CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Mike DePrisco is the new CEO of the IMA, taking over from Jeff Thompson who led the organization for nearly 15 years. The IMA recently celebrated its 100th anniversary and aims to support and optimize the accounting profession while helping individuals achieve their career aspirations. Mike DePrisco has a background in higher education and previously worked at the Project Management Institute before joining the IMA. The IMA has over 140,000 members globally and focuses on providing competency, knowledge, and skills to drive business value in the finance and accounting field. AI is expected to have a significant impact on the accounting department, and the IMA aims to help its members navigate and leverage new technologies to create positive outcomes for organizations and society.

Rick Rosenthal had been working as an investment analyst at Bear Stearns for some 3 years when the bank became a casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis.He remembers sitting in front of his Bloomberg terminal in March 2008 and watching a news conference at which a Wall Street expert was assuring viewers that Bear Stearns was a solid company—just as the bank’s stock began to plummet.  In a deal reached a few days later, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay a mere $2 a share to buy all of Bear.“While our fund had been performing well, JPMorgan had its own, so the question became, ‘What is going to happen to our fund?,’” recalls Rosenthal, who became part of a team of Bear veterans who ultimately were spun out by JPMorgan to manage the fund independently.Reports Rosenthal: “Relative to traditional asset management funds, we actually performed pretty well, but I did come to understand much more clearly how integrated the financial system is into the greater economy.”Rosenthal remained inside the investment banking realm until 2013, when he was named vice president of finance at CLEAR, the biometrics technology start-up that had introduced a menu of offerings to boost security measures at airports and stadiums.At CLEAR, Rosenthal was finally able to satisfy an “operations itch” and acquire the operational skills that he now views as being critical to stepping into a CFO position.To help underscore the career-building value of being able to cite experience in multiple operational and functional tasks, Rosenthal tells us about a productivity metric that he helped to develop while at CLEAR.Historically, a total sales figure had been tabulated each day, along with a total sales per employee number. However, visibility into the sales function remained limited, and it was felt that management had too few levers to drive new sales.“Since I oversaw the payroll function, I had visibility into the number of hours that different employees worked each day and could actually see the sales that each made,” explains Rosenthal, whose next step was to engage the operations team responsible for employee scheduling.“The idea now was to assign the top performers to times when the lanes at the airport were the busiest,” comments Rosenthal, who adds that the experience of having advanced a new metric revealed to him not only the power of the operator’s view but also the risks of continuing to allow one data point to cloud over new opportunities.Says Rosenthal: “Here was an important segment of employees that we had just not focused on before because they hadn’t been generating a high enough overall volume of sales to merit attention.” –Jack Sweeney CFOTL: Tell us about Clara Analytics … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?Rosenthal: Clara Analytics is an AI-based software platform for claims organizations inside the commercial casualty industry. So, what do I mean by this? Think about an adjuster who’s working at a carrier or maybe even for a self-insured company, as many firms today manage these risks in-house without using an outside carrier. An adjuster may be managing 100-plus claims at any given time. There’s a lot of information on these that’s coming in on a daily basis, and it’s hard for any individual to read and comprehend all of it on sort of a real-time basis. What ends up happening is that they’ll look at each claim periodically. Every 30 days, or even less often, they’ll review what’s transpired since they last looked. What our tools do is to monitor all of the relevant information daily, so that we can alert adjusters as to which of their 100 claims require their immediate attention on any given day.This allows the adjuster to be more strategic in managing the claims and optimizing outcomes. What drew me to CLARA Analytics was that it was an opportunity. It’s a series B company. The CEO, Heather Wilson, has a tremendous background. She was the former chief data officer at companies like Citi, AIG, and Kaiser. She’s on the board of Equifax. I met her, and we just clicked from Day One. This was a really interesting opportunity on top of that because she was relatively new to the company. We had this opportunity, essentially, to rebuild from scratch some of our team, some of our products, and our go-to-market strategy. We could really think through how to invest capital in a way that was going to get CLARA growing significantly. We’ve made these investments and now, excitingly, have seen revenue grow tremendously. 

