CFO THOUGHT LEADER

A brief summary of this episode

Asked to recall the experience of stepping into a CFO role for the first time, Nicole Anasenes doesn’t mince words. "It’s a very lonely, scary moment,” comments Anasenes, as she considers her early days at technology company Infor—a CFO appointment that preceded more recent CFO engagements at Squarespace and now technology firm Ansys. “If only someone would have told me how lonely it feels to make certain decisions—you can bounce ideas off people, but you are the ultimate decision-maker,” continues Anasenes, who says that, looking  back, she may have been able to ease some of the decision-making concerns if she had had a broader professional network to which to turn. “I happened to have been lucky that Charles Philips, the CEO of Infor, was a financially savvy person, but since then, I’ve built a much broader network of people and a framework for how to have these type of conversations in which you don’t divulge the specifics concerning your company but get the mentoring and support that you need,” remarks Anasenes, who prior to entering the CFO office at Infor spent more 14 years at IBM Corp., where she last served as CFO of the tech giant’s middleware group. “I learned very quickly after leaving IBM that you need to be open to networks and different types of networks,” explains Anasenes, who adds that her appetite for networking has grown along with her CFO talent development responsibilities. “You are only good as the talent you attract, retain, and are able to keep engaged, so my relationship with the executive search community is quite broad,” she notes.  –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

It was nightly business conversations at his parents’ dinner table that first led Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah to consider alternatives to business when it came to building a career. “As most small business owners do, my parents worked all the time—and as with most small businesses, things could at times be financially challenging,” explains Mahendra-Rajah, who vividly recalls business rent increases, outstanding receivables, and the dynamics behind supply and demand that pervaded his parents’ dinner conversations. Nevertheless, it was this same scrutiny of supply-and-demand dynamics that Mahendra-Rajah credits with helping him to “come full circle” and ultimately led him to business school. At the time, Mahendra-Rajah was working full-time as a senior process engineer for chemical giant FMC Corp., a career-building stint that afforded him the real-world insights required to enrich a master’s thesis that he needed in order to complete a chemical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins. “It was my first job out of college, and the plant manager’s M.O. was to always beat me up and demand more cost reductions and better process yields,” recalls Mahendra-Rajah, who notes that his immersion into the business side of manufacturing quickly escalated when FMC received a large order for a synthetic that the company no longer manufactured. “I was given the task of refurbishing an old factory and getting it up and running in a matter of weeks,” remembers Mahendra-Rajah, who adds that the production of the once-discontinued synthetic led the plant manager’s mind-set to suddenly pivot. “He was pushing me to spend as fast as I could. I was told not to negotiate with suppliers, and if I needed overtime for the maintenance workers, to ‘go for it’—schedule was paramount, cost was secondary,” explains the career finance leader, who credits the experience with helping him to open a door that he had once shut. Says Mahendra-Rajah: “It kind of brought me back to the table with Mom and Dad and made me realize how so much of our world is really driven by supply and demand and how finance is the oil in the gears." –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Billtrust CFO Mark Shifke likes to label himself an “accidental CFO”—a tag that a number of our guests have appropriated from time to time when faced with explaining a past filled with less-than-traditional career experience. However, in the case of Shifke, the term arguably has little to do with career experience, for Billtrust’s CFO spent nearly a decade on Wall Street before entering the C-suite. Instead, Shifke uses the appellation to help to reveal the pivotal role that a single phone call came to play in his finance career. Back in 2000—near the beginning of Shifke’s Wall Street career and the end of the market frenzy known as the dotcom bubble—Shifke took a phone call from a CEO founder whom he had met through a personal acquaintance. Just as the CEO didn’t hesitate to ask Shifke to invest in his struggling company, Shifke didn’t dither when it came to coming up with some figurative cash. “I made a handshake agreement with him over the phone,” explains Shifke, who notes that the investment did require some visibility into the company’s sales pipeline.   “I told him, ‘If you are successful at selling into this environment and you are able to generate revenue, then on the back of that, I will raise capital’—and I did so,” recalls Shifke, who raised a "family and friends" round of funds that allowed him to become a central angel investor in the company Green Dot Corp., a fintech start-up and pioneer of prepaid debit cards.   Fast-forward 11 years, and Shifke is no longer just a Green Dot investor but a board member, when he opts out of a managing director role at JPMorgan Chase to join Green Dot in a senior corporate development role.  “It’s one thing to invest in a business and it’s another to advise a business, but it’s quite another thing to go operate it—and I had never operated one,” comments Shifke, who would enter the CFO office at Green Dot a few years later in 2015. In the end, Shifke says, the “accidental CFO” label still fits because he originally had zero aspirations to be a CFO and now-midsize fintech firm Green Dot simply became the means to scratch his operations itch.    Says Shifke: “There was an opportunity to either enhance my position as a shareholder or materially harm it—but this tended to play out to the positive.” –Jack Sweeney  Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Several actions proved key as Waifa Chau advanced from financial planning and analysis (FP&A) roles to chief financial officer positions. Collaborating with other functions, gaining an in-depth understanding of the overall business, and helping his colleagues understand how FP&A benefits an organization have driven his success, says Chau, currently CFO with Nylas, Inc., a provider of productivity infrastructure solutions for software.  Cross-functional collaboration helps in gaining an understanding of a company’s overall business, Chau says. While working at Gap Inc., the company behind Gap, Banana Republic, and other apparel brands, Chau focused on driving higher gross margins—key in the retail industry. Chau’s curiosity about the business also helped him propel his career forward, he says. He spent about two years in a merchandising role at Gap, during which he gained a better understanding of the intricacies of operations. Often, employees in other parts of an organization assume FP&A’s primary role is to tell them when they’re over or under budget, Chau says. He tried to show how a strong FP&A partner tries to understand their performance so the business can better prepare for the future. After about seven years at Gap, Inc., Chau moved to an FP&A role at Walmart.com. In an ecommerce organization, there were “different levers to pull,” he says. For instance, along with analyzing gross margins, he reviewed margins on grocery delivery apps. Building on his success in FP&A, Chau set a new goal: establishing a finance team from the ground up. He joined BirdEye, a marketing platform, as vice president, finance, and advanced to CFO. Among other accomplishments, he structured the accounting and FP&A functions and determined how finance would interact with other functions. At Nylas, Chau again is leveraging his experience to propel himself forward and establish the finance function, this time for a slightly younger and small company. Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Of course, every finance leader needs to understand the mechanics of accounting and know how to identify the financial implications of management’s decisions. Their preparation should also include learning from their experiences—and this includes mistakes, says Ian Charles, chief financial officer with Flexe, an on-demand warehousing solution. In particular, identifying the optimal candidate for a job is one of a leader’s most difficult and critical responsibilities, Charles notes. It’s also far from straightforward. It’s easy to believe that you’re hiring a star who will move the organization to the next level, only to discover that the individual isn’t as exceptional as he or she appeared as a candidate. In other situations—say, when it’s necessary to fill a role quickly—a candidate who appears less inspiring at the outset can turn out to add tremendous value to the organization. To improve his track record when hiring for critical positions, Charles has beefed up his interview process. He begins by interviewing several dozen individuals. From this group, he chooses two or three finalists. All go through at least several rounds of interviews, with both Charles and other members of his team. To be sure, this can mean balancing rigor with market realities. Given the tight job market at the moment, good individuals can find plenty of great opportunities, Charles adds. Also key to hiring well is adeptly balancing the interests of multiple parties, including the board, management, and employees. Focusing too heavily in one direction can lead to unintended consequences. For example, a goal of maximizing share price will impact the board, investors, management, and employees differently. Charles notes that in the early days of his career, he would lean toward maximizing share price for the board rather than focusing on employees’ needs. “I’ve learned from that mistake as well,” he says. Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

