When Erik Wissig recalls his early years as a founder, one moment still stands out. The team had met its growth goals and earned their bonuses—but the company’s cash flow hadn’t caught up. “You need the cash to make those payments,” he tells us. That hard-won lesson reshaped how Wissig approached finance from that day forward: plan ahead, balance ambition with liquidity, and bring the wider leadership team into that awareness. Before that turning point, Wissig had spent a decade in investment ba...
Nov 05, 2025•44 min
The moment that stayed with him began at a marketplace where sales dashboards showed 40% gross margin—yet finance closed the books at 20% , Boon tells us. The gap, he discovered, lived in the shadows: rebates, discounts, and “free” services that never touched operational metrics. He manually traced economics to the client level and found margins many considered healthy were thin—or nonexistent. One customer representing roughly 30% of revenue delivered 0% gross margin, Boon tells us. That scene ...
Nov 02, 2025•1 hr
In this special episode of CFO Thought Leader—the first of three produced in collaboration with The Suite, Shaun Sethna (General Counsel and GM for the L Suite) maps where CFOs and GCs misjudge contract risk and how to collaborate effectively. He spotlights “locked-in” deals that still enable termination via vague clauses or missing notice-and-cure. Start with strategy alignment, then cross-train—mini finance for lawyers, mini legal for CFOs—and empower teams to escalate wisely. He urges adoptin...
Oct 31, 2025•27 min
When Procter & Gamble asked Atsushi Kitamura to move from finance analysis into running a manufacturing plant, he didn’t hesitate. “They always give me next challenge to stretch me,” he tells us. Managing one of P&G’s large diaper plants in Japan forced him to apply finance in real-time operations—a proving ground that shaped his comfort with change and appetite for transformation. That readiness carried him from consumer goods to logistics, restaurants, and electronics before arriving a...
Oct 29, 2025•25 min
On a quiet afternoon in Punta Cana, Michael Levine sat alone on a stretch of white sand. The turquoise water and silence offered the perfect scene for rest—until he realized what was missing. “I didn’t have my phone and I didn’t have my laptop,” he tells us. “That’s what makes me happy… I love doing work from the beach.” It was there, after stepping down as Payoneer’s CFO, that Levine accepted a truth about himself: he wasn’t ready to retire. Levine had spent 11 and a half years helping Payoneer...
Oct 26, 2025•56 min
She starts with tape from the field, not the spreadsheet. Listening to enterprise sales calls, Amy Foo heard customers whose usage rose and fell with seasons. Fixed per-seat pricing “wasn’t quite hitting the mark,” she tells us, so she piloted a pooled-seat model that flexed monthly within an annual commitment—turning smaller clips into “one to five million” deals and lifting revenue “six to seven times per customer,” she tells us. That instinct—to meet the customer where they are—threads throug...
Oct 22, 2025•57 min
When Joe Custer describes Intrado’s purpose, he begins with a story that traces back almost half a century. The company, he tells us, was born inside the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department when someone asked whether there might be a better way to connect a caller in distress with a first responder. “Turns out they were on to something,” he adds. Today that idea has scaled into a mission-critical network touching roughly 90 percent of all 911 requests for assistance. Custer explains that Intrado...
Oct 19, 2025•1 hr
On his first day in investment banking, Clayton Kossl was “thrown right into the cauldron.” With few senior professionals in the small aerospace and defense group, junior bankers like him were expected to face company owners directly. “You had to understand the businesses inside and out,” he tells us. The experience forced him to blend analytical depth with the interpersonal agility needed to earn trust in every room. That mix of skills—numbers and nuance—became a through line in Kossl’s career....
Oct 15, 2025•42 min
“InvoiceCloud is not just payments,” Chris Sands tells us. Sitting inside the company’s finance organization, he sees a platform built to change habits—helping businesses shift customers from paper invoices and mailed checks to fully digital transactions. The success metric, he adds, is simple: “Do more of their customers stop receiving paper invoices, stop mailing in checks, and do both of those things digitally?” That clear yardstick reflects how Sands thinks about growth. He describes a found...
Oct 12, 2025•38 min
In this episode of Planning Aces , host Jack Sweeney and resident thought leader Brett Knowles explore how finance leaders are approaching AI’s early returns —balancing efficiency, experimentation, and human judgment. CFO Craig Foster of Pax8 discusses how AI enablement is driving measurable productivity gains. CFO David Obstler of Datadog reflects on finding ROI amid rapid innovation and market demand. And CFO Ben Gammell of Brex shares why forecasting still requires human intuition despite dat...