Back in 2011, the buzz surrounding the launch of Redbox’s Blu-ray disc rental business was getting increasingly dour.For Taryn Aronson, who had been hired to help to execute the firm’s digital content strategy, the performance woes of physical discs were not anything to lose sleep over.However, the negative notions surrounding Blu-ray’s lackluster performance drew Aronson’s curiosity.According to the buzz, the root cause of Blu-ray’s performance blues at Redbox was that Blu-ray was “a low-margin business.”“This just didn’t make sense to me because as a rental business, the driver of your profit is inventory turns,” explains Aronson, who notes that data showing robust turns of Blu-ray discs by Redbox competitors had exposed that demand was not the issue.     Meanwhile, a senior content leader at Redbox had recently broadened Aronson’s role, allowing her to troubleshoot for both digital and physical content. Having started her career as a financial analyst at Blackstone Group, Aronson first jumped into the media world at NBCUniversal, where she had become involved with the launch of streaming service Hulu. She would subsequently join Redbox’s strategy team after having completed an MBA degree.In the ensuing months at Redbox, Aronson dug into the numbers and began to educate others on the true economics of Blu-ray versus SD and the practices that optimized the buying and allocation of Blu-ray discs at Redbox.Reports Aronson: “I got people on board, and we were able to drive a ton of incremental profit for Redbox.”Aronson’s key takeaway from the Blu-ray experience was the importance of understanding the role of finance and leveraging data to make better decisions across the business. As finance leaders, Aronson tells us, it’s crucial for us to work in partnership with colleagues and to make smart trade-offs to increase value for the company. –Jack Sweeney

Sruthi Lanka is clearly not the only CFO who began her professional career at blue chip investment house Goldman Sachs.However, she may be one of the only CFOs—if not the only one—who can trace her career roots to Goldman’s technology engineering team.Back in 2009, as the economic downturn dispatched a daily dose of bad news, Lanka was tasked with separating Goldman’s nervous bankers from their long-tenured messaging device of choice:  the BlackBerry.  “Most banks would not even entertain the idea of switching because the BlackBerry was so locked down and considered to be ironclad,” explains Lanka, who notes that while Apple’s iPhone had become a popular alternative to the BlackBerry inside a number of different industries, bankers were known for clutching their BlackBerrys—and Goldman was no exception.According to her, “We found that most Goldman employees were already living on the iPhone, but meanwhile they would still carry this clunky BlackBerry.”After 3 years with Goldman Sachs, Lanka found herself being led into another realm by the same curiosity that had once caused her to become an engineer and subsequently drawn her to all things tech.A typical self-question of the time was “How did bankers make the decisions that they made about about whether to invest or not invest?” “This was all lost on me as an engineer,” recalls Lanka, who would return to school for an MBA and subsequently open her next career chapter as an investment banker.With Royal Bank of Canada, Lanka advised clients during pivotal moments of their company’s trajectory. She found investment banking to be empowering, as she was able to work with seasoned CEOs and CFOs, but at the same time it was frustrating for her. Lanka tells us that it was then when she realized that she wanted to build a company rather than just advise others about theirs.This experience led her to MoneyLion, where as head of strategic finance she leveraged both her finance acumen and tech engineering skills to build a data team to help to realize the early-stage start-up’s data-driven vision—a combination of skills and collaborative approaches that she would once more rely upon after stepping into the CFO office at Public.com in 2020.     Says Lanka: “It’s not about having all of the answers but about knowing the right questions to ask.” –Jack Sweeney 

Even today, Dayton Kellenberger marvels at his good fortune in having landed inside the corporate finance department of The Coleman Company, Inc..Of course, like a lot of career success stories, this tale had timing as a large contributor, especially inasmuch as and a little more than 10 years ago, Coleman was experiencing declining gross margins across its business.To Kellenberger, a recently hired business analyst, Coleman’s shrinking gross margins seemed to present not only a problem-solving challenge but also an opportunity to help to rewire a renowned brand’s customer best practices.   “When you’re part of a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, you basically have one shot at the beginning of the year to do an annual line review with a customer,’” explains Kellenberger, who adds that at the time, the process might have involved having a “seller” from, for example, Cabela’s freely thumbing through different Coleman catalogs while casually signaling to a Coleman representative, “Okay, we’d like to sell this product.”  “The process change that we made was to get finance involved from the very beginning and have us run the line reviews so that we would create one catalog of feature products,” recalls Kellenberger, who notes that the new catalog proved particularly invaluable for what it displayed internally.  Comments Kellenberger: “Because we could see what a product’s margin was from the previous year and compare it to the current one, we could flag low-margin products, consider replacement products with higher margins, and sometimes even sunset certain SKUs.”Kellenberger believes that the resulting price volume analysis exposed the previous risks of making business decisions based on analysis that had historically seldom penetrated beyond the customer or product category level.“What we learned at Coleman was that a single SKU at a single customer could be responsible for dragging an entire product category down,” remarks Kellenberger, who reports that the analysis also exposed the alarming fact that Coleman had at times unintentionally been replacing high-margin products with lower-margin newer ones.Looking back, Kellenberger observes that Coleman’s margin decline turnaround might have had a different outcome had the manufacturer not rejected certain popular theories.At the time, Kellenberger remembers, one management team member attributed the decline to “rising prices in China,” while another suggested that the downturn was due to “manufacturing snags in the U.S.”Says Kellenberger: “This all began with a debate that was rooted not in fact but in emotion.” –Jack Sweeney

