590: The Art of Fixing What's Broken | Terry Schmid, CFO, Topia

Purchasing bananas and moving them through a warehouse in less than 24 hours is perhaps not a professional experience widely shared by today’s finance leaders. Still, as Topia CFO Terry Schmid tells it, mastering banana logistics may just be a worthy prerequisite for many of today’s CFO roles.

“It taught me to think about the process that you go through to understand how things flow, how things actually work, and how you can improve things,” says Schmid, who first entered the professional world as a software coder specializing in COBOL—a language that landed him a consulting engagement with Safeway, Inc., in the 1990s, where he spent months alongside a team of Safeway buyers building a new logistics and warehousing system.

“Being responsible for the produce piece, I had to learn how they buy produce and move it through the warehouse, after which we wrote a system to automate the process to a large degree—particularly the buying part,” explains Schmid, who recalls the Safeway team as being at first somewhat doubtful about the new system. “Automation has a tendency to unnerve people. It was my job to convince these guys that using the system was going to be beneficial to them and make their job better. It wasn't going to replace them. It was just going to make their job simpler,” he recalls.

Schmid doesn’t hesitate to draw a line from his COBOL coding days straight to the CFO office. “The opportunity that I got out of that was a solid understanding of how businesses work, how information flows, and how important it is that information is timely and accurate,” notes Schmid, who characterizes the CFO role as one dedicated to helping organizations fix broken processes or adopt new ones in order to clear the path for growth. This is a role widely coveted inside the tech sector, but few CFOs have been as frequently recruited as Schmid, who has to date served as CFO in more than a half-dozen early-stage companies.

Twelve months into his latest CFO role, at Topia, Schmid is back to fixing processes and studying workflows and purchase patterns just as he did in the 1990s. In one way or another, it seems that he’s been moving bananas ever since. –Jack Sweeney