CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Even after serving in multiple CFO roles and spending 10 years on Wall Street, Manish Sarin still marvels at the plus-size experience that he acquired in the mid-1990s when he worked for Price Waterhouse as a financial advisor in its Nairobi office in Kenya, East Africa. At the time, Sarin recalls, an abundance of available funding from the World Bank and IMF was enticing growing numbers of state-owned business in the region to privatize their operations as a prelude to jump-starting their capital market strategies. “These were businesses like steel mills, aluminum plants, car dealerships, and commercial banks—for me, it was just an amazing introduction to how businesses work, what makes them successful or not successful, and how to actually evaluate businesses from a capitalistic perspective,” explains Sarin, who reports that he was the most junior member of the East African privatization practice, a team of 10 people within PW’s 100-employee Nairobi office. Says Sarin: “Our clients were really the World Bank and IMF—we would go and work at state-owned businesses at their request and then prepare and present our analysis to both the World Bank and the national government.”     Twenty years later, as Sarin prepared to open his first CFO chapter, some of those presentations undoubtedly came to mind as he began to formulate his own vision for the role and the broader business contexts that Wall Street now expects 21st-century finance leaders to deliver. Along the way, Sarin tells us, he has learned that a broader perspective is being demanded not only by outside stakeholders. “A few years ago, a head of sales told me, ‘You have great ideas, Manish, but you need to provide greater context and better explain why you are doing the things that you are doing,’” remarks Sarin, who says that he took the advice to heart and has found that adding more context has accelerated his relationship-building with different parts of the organization. “If a CFO approaches the role from the perspective of occupying a finance swim lane, I think that this is a very narrow view of the role—it has to be much broader, and you have to be thinking, ‘the entire company and what is happening in every department are part of my concern,’” explains Sarin.  - Jack Sweeney

When Mark George first joined Otis Elevator’s accounting team back in the late 1980s, he found fixed asset accounting to be different from what he expected. Says George: ”We had to run around the company and put barcodes on any new piece of furniture that the company had purchased.” What’s more, George tells us, he roamed the corridors as a deputy in the accounts payable department, “punching A/P vouchers” and acquiring any necessary signatures. “I was always thinking, ‘How do I get away from doing this?,’” comments George, who notes that as a 20-something-year-old he sometimes felt like a “fish out of water” at Otis, which back then—as it is now—was part of the larger conglomerate patchwork that is United Technologies Corp. “I understood accounting to a certain degree, but I was definitely not an accountant,” recalls George. Less than enamored with the Otis accounting career ladder and potentially facing years of manual work, George began to speak up as he roamed the office and suggest changes to certain policies and processes that could eliminate the work that he personally disliked. He also began championing the adoption of new technologies that could automate manual tasks, despite the fact that such automation would more than likely put at risk his own position “with puncher in hand.” “If at some point if they fired me, I was young enough and naïve enough to think that I would just go and get another job, as if that would be just that easy,” explains George, who adds that over time, his suggestions found wider support—and as more tasks became automated, he found himself in greater demand, not less.      “I would solve a problem, and they would give me more problems to solve,” remembers George, who observes that he began to view his early years at Otis in a new light after returning to the United States from a stint as CFO of Otis’s South Asia operations. “I had moved around the company quite a bit by then, and I considered why I had already reached a certain level while others who had joined Otis at the same time had languished,” notes George, who credits his aversion to manual work with having opened the door to more opportunities in process improvement, beginning with a job in Otis’s treasury department and then leading to stints in financial planning and corporate development. “Eventually, due to some M&A work and my treasury background, I got some exposure to some international M&A roles overseas, and our regional headquarters then asked me to take a permanent role,” says George, whose stint as Otis’s South Asia’s finance chief became the first of several CFO tenures within UT—including a term as CFO of Otis itself. –Jack Sweeney

Looking back on her career as a corporate finance executive, Angela Pierce says that the call of leadership arrived at a moment of unvarnished frustration. Sixteen years ago, when the management of Level 3 Communications was expressing a keen interest in acquiring Pierce’s then-company, Broadwing Corporation, it was not the first time that Pierce found herself sitting across from Level 3 corporate development executives.    In fact, as Broadwing’s vice president of finance, Pierce had been involved in two earlier engagements when Level 3 executives had expressed similar sentiments—only to have nothing come out of the exercises in M&A due diligence. For Pierce, the third engagement necessitated a more direct approach—one that signaled to Level 3 that Broadwing management was confident that further negotiation was not necessary. “At some point, you have acquired the required competence from your past experiences, so I said to the executive, ‘Look, I don’t want to do this again, so here’s the deal,’” recalls Pierce, who adds that she shortly received a term sheet for a $1.4 billion deal that would be signed only a few days later. While Pierce says that she was just expressing a sentiment shared by Broadwing’s wider management, her grasp of the deal’s fundamentals and confidence in her own ability to deliver the message abruptly quelled any angst concerning her future leadership roles.    “At that moment,” she observes, “I realized that I wanted to be the one to make the call.” –Jack Sweeney 

