CFO THOUGHT LEADER

The corporate headquarters of Bend All Automotive may have been a mere 30-minute drive from KPMG’s offices in Waterloo, Ontario—but Melissa Howatson had to put in a 6-year career investment at the accounting house before she came to realize that it was time to go the distance.Not unlike those of many of her peers, Howatson’s years in public accounting were laden with mentorship generously supplied by a partner (and a number of senior managers). KPMG was an enviable launchpad populated by many professionals who remain in Howatson’s life today, as she explains when we make inquiries to better understand the motivations and choices made by this future CFO. When Howatson arrived inside Bend All’s corporate offices in late 1999, she used the preferred door-of-entry for accountants far and wide: controllership. She would have a lengthy tenure there (10 years), which leads us to prod her in hope of better exposing what she perceives to be the return on this career-years investment.In the early 2000s, it seems, auto parts manufacturer Bend All may well have had traditional expectations for whoever filled the role of controller that didn’t necessarily include undertaking menu of strategic finance initiatives. Looking back, Howatson tells us that she now wishes that she perhaps had been “more deliberate” when it came to acquiring financial planning and analysis experience during the early years of her career. Still, she lets us know that she satisfied her growing appetite for financial insight by tapping finance expertise that resided with professionals outside Bend All’s existing accounting and finance functions.“We had a very strong engineering leader who was very financially astute, so I would really lean in to try to understand how his part of the business worked,” recalls Howatson, who notes that she eventually sought to build her own “tight” network of professionals across the company.“I had to build my own network in order understand how the key inputs could help me to build a financial plan, but this was something that I really had to learn on my own as I went along,” she continues.  Fast-forward a few years, as Howatson finds herself in a conference room seated alongside Bend All management and a number of bankers. The topic for discussion is the potential sale of the company, and Howatson is expected to participate in a management presentation.“This was when I realized that I needed to practice those skill sets,” explains Howatson, who reports that although she had never really feared presenting to groups before, the possibility that she’d be presenting to the future owner of the business presented circumstances altogether different.She adds: “While our CEO and president covered a lot of  the material, I appreciated the chance to present. I was a little nervous, but it did help that I had the confidence of the CEO behind me.” –Jack Sweeney 

For those executives residing inside the private equity and investment banking realm that aspire to someday occupy the CFO office, it’s not uncommon to seek out an “operator’s role” – one that allows recruiters “to check the box” and confidently present a leadership candidate (operations credentials intact) to a company’s management team or board members.“Inspect your chute carefully and jump smart,” might be the abbreviated advice for those looking to land inside an operations role.  Once inside, the goal is to canvas the corridors and collaborate with the company functional areas and managers the banking world seldom sees.  Sometimes such operations stints are little more than a year long, while others last several years and incorporate roles at multiple companies.  For Michael Linford, whose chute opened wide, the operations tour of duty was at Hewlett-Packard, and the multiyear stint would arguably afford him more operational insights than any aspiring CFO could hope to glean.“When I joined the decision to separate HP’s consumer business and the enterprise business had been made,” explains Linford recalling his 2015 arrival within the firm’s M&A integration team.   The historic split up of Hewlett-Packard company was structured so that the former company would change its name to HP Inc., spin off Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a newly created company and sell off its enterprise services business.“As the slpit off was happening we knew we had to continue to grow the company. …There was a duality to it.  If you want to achieve change, you must continue to buy and sell companies at the same time,” comments Linford, who tells us he quickly became involved with helping integrate a recently acquired networking firm that had stumbled since being acquired.“The networking business had been growing quickly, but as it came into the HP mothership it had just stalled, so we spent a lot of time getting that business back on track – and this was as the larger separation was underway – so we were tasked with building a real business and at the same time shed these other businesses,” explains Linford, who tell us the role taught him to be mindful of distractions.  “If you didn’t focus on getting the value from the acquisitions that were being made – what is left wouldn’t have any value,” comments Linford, who tell us the networking business would ultimately become a “material part” of the business.  Roughly two years into his M&A stint, Linford joins HP’s software business where he would serve as finance leader for the newly formed HP Enterprise.  “That was where I encountered one of the hardest problems I’ve ever had to solve in my career,” comments Linford, who tells us the succession of business separations within HP led to a talent shortage as employees found themselves attached to one or another entity.   “By the time we got to the software business separation, there was nothing left in the cupboard. And so, we had to stand up a whole new technology stack to operate the business. And we had to hire a whole new team to support the business,” remarks Linford, who once more emphasizes the stiff price for indulging distractions.  He explains “Staying focused on the job at hand while all this change is happening around you is a tremendous leadership challenge, and its alongside the technical, operational and finance challenges that were all very real for us.” – Jack SweeneyCFOTL: Tell us about Affirm .. what does this firm do and what are its offerings today?Linford: So Affirm’s mission is to build honest financial product that improve lives. We’re a payment network that helps consumers purchase the things they want and need. And we help merchants grow their businesses. Many people, especially millennial and Gen Z consumers, are not happy with the choices they have for their existing credit products. They do not want to be revolving on credit cards. They do not want the ball and chain that comes with compounding debt.And with Affirm, they don’t have to. We have never charged late fees. We don’t compound interest on interest. We give consumers immutable certainty of the cost of financing when they check out. We can bring 0% as well as interest bearing products to help merchants offer a differentiated set of financing offers to their consumers. And in all of this is with an eye towards attacking what we think is a lot of areas of potential future benefit for consumers and harm that happens today where consumers do fall into a lot of traps.I have nine siblings. I grew up as one of 10 people. And I like to tell folks that I don’t care how wealthy you are, financially caring for 10 human beings is something that will put an incredible amount of stress on your financial life. And so for me growing up, there was always a constraint on even access to credit. And my parents were certainly not immune from those who fall into the spiral of never ending credit card debt.And I saw what Max was building and I said, this is going to be something that has the opportunity to change the world. And that was my criteria. To answer your question, I did not want to work. If I was going to get out of bed and I was going to stop my four times a week running routine and going to the gym, I was going to do all that. I wanted it to be on something that I thought had a good chance of changing the world.And with that audacious statement, which truly, it’s a lot of audacity to say you want to get out of bed and change the world. I wanted to do it somewhere that I thought was going to do it responsibly. And the combination of financial services, technology, solving a real problem for consumers, to never charge late fees, and then to position yourselves with real principles, we like to say that we will never profit off of a consumer’s misfortune or mistake.

