CFO THOUGHT LEADER

When asked what his priorities are as a finance leader over the next 12 months, CFO Nadeem Moiz supplies an answer that uses the phrase “shareholder value” not once, but three times. Needless to say, shareholder value appears to be top-of-mind at Select Interior Concepts, a diversified building products and services company.

Explains Moiz: “In a public company reporting becomes very important. Governance becomes more important and investor relations and shareholder base management are always priorities. And so this requires some thought when it comes to the time allocation required for these added functions.” 

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Asked to reflect on his path to the CFO office, Dan Fletcher characterizes his years in private equity as being more operationally focused than transaction focused. Or at least, he recalls being drawn more to the challenges facing CFOs and other senior members of management teams, rather than the deal making mechanics of the banking side.

As CFO of Host Analytics, Fletcher’s operational view is now fully unobstructed and meanwhile, HA’s finance leader has managed to keep one foot inside the private equity realm. Today in addition to being HA’s CFO, Fletcher remains a vice president at Vector Capital, the private equity firm that acquired HA last January. It’s a finance leadership tour of duty that is expected to unlock new value for both HA and Vector as Fletcher decodes the synergistic benefits of growth capital and technology enriched performance.

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Three years ago, Tim Adams probably never imagined that today he would be taking spin classes in Geneva, Switzerland. At the time, the seasoned finance leader could be found queueing up at Logan Airport to board yet another flight to San Francisco.

Of course, one could argue that a certain Logan departure gate ultimately helped to put Geneva spin classes on the horizon, since it played no small role in transporting the CFO to a round of talks that helped to seal the sale of the finance leader’s earlier company Demandware of Woburn, MA, to Salesforce of San Francisco back in 2016.

As Demandware’s CFO, Adams says, he was involved when an unsolicited offer arrived from Salesforce after the e-commerce platform had achieved consecutive years of 30% growth.

“It’s sometimes hard to sell a company when you enjoy what you are doing and there’s a personal aspect, but you have to put that aside to do what is right for the company’s shareholders,” explains Adams, who today is CFO of ObsEva, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company based in Geneva, Switzerland.

“When I joined ObsEva in January 2017, mission number one was a successful IPO to raise the money that we needed to develop our compounds,” explains Adams, who operates from the company’s Boston office. While ObsEva achieved “mission number one” shortly after his arrival, financing stills remains top-of-mind for ObsEva’s finance chief, who–regardless of travel–likes to make exercise a part of his daily routine. Asked if he’s opened a gym membership in Geneva, Adams tells us that his next spin class is one departure gate away.

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A career stint inside the corporate development realm at Visa – quickly came to mind for CFO Adam Meister when asked about those experiences he believed shaped his CFO mindset. Characterizing his time at Visa as more “a detour” rather than a straight line along his career- building trajectory, Meister recalls the career chapter as one where he had few direct reports or underlings and yet was tasked with motivating a team.

“You learn a lot about how to motivate and mobilize a team from a position of collaboration – but without a lot of direct authority,” says Meister, who believes the experience parallels the challenges many CFOs face to day as they step beyond their traditional realm of influence to build new relationships across the enterprise.

“There’s a real power in how you lead by example and how you show value to business owners and peers by helping them look and understand the economics of a business,” says Meister.

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Thanks to an entrepreneurial itch, Bal Bhullar will never be a conventional CFO. In fact, her CFO resume may be the only one ever to include three-wheel electric cars alongside vitamin supplements.

However, when it comes to finance milestones such as the $12 million in new financing on which Electra Meccanica closed last March, Bhullar is clearly marching in step with her professional peers.

This being said, when your CEO is a former race car driver and you’re building three-wheel vehicles using Chinese parts in western Canada, a CFO would be more likely to attract the interest of People magazine than Wall Street investors. Nevertheless, Wall Street has been listening, and, as for many CFOs along the front lines, Bhullar has found that communication and relationship-building remain top-of-mind.

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One of Brett White’s first assignments as a CFO was also one of his toughest. Back in 2001, with 10 years of career-building at Oracle Corp. behind him, White recalls eagerly stepping into his first CFO role–only to be handed a less than exhilarating task.

During a meeting in his first week on the job, White was welcomed by the CEO, who then asked him to pull together and execute a plan to eliminate one-third of the company’s workforce, or roughly 850 employees.

“It was a palm-to-the-forehead moment,” says White. “I realized that this was just not crunching numbers, and that the decisions that were required to be made would have an enormous impact on people’s lives.”

Fifteen years and four CFO tours of duty later, White received a call from a recruiter regarding a health and wellness business located down the coast.

