CFO THOUGHT LEADER

When Ted Myles is asked to reflect back on his early efforts to land a CFO role – he arguably sounds a little bit like a safe cracker: “Breaking into the c-suite that first time is always hard,” he explains. “I went in and would continue to get beat out by a sitting CFO,” says Myles, who comments: “Understandably – a board or a CEO is always going to look for someone who’s already proven in the seat.”

Having to date successfully decoded the c-suite’s entry formula not once but four times – the CFO seat at AMAG Pharmaceuticals is today filled by a seasoned CFO, who is routinely raising the bar for himself as well as AMAG’s finance team.

This past January – six days into the new year – AMAG preannounced its 2019 earnings at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco – an energetic gathering where the bio pharmaceutical crowd traditionally kicks off the new year with some blatant chest beating.

“Our accounting team had about six total calendar days to provide us with a tight fix on what the accounting numbers were,” recalls Myles.

“Fast forward six weeks after we got through an audit and the numbers were pretty much exactly what we announced six weeks earlier, ” explains AMAG’s finance leader, while exhibiting a little extra pride in the biotech firm’s fast and accurate close capabilities. At AMAG, apparently, the ease with which numbers are accessed is as worthy of note as the numbers themselves. – Jack Sweeney 

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From the moment Chris Whitfield stepped into the CFO office at Mana Nutrition, it was clear to him that various snags in the organization’s information flows were keeping the not-for-profit’s board members on edge. To remedy the situation, Whitefield reformulated the not-for-profit’s approach to reporting, beginning with a beefier balance sheet instead of the slimmed down Statement of Financial Position on which Mana had relied to date.

“It was clear to me that we had to begin reporting on our performance back to a pretty savvy board of directors just as any for-profit company would,” says Whitefield, who also sought to give the board greater visibility into the ebb and flow of the not-for profit’s working capital. “I realized that we could not behave like a not-for-profit that relied on giving and charitable donations, but instead had to rely on our own wits and ability to raise capital through beneficial investment or normal credit channels,” Whitefield explains.

After a few tense meetings–where some pointed questions lingered–Whitefield began to adopt the tools needed to routinely output the reports required to satisfy Mana’s board and at the same time draw the more capital-intensive parts of the organization closer to his finance team.

“We now plan to routinely engage our operations management in the budgeting process,” explains Whitefield, who says that Mana’s operations people began collaborating more closely with finance a year ago, when the organization adopted a cost center reporting process. –Jack Sweeney

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It’s unlikely that this is the first sentence ever to include the phrase “even-keeled” alongside the name Robin Gantt, but this is a pairing that bears repeating here to reveal not only an obvious character trait of our latest guest, but also one that frequently sets apart CFO leadership at large.

Gantt, already a seasoned finance leader, arrives at Northwest Pipe as an advisor to the CEO, who is seeking to better align finance with the steel pipe manufacturer’s overall strategy. We don’t learn all of what needs to get done, but Gantt’s subsequent advance to the CFO office makes clear that the alignment is being achieved as the organization responds and is placed on a more even keel.

Listeners will enjoy hearing Gantt offer a short, concise overview of the uncommon business of manufacturing steel pipe that ranges from 2 feet to 13 feet in diameter. Meanwhile, her modest appraisal of both her early career and communication abilities informs finance newcomers that they too can learn and achieve along the finance career track.

Along the way, Gantt refuses to sugarcoat the inbred challenges that the business faces. “This is a very heavy working capital-intensive business, with a long cash flow cycle. Anyone who works with governments and municipalities knows that you’ll get paid, but sometimes it can be quite a while,” she explains. Just like the pipe Northwest manufacturers, Gantt’s words run deep beneath the surface. — Jack Sweeney 

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When Matt Fahy identifies the opportunities that have punctuated his finance career, he credits subscription revenue models as having played a recurring role along the trajectory that has led to multiple CFO tours of duty. For Fahy, it all began with a move to New York City, where he was soon serving one of the media world's most coveted clients: the Newhouse family (owners of a string of newspapers and Condé Nast publishing).