When Ralph Leung relocated to Hong Kong from Morgan Stanley’s New York offices, he was a newlywed eager to energize the financial world as one of the bank’s senior deal makers for the Asia Pacific region.Four years later, when he accepted a call from a U. S. recruiter, he had been credited with having helped led numerous transactions (mostly IPOs) from the region, including Alibaba Group’s historic $25 billion IPO. What’s more, Leung had become the father of two.“It was time to go back home,” recalls Leung, who would relocate to San Francisco’s Bay Area after accepting a finance leadership role for an online video and entertainment company. Looking back on his Hong Kong years, Leung tells us that the experience was a departure from his previous Morgan experience because it involved advising more early-stage founders and entrepreneurs.   “I learned what Series A, Series B, and Series C meant and how to grow a business from different capital perspectives,” continues Leung, who credits the experience with having helped to open the door to CFO roles within early-stage companies.Still, Leung tells us that some of the best learning experiences from his banking years came from transactions that never occurred, including one IPO that after 2 years of persistent effort failed to capture the necessary investor attention.   “It was taking a lot of time to educate investors, and while we thought that we could get over the hump by using industry research and really demonstrating how the company could be a profitable business, we underappreciated the difficulty of advancing the narrative,” explains Leung, who tells us that the IPO was “shut down” when the company opted instead to reposition itself according to investor feedback and give itself an operations boost to make it more attractive to investors.“So, the business responded and made some changes, rather than just trying to have us sell through certain obstacles,” reports Leung, who adds that ultimately the business went public a year or so later.  He concludes: “Some obstacles just have to be respected and resolved.” –Jack Sweeney

Of the different acquisitions with which Jason Leet became involved at ExactTarget of Indianapolis, Indiana, there’s little question that the seventh was the most impactful on his finance career.As it turned out, this would also be his last acquisition—or perhaps we should say his last ExactTarget acquisition, given that this time it was ExactTarget itself that was being acquired.In 2013, ExactTarget became not only the largest company that tech wunderkind Salesforce had ever acquired but also the first publicly traded one.Over the next 9 years, Leet would work on more than 40 acquisitions for Salesforce, including an additional four publicly traded firms. What’s more, over this period he would lead the finance team that took charge of what he calls Salesforce’s “best-in-class M&A machine.”However, turn back the clock to his ExactTarget days, and it’s easy to see that for a number of months, Salesforce did indeed flip Leet’s world upside down. “I was involved in some of the diligence, so I was aware of what was going down several months in advance,” explains Leet, who had joined ExactTarget in 2006, as he vividly recalls for us the company’s impressive climb upward—along with its disappointing 2007 decision to pull its IPO due to Wall Street’s economic collapse.“Never waste a good crisis: Having that IPO door slammed became a pivotal moment in our future success,” comments Leet, who tells us that ExactTarget then turned to private investors for funding, which allowed the company to generously invest in the business at a time when many firms were curtailing their spending.   After consecutive years of impressive revenue growth, ExactTarget went public in 2012, after which Salesforce came knocking on the door with a $2.5 billion deal in 2013.   “Since this was Salesforce’s first acquisition of a publicly traded company, there was a sense of being in it together with the Salesforce folks with regard to how this whole thing was going to work,” remarks Leet, who tells us that when word of the deal first surfaced, he fed his enthusiasm for the career chapter that lay ahead by buying a copy of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s book Behind the Cloud.”To me,” he continues, “the acquisition was an opportunity, first, to support the business—but as you go through an integration, it’s also a chance to follow different lanes of experience, with an eye toward growing with your different teams.”For Leet, this growth would remain inside the realm of M&A, where his 9 years at Salesforce would be what he describes as always being “fresh,” as he became engaged with the different management teams of the companies that Salesforce acquired and sought out knowledge to help in determining how best to invest in the acquired firm to maximize post-acquisition top-line growth.From the ExactTarget acquisition on forward, Leet tells us, M&A has consistently broadened his view of the role that finance plays in business and exposed to him how often the “people part” is the most time-consuming yet most vital aspect of the success of an acquisition.Leet concludes: “My team and I had this sense of ownership, in that we took personally the success or failure of the acquired companies—and because of this, we were able to step up and play a broader leadership role.” –Jack Sweeney

