the product was not sustainable for the business in the long run, canceling the product ultimately prevented the bank from suffering significant losses when the financial crisis arrived 18 months later.

“The real takeaway for me was to always delve into the details behind the data,” he observes. “The overall position may look good, but there will likely be nuggets that look not so good and signal something else.”

When asked about how he was able to put the brakes on the product line, Sheriff emphasizes the importance of taking people on the journey and building consensus. He advises not to make snap decisions and to allow time for reflection and consensus-building.

Sheriff first began acquiring consensus-building skills early in his career when he managed different teams. He tarted with a small team of three people and then gradually progressed to managing a team of 300. He emphasizes that the tools and techniques that he developed while managing bigger teams have helped him in his current role as CFO of NewDay. –Jack Sweeney 

By the time the general manager of Intel’s data center chipset business parted ways with the company, Julie Swinney had already advanced into one of their coveted business unit CFO positions.

To Swinney—who had already served in a series of senior finance roles—the GM’s departure seemed to leave a startling void in a business that served as a key enabler for Intel’s server business at large.

The unexpected opening prompted Swinney to raise her hand and issue what perhaps was a bold proposal to be coming from an executive who had thus far resided within Intel’s career ropes—the functional restraints that gingerly guide the chip maker’s finance career builders.  

To jump beyond finance, Swinney tells us, with little hesitation she put forth her solution to the challenge at hand: “We absolutely need a GM. We don’t have one, and I want to step in and run this business.” 

It perhaps goes without saying that Intel management accepted Swinney’s bid, allowing her to establish a career point for comparison with the finance roles that she had previously played.

“You don’t always appreciate the gravity of responsibility that a GM experiences when their territory spans from sales and supply chain management to people and culture,” remarks Swinney, who in turn promoted one of her finance team members into the business unit CFO role that she had been required to vacate.

For Swinney, the GM position became just the latest twist in a career that had not always featured traditional moves. In the past, for example, while many of her finance peers had set their sights on Intel’s larger business units, Swinney had opted for a CFO role in Intel’s Software-as-a-Service start-up group.

“I was told by several of my peers that it was not the obvious choice for me,” she recalls, “but that experience turned out to be foundational to building my Software-as-a-Service knowledge.”

Similarly, Swinney tells us that her career chapter as a GM added an indelible lesson to her CFO leadership skillset that she regularly seeks to teach to her finance team members and reports:

“Ultimately, what that experience cemented for me was the enterprise mind-set: Firm over function. It was important that I step into a different role because that is what the company needed of me at that point in time.” –Jack Sweeney