Michael Rosen’s finance career began inside the loan department of middle market lender Union Bank (now MUFG Union), when—after completing an 18-month training program—the 23 -year-old was provided with a stack of business cards bearing the title “Loan Officer.” “At the time, being a loan officer meant a great many things. You would be responsible for most of your clients’ needs, as well as bringing in new business for the bank,” remembers Rosen, who today credits the program’s scope with allowi...
Oct 17, 2021•47 min
Brett and Jack discuss the marriage of fintech and human capital management, and the of the growing mandate for employee success. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Sameer Ralhan of the Chemours Company, CFO Robert Alvarez of Big Commerce, CFO Laurence Capone of Pipedrive.
Oct 16, 2021•52 min
When Thomas Kramer recalls his decision to leave his job with a prestigious consulting firm to start up a tech firm in the final hours of the dotcom boom, he doesn’t hesitate to underscore his decision’s questionable timing. “This was when I realized that I would be getting out of consulting at what potentially would have been the worst possible point in time. Everyone could see that the Internet boom was closing, and smart people do what smart people do: They run in the other direction,” recall...
Oct 13, 2021•37 min
In the wake of an economic downturn, a company’s door of opportunity swings open to a finance up-and-comer. This is a familiar early career chapter for many finance leaders, and few have revealed to us the uncertainty surrounding the moment better than Apptio CFO Kurt Shintaffer “The CEO came to me and said, ‘Do you think that you have what it takes?’ I said, ‘Well, sure!,’ without really knowing what I was signing up for,” explains Shintaffer, who back in 2002 was a senior finance executive for...
Oct 10, 2021•42 min
Twenty years ago, when Roy Simmons first joined General Electric Company as a rookie financial analyst, it likely would have been difficult to imagine that he would someday occupy the CFO office of GE Lighting. Of course, occupying the CFO office of “GE Lighting, a Savant company” would have required the young analyst to be endowed with not just imagination – but a crystal ball. This being said, in 2019, when a more seasoned Simmons joined the former GE business (now owned by Savant Systems, Inc...
Oct 06, 2021•55 min
It was after he had worked 3 years as an investment analyst with Bear Stearns and spent more than 2 years inside the corporate strategy bullpen of The Walt Disney Company that Craig Abrahams decided to head to business school. However, Abrahams says that unlike many of his future classmates, he had made up his mind that hedge funds, investment banks, and strategy consulting firms would not be on his preferred menu of postgraduation career opportunities. “I wanted an opportunity to work really ha...
Oct 03, 2021•42 min
Unlike many of the up-and-comers who populate the corridors of The Chemours Company, CFO Sameer Ralhan spent the balance of his career building years with the company inside its manufacturing plants. It was there where Ralhan says that he observed everyday executives making decisions that routinely impacted the business, and it was there where his M&A activities allowed him to imagine new avenues for value creation. Says Ralhan: “The heart of this company beats at the plants.” Still, the man...
Sep 29, 2021•50 min
It was a complicated transaction that Ingersoll Rand’s then-CEO Mike Lamach challenged his finance and operations people to address by “turning over every rock in the company” to nullify the possibility of unforeseen snags. Recalls Chris Kuehn, who at the time served as Ingersoll Rand’s chief accounting officer: “I remember Mike coming back and telling us that he had never been through an IPO in his career, but this transaction was likely going to be the closest he ever got to one.” Today, Kuehn...
Sep 26, 2021•42 min
When Pramod Iyengar returned to school after working for several years as a manufacturing engineer with United Technologies, he was ready to change careers. The young engineer headed back to the University of Michigan, where as an undergraduate he had earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering. However, this time he had a business degree in mind Post graduation with an MBA in hand, Iyengar landed at Intel Corp., where he had the opportunity to join a “very efficient and very well-structured finance...
Sep 22, 2021•51 min
Back in 2014, when Akash Palkhiwala was first approached to serve as treasurer of wireless technology company Qualcomm, the company’s future CFO was uncertain as to what the role of a treasurer might actually entail. “I’m not making this up: I did a Google search on what a treasurer does,” explains Palkhiwala, who recalls that the approaching retirement of the firm’s incumbent treasurer had led then-CFO George Davis to gauge Palkhiwala’s interest in the role. Palkhiwala had first joined Qualcomm...