Oct 10, 2025•34 min
When Kimberlee Duval arrived at Cymbiotika, the wellness company was preparing a leap few bootstrapped brands attempt—moving from direct-to-consumer to retail shelves. “Our two owners, Charlene and Shahab, have done everything direct,” she tells us. “They wanted to build an organization for the long term.” That resolve led the company to take on debt rather than private-equity money to fund its Sprouts launch in 2024. The risk paid off: Sprouts highlighted Cymbiotika’s success in its quarterly e...
Oct 08, 2025•1 hr 4 min
When Steve Sutter joined Celigo five years ago, he stepped into a company positioned not as another SaaS app but as what he calls “the infrastructure, the piping, the plumbing” of business automation. Celigo, he tells us, moves data between systems like Salesforce, NetSuite, and Snowflake so companies can “create very sophisticated business processes” without the friction of disconnected silos. For Sutter, the real work of finance begins behind that plumbing. “As CFO, you have to build a sustain...
Oct 05, 2025•50 min
In 2008, Beth Gaspich stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, ringing the bell as RiskMetrics went public. What made the moment extraordinary was its timing—amid one of the most volatile markets in decades. The IPO decision, she tells us, came “down to the wire.” After months of preparing the S-1, long roadshows, and weekend work with auditors, leadership had to choose: delay indefinitely or seize a fleeting opening. They chose action, and the listing became a defining milestone in he...
Oct 01, 2025•47 min
When David Obstler joined Datadog in 2018, the company’s co-founders had already built momentum with a product that observed modern cloud workloads. What struck Obstler was the alignment with a powerful long-term trend—the shift from legacy, on-premise systems to modern cloud applications. “It was a product that had a lot of product market fit in a really strong growing market,” he tells us. From that foundation, Datadog scaled rapidly. Today, the platform serves more than 3,100 customers worldw...
Sep 28, 2025•42 min
On her first day as CFO of UHY, Laura LaPeer asked a simple question: “Do you guys do Copilot?” She had grown accustomed to using Microsoft’s AI assistant for tasks ranging from summarizing documents to creating slides, and she wanted it in place immediately. The request, she tells us, reflected both her pragmatism and her view that technology should be leveraged quickly, but carefully, to support higher-value work. That same instinct—to look beyond the surface of a task—has shaped her career. A...
Sep 24, 2025•46 min
In 2018, Brex made a defining decision: rather than rely on middleware providers like Stripe or Marqeta, it built its own payments infrastructure from the ground up. That move, Ben Gammell tells us, gave the company a direct integration with MasterCard and the ability to issue corporate cards in “over 50 plus local currencies.” The choice, he explains, was born of necessity at the time but has since become a structural advantage, offering customers greater control and global reach. That same pri...
Sep 21, 2025•47 min
When Damon Lee reflects on his first conversations with C.H. Robinson’s CEO, he recalls how natural the alignment felt. “We spoke the same language. We were finishing each other’s sentences,” Lee tells us. For a finance leader whose ambition had long been to step into the CFO chair, the clarity of vision he encountered at Robinson made the opportunity stand out. Lee emphasizes that Robinson’s longevity mattered. “A company that survived and thrived for 120 years—that’s special in its own right,”...
Sep 17, 2025•52 min
When Holly Grey first examined Horizon3.ai, she saw more than a cybersecurity startup. She saw a technology that could change the way companies safeguard themselves. Traditional pen tests, she tells us, are human-driven, vary widely by auditor, and usually happen just once a year. Horizon3.ai, by contrast, “started out as a technology alternative to pen testing.” Its platform can be deployed “within minutes, not hours or weeks or months,” Grey tells us, and has already executed “over 100,000 pen...
Sep 14, 2025•58 min
At 30, Jay Peir stepped into the CFO role at SunPower, a high-efficiency solar cell manufacturer. The appointment came after leading M&A and venture investments at Cypress Semiconductor, where SunPower was the largest portfolio company. “I had my first CFO experience at the age of 30,” Peir tells us, recalling how corporate development responsibilities opened the door to finance leadership. That early leap reflected a broader pattern in his career: moving fluidly between finance and strategy...
Sep 10, 2025•18 min
When Craig Foster talks about artificial intelligence, he begins with scale. Pax8, the enterprise marketplace where he serves as CFO, connects vendors like Microsoft and CrowdStrike with 43,000 managed service providers. Those MSPs, he tells us, serve between 700,000 and 800,000 small and midsize businesses worldwide. Against that backdrop, Foster describes how AI is reshaping both internal operations and external opportunities. Inside Pax8, teams are experimenting across functions—from customer...