Are you tired of sitting through unproductive monthly meetings that turn into show-and-tell sessions? Do you want to shift your focus to key metrics that matter and move away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach? In this episode of the Planning Aces podcast, Cohosts Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles feature the commentary and insights of three finance leaders who don’t mind displacing the status quo as they seek to optimize their business metrics and drive performance. Episode #23 kicks off with the hosts featuring recent commentary from Dayton Kellenberger, CFO of Vendavo, who shares his experience with implementing a metrics-based approach to monthly business unit reviews. He explains that they shifted their focus to key metrics that matter and moved away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach. Dayton also discusses the importance of optimizing SAS gross margins, which is a cross-functional effort that involves finance, sales, cloud ops teams, and customer success teams. Later in the episode, Celeste Ackert and Jason Quinn share their insights on creating cross-functional dashboards and raising the profile of metrics within an organization. Brett emphasizes the importance of using planning tools to build cross-functional dashboards, as it allows for better integration between the planning and operational cycles. He also highlights the significance of customer contribution analysis in optimizing resources and identifying areas of sub-optimization. Jason Quinn also discusses the importance of cultural norms in achieving desired outcomes. He emphasizes the need for fairness, transparency, kindness as a service, pursuit of truth, and trust through transparency. Brett summarizes Quinn’s points into three categories of measures for FP&A professionals: the overall scoreboard, success potential (leading indicators), and experiences. Overall, the episode aims to highlight the takeaways and provoke listeners to think about other ways of monitoring how their businesses are performing. Related Episode Content

While April 2020 may forever bring to mind corporate corridors newly silenced by COVID 19’s arrival in the United States, CarParts.com CFO Ryan Lockwood will likely always remember it as the month when opportunity knocked.Having spent the previous 10 years in investment management, Lockwood, a portfolio manager for a Southern California investment house, was looking to move to more of an operational role when he got a call from David Meniane and Lev Peker of the management team at U.S. Auto Parts, the car parts retailer that was about to rename itself CarParts.com.“They said, ‘Why don’t you come out to our offices, and we’ll talk?,’ which I was a little nervous about because COVID had arrived only maybe 4 weeks earlier,” remembers Lockwood, who notes that in the past he had offered the business leaders friendly advice as a “capital markets buy-side professional.”“They told me, ‘Look, it will just be the three of us in 25,000 square feet of office space—just come by and talk,’” explains Lockwood, who adds that the two men were in the midst of executing an ambitious turnaround plan for the business. Ultimately, they offered Lockwood the position of senior vice president of finance.Lockwood accepted, and in the months that followed, the business found new traction along its turnaround journey as the auto industry’s struggling supply chains helped to spike car prices for both new and used cars and CarParts.com found itself serving a swelling population of online customers.For Lockwood—who would be named CFO in Spring 2022—the focus became data insights and profitability for every customer transaction in order to ensure that the company’s upward trajectory would continue.Says Lockwood: “We needed a lot more data insights about our customers, and fulfilling this need has pretty much informed our every decision.” –Jack Sweeney

Of all of the places future CFOs could have been employed in the late 1990s, the printing division of RR Donnelley might seem to have been among the least likely.However, it’s important to note that this period predated the wide deployment of EDGAR, the database system that electronically automates the collection, validation, and acceptance of financial documents by the government’s SEC division.  Hence the printing division of marketing communications giant RR Donnelley remained one of the country’s largest hubs of activity surrounding the creation, printing, and submittal of financial documents.“For time-sensitive documents, there would be a deadline to be met each afternoon in order to enable documents to be flown and then hand-couriered to the SEC’s offices,” recalls Celeste Ackert, who tells us that in order to better accommodate any clients who might drop by, the office space that she occupied with others featured a half-door whose bottom was closed and top always open.For Ackert, who had become an eagle-eyed project manager inside Donnelley’s printing bullpen, the endless flow of financial documents served to satisfy a growing operations appetite before morphing into a portal from which to observe future career possibilities.“I would be flipping through these SEC documents and thinking to myself, ‘You know what?—perhaps I’d like to see myself in a prospectus someday,’” remarks Ackert, who after 6 years of serving Donnelley clients segued into a series of corporate finance jobs first by leveraging her printing operations expertise and subsequently by climbing the ranks as an FP&A all-star.Before leaving Donnelley, Ackert—much to her credit—decided to balance her “prospectus ambitions” with some added ballast for the journey ahead: an MBA degree.Comments Ackert: “I wasn’t really certain how I was going to get there, but these two things equipped me with some fire.” –Jack Sweeney

