The CFO Playbook

Having technical expertise is important, but successful CFOs will tell you that you must go beyond this, to take a step back to see the larger picture. How can you position yourself to solve problems your company is facing?

To do this, you must first learn the business. 

For Ken MacAskill, it’s a mindset he wishes he could have learned sooner in his 20-year career working with emerging and high-growth companies. Over his career, he held CFO positions at five companies before landing as CFO of tech company Snyk in 2019.

Understanding the business that you’re in takes patience, according to Ken. Don’t rush the process. He describes his journey as an evolution. With each project, he learned something new from it and used it to inform how to approach the next. Learn not only your own role, but also the role of others, and how they intersect on a large scale.

This growth mentality has been integral to Ken’s development over the course of his career, and it’s one he encourages the emerging CFO to keep in mind.

On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Ken shares his mindset shift, expertise on methodology to achieving success as a CFO, and what to look at when funding growth in the business.

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Joel Stephens’ career at Lyst started in 2015, when the fashion shopping app and website was still a startup and he was its financial controller. Fast forward to 2021, and Joel is now VP2, leading three teams in the finance department. He recently finished heading up the financial part of an $85 million pre-IPO round.

Joel has found several strategies that help him get the best from his team. He encourages them to use the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) framework — a concept he learned from the book “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. This encourages everyone to focus on the larger picture, rather than getting lost in the details from the beginning. 

In this episode of The CFO Playbook, Joel explains how his time at Lyst has shaped his leadership style, how the models he used to fundraise during the pre-IPO round were changed by the pandemic, and some of his favorite goal-setting methodologies.

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COVID-19 created unique challenges across a range of industries. 

Managers and business leaders had the difficult task of finding ways to keep employees motivated amidst all the uncertainty and new ways of working. 

Motivation wasn’t in short supply for Rahul Goel and his team. Moglix, the B2B e-commerce company where Rahul is Vice President of Finance, sells oxygen concentrators and PPE among other medical and industrial supplies. 

Knowing that the company provided important medical equipment to fight the pandemic was a great source of motivation for his team and employees across the Asia-based company. 

Apart from motivating a team, Rahul says being fearless and transparent are key traits when you’re managing people. 

On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Rahul shares insights into how technology and automation can streamline processes, and why you should look beyond financial KPIs. 

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After starting his career as a computer programmer, Ronald Hohauser stumbled on a chance to join the entertainment industry, and was excited by the opportunities it presented. 

In 2004, Ron became Senior Vice President of Finance and Operations at Marvel Studios. He helped the studio transition from licensing its products to independently turning the then-niche comic book character Iron Man into a superhero icon — with the help of Robert Downey Jr., of course.

Ron is now the CFO of Legendary Entertainment, the studio responsible for blockbusters like the “Jurassic World” franchise and 2021’s “Godzilla vs. Kong.” 

As Ron worked his way up the ladder in the entertainment industry, he learned that a CFO doesn’t have to do all the work themselves: in fact, they shouldn’t. Ron has got to a place where he’s comfortable relying on his team members, and mentoring emerging financial leaders is a big source of pride for him.

In this episode of The CFO Playbook, Ron talks about how he’s used tough times as learning opportunities, how and why he has to accept that some things are outside his control, and why he thinks being personally connected to your team is one of the greatest assets of a CFO.

Connect with Ron on LinkedIn.

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Catherine Birkett’s career as a CFO started in 2004, when she was promoted into the position at the telecommunications company Interoute. Looking back, she says she sometimes had to struggle to keep her head above water while addressing the large challenges the company was facing. 

But Catherine pushed forward, and she now attributes her success as a CFO to these experiences. She sees past mistakes and hardships as ultimately putting her on a path to growth. 

After becoming intimately familiar with her own strengths and weaknesses, Catherine now feels comfortable leading a finance team through tough spots and helping other people grow. At GoCardless, where she has worked as the CFO since January 2019, she was able to take the reins during the COVID-19 pandemic and keep the business-to-business banking service on a growth trajectory as its scope expands. 

In this episode of The CFO Playbook, Catherine details how she grew from tough experiences early in her CFO career, how she maintained control of GoCardless’ financial growth during a global pandemic and recession and how to balance risk taking and flexibility with keeping your company in line to achieve its ultimate vision.