"Being a private, family-owned business, their concerns were really about safeguarding their assets and monitoring their taxes," explains Fahy, whose lines of sight into the house of Newhouse were bestowed upon him by his employer, Paul Scherer & Company, a boutique New York CPA firm. Fahy would continue to serve media clients when, in the mid-1990s, he jumped to KPMG's Information, Communications, and Entertainment (ICE) practice, where he acquired an entrepreneurial itch and soon entered the world of dotcom start-ups. He would serve as CFO for Public Access Technologies and QualityClick.com, Inc., before logging a lengthy CFO tenure at AgilQuest, a workplace management SaaS software company.

It was at AgilQuest that Fahy would fine-tune his approach to customer-centric finance by standardizing the collaborative cross-functional practices that today underpin the customer-serving platform that many call "customer success." ¤

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Before joining Goldman Sachs back in the late 1980s, Mark Lee was a finance manager at Hewlett-Packard Co. Today, Lee fondly recalls being mentored by a senior controller while situated deep inside the technology behemoth's computer support division. The finance executive, explains Lee, viewed controllership as a strategic role where executives could acquire and build their leadership skills that could be applied elsewhere. "He told me that his next job could be the head of marketing," explains Lee, who credits his early mentor for outfitting his finance mind-set with a wide lens rather than a narrow one.

After four years inside an HP cubicle, he set off on a finance adventure by entering the investment banking world via a seven -year tour of duty with Goldman Sachs in New York. While the banking chapter of Lee's long finance career is the most robust of his career book (which is nearly 20 years thick), it is perhaps not the most intriguing. This designation arguably belongs to Forge Global where he and his finance team are focused on cultivating a fresh class of investors outside the traditional venture capital ecosystem. To be clear, Forge is one of a number of trading platforms that help employees sell their shares in pre-IPO companies. It's no secret that the number of IPO delays has been steadily growing as venture firms keep funneling more money into large private companies as they seek bigger payoffs down the road.

As more “unicorns” supposedly worth billions of dollars—at least on paper—delay going public, Mark Lee and his team are seeking to ease an appetite for liquidity among Silicon Valley's IPO-hungry entrepreneurial rank-and-file. It's an opportunity where customer retention and talent retention are one in the same, and one that places Forge's finance team along the outer reaches of the finance function's evolutionary path.

When asked about his arrival at Dermira, CFO Andrew Guggenhime explains: "I was the 22nd employee, and today we have over 300."

Along the way, the company executed an IPO, reached a market value of $1 billion, received FDA approval for its first medication (last June), and brought the offering to market (last October). Not bad for a five-year CFO sprint into the land of leading-edge medical dermatology.

Looking back, Guggenhime says: "When I joined Dermira, we had one other person on the finance team. We had no employees on our legal team. We had no employees on our IT team. And those were functions for which I was responsible. So we had to build those teams and begin by bringing in the leaders and building those capabilities so that we could not only serve the growing needs of the company internally, but also satisfy our obligations as a public company."

Today, with his finance team in place, Guggenhime prefers to look forward as he and his team awaits the "readouts" from different clinical evaluations. "Preparing the organization for the readouts regardless of the outcome is an important task for us," says Guggenhime, whose remarks seldom stray far from the topic of raising capital. "We have to access capital to continue to execute on our strategy, to continue to fulfill the vision of the company, and to continue to build the portfolio and to develop the treatments that will benefit patients," says employee number 22. –Jack Sweeney

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There was a time when Glynis Bryan imagined herself someday retiring from Ryder System, Inc.—a company she entered as an intern and would later exit as a senior vice president. Along the way, she credits the transportation logistics giant with having exposed her to complex M&A transactions and innovative capital structures—two areas that she believes have made a hefty contribution to her post-Ryder success as a CFO. However, the Ryder experience she recalls most fondly was inside the FP&A function at what was her first destination on a finance career journey and one that has served her well at Insight Enterprises, Inc. There, shortly after being appointed CFO in 2007, she energized her team's FP&A ambitions and set a course that would forever transform the technology services company's notion of strategic finance. "I think of the FP&A function as being the road map within the finance function that helps each one of the senior leaders across the organization by supplying them with tools and actionable data that they can use to see where the business is going," she observes. Meanwhile, in 2012, Insight overhauled its internal systems, establishing a single platform from which to integrate acquisitions and satisfy its appetite for growth and helping the company to better unite its North American and Asia-Pacific operations. It's a platform that Bryan has gotten to know well as she routinely weighs the obstacles and advantages that future merger partners may bestow. 

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Near the end of our discussion with CFO Wilco Groenhuysen, he recommends a book while confiding:  "It's not a great book—but it has a big lesson."

