CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Looking back, Jeff Coulter is not exactly certain how he landed a spot on a team tasked with designing and implementing the first-ever budgeting and reporting processes responsible for tracking Procter & Gamble’s marketing dollars on a single worldwide system.“P&G had hundreds of disparate setups that we had to bring into one system globally,” explains Coulter, recalling the effort behind the information systems upgrade with SAP software that many at the time (the year 2000) deemed to be a historic milestone not only for the packaged goods company but also for industry at large.Coulter had been plucked out of Procter & Gamble’s Iowa City office, where he had been working as a cost analyst for such products as Pantene and Scope. The new assignment required Coulter to relocate to Cincinnati, where for the next 2 years he became involved in multiple aspects of the implementation, including the rollout of SAP end-user training across P&G globally.“At the time, any career management at Procter & Gamble was essentially the result of a benevolent dictatorship—you were basically told where you were going to go next,” remembers Coulter, who adds that the experience and training that he gleaned along his P&G way made his time there a very worthy investment.Still, Coulter was eager to return west. Living close to family had always been a priority for the young finance executive, and Cincinnati turned out to be not so short a stint.  Consequently, while geography is perhaps not the first reason that people give for having joined Intel Corporation, for Coulter—who would first join the chip maker’s Portland, Oregon, complex—it was certainly among his top three impetuses.To move from a consumer products company to a technology company may seem unconventional, but Coulter tells us that his love for learning and his growth mindset helped him to adapt quickly at Intel, where he would remain for the next 6 years. He emphasizes the versatility of finance, which allows professionals to work across various industries.Says Coulter: “I love learning business models and figuring out how they’re making money and how to optimize that.” –Jack Sweeney

Jeff Laborde, a seasoned finance leader, shares his experience of understanding company operations through attending different meetings. He highlights the challenges of siloed finance functions. The podcast also discusses transitioning from investment banking to corporate finance during the financial crisis, as well as organizing finance for improved visibility. Other topics include staying dissatisfied, priorities as CFO of Jagger, and the company's history and current state.

While the leadership journeys of many of our CFO guests began on an upper floor of a glass-and-steel skyscraper affording a wide-angle view of a cosmopolitan metropolis, that of Blackbaud CFO Tony Boor started at street level in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.Less than an hour’s drive north of El Paso, Texas, Las Cruces is home not only to the main campus of New Mexico State University but also to a crowded schedule of holiday festivals and a varied collection of retailers—including motorcycle shops such as the one that Boor first visited in the mid-1970s.“When I was 13 or 14 years old, I walked into a motorcycle shop to buy my first bike and they ended up hiring me to sweep floors and haul trash,” recalls Boor, who over the next 10 years segued from maintenance to the service department, to parts management, to sales management, to being general manager of the store.“Thinking back now on being that young and running a business, I realize that I got a chance very early in my career to experience a firm from the other side of the desk, as I oversaw people much older than me and dealt with things like payroll, books, and accounting,” continues Boor, whose hours at the shop populated his high school and college years.Nonetheless, in a family with a father who worked at the nearby White Sands Missile Range as a nuclear electrical engineer and other sons who were embarking on engineering careers of their own, the motorcycle shop entry on Boor’s resume did not go unnoticed.Thus what might be surmised to have been a collective sigh of relief may have been heard when he decided to pursue an engineering degree at New Mexico State, thereby keeping safe the Boor family tradition. Or would it?“I was actually in my senior year of college when I decided that I didn’t want to be an engineer because I knew from working in the motorcycle shop that I loved business,” reports Boor, who remembers his parents not being at all pleased that the timing of his decision was coming so “late in the game.”    “It ended up taking me a little longer to be done with school, but I did switch over to accounting,” explains Boor, who would subsequently work for a number of the original Big Eight accounting houses before stepping into the ranks of corporate finance professionals—where the same qualities that had once served him well at the bike shop appear to have propelled his climb upward.Says Boor: “A lot of what I learned in those very early years of my life and career had a big impact on how things have gone for me, even in these finance leadership roles.” –Jack Sweeney

Evan Goldstein, with a multi-decade finance career at Genentech and Salesforce, shares a pivotal moment that transformed his leadership approach. He emphasizes the importance of data integrity, the role of finance in sales enablement, and the value of talent. Goldstein also discusses managing email and work-life balance and recommends books on influence without authority and market bubbles. Finally, he talks about CFO priorities for driving growth and scale at Seismic as they prepare to go public.

CFOs discuss driving profitability, appropriate metrics, and strategic cash management. Shifting focus from revenue growth to customer success. Importance of focus and one key result in strategy-setting. Reflections on the profitability journey at The Real Real. Building a central operations team and negotiating material savings.

Marco Torrente kicked off his finance career inside the Milan, Italy, offices of SC Johnson, the household cleaning products giant headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin.All told, he would end up spending 7 years in various finance roles at Johnson—including that of controller—while relocating first to London and then eventually to Geneva.Looking back, Torrente tells us that the family-owned company created a “flexible culture” that valued autonomy and direct communication—two qualities that have been instrumental in shaping his approach to finance leadership.

