Unlike many of his finance leader peers, Jean Lavigueur has little difficulty in identifying where and when his path to the CFO office began. It was back in the early to mid-1990s, he recalls, when—after he had spent nearly 10 years with PwC—a charismatic entrepreneur client named Louis Têtu convinced him to join his supply chain start-up. Although this company was soon thereafter sold to Baan, Têtu and Lavigueur found that they had unmistakable chemistry—or at least this is what we must assume,...
Jan 09, 2022•47 min
When it came time for Jen Herdler to get back into the workforce, she signed up for a refresher course in financial modeling through a weeklong classroom experience in lower Manhattan. There she would become reacquainted with an old friend: Excel. However, her fellow classmates were another matter. “I’ll never forget that first day when I walked into the classroom and discovered that everyone was at least 20 years younger than me—I felt so uncomfortable and out of my element,” recalls Herdler, a...
Jan 05, 2022•47 min
Like many of his finance leader peers, Pete Mariani credits a senior operational role with helping him to plant both feet on the path to CFO office. However, unlike many of his peers, Mariani found his transformational role to be in Japan. Back in 1998, he was a director of finance for Guidant, a maker of cardiovascular medical products that was looking to grow its footprint in a number of markets offshore—including Japan, where it had recently acquired one of its distributor partners. However, ...
Jan 02, 2022•58 min
About Episodes Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode The podcast featuring finance leaders driving change within their organizations. All Episodes 728: The Courage of Your Convictions | Joe Wolk, CFO, Johnson & Johnson 728: The Courage of Your Convictions | Joe Wolk, CFO, Johnson & Johnson Aug 22, 2021 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 comp...
Dec 31, 2021•45 min
Steve and Jack discuss how building trust may be an FP&A professional’s greatest skillset. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Puneet Pamnani of KORE Wireless, CFO Robert Alvarez of BigCommerce & CFO Dave Bernhardt of SentinelOne.
Dec 29, 2021•41 min
Holiday Replay: When it comes time for Harmit Singh to brief Levi Strauss & Co.’s management team regarding the latest performance results, Levi’s CFO will often share a briefing document that features a front page bearing the heading “What’s Working and What’s Not.” “It’s more difficult to understand what’s not working, and it’s the ‘What’s not’ that helps us to determine the areas on which we have to focus to take the business to the next level,” explains Singh, who notes that the “front p...
Dec 26, 2021•45 min
When CFO Tania Secor looks back at the early years of her finance career, she can’t help but revisit her decision to accept a position with the McGraw-Hill Companies. For a half-dozen years, Secor had been entrenched in the private equity world, advising portfolio companies on different growth strategies and helping to complete the acquisition of a string of middle-market firms. Her new role at McGraw-Hill would not only leverage her M&A experience but also situate her within the corporate f...
Dec 22, 2021•47 min
When CFO Scott Walker has considered new career opportunities in the past, only a small subset of growth businesses have been able to meet all of his desired criteria. Very often the firms had achieved product market fit and successfully raised a number of rounds of funding, but to Walker they were just still too young. Perhaps the management was being reshuffled or the operations were too fragmented, and it would become clear to Walker that the company was not yet ready to find its “cadence.” T...
Dec 19, 2021•54 min
Brett and Jack weigh-in on Zoom firing squads, the move to hybrid workplaces and hiring’s enormous impact on your company’s funnel. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Jim Morgan of CallRail, CFO Amol Chaubal of Waters Corporation and CFO Justin Judd of BanbooHR.
Dec 17, 2021•37 min
When it comes to FP&A data, WP Engine CFO David Brolsma is an open book. “We make a data visualization tool called ‘Looker’ available to all of our employees,” reports the veteran tech executive. “We’re an open book company, so all employees can see almost all of the same performance data points that I see.” At the Austin-based start-up that provides developer-centric WordPress products for companies and agencies of all sizes, Brolsma and his extended team keep their eyes on the crucial metr...