"Opportunities exist for only for a short time. So when you see an opportunity, grab it and make the best of it," says Groenhuysen, revealing the big lesson and adding perhaps a surprise ending to a talk that up until his book recommendation appeared to chart the career path of yet another graduate from the CFO school of strict discipline and resolve.

But wait! There were other clues along the way that Groenhuysen was more a CFO of his own making than a familiar reproduction. Certainly, the fact that his professional life spans three continents should have tipped us off. Also, how many finance leaders would ascend to the top of a manufacturing behemoth (Philips NA) only to forfeit the comfort of hard-earned industry knowledge to land fleet of foot inside the always-changing realm of biotech?

Asked to explain how he addresses the difference between the two realms, Groenhuysen says, "Driving a car really isn't that difficult. Sometimes the steering wheel is on the left side of the car, sometimes it's on the right side of the car. It's really the challenge, and here at Novocure, it's the commitment to helping patients."  And no one doubts that Novocure's CFO likes a challenge. While CFO of Philips Thailand, Groenhuysen challenged himself to achieve a conversational level with the Thai language—one of the few milestones that the finance leader admits with a degree of frustration that he may not have reached.

Still, even with a career as sprawling and experience-rich as Groenhuysen's, one senses that the latest chapter may offer the most startling lessons yet for the Dutch-born CFO, who these days seems to enjoy educating others about science as much as about financials. Certainly, explaining how alternating electric fields can disrupt cancer cell division and cause cancer cell death is an altogether different opportunity than explicating the virtues of ultra-HD televisions. – Jack Sweeney

Of all the finance milestones that CFO Mike Myshrall uses to illustrate Cyren's appetite for success, perhaps few are more enlightening than the one involving private equity titan Warburg Pincus. Two years ago, Warburg Pincus offered to buy out Cyren shareholders at a 35 percent premium over the current price of their shares. However, unwilling to have the firm forfeit its publicly owned shares entirely, Cyren management structured the deal so that Warburg would be eligible to acquire only up to 75 percent of Cyren's outstanding shares.

Surprisingly, Warburg found itself battling to capture half of the available shares despite the hefty premium. In the end, the PE firm ended up with only 52 percent of outstanding shares.

"Many shareholders chose to stay in the company and ride it with Warburg so that they could potentially get an even bigger return down the road if the company were to go fully private or if we were to sell to a larger company through an acquisition," explains Myshrall, who describes the transaction's structure as being "quite elegant."

For his part, Myshrall advanced down the business development path before jumping into the ranks of finance leaders. However, before there was a leap upward in finance there was a sojourn inside the electrical engineering realm and an MBA from Harvard Business School—both of which Myshrall today credits with having helped point the way down the  finance leadership path. 

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Sometime in the next three to six months, Syngenta AG, a Swiss-based agribusiness company, is expecting to welcome a clan of ambitious offspring. Months, even years in the making, these fruit from a forward-looking group are born from a cross-functional team—one tasked with helping the $13.5 billion enterprise correctly measure its expansive sustainability initiatives.

To be clear, the aforementioned "offspring" are new metrics, the output of an ambitious metrics "refresh" triggered in part by the firm's determination to routinely evaluate the numbers intended to provide Syngenta management as well stakeholders with a clear-eyed view of its sustainability efforts.

"It's all good and well establishing a new metric, but if you can't measure and monitor it, then it has no value in any shape or form," explains Syngenta CFO Mark Patrick, who first mentioned the sustainability "refresh" when asked about metrics that had become increasingly top-of-mind for finance—but were clearly "nonfinancial" or beyond the realm of traditional finance.

While Patrick said that he was reluctant to discuss the yet-to-be-released metrics, he suggests that when it comes to finance, the innovation is not what the metrics measure but how they came to be—and how Patrick's finance team operated as part of a larger cross-functional effort where finance partnered with the sustainability group and the company at large.

"We're actually the custodians of value, and it's about how do we work with those within those cross-functional teams to ensure that we're moving down the right path and investing in the things that are going to give us the greatest chance for success tomorrow. And this has to be a relationship built on trust," he explains.

This trust, according to Patrick, is now being enriched by finance as it seeks to make metrics more visible across the organization and allow individual employees to measure how their work is bringing benefits to the company and contributing to its success.

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