This episode of Planning Aces sheds light on the critical role financial leadership and strategic planning plays in guiding companies through turbulent times and the importance of balancing short-term opportunities with long-term strategic planning. Each of the featured finance chiefs faced unique challenges related to the pandemic’s impact on their businesses, and their responses offer valuable insights into effective financial leadership during times of crisis and change. In each case, the CFO...
Jan 26, 2024•42 min
It was the type of introduction that any MBA student would envy, and one at which David Snyder, 35 years later, still marvels. Back in the late 1980s, a business school classmate introduced him to notable investor and billionaire tycoon Sam Zell, who subsequently offered Snyder a job. Without hesitation, Snyder accepted Zell’s offer and in short order began working for him in Chicago, where he joined a group of recent young graduates whom Zell had recruited to help inside the realm of corporate ...
Jan 24, 2024•58 min
Like many of her CFO peers, Karen Walker had an early career that was guided by abundant opportunities surrounding finance-driven decision-making within organizations. It was a path that often led Walker to engage more closely with sales and operations, as was the case at CNET Networks, where she tells us that she recognized the limitations of embracing a strictly “rules-based” approach in finance. It was at CNET that she embraced a more transformative perspective—prioritizing the customer’s obj...
Jan 21, 2024•49 min
This Episode is CFOTL Special Supplement. Franklin Templeton Chief Accounting Officer Lindsey Oshita expains how challenges faced during an ERP integration following a merger and the massive IT commitment it entailed. She highlights the significance of a chart of accounts and their potential adaptations, along with her team’s successful implementation of Workday at the start of the fiscal year. Lindsey Oshita is the Chief Accounting Officer, Americas at Franklin Templeton. She’s spent 14 y...
Jan 19, 2024•44 min
CFO Michael Perica’s career journey began with an opportunity to work as a junior analyst for a national capital markets firm, where he would find a billionaire mentor. According to Perica, his association with the billionaire would ultimately offer him access to influential networks and unique opportunities. From his early days onward, Perica tells us, he became skilled at building connections with successful individuals—an expertise that would open the door to a diverse range of opportunities....
Jan 17, 2024•45 min
For Emma Brown, it was as though she had just removed the sword from the fabled stone, a moment that would challenge the inclination to persistently question her own judgment when it came to business. As is often the case, Brown’s moment of insight occurred in a high-pressure situation. Faced with poor financial visibility and the need to prevent a liquidity crisis, she championed the notion that her company’s finance team take a radical approach. Stripping everything back to basics, she delved ...
Jan 14, 2024•56 min
Four years ago, when Luigi Testa first joined LinkSquares as CFO, the Boston-area tech firm employed roughly 40 people. Today, with nearly 400 employees, the company is concerned less with growth and more about achieving a balance between growth and efficiency. To achieve this, LinkSquares management has made automation and AI adoption a priority. According to Testa, the goal was to first identify repetitive and manual tasks that could be automated to reduce the need for hiring additional person...
Jan 10, 2024•50 min
It's no secret that Moderna's R&D efforts have expanded well beyond the realm of COVID-19. CFO Jamey Mock tells us that today the company has more than 40 drugs in its pipeline, with targets such as respiratory, latent, and rare diseases. As he explains, this diversity means that the biotech innovator is reliant not solely on one product or therapeutic area, which makes for less risk than would be the case if the company had only a single product focus. Meanwhile, Mock leaves little doubt th...
Jan 07, 2024•45 min
More than any other human quality or characteristic, Brandon Nussey is known for his calm demeanor—or so Coveo’s finance leader tells us near the end of our discussion. It’s an observation that we’re not about to refute. After having spent 40 minutes in trying to identify just what it is that sets Nussey apart from his CFO peers, we had found his composure a trait to flag, even if he hadn’t ended up doing so himself. This, of course, is an enviable quality always in demand in C-suites, yet at ti...
Jan 03, 2024•45 min
Planning Aces Hosts Brett Knowles and Jack Sweeney discuss how AI's integration into FP&A is still in early stages, with many teams 'dabbling' in AI rather than regularly employing it. However, its use has been significant, inspiring creativity and improving team performance. This episode's conversation emphasizes how FP&A is not just about financial numbers but involves drawing in non-FP&A players into the process. This approach fosters a more comprehensive and collaborative financi...