Among the career milestones that CFOs prefer to highlight for us during our discussions, there’s little question that examples of driving business growth are an ongoing favorite. However, for Jason Keen, who built his finance career inside midsize construction firms, management’s growth goals have always needed to be mindful of a company’s organizational culture. Inside the construction realm, where multigenerational, family-owned businesses survive and thrive, growth goals are often tempered by enduring organizational cultures that are apt to cast a cautious eye upon those who choose to champion change. As just such a champion, Jason Keen has had few milestones for driving growth that have resembled the double-digit feats commonly recounted to us by CFOs from other sectors. Instead, Keen tells us of the unique challenges that finance leaders sometimes face within multigenerational firms.   “Part of what I do is to get a foundation in place—which is what I have done three times now—and then structure the company to be ready for growth,” he reports. “This means putting the right type of team in place and preparing them for this smart growth so that both the top line and the bottom line grow together.” It’s an approach that most recently led Keen to step into the CFO office at Mills & Nebraska, a family-owned business specializing in the manufacture and installation of doors.   Says Keen: “We want to be ready for growth in a smart way.” –Jack Sweeney 

Steve and Jack discuss how growing concerns about a possible economic recession are helping fuel CFO aspirations for creating a more agile finance function, and Steve reflects on how different career experiences and backgrounds influence how CFOs lead and make business decisions. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO David Barnes of Trimble, CFO Komal Misra of Starry, Inc. and CFO Jason Keen of Mills Nebraska.

Generally, when legendary CEO Roger Enrico wasn’t happy, just about every PepsiCo executive from junior grades on up knew about it. So it was that when David Barnes was told he would be presenting to Enrico on a subject known to inflame the CEO’s ire, he knew that his presentation—one way or the other—would be career-defining. “Enrico was known to be very impatient with those who would present a bunch of facts but offer no insights,” remembers Barnes, whose tryst with destiny surfaced via the guidance of none other than Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s future CEO, who Barnes tells us was his “great mentor and sponsor” during his Pepsi years. “Pepsi had hired a big consulting firm and they had dumped a lot of data on us, but they couldn’t find any insights, so Indra asked me to work with the consultants and actually get the insights out of the data,” continues Barnes, who had been hired in the mid-1990s to be part of a strategy group within PepsiCo that had been tasked with integrating strategy and finance across the company. As it turned out, Barnes’s presentation succeeded in delivering a number of new insights related to the profitability (or lack thereof) of PepsiCo’s restaurant business in China. “We had a small, money-losing business in China at a time when the Asian economies at large were experiencing deep recessions, so the questions being asked were ‘Do we give up?’ and ‘Do we double down?,’” recalls Barnes, who would soon open a new career chapter in China—an indication that perhaps his presentation had gone well.  “They wanted a known quantity in China—someone with the company’s corporate interests at heart—so I became responsible for finance as well as our development activities around new stores for KFC and Pizza Hut,” explains Barnes, who would subsequently use data to better expose an opportunity for new stores inside China’s smaller tertiary markets rather than in big cities. “We figured out that there was a better way to do capital resource allocation just for these markets,” comments Barnes, who recalls the business leader who ultimately made the call when it came to opening new stores as saying: “Let’s get at it!” –Jack Sweeney 

Among the many strategic changes that finance leader Danielle Murcray has helped to put in motion during her multi-chapter CFO career, perhaps none better reveals her mantle as a strategic leader than the move by cybersecurity firm AttackIQ to adopt a 100 percent–remote U.S. workforce.   With the arrival of the pandemic, Murcray—like many of her CFO peers—became laser-focused on the company’s finance liquidity and operational efficiencies. At the same time, though, she felt compelled to communicate the health and well-being of the company more broadly. “I really sought to promote stability across the organization and looked to instill trust with employees and investors,” comments Murcray, who credits the same aspects of her leadership outreach with helping AttackIQ to leverage the advantages of a remote workforce. “I spend quite a bit of my time making certain that we are overcommunicating and collaborating in different ways so that people feel that we are together even though we are not physically together anymore,” explains Murcray, who moved to Montana from California back in late 2020 after the company announced that its U.S. operations would be moving to a remote model. It subsequently closed its Santa Clara headquarters and San Diego offices. “From the results of our own surveys, we realized that most employees did not want to go back to the office anymore, so we could see that being 100 percent–remote would be a huge competitive advantage,” reports Murcray, who adds that since the decision, more than a dozen AttackIQ employees have relocated out of the state of California. Says Murcray: “I think that leading through the pandemic is now become something of a defining moment in my career. –Jack Sweeney