Finance leaders discuss challenges in talent optimization, strategy execution, and adoption of AI in finance. Insights from CFOs of Potbelly, Blackbaud, and Portillo's. The podcast explores evolving skill sets in financial planning and analysis, planning and budgeting processes, retooling finance after acquisitions, and building smaller restaurants based on data-driven analysis.

Roughly 20 years ago, Neha Krishnamohan arrived as a college freshman on Duke University’s Durham, N.C., campus, intent on pursuing a career that would someday grant her the agency to develop a product or therapy capable of solving a healthcare problem.Having grown up among family members with different careers in the medical field, Krishnamohan had inherited a deep interest in medicine—although she felt that her tendency to want to be more “hands-on” might make engineering a more suitable field of study.“As far as I was concerned, I was going to go to work for a Medtronic or a Pfizer, where I would come up with a great new product,” reports Krishnamohan, who after enrolling in Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering chose biomedical engineering as her major.As Krishnamohan was ratcheting up her engineering studies, one of her professors made a lasting impression on her by enlivening their discussions with tales of past experiences as a Wall Street banker.“The idea that the financial merits of a company really inform its decision-making and that you as a finance person are at the center of critical decisions that need to be made was intriguing, to say the least,” recalls Krishnamohan, who along the way began thinking of investment banking as perhaps an alternative path along which to achieve her goal of developing a medical product.   As her college years progressed and Krishnamohan applied to a number of investment bank internship programs, eventually she nabbed a spot at Goldman Sachs, which subsequently offered her a full-time position upon her graduation in 2008.  “This was a tumultuous time to be starting a career in investment banking, but I think that it helped to lay a foundation for me with regard to the importance of being prepared for the worst,” explains Krishnamohan, who would remain at Goldman Sachs for a period 13 years, 11 of which were spent inside the firm’s healthcare investment banking group. Krishnamohan ended up being named a Goldman vice president in 2015, about midway into her lengthy tenure with the firm.In this same year, while Krishnamohan was tasked with helping a Boston-based client to prepare for an IPO, a snowstorm prevented her manager and Goldman colleagues from attending the company’s “drafting sessions,” wherein the firm’s management and lawyers would toil for many hours over a period of days to create its IPO documents.As Krishnamohan remembers, “I knew that the room was going to be looking to me for the right guidance, so I embraced this and found myself having a point of view, asking questions, guiding them through the story—and I saw that people were listening. It was a remarkable 3 days.”“Leadership doesn’t have to have all the answers,” she adds. “You have to listen and drive toward decisions that have conviction.” –Jack Sweeney