“The business was a recurring revenue model and SaaS business, so it meant no more of this end-of-quarter fingernail-chewing stuff. It was all highly recurring with a group of A-list investors,” adds White, who arrived in Mindbody’s CFO office in 2016.

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At times, it must seem to Vijay Kumar that his 12-year tenure as a CFO has been spent not at one company but three. This must be a sense that most C-suite members at Sify Technologies likely experience in light of the company’s appetite for continuous reinvention.

Back in 2007, when Kumar arrived at the information and communications technology company, Sify was widely known as a consumer business–and one perhaps without the will or resources to attract business customers. As CFO, Kumar was part of a management team tasked with changing that perception both inside and outside of Sify’s existing world. More specifically, Kumar and his finance team were responsible for calculating and tracking the necessary capital expenditures that could provide the new business-to-business infrastructure that business customers would demand. Of course, no sooner was the infrastructure in place then Sify decided to super-size its business services menu, making it a bona fide provider of technology services. Looking forward, Kumar says that Sify’s latest innovation involves not so much its customer offerings but how customers buy its offerings by using outcome-based pricing. This is an approach that Kumar believes will empower Sify to open a new chapter of growth. 

“I have one primary agenda for the next 12 months: to ensure that the organization has enough support available across all of the functions to enable scale. I want to ensure that every part of the organization is in a position to enable scale and monetize market opportunities,” explains Kumar. 

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It wasn’t long after David Evans arrived inside the CFO office at Cardlytics that finance team members learned that their office surroundings were about to change. Originally domiciled in the less-trafficked–some would say “quiet” side–of the building, Evans wasted little time in relocating his team to more central (and arguably more social) office space.

“Physically speaking, if I’m advancing a mantra that my team is a trusted business partner, they need to be visible, and part of that involves the cadence and frequency with which they operate,” says Evans, who believes that finance team members at Cardlytics have perhaps a plus-size opportunity to play a strategic role in the business. It’s an opportunity that becomes more easily grasped when one considers the company’s unique lines of sight.

The Atlanta-based company partners with financial institutions (2,000 of them) to run their banking rewards programs that promote customer loyalty, providing Cardlytics with a coveted view into where and when consumers are spending their money. Meanwhile, that view over time has become pools of data, into which the Cardlytics finance team is today known for taking deep dives.  “Our team is very much involved with helping to assess those opportunities. And that means assessing the required resources and capital to go after the opportunities where we think that there could be pockets of outsized returns to the organization,” explains Evans. 

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Back in 2014, shortly after Arthur Levine first stepped into the CFO office at Sensus Healthcare, the fast-growing medical device company hit a sizable speed bump. A growing number of future Sensus customers were putting their purchases on hold as uncertainty around insurance reimbursements grew in relation to a review being conducted by The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

In order to quickly ease the company’s hefty appetite for cash, Levine and Sensus management executed a sizable layoff largely impacting the company’s sales team–while for the time being the healthcare company opted to leave its research and development team untouched.

Ultimately, reimbursements for Sensus offerings remained in place and product demand surged, allowing its 2015 revenues to jump 77 percent. Such news could not have been better timed for an initial public offering, a notion upon which Sensus acted in early 2016.

“We became one of the first companies to complete an IPO in 2016. Actually, we were the only Florida-based company to go public on a major exchange that year,” explains Levine, who had helped to restore the company’s sales function by green-lighting a flurry of new sales hires in 2015.

“I like the challenge of turning companies around,” says Levine, who quickly adds: “I also like periods of stability and a little less stress.” –Jack Sweeney 

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When it comes to newbie accountants, few clients are more coveted within the realm of public accounting than those preparing for an IPO. So it was back in the early 1990s, when Craig Nickerson found himself knee-deep in CPA envy after having served not one but five of his firm’s IPO-minded tech clients. Today, Nickerson credits his IPO client streak to having aligned himself with a well-connected senior partner widely known in Florida’s tech community for his IPO savvy.

Fast-forward to the late 1990s, and Nickerson is living in Beijing after having been tasked with helping to set up a Chinese manufacturing plant for a client company that he had joined as a controller. “It was the Wild West,” explains Nickerson, who recalls the added complexities of business dealings involving large amounts of cash. “As they said in China, an executed contract is just the start of a negotiation.”

Nickerson, who would later ascend the finance leadership ladder at a string of private equity–backed companies, observes that “anyone can be a good CFO when the numbers are up and to the right … but being a good CFO is about having the fortitude to stick with your investment thesis through good times and bad times.”

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