It’s perhaps appropriate that Scott Healy’s finance career began at an airport. With recently displayed boarding pass in hand, Healy thought that he was ready for takeoff—only to have his new boss board with a mystery box under one arm.“He was carrying a package that I thought was some sort of welcome gift for me because from the outside you could see some cookies and things to eat,” recalls Healy, who upon closer inspection discovered that while the package did indeed contain a few treats, it also held 15 prospectuses.   “He expected me to read and analyze each of them during our 6-hour flight from San Francisco to Boston,” continues Healy, who uses the story to illustrate the first of multiple lessons that he believes became invaluable to his career.“First, I learned how to critically process large amounts of information, regardless of whether it was communicated verbally or in writing,” reports Healy, who tells us that in the years ahead, the processing pace never let up as his ability to consume information became further improved by the the many prospectuses that he himself would come to author.Another lesson that became critical to Healy’s finance career was learning how to pitch clients.      “Pitching is a bit like speed dating—generally, you have 5 minutes to capture someone’s interest, and if you don’t, you will not get the transaction done,” comments Healy, who credits his ever-maturing pitching acumen with winning over one client in particular.“I had this very detailed pitch planned, but when we sat down, the client said to me, ‘There’s absolutely no chance that you’re ever going to do one of my projects,’” remembers Healy, who adds that for the next 30 minutes, the client listed all of the specific terms that he would expect in a purchase agreement.“I listened, I commented, and slowly I got him to agree to talk further,” remarks Healy, who notes that he countered each specific term being required by the client with a “mini pitch” designed to address each item.In the end, the client rewarded Healy with the project, a feat that speaks highly of Healy’s ability not only to pitch, but also to negotiate—which the CFO admits might well be his greatest skillset.Says Healy: “I’ve negotiated in 12 different countries and on four different continents. One time, I even negotiated for 76 hours straight.” –Jack Sweeney

While chief accountant for the SEC’s investment management division, Alison Staloch reports, she found herself being greeted by a degree of inclusive enthusiasm that she had seldom encountered before.“People would say, ‘Great, the accountants are here!,’” recalls Staloch, who tells us that accountants at divisional meetings were sometimes sparse in comparison to the number of agency attorneys seated at the table.“Coming from a place where everyone was an accountant, this was new to me,” continues Staloch, who tells us that the commission’s high regard for her expertise and the accounting discipline in general helped to make her 5-1/2-year tenure there a satisfying career chapter.Having joined the organization as part of the SEC Fellows Program, Staloch found that her experience there seemed to grant her a healthy dose of professional activation—something that she admits that her early career had not always provided in large supply.  “I wavered a lot early in my career—I took the MCAT but didn’t go to medical school, and I took the LSAT but didn’t go to law school,” remarks Staloch, who as a seasoned KPMG auditor found herself similarly vexed with regard to possible next opportunities behind the doors at that firm.The SEC Fellows Program, however, was different. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow!—this is just a great way to become ingrained with an understanding of how regulations impact the accounting standards that companies operate under,’” remarks Staloch, who eventually exited the SEC in Spring 2021 to step into the CFO role at Fundrise, a software company that gives investors access to commercial and residential real estate deals by pooling their assets through an investment platform.Self-dubbed as the largest “direct-to-consumer alternative asset manager,” Fundrise has future investor-related ambitions that no doubt made Staloch’s resume—rich with regulatory smarts and investment management intuition—an attractive match.Says Staloch: “At the time, I still had thoughts about going back to public accounting. I do have a deep respect for that profession, but this came up somewhat serendipitously after I met Fundrise’s CEO through my network. He was very visionary and inspiring as he explained Fundrise’s mission, and it became very appealing to me.” –Jack Sweeney