Sep 07, 2025•57 min
The pivot began when Jim Rogers raised his hand. Groupon was shifting from mobile daily deals to a goods business in Europe, and—still early in his career—he volunteered to help lead the finance work. That step, he tells us, bridged his path from technical accounting into FP&A and set a pattern: seek out the build stage, then make finance a partner to the business. Rogers started in audit at Ernst & Young before moving through technical accounting and controllership into planning. He ear...
Sep 03, 2025•39 min
In this Planning Aces special, three finance leaders map how AI is moving FP&A from dashboards to decisions. Andrew Casey (Amplitude) shows agents automating analytics, experiments, and order-to-cash checks to democratize insight and speed action. Eric Brown (Cohesity) contrasts AI’s capital intensity with the cloud era and spotlights an “epic data battle” where privileged datasets drive advantage. Chris Miorin (APEX Analytix) links on-prem investment and clean data to faster product velocit...
Aug 31, 2025•38 min
Chris Miorin’s path to the CFO office began in a crucible of leadership. At West Point, and later at Ranger School, he was forged in environments designed to test resolve. Commissioned shortly after 9/11, he knew combat was certain. Leading an infantry platoon in Iraq, he found himself working side-by-side with a colonel “30 years my senior.” The challenge, he tells us, was learning how to add value humbly yet confidently in an environment where everything was fluid. Those early lessons in partn...
Aug 27, 2025•46 min
During what he calls a “terrible soccer game” his son was playing, Ademir Sarcevic picked up a recruiter’s call that would change his career. The game was lopsided, but the timing was fortunate. Within months, Sarcevic was interviewing with Standex International’s leadership team. By 2019, he was CFO of the diversified manufacturer, helping guide a portfolio that spans precision electronics to specialty machinery. Sarcevic’s readiness for that moment was shaped years earlier in Sarajevo. He came...
Aug 24, 2025•47 min
In Part Two of The Room Where It Happens , we continue our journey alongside CFOs who found themselves face-to-face with some of the most iconic business visionaries of our time. From Salesforce founder Marc Benioff to Intel’s Andy Grove, Cisco’s John Chambers, and Apple’s Steve Jobs, these finance leaders share the moments when vision collided with execution, when bold strategy met financial discipline. Their stories reveal not only what it meant to sit in those high-stakes rooms, but how those...
Aug 20, 2025•36 min
Eric Brown vividly recalls his trial by fire at MicroStrategy. Joining a subsidiary, he expected to help deploy hundreds of millions from a planned secondary raise. Instead, “the parent company had a restatement…raised zero,” he tells us. Elevated to CFO, he faced layoffs of two-thirds of staff and operating margins at -40%. Over three years, Brown led a turnaround to +30% margins and a market cap recovery from $55 million to more than $1 billion. “Nothing really phases me,” he says of the exper...
Aug 17, 2025•54 min
In Part One of In the Room Where It Happens , we hear from four CFOs reflecting on formative moments when they found themselves face-to-face with legendary industry leaders. Gabi Gantus of Mytra recounts a pivotal meeting at Tesla with Elon Musk, while CFO Jason Child (Arm) shares an FP&A breakthrough alongside Jeff Bezos during Amazon’s early growth years. CFO Brian Gladden of Zelis reflects on leadership lessons from both Jack Welch and Michael Dell, and CFO (emeritus) Bill Korn of MBTC re...
Aug 13, 2025•29 min
When people Google Bonterra, they often see 2021 as its starting point. That year, lead investor Apax joined with Vista, holder of Social Solutions, and Insight Partners, holder of EveryAction, to unite those businesses under one brand. But, as Matthew Hardy tells us, the company’s history stretches much further back—“We have customers that are 20–25-year-old customers, so (there are) a lot of longstanding relationships.” From its earliest days, Bonterra’s mission has been clear: provide “purpos...
Aug 10, 2025•50 min
In Episode 47 of Planning Aces , Jack Sweeney and resident thought leader Brett Knowles explore the evolving role of FP&A through the lens of three forward-looking CFOs. Dan Zhang (ClickUp), John Rettig (Bill), and Josh Schauer (insightsoftware) share how they’re driving enterprise agility, leveraging AI to eliminate inefficiencies, and rethinking capital allocation. From Zhang’s battle against “SaaS overload” to Rettig’s “prove-it mentality” and Schauer’s daily forecasting, each CFO reveals...
Aug 07, 2025•45 min
Host Erik Zhou, CAO at Brex, sits down with Richie Mashiko, Fractional CFO, to unpack the financial complexities of running high-growth e-commerce and CPG brands. From measuring the right things to navigating ad spend, pricing strategies, and fragile supply chains amidst tariffs, Richie offers a unique operator’s perspective on what it takes to drive sustainable growth in today’s market.
Aug 06, 2025•40 min