Connect with Catherine on LinkedIn.

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When Sharon Virag became Chief Accounting Officer of customer service software company Genesys, she had already worked for Fortune 500 companies including General Electric, and served as CFO for NeoGenomics Laboratories.

But for Sharon, who loves building out company infrastructure, working with an emerging organization like Genesys was just as intriguing and exciting. 

With her help, the company has grown and hit financial milestones. Highlights include navigating new regulations and financial reporting requirements, and building strong, diverse teams that work in lockstep with one another.

Sharon believes that working on your leadership habits is one of the most important things you can do as a financial chief. This means knowing when — and how — to speak your mind, and figuring out how to delegate tasks to your team, so you can let go of some of the details and see the full scope of the company’s needs. 

On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Sharon talks about her strategy for being a flexible leader, when to think big picture, and how to work with the systems you have to manage your company’s finances with ease and efficiency.

Connect with Sharon on LinkedIn. 

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Maddy Devine traded consulting with multinational corporations for building startup finance teams from the ground up — and she’s never looked back.

Her first finance job was consulting for Accenture, and she’s now VP of Finance at virtual conference software company Bevy.

Maddy believes that the two key components of building a finance department that fuels business growth are the tech and the people. Not necessarily in that order.

Maddy looks for people who share the belief that finance should be about more than making sure what’s going out is balanced out by what’s coming in. Her team outsources that work, so they can focus on strategizing.

On the tech side, Maddy won’t settle for a tool that can’t scale along with the business. Researching and implementing software is a significant commitment of time and energy, so you need to make sure you’re not going to outgrow your investment within a few months.

On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Maddy explains which part of the function startup finance leaders need to tackle first, how to find a balance between protecting your budget and empowering departments on the business end, and the skills she looks for in her team.

Connect with Maddy on LinkedIn.

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When Ken Goldman became CFO of Yahoo in 2012, he had more experience in business administration than accounting. But he used his background to his advantage, approaching the CFO role from a globalist perspective. 

To Ken, the relationship between the CEO and CFO of a company is vital to its success. A CFO’s job is to provide objective counsel to the CEO, who can use that information to make informed decisions about a company’s future. 

Ken values having positive relationships with everyone in the company, including the board members and the engineering and accounting teams. A strong, company-wide rapport encourages collaboration in administrative and accounting tasks, and ensures everything runs smoothly. 

In this episode of The CFO Playbook, Ken encourages people to take a look at CFO roles even if they don’t have a background in accounting, and discusses the importance of software system management, maintaining relationships with activist investors, and work-life balance.

Connect with Ken on LinkedIn.

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Mark Pettit joined London-based venture capital firm Connect Ventures in 2016 as Head of Finance. Earlier this year, he was made CFO, and sees his new job as assisting the partners in making strong financial and investment decisions, putting the firm on the front line of SaaS, fintech and digital health.

“My role was to come in and take as much of that finance slack away from the partners [as possible] so they can focus on the areas where they can make a big difference,” Mark says.

One of his first missions has been driving the team toward using data management software that helps create a more reliable source of truth, which the entire firm can look at when making decisions. Mark has also helped create a KPI framework which Connect Ventures can use when deciding which early stage startups to invest in. 

On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Mark lays out how he manages day-to-day workflow as a CFO, the challenges of growing a small venture capital firm’s finance team, and his outlook on the future of remote work.

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn.

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Don Dixon has held finance positions in startups and established organizations, been through acquisitions and IPOs, and is now CFO at DataStax. In his experience, rising to the CFO position requires understanding something much more complicated than finance: people.

Once you’re at that executive position, managing numbers is a smaller part of your daily job than managing the people on your team.

Don is so committed to empowering the people in the finance department that he doesn’t even think of it as managing. 

He sees his role as closer to coaching. Instead of trying to mold each person to fit DataStax, he helps them improve their all-round skill sets so that they can achieve their career goals.

Even if that means employees end up leaving for a higher position the organization can’t currently offer, Don knows he’s done his job.

On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Don discusses how to help the finance department feel connected to customers and how to give everyone on the team just the right amount of transparency. He also explains why your IPO delivery team should be as small as possible.

Connect with Don on LinkedIn.

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