Sep 19, 2021•40 min
Featuring FP&A Insights & Commentary from Planning Aces: Ian Charles, CFO, Flexe, Beth Clymer, CFO, Job Case, Mark Shifke, CFO, Billtrust, Mike Rasic, CFO, Synapse.
Sep 17, 2021•40 min
Back in 2011, when Radiant Systems was acquired by NCR Corporation, a door swung open for Radiant Systems controller Geoff Brannon, who received an invitation to join NCR’s plus-size FP&A function as a finance director. The appointment had been made possible by a former Radiant boss who had stepped into a divisional CFO role shortly after the acquisition’s completion. “He took a bet on me,” recalls Brannon, who says that the former boss knew his skillset well and had witnessed firsthand “a w...
Sep 15, 2021•44 min
Back in the early 1990s, Laurence Capone was a Paris-based public accountant serving a distinguished list of oil and gas industry clients when she heard about an audit assignment unlike any that she had taken on before. It turned out that a manufacturer of cotton fabrics had engaged Capone’s firm to help to audit the operations of its subsidiaries located in central Africa. As a team was being assembled for the client engagement, Capone did not hesitate to express her interest and shortly found ...
Sep 12, 2021•41 min
It was little more than 6 months after Matthias Tillmann first joined Trivago—and shortly after the travel booking company’s December 2016 IPO—when the company’s future CFO decided to step away from his senior IR role in order to head up Trivago’s creative production function. However, the jump to the creative side was not triggered by a sudden creative itch on Tillmann’s part. Instead, he was determined to extract new ROI insights from Trivago’s television advertising dollars, the very allocati...
Sep 08, 2021•37 min
In front of the restaurant’s dozen or more cash registers, customers were standing six or seven deep when Brice Hill raised his voice and began instructing the hungry mall shoppers to immediately exit the store. “No one listened to a single word I said,” says Hill, who opens our discussion by transporting us back to the mid-1980s, when as a teenage recent graduate of McDonald’s management training program he was given a surprise leadership test. Having made a trip to the mall for some holiday sh...
Sep 05, 2021•42 min
Brett and Jack discuss the highs and lows of executive compensation, and why corporate culture may trump all. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Gregg Clevenger of LiveVox, CFO Charles Freund of FLEETCOR and CFO Jill Klindt of Workiva.
Sep 03, 2021•42 min
Having previously held a succession of finance leadership roles inside Chicago’s ever vibrant financial services sector, Vicki Dudley was perhaps more surprised than anyone to find herself accepting a CFO position with Yancey Bros. Co. of Atlanta, the oldest Caterpillar dealer in the country. Nevertheless, the job hop drew Dudley into a world of opportunity that she credits with having helped to open the door to her latest career chapter as CFO of TTX, the largest railcar provider in North Ameri...
Sep 01, 2021•49 min
When Charles Freund was named CFO of FLEETCOR in 2020 – his arrival in the c-suite became the latest chapter of a varied and lengthy career journey that paralleled the rise of the $2.6 billion fintech. Accepting a position in FLEETCOR’s corporate development department, Freund joined the firm in the year 2000 when it was generating roughly only $30 million in annual sales and struggling to manage its cash flows. “On two separate occasions, the corporate controller called me and said, ‘Charles, I...
Aug 29, 2021•46 min
Jill Klindt recalls that back in 2008, when she joined Workiva, the software start-up was somewhat removed from the career path that she had envisioned for herself. “It wasn’t that obvious to me at first, and it wasn’t what I was looking for,” explains Klindt, who says that at the time, the Ames, Iowa, company employed six to eight people. Once on board, Klindt found that her accounting skills and willingness to problem-solve quickly made her a go-to executive along the entrepreneurial byways th...
Aug 25, 2021•41 min
Joe Wolk was about 5 years into his 23-year career with Johnson & Johnson when he was encouraged to take a manufacturing operations position at a newly acquired J&J company in Vacaville, California. One hot July day, Wolk recalls, he and his wife drove up to Vacaville to visit the plant, where he ended up taking a seat across from the newly acquired company’s plant manager. As one of Vacaville’s initial J&J transplants, the young finance executive sensed that his arrival was being vi...