When Komal Misra, a software engineer turned asset manager, decided that it was time once again to make a career change, she found herself staring at a computer screen filled with stocks from various portfolios that were being traded based not on business fundamentals but larger macro-driven trends. “It got me to thinking: Here I had invested so much time in understanding these businesses and why they were good or great investments, but none of it mattered in that place in time when things were just selling up,” recalls Komal, who adds that she began thinking about her career as if it were a company stock that over time would be propelled or impeded due to macro-driven trends. According to Misra, “I started with a top-down approach to consider what my options were within business—in just the same way that I would’ve analyzed any stock investment. This led me to the conclusion that in the long run, if I wanted another 10- or 15-year career, I really should be thinking about transitioning to something that had a lot more staying power than what I was doing at that time. “ For Misra, who had spent the previous 15 years as a tech sector portfolio manager, the move to corporate finance was not triggered by ambitions to someday be a CFO. Instead, she tells us, she knew that management teams were seeking to add senior finance executives who could help to propel traditional finance teams into the realm of strategic finance. Misra would join technology services company Cognizant as a vice president of finance and eventually oversee the company’s corporate development.   “Cognizant is where I learned the inner workings of a large, mega-cap company from a finance team point of view,” comments Misra, who a few years later would enter the CFO office at Internet service provider Starry, Inc. Looking back, Misra says that it was not so much the CFO role as the opportunities that the role has afforded her that led her into the C-suite.     Says Misra: “I was very willing to take on risks in life and see where things led me and not be afraid to fail, because from my point of view, whether I became a CFO or not didn’t matter—what mattered was that I was doing something interesting.” –Jack Sweeney 

A dozen years ago, if you had told Ryan Gwillim that within the next decade he would be named CFO of the Brunswick Corporation, he may have laughed. At the time, he was an associate with law firm Baker & McKenzie who was spending his days traveling the globe to advise legal clients as an M&A transaction guru. However, over the next decade, Gwillim and Brunswick would together find a common groove as each embarked on a journey of transformation. For Brunswick—a 155-year-old conglomerate—the evolutionary arc would trigger a flurry of historic M&A activity that included the sale of its marquee bowling center business (2014) while at the same time advancing its steady stroke into marine products. For Gwillim, the transformation chapter would put an end to his vagabond existence while landing the seasoned M&A attorney inside Brunswick’s corporate counsel office in 2012. It would be little more than 5 years later, after a steady progression of internal M&A projects, that Gwillim would be asked by Brunswick’s CFO to step into the role of vice president of investor relations.   “From September 2017 to about the summer of 2019 was one of the most volatile times in Brunswick’s history, and here I was, along with the management team, becoming the face of storytelling for the investment community,” explains Gwillim, who characterizes the period as one when Brunswick once-and-for-all “closed the books on its conglomerate viewpoint.” Determined to focus investor attention on the company’s promising future in marine technology products, Brunswick accelerated efforts to jettison businesses procured during its conglomerate years, such as a struggling fitness operation that had been undermining investor confidence in the company. Along the way, Gwillim would become a primary driver of the Brunswick transformation as he helped to manage investor expectations as well as the financial levers that would allow the company to find its footing while opening its post-conglomerate chapter.    As it turned out, the beginning of Brunswick’s post-conglomerate life coincided with the completion of the seasoned-M&A-attorney-turned-IR-executive’s own transformation chapter. Appointed as Brunswick’s vice president of finance and treasurer in 2019, Gwillim would be named Brunswick CFO only a year later.   “We are completely different from what we were 10 or 15 years ago,” reports Gwillim, sharing a thought that one could argue applies to the CFO as well as to the company. –Jack Sweeney

Among the many acquisitions with which Marc Levine became involved during his 25 years at Hewlett-Packard Co., it may surprise few of his former colleagues that he counts HP’s purchase of Compaq Computer as one of the tech giant’s most unusual marriages.     However, Levine doesn’t single out HP’s purchase of Compaq due to the lively behind-the-scenes drama that accompanied it after Walter Hewlett, son of one of the HP founders, loudly voiced his opposition to the deal or the two books that a subsequent proxy battle helped to fatten. Instead, Levine tells us that from his perspective, the unusual aspect of the Compaq acquisition had more to do with the integration of certain pieces of the business. “On my particular team, I was the only person from HP, which was unlike in any of the other HP integrations I had previously been involved with, where there had always been more HP people,” explains Levine, who recalls spending many a night in Houston, Texas, hotel rooms beside Compaq’s headquarters. Looking back, Levine suspects that the lack of HP representation on his team had to do with his group’s focus on the integration of Compaq’s sales team and field organization. Having in the past worked closely with the HP sales team (including a stint as a sales leader in HP’s Southeast Asia operations), Levine was perhaps better prepared than many of his HP peers to join the integration effort. Says Levine: “I think that past experience brought me a little more credibility when I walked into the room, and I could understand better some of the things that the Compaq people were dealing with.” Still, while HP was widely known as an engineering organization rich with technical talent, Compaq was known for having a dynamic sales organization—a standout attribute that may have led the acquiring company to give Compaq greater influence than in other deals when it came to integrating sales talent.   Adds Levine: “It was the biggest and probably the first acquisition that I became involved with at HP. There was a lot of controversy at the time as to whether it was the right move for HP, but the integration was really about making certain that we could bring together the best of both companies.”  –Jack Sweeney