749: Scouting the Perimeter of Predictability | Daniel O'Shaughnessy, CFO, Formlabs

Dan O’Shaughnessy may be the only finance leader with whom we’ve ever spoken who credits hard work and financial acumen with having helped to keep him out of business school. Or at least this seems to be what unfolded at Gymboree back in early 2015, when he accepted a job offer from the CFO of the children’s apparel retailer.

Explains O’Shaughnessy: “At the time, Gymboree had been taken private and was managing a significant amount of debt. I told myself that if we could turn around the business quickly, it would be a great opportunity, and if we couldn’t, then business school was always a good option.”

As it turned out, the retailer’s successful turnaround would require a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing as part of a larger process that expanded O’Shaughnessy’s role into comptrollership, tax, treasury, and even supply chain planning and store operations.

Along the way, the finance executive was frequently tasked with dealing with the company’s creditors and investors.

“The creditors across the table with whom I had been negotiating aggressively one day became my board members on the following day,” reports O’Shaughnessy, who notes that the experience taught him “how to have professional conflicts but maintain relationships.”

Within a few quarters, the turnaround began to get some momentum, as the retailer sold off certain noncore assets and saw EBITDA grow by 50 percent.

For O’Shaughnessy, a former manager with Price Waterhouse’s M&A practice, the leap to the operations side of a struggling business likely provided more relevant lessons than he might have learned from attending business school. In the end, he says, “it opened up my eyes to how much I enjoyed the operations side of business.” -Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about Formlabs, what does this company do and what are its offerings today?

O’Shaughnessy: Formlabs is in the 3D printing space and has successfully disrupted the 3D printing space. To give you some perspective on the industry, it’s not new. It’s been around for 30 plus years. This company was founded 10 years ago last week, and really took off on Kickstarter.

The whole model here is bringing a machine, a technology that I equate to the IBM old mainframes, hundreds of thousand of dollars, take up half of a room require an engineer to run, and put that onto the desktop. You’re now providing a technology that previously cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for under $5,000. As I like to put it, it’s so easy a finance guy can use it. It’s an out-of-the-box solution. 3D printing is a very complex technology, and the team was able to develop and manufacture an offering and a product that performed at 99% of these multi hundred thousand dollars machines at a fraction of the price.

I’d say my number one, two, and three priorities are to grow and scale the Formlabs business. Everything that we do from a finance perspective is in support of growing the business, delivering more value to our customers, and then how do we do you that? It’s engaging the team and driving alignment in trust. It’s getting the simple things right so that we don’t run around every day fighting fires. Sometimes it makes us feel good and important, but there are certain things that just need to run smoothly. So do that. Driving predictability. If this, then that, and here’s the different levers we have to pull. Then it’s really putting the right people in the right place to deliver the most value and grow the most personally and professionally in support of this infrastructure that is finance that enables the growth and, again, if done well, drives the growth in the business over the next 12, 24, 36 months.