Aug 22, 2021•46 min
When Greg Saunders tells us that “having patience” was perhaps the quality that most contributed to his first appointment as a CFO back in the early 1990s, we wonder how many additional years a more impatient Saunders (then only 32) may have needed before stepping into the CFO office. Of course, then again, a railcar leasing and repair business might not have been the first choice of many aspiring Bay Area CFOs, who as a group have for decades preferred to satisfy their C-suite ambitions via the...
Aug 18, 2021•45 min
Back in the early 2000s, the use of videoconferencing to conduct job interviews remained rather rare in most parts of the world—and India was no different. What made Manish Dugar’s interview experience still rarer was the fact he had participated in 18 different video calls over a period of 3 months for a single job opportunity. Says Dugar: “Over that span of interviews, I became almost as knowledgeable about IT services as any professional in that sector.” Nonetheless, Dugar recalls, he had som...
Aug 15, 2021•56 min
This Episode Features FP&A Insights & Commentary from: Ross Tennenbaum, CFO Avalara Waifa Chau, CFO, Nylas Brad Kinnish, CFO, Aryaka
Aug 13, 2021•44 min
“Fire the auditor!” Three words that Quantum CFO Mike Dodson vowed would never cross his lips were now being spoken aloud by Quantum’s board. “Fire these guys!” was the message that Dodson received after weeks of personally rejecting the notion. “We had been delisted, we were in the middle of a multiyear restatement, and there were lender issues,” recalls Dodson, listing the action items that needed to be addressed to regain credibility with Quantum’s investors and lenders. “In the middle of all...
Aug 11, 2021•54 min
Back in 2001, after Scott Dussault had been named CFO of StorageNetworks, it’s unlikely that the 30-year-old finance leader was popping any champagne corks. The company’s management had offered him the position when its previous CFO had vacated the office to serve as CEO in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble collapse. “The ride up the roller coaster was exhilarating—the ride down was educational,” explains Dussault, who had joined the firm as a controller in 1999 and been promoted to vice presid...
Aug 08, 2021•46 min
The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s is as good a place in time as any for Gregg Clevenger to use to begin explaining the mix of professional and personal circumstances that made Rochester, New York, his port of entry into the CFO office. At the time, Clevenger recalls, he was a vice president for Goldman’s Sach’s media entertainment and technology group in Singapore and observed $100 million of recently raised funding “go up in smoke.” Having been recruited to join Goldman while oversea...
Aug 04, 2021•49 min
Lovers of tortilla chips will swear that the only true ones are made with corn (and never wheat) and that when it comes to sourcing them, the highest-yielding kernel of corn comes from West Texas. Or so explains Joe Euteneuer, who exited an auditor position with Price Waterhouse in the mid-1980s to join a snack-making entrepreneur in a quest to lower the cost of tortilla production—a coveted advantage in what was quickly becoming a highly competitive market. “I flew to West Texas and bought corn...
Aug 01, 2021•47 min
Brett and Jack discuss the power of the mission, the CEO return-to-work agenda and covid’s delta variant backlash. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Beth Clymer of Jobcase, CFO Todd McElhatton of Zuora and CFO Scott Dussault of Workhuman
Jul 31, 2021•37 min
When Melissa Ballenger stepped into a deputy CFO role for TD Bank’s U.S. subsidiary back in 2011, she did so knowing that she had been recruited to be a change agent. Having recently generated business headlines from acquiring two sizable banks in the U.S., TD Bank had U.S. expansion plans that were hardly a secret. “A lot of competitor banks in the U.S. were still back on their heels at the time from credit concerns, capital considerations, and other things like that, and TD had the opportunity...
Jul 28, 2021•40 min
It was one of the last pieces of advice that CFO Beth Clymer left us with—an item that we snagged with one of our favorite questions: What advice do you have for new CFOs? Her reply—“Don’t skimp on resources”—at first seemed trite, but a groundswell of words shortly followed. “Too often, CFOs will say, ‘I don’t need that extra analyst’ or ‘I don’t need an extra accounting manager.’ But don’t skimp on resources. The impact that a strong finance organization can have throughout the business is mas...
Jul 25, 2021•47 min