It was late 2020 when Michelle Hook ended 17 years of fruitful career-building at Domino’s to accept a CFO appointment at fast casual restaurant chain Portillo’s.  “The two things that I was looking for were to be passionate about a new brand and to feel a culture fit,” recalls Hook, who adds that she had long imagined someday leaving Domino’s to join a smaller company that she could help to grow.“I just didn’t care about going to a bigger company or ‘X,’ ‘Y,’ or ‘Z,’” continues Hook, who tells us that she ultimately took a leap of faith with regard to there being a culture fit at Portillo’s.“I actually never stepped into our headquarters until my first day on the job and had met in person only with the CEO, since this was during COVID times and the rest of the hiring process had been done on Zoom,” comments Hook.Fast-forward 15 months to when the Omicron variant was still grabbing headlines and inflation had begun to rattle the economy—and Hook could not escape the notion that the traditional Portillo’s restaurant needed to change for the post-COVID world.“I thought to myself, I think that we’re overbuilding our restaurants—we need to think about where the puck is going,” remembers Hook, who notes that Portillo’s dine-in customers in today’s post-COVID environment account for only roughly 35 percent of the chain’s volume.“I had come from Domino’s, which didn’t have these big dining rooms and had built out a heavily digital business,” remarks Hook, who reports that Portillo’s digital business represents only 20 percent of overall sales.This subject soon surfaced at an executive strategy session at which Portillo’s CEO, Michael Osanloo, tasked Hook and Portillo’s head of marketing with leading an initiative dubbed “Restaurant of the Future.”   “I think that Michael knew that I’d take on the project by using a data-driven lens,” comments Hook, who points out that the project has involved “time and motion studies” involving specific restaurants and their conveyance activities within the kitchen.      “Getting the engine right in the car is super important to us,” she says. “This will bring benefits not only on the cost side of things but also for our team members, who will find it easier to complete their work.” –Jack Sweeney

Topics discussed include the importance of financial agility, Derek's career path, the role of AI in the finance industry, and CFO priorities for the upcoming year.

We are near the end of our discussion with CFO Svai Sanford when he permits us to unlock one last door to his past.Unbeknownst to us, 20 minutes earlier, Sanford had handed us the key to its lock in the form of a short story.The story had begun with Sanford receiving a job offer, to which he had replied, “Are you sure? I do not have any experience in this sector.”His future boss had replied: “You will figure it out.”At first, we were left wondering whether there had been something more that the future boss had known about Sanford—perhaps a piece of contributing evidence that had made him feel confident that Sanford could acclimate and succeed.“There’s something in me that has always allowed me to figure things out,” Sanford had confided.Sanford’s choice of words—“something in me”—had been interesting. Certainly, there is no shortage of problem-solving exercises along any CFO’s path, but he had already told us that his career track had likely been different from that of other CFOs—and we had sensed that the “something” to which he had been referring had not yet been disclosed to us.Still, as Sanford had helped us to check off the requisite CFO career milestones via his engaging and modest narrative, we eventually had heard about his arrival in the C-suite—which for a moment had led us to consider how Sanford’s success story is not remarkably different from that of other CFOs.However, that’s exactly why it’s so remarkable, or so we later realize.As we enter the final minutes of our discussion, we learn that Sanford had arrived in the United States as a 13-year-old refugee from Laos, who with only a 3rd-grade education had entered a Kansas City high school while not yet speaking a word of English.How does someone enter the C-suite some 20 years later after having surmounted such adverse circumstances?Here’s where we find the key that Sanford gave us.We think of the 13-year-old Sanford and hear the words of his future boss, “You will figure it out.” –Jack Sweeney

When Charly Kevers took his mentor’s advice and swapped a corporate development role at Hewlett-Packard for a tour of duty as a director of HP’s investor relations arm, he looked forward to tackling a variety of IR requisites, including crafting the messaging that follows a change at the top.Two years and four HP CEOs later, Kevers exited HP knowing that his IR term (with its extra helping of CEO turnover) had afforded him a stint unlike any before it at HP.“It’s a highly stressful role when you are standing in front of the Fidelitys of the world and they’re asking you a lot of questions beginning with ‘What does it mean for the business and what does it mean for my stock,’” explains Kevers, who subsequently stepped into a corporate development role at Salesforce. “That experience has since helped me by allowing me in many cases to rationalize things by saying, ‘Well, this is not as bad as what I dealt with there,’” comments Kevers, who these days, as CFO of Carta, appears to be focused as much on internal communications as he is on external PR.“Having worked mostly for public companies, I‘ve been trained to not talk about any number that isn’t public information, but here at Carta, we are very transparent,” remarks Kevers, who adds that he is routinely surprised by how Carta employees respond to numbers.“We’ve been very transparent about where we want to save money and have sought to explain why we care about gross margin and metrics like sales efficiency and other things that contribute to profitability, and I have been surprised by how much people will care about them and then take ownership of them by finding ways to improve these metrics,” reports Kevers, who notes that Carta’s efforts to achieve greater  transparency are visible on the company’s P&L, which now reports the gross margin for different product areas along with product-specific marketing and R&D spending.“We can now look at how the Rule of 40 applies to every one of our product areas, so the board room discussions can be much more in-depth when it comes to discussing tradeoffs” observes Kevers, who seems to harbor as much enthusiasm for transparency outside the boardroom as he does for clarity inside its doors.“If you’re transparent and explain what metrics need to be watched,” he says, “doing so really does help to drive productive discussions between finance and the rest of the business.” –Jack Sweeney