Dec 31, 2023•38 min
Jim Moylan is perhaps our first CFO guest to list the leasing of oil rigs as one of the experiences that best prepared him for a CFO role. Of course, he makes it clear that the experience is worthy of mention not so much because of what he was selling but because he was selling at all. “The best way to learn what a company does and understand its value proposition is to be a salesperson, and I have told this to people everywhere that I’ve been,” comments Moylan, whose stint as a salesman helped ...
Dec 27, 2023•46 min
When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American expats being deployed by digital disrupter SMB printer Vistaprint of Boston, Mass. For the next 5 years, Quinn would be involved in a string of business acquisitions that would grow the digital printer’s European revenues from nothing to more than $500 million annually. Based in Barcelona, Quinn spent roughly 3 weeks of every month traveling to other parts of Europe to evaluate the operations of different busine...
Dec 24, 2023•52 min
Greg Robbins began his career inside the realm of Big Six accounting houses, an experience that he tells us laid the foundation for a career in financial operations and strategy. However, he credits much of his leadership style to his time at Red Bull, where he learned that real development comes from hands-on experiences, insightful feedback, and formal training, a philosophy that he has carried forward throughout his career. At Red Bull, Greg participated in several leadership development prog...
Dec 20, 2023•37 min
Our discussion with Christine Chambers has been going on for only a little more than 5 minutes when she tells us that she remembers sitting on the steps of a London flat years ago while contemplating life’s many twists and turns. It seems that the accommodation—which she had only recently acquired and unquestionably counted as a milestone in life—had with little warning come to present a dilemma. At that time back in 2007, when Chambers was working as a financial analyst inside the UK ope...
Dec 17, 2023•44 min
If Mark Seidel had told us that he had spent many of his high school evenings peering through a telescope at the stars, we would have likely believed him. However, Seidel—CFO of space security start-up True Anomaly—swiftly short circuits the familiar narrative of a space-loving youth. Instead, he draws our attention to his early entrepreneurial endeavors on eBay (he achieved power selling status while in high school), and, as for his finance career, he tells us that he has long preferred not to ...
Dec 13, 2023•38 min
Among the industries on which the pandemic was most known to have afflicted an extra helping of earnings chaos, most business analysts agree that the home fitness market is perhaps most deserving of special mention. Indeed, few sectors logged steeper gains and more precipitous losses during COVID’s comings and goings than home fitness—and perhaps few demanded more reflexive, in-the-moment, decision-making inside the management cockpit. At BowFlex (formerly Nautilus), that cockpit has been “manne...
Dec 10, 2023•1 hr 9 min
When Michael Kennedy first stepped into the CFO office at the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) in 2018, he was surprised to learn that the association was spending $8 million annually on office space across the country. “Why were we in these offices?,” asks Kennedy, voicing the question that helped to kick off the first of what he now characterizes as a multichapter digital transformation. As it turned out, the 93 offices occupied by the MDA were a legacy of the organization’s historic Jerry...
Dec 06, 2023•56 min
CFO Zhi Li's Career Background: Zhi Li's professional life begin at Bell Canada, where he was involved in operational finance within the Wireless Division. The division, Zhi tells us served as the growth engine for the company at the time. During his time at Bell Canada he worked on a subscription business model, dealing with wireless units and the basics of a subscription business, which later proved helpful in his work within the SaaS space. Li entered the investment banking realm during the e...
Dec 03, 2023•54 min
Insights from Planning Aces: CFO Lauren StClair talks about leveraging AI for faster analysis, transparency in reporting, and the challenge of maintaining clean, adaptable data. CFO Doug Lindroth emphasizes the shift from closed data structures to open-book management, enabling deeper discussions on profitability and investments. CFO Charly Kevers underscores AI's impact on manual tasks, reshaping organizational charts to prioritize higher-level thinking. AI's Role in FP&A and Security Conce...
Dec 01, 2023•49 min
It was back in 2016 when Lauren St. Clair realized that it was time to raise her hand. Online marketplace giant eBay had just completed a deal to acquire the Spanish online ticket platform Ticketbis, and St. Clair, a 9-year eBay veteran, was itching to get overseas. eBay had entered the online ticket business in 2007 with its acquisition of StubHub, and the addition of Ticketbis now promised to fatten StubHub’s international revenues, a development that St. Clair realized would likely require eB...