Dec 15, 2021•48 min
How should a textbook rental company respond when it discovers that Amazon has just introduced offerings that will make the giant retailer its newest and biggest competitor? If it’s 2013 and the company is Chegg, Inc., management found a conference room and locked itself inside not for hours but for days and weeks, according to Dave Bernhardt, who sat alongside the company’s CFO and other operations leaders as they together considered some of the grim realities of having Amazon as a competitor. ...
Dec 12, 2021•46 min
Waters Corporation CFO Amol Chaubal has cracked the code on the strategic CFO role, and he’s willing to share a snapshot of his formula for success. “A lot of companies focus on data and the insights coming out of that data,” reveals Chaubal, who amassed finance leadership experience in consumer products, pharma, and energy before joining Waters Corporation—a publicly listed analytical Laboratory instrument and software company—earlier this year. “Our focus is a few steps ahead. We say that data...
Dec 08, 2021•48 min
Ten years ago, when Adobe management finally made up its mind to enter the software-as-a-service (SaaS) realm and become part of the mass migration from selling boxed software to selling its software offerings via subscription, Adobe’s migratory undertaking might well have been compared to that of the arctic tern. With by far the longest such treks known in the animal kingdom, the arctic tern has one of the most widely followed migrations on the planet—and such would be the case for Adobe, whose...
Dec 05, 2021•56 min
Start early, stay late, be prepared, and don’t shy away from the street-fight environments surrounding start-up companies. These methods have helped Michael Levine to bound up an unconventional leadership ladder en route to the CFO office of Payoneer, the global B2B digital commerce company that he helped to take public in June of this year via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). According to Levine, Payoneer’s decision to go with a SPAC rather than a traditional IPO was influenced by ...
Dec 01, 2021•50 min
During 2018, the very year Craig Foster joined Bright Machines, the San Francisco–based company was spun out from contract manufacturing firm Flex, raised a headline-grabbing $179 million in Series A funding, and shed its original moniker, AutoLab AI. By all accounts, the manufacturing start-up, which promised to use a combination of robots and new software to perform manual labor, was open for business. However, like many start-ups, Bright Machines had yet to add some basic business functions. ...
Nov 28, 2021•43 min
Steve and Jack discuss FP&A's 100-year march. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Kurt Shintaffer of Apptio CFO Jim Morgan of CallRail & CFO Daniel O'Shaughnessy of FormLabs.
Nov 28, 2021•40 min
Inder Singh started off his professional life as an engineer, only to learn that the large engineering projects that he aspired to someday lead often faced as many financial obstacles as they did engineering challenges. So, Singh says, he went back to school and earned an MBA in finance, allowing him to redirect his career down a path populated with unique and imaginative financing deals to support engineering feats as well as business transformations. One of the more innovative financing projec...
Nov 24, 2021•49 min
Back in the mid-1990s, before email became widely used across corporate America, the executives of Frito-Lay’s northern California region suddenly found their mailboxes full. “We were getting all of these letters from people asking, ‘What did you do? What’s going on in northern California?,’” explains Tom Fitzgerald, who at the time was finance director for the region, a geography known to be a sales laggard among Pepsico’s 24 business units, within which Frito-Lay itself was a particularly heav...
Nov 21, 2021•57 min
Jim Calabrese recalls that when he began to climb the corporate ladder early in his finance career, an executive mentor told him, “Never be afraid to make the coffee.” This curious advice caught Calabrese’s attention, so the up-and-coming executive listened carefully as the mentor added: “As an executive, you need to be able to get dirty—to roll up your sleeves. You don’t want to be the person who can’t do a mundane task because you’re in love with your title.” Today, as a CFO, Calabrese serves ...
Nov 17, 2021•41 min
Among today’s career building finance pros who view the CFO office as their ultimate destination, Howard Wilson might be labeled an off-road commuter. Whereas most finance leaders have shared a common view as accounting and finance milestones fell away in their rearview mirror, Wilson entered the finance realm from the merge lane – where his rearview revealed a roster of operational milestones and sales experiences. Having spent most of his early career altogether removed from the accounting cub...
Nov 14, 2021•45 min
When does a mission-driven CFO initiate a crucial turnaround of an erstwhile nonprofit that’s been losing money for years and has a legacy pension plan dragging down its balance sheet? Before he’s even been offered the job. At least that’s how you take care of business if you’re March of Dimes Senior Vice President and CFO Dave Damond. “I came in with a change management plan,” reveals the former KPMG auditor, who was a finance executive with American Red Cross before launching himself into his ...
