506: Boarding the Moving Train | Sean Sobers, CFO, Quantenna Communications

Asked to supply us with a finance Strategic moment, CFO Sean Sobers recalls an acquisition completed during an earlier chapter of his career. Convinced the the acquired company was only capable of yielding a meager profit, Sobers and the finance team set out to expose the company’s shortcomings only to discover the opposite. “It was probably the most profitable business unit we had,” explains Sobers, who says the discovery came as part of a broader effort on the part of finance to require management to apply R.O.I. measures to their investments across the company. Meanwhile, certain opportunities that had garnered steady investment over the years would lose their luster as finance fine tuned its R.O.I. lens and began tracking returns more closely. “As we went forward, if you were going to ask for funding you had to supply an R.O.I. measurement that was approved by finance,” explains Sobers, who says the R.O.I. performance of investments would be tracked annually and frequently quarterly.

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