Bill Zerella’s path to the CFO office began at a company whose customers largely belonged to a bygone era. At the time, Simplicity Patterns was the largest pattern company in the world, and its most devout customers were sewing machine owners across the United States and Canada who enjoyed making clothes for themselves and their families.
For Zerella, a 20-something-year-old auditor, the critical career decision to join Simplicity was a no-brainer not because of the business opportunity being presented or the position being offered but because of the source of the proffer. The company had recently hired a former Fortune 500 finance leader by the name of Bill Lewis, who was looking to throttle up the company’s business model. Zerella was ready to climb on board.
“I probably learned more from him during the 5 years I was with that company than I’ve learned in the past 25 years,” comments Zerella, who today is a seasoned tech finance leader who has served in a string of CFO roles, including one with Fitbit, where in 2015 he oversaw the company’s $841 million initial public offering (IPO).
Still, when asked about the consequential experiences that allowed him to advance upward, Zerella is drawn back to his years at Simplicity.
“It was a low-tech company that basically just printed sewing patterns—which might not sound interesting to most—but it was incredibly lucrative and probably one of the most profitable that firms I’ve ever been part of,” reports Zerella, who started in an auditing role but quickly found himself reassigned to FP&A as CFO Lewis looked to beef up the company’s performance measurements. However, Zerella’s arrival in the FP&A planning realm coincided with Simplicity’s adoption of one of the desktop computing era’s most disruptive technologies, spreadsheet application Lotus 1-2-3.
In the months ahead, Zerella’s mastery of the tool would allow the former auditor to move the Simplicity finance team beyond calculators and pencils as he led the automation of the company’s entire planning process—and received multiple promotions.
In fact, the former auditor held the position of treasurer at the time of his departure to accept his first CFO appointment—only 5 years after his arrival.
“Looking back, I probably got there too soon—I probably could have used a little more training,” recalls Zerella, whose Simplicity career was also notable for having permitted him to witness firsthand the transformational power of tech—which itself would lead to his relocation only a few years later to a locale he will now likely always call home, Silicon Valley. –Jack Sweeney