Nov 29, 2023•42 min
When Peter Benevides joined Olo back in 2015, the provider of restaurant technology's CFO office was vacant—as it would remain for the next 4 years, until he ultimately got the position thanks to a nod from the firm's CEO and perhaps a sprinkling of magic dust from Olo board members and investors. Of course, things may have gone very differently for Benevides, as they so frequently do for many senior finance hires who, like Benevides, join fast-growing firms while knowing full well that there ar...
Nov 26, 2023•45 min
The Goldman Sachs “anti-raid” team was between conference calls with an embattled client company when word came that a senior member of the target company’s management team had unexpectedly died. Looking back, Tom Fennimore says that the next few months of his early career years at Goldman then became a transition point—or period of accelerated learning. “It was a very sad situation—they were in the process of being raided,” explains Fennimore, who lists the anti-raid transaction as one of two t...
Nov 24, 2023•51 min
CFO Rodrigo Brumana’s career journey began with a position as a computer programmer in Brazil. He would move in his early career years to the United States, where he got his start in investment banking. Soon thereafter, he moved to Fairchild Semiconductor, where he advanced into an investor relations role. Next, Brumana delved into the realm of predictive analytics at eBay, a stint that opened the door to a succession of opportunities inside the world of e-commerce marketplaces.
Nov 22, 2023•34 min
The episode features Mark Lampe, CFO of Monte Vista Farming Co., discussing the significance of understanding labor and its impact on business success. CFO Lampe discusses the significance of labor and the challenges faced in managing a workforce of over 140 individuals engaged in almond production, emphasizing the importance of a cohesive and hardworking team in a challenging industry.
Nov 19, 2023•43 min
For a dozen years or more, Frank Teruel has been leading a double life professionally. When he stepped into the CFO slot at Arkose Labs last February, the position was just the latest in a succession of CFO stints that had required him to align C-suite duties with additional responsibilities in a Santa Clara University classroom. In his teaching mode, Professor Teruel is known to speak quickly, while keeping discussions lively and interesting by injecting real-world knowledge and business insigh...
Nov 15, 2023•57 min
When 21-year PwC veteran Mark McCaffrey decided that it was time to open his post-PwC career, he briefed the firm’s U.S leadership about his plans, diligently outlined 24 months of departure prep, and set aside an extra helping of patience. Two weeks later, he had a CFO job offer from publicly traded Internet domain company GoDaddy. “At the time, I thought that I’d have a couple of years to figure out what my next step was going to be,” recalls McCaffrey, whose 2021 CFO appointment ...
Nov 12, 2023•52 min
Phenom CFO Davinder Athwal tells us that he has a personal connection to his company’s mission. Near the beginning of our talk, he shares a touching story about his father, a highly skilled individual who struggled to find a job in the UK. This personal experience fuels his passion for Phenom’s mission: to help a billion people to discover the right work. It’s not just about finding a job; it’s about finding the right job that matches skills with aspirations, as Athwal is eager to explain. The P...
Nov 08, 2023•50 min
This podcast episode features CFO Christopher Crawley of Hoffman Hospitality Group, discussing challenges related to managing labor in the restaurant industry Hoffman Hospitality Group, a family-owned restaurant company, adapted to the pandemic by introducing food trucks and online kitchens, enhancing their financial processes. Crawley shares his career journey, including experiences in audit, finance, and operations, emphasizing the importance of adapting to change and understanding business me...
Nov 05, 2023•49 min
The Three Phases of Teresa Chia’s Career: Teresa Chia’s journey to becoming a CFO is divided into three distinct phases. The first saw her honing her skills in investment banking and private equity at Credit Suisse in NYC. The second found her in the insurance industry, where she discovered her passion for the field and learned about its complexity and regulatory aspects. The most recent phase has seen her also serving on the boards of various companies, a testament to her industry connections a...
Nov 01, 2023•51 min
For corporate finance executives, few professional experiences are as adeptly converted into social currency as those manifested inside the realm of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). It seems that regardless of whether a finance executive has been involved in one deal or 40, they are usually able to quickly share a takeaway or two. For finance leader Natalie Laackman, the latter would be the case—or, rather, the latter times two, as she estimates that she has been involved in 75 to 100 such tr...
Oct 29, 2023•45 min