Perhaps it would be fair to speculate that were it not for the changing dietary habits of Americans and surprise arrival of a global pandemic, Steven Cirulis would likely not be occupying the CFO office at Potbelly Sandwich Shop.The pursuit of new alternative proteins inside the land of agtech has in recent years led more than few venture capital firms to seek out the advice of strategy executives familiar with the mathematics behind the evolving menus of fast dining establishments.Having held a succession of top strategy roles with the likes of McDonald’s and Panera, Steven Cirulis found his budding popularity within the VC community to be little more than a rewarding satisfaction—that is, until late 2019, when he decided to put some of his VC-related activities aside to accommodate an advisory gig with publicly-held sandwich shop Potbelly.  “They had been looking for a CFO at the time, but I was really enjoying my work on the venture capital side of things,” recalls Cirulis, who adds that the arrival of the pandemic changed everything.“I ostensibly became the person whom they turned to and asked, ‘Okay, what do we do here?,’” continues Cirulis.Within the next several weeks, he busily implemented a list of cash preservation edicts, triggered the renegotiation of bank covenants, and—along with Potbelly management—announced a pay cut, instituted an employee furlough, and applied for a PPP loan.Along the way—perhaps not more than a month into the pandemic—Potbelly proposed to Cirulis that he join the company as CFO and chief strategy officer.“Why would you join a restaurant business at the start of a pandemic?,” rhetorically reflects Cirulis, in highlighting but one of the queries that crossed his mind at the time.Nevertheless, Cirulis tells us, “I jumped at it.”  Three years later, with the virus now in the rearview mirror, Cirulis makes it clear that the pandemic will never fully escape his view: “Getting forgiveness on that PPP loan was a great day in my career as a CFO.” –Jack Sweeney

Matt Gustke, finance professional during the dotcom bubble burst, discusses receiving a fateful phone call from the CFO of eBay, which led to joining the company for 12 years. He shares insights on working in the e-commerce sector in the late 90s, transitioning to WooCommerce, achieving profitability, personal habits and routines, and book recommendations as CFO.

As listeners to our podcast well know, one of our favorite queries for finance executives who have had a lengthy tenure in one place is, “What kept you there?”It may go without saying that something with the word “opportunity” in it is perhaps the most popular response. Still, for certain finance leaders—and especially those whose careers span multiple decades with a single company—this question often summons up a degree of self-reflection that few others bring forth.Such was the case with Cox Enterprises President and CFO Dallas Clement, who afforded our question an extra modicum of contemplation that we had not expected before issuing some of the best career advice that has ever been shared on this podcast.To be fair, we may have prejudged Clement in assuming that his expansive (33 years) and adventurous career within Cox had unfolded without any degree of uncertainty. However, Clement quickly dispersed our presumptions by unveiling two career snapshots.The first came from the early 1990s, when Clement was contemplating exiting the environs of Cox’s Atlanta headquarters to practice law while living on the beach in Sarasota, Florida. “I had kept deferring law school, but at the time, I thought that this possibility might make for a pretty good life.”Another came from nearly 15 years later, when Clement—now a father with four daughters—was touring homes with his wife in Silicon Valley as he evaluated the relocation possibilities associated with an appointment that he subsequently would reject.  “Even if I wasn’t completely happy in my current role, it would have been disruptive to the kids and risky, so I didn’t leave,” explains Clement, who perhaps saves his best observations for those career-builders who like him have elected to stay put.He advises: “Once you’ve gone through that exercise and decided to stay, don’t second-guess yourself. Be all in—not only in your professional role but also more broadly in your life, your family, your outside work activities—because work is what you do, it’s not who you are. Over time, I have learned to be more mature and thoughtful about this. I really appreciate how lucky I’ve been in a variety of areas.”  –Jack Sweeney

If Paystand CFO Scott Bennion were to break his three-decade-long finance career into different chapters, the software finance leader would likely agree that he and many of his peers have recently opened a new one.As a starting—or concluding—point, the chapter that has just ended might simply be titled "The Data Set," in order to focus our attention on the means by which Bennion and others of his ilk have over the past decade extended their lines of sight into the business well beyond those of any previous generation of CFOs.   For Bennion—who remembers tracking CD shipping costs during the desktop computing era—the latest marker or evidence that a new page has been turned has been made visible by Paystand’s product engineering and development team.“After having deployed AI tools and generative AI, we’re able to actually see a 4x increase in productivity by our product and engineering teams so far,” reports Bennion, who minces no words when asked about AI's impact on company finances.He continues: “From a finance perspective, I see a massive opportunity for improved ROI through doing more with less. From a legal perspective, I see that we need to be making sure that we do this in a smart way so that we don't accidentally hit any legal third rails.”Bennion believes that the adoption of AI tools within SaaS organizations is not unlike what he previously observed firsthand in the open-source software environment.“New tech is often a developer-led initiative that comes into the organization through the side door, but once it's in, you need to embrace it,” observes Bennion, whose resume includes a stint as CFO of an open-source software company.Moreover, when it comes to some of the legal concerns associated with AI, Bennion suggests that just as happened in the open-source world, commercial licensing will be used to address some of the go-to-market concerns related to potential software infringement.As far as Bennion is concerned, when it comes to AI, the hands of time have already begun to move.    “You need to embrace it," he advises. "You can’t not embrace it." –Jack Sweeney