Nov 12, 2021•30 min
Talk to, or about, CircleCI CFO Chitra Balasubramanian and you’ll hear the word “team” early and often. The phrase describes her leadership approach and to how her finance group equips colleagues with next-level business and customer insights. Current and former colleagues will tell you how much value (and fun) she brings to any “solve team.” And Balasubramanian refers to her “insights team” when discussing her group’s FP&A activities at CircleCI, a continuous integration and continuous deli...
Nov 10, 2021•54 min
Dan O’Shaughnessy may be the only finance leader with whom we’ve ever spoken who credits hard work and financial acumen with having helped to keep him out of business school. Or at least this seems to be what unfolded at Gymboree back in early 2015, when he accepted a job offer from the CFO of the children’s apparel retailer. Explains O’Shaughnessy: “At the time, Gymboree had been taken private and was managing a significant amount of debt. I told myself that if we could turn around the business...
Nov 07, 2021•49 min
Brett and Jack discuss the move by Amazon and other companies to pay employees daily are likely to trigger new approaches in salary administration. Plus, more developments in the age of the "great resignation." Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CEO Craig O'Neill of Versapay, CFO Michael Rosen of Digital Power Marketing, CFO Kurt Shintaffer of Apptio.
Nov 05, 2021•54 min
Minnesota-based Mann Lake Ltd. is a leader in the beekeeping industry, serving commercial beekeeping businesses and backyard hobbyists alike. The company specializes in quality manufacturing, innovation, customer service, and global ESG (environmental, social, governance) matters. “Bees pollinate one in every three bites of food that humans consume,” Mann Lake CFO Shana Rowlette explains. “Colony collapse is a real thing, and we’re very involved in helping our industry to address this risk.” Her...
Nov 03, 2021•30 min
It sounds counterintuitive, but the best big men in basketball succeed less on size than they do on finesse and footwork. NBA Hall of Famer Tim Duncan’s right-foot jab created the space that he needed to sink his patented bank shot or fire a pass to an open teammate. The same holds true for data-driven CFOs who partner with founder CEOs in technology start-ups. CallRail CFO Jim Morgan began his professional career by pivoting from Goldman Sachs to a 100-employee, venture-backed start-up in early...
Oct 31, 2021•46 min
Steve & Jack discuss planning’s crunch time in the 4th quarter and the operationalization of FP&A inside different business functions. Featuring FP&A Insights & Commentary from Planning Aces: Sameer Ralhan, CFO, The Chemours Company, Chris Kuehn, CFO, Trane Technologies, Laurence Capone, CFO, Pipedrive. Akash Palkhiwala, CFO Qualcomm.
Oct 29, 2021•35 min
When Robert Alvarez first joined the finance team of one venture-backed start-up, he was thinking that one day he might like to be a CFO. However, upon further reflection, the young finance analyst realized that he had little idea what a CFO did. Being part of a start-up team afforded him the opportunity to have one-on-one meetings with different senior leaders, including the company’s CFO, Alvarez recalls. Of course, access to leadership has little value unless you are willing and able to under...
Oct 27, 2021•54 min
Troy Ignelzi’s CFO career is rooted in an unlikely place. In fact, some might describe it as the least likely of all places, for the environs of his early vocational path were not those of a growing company but instead a place where businesses had stopped growing. So it was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the late 1990s when Ignelzi—part of a local economic development team—became tasked with creating jobs in the wake of Pfizer’s decision to remove a number of business operations from the region, inc...
Oct 24, 2021•47 min
When Evan Fein accepted his first CFO position more than a decade ago - his focus as a finance leader was too narrow according to the CFO, who in a moment of self-reflection can’t conceal his exacerbation. "Ashamed is not the right word, but I'm such a better CFO now than I was then,” remarks Fein, who gives his younger self some kudos for having helped to champion the company’s business model as well as extending the organization’s lines of sight into the future. Still, there’s little question ...
Oct 20, 2021•36 min