Nearly 20 years later, CFO Trent York tells us that he can still hear the finance executive’s exact words. “Trent, I don’t need you tell me how not to do something—I need you to help me to figure out how to work through the issue and what needs to be addressed in order for us to be able to expand,” recalls York, placing just enough emphasis on the word “not” to expose a degree of anxiety that still lingers. At the time, York was a newbie controller for Golfsmith, an Austin, TX–based golf specialty retailer that in the 2000s was opening dozens of stores annually as golf enjoyed newfound popularity nationally amidst the Tiger Woods boom.  “We went from 20 retail stores at the time I joined to close to 80, and we actually took it public, so this was really a build-and-scale moment that was quite exciting,” explains York, who advanced into the vice president of finance role as the golf retailer began to prepare for a public offering that ultimately debuted on NASDAQ (symbol: GOLF) in June 2006. Beyond gainful employment and resume enrichment, Golfsmith provided York with a series of “build-and-scale” moments of insight that allowed him to confidently step into yet another fast-growing Austin phenom of the 2000s, HomeAway. “HomeAway was about scale. There was meaningful organic growth, and we were very acquisitive along the way, too, because the market that we were looking to bring together was fragmented,” remembers York, who would spend 13 years at the company and enter the CFO office a year after its sale to Expedia Group in 2015. Later, HomeAway was rebranded as part of VRBO. “Following the sale, we pivoted our entire business model from being subscription-based to being transaction-driven, which was really more aligned with the marketplace—and to pivot like this was not an easy thing to do,” reports York, who adds that his lesson or takeaway from “the pivot” was coming to understand how making complex tasks simple could help an organization to achieve greater agility.   Says York: “The ability to be agile or stay fluid within a changing environment—and to drive through it—comes back to keeping things simple.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021     

A brief summary of this episode

When the TreeHouse Foods financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team notice CFO Bill Kelley entering the room, chances are that a number of team members shoot a quick glance at the company’s latest revenue figures. “I’m probably more predictable than I want to be,” explains Kelley, who has made revenue management a top priority for the $4.5 billion private label food and beverage maker. The push for organic growth at TreeHouse follows a larger reorganization at the company that roughly coincided with Kelley’s arrival inside the CFO office. According to him, that reorg has since led finance to begin embedding senior finance executives inside different business lines. “There are finance people who are now hard-wired into the business units, and we have created a revenue management function that had not previously existed,” points out Kelley, who notes that the embedded finance professionals are today playing a more strategic role inside the business than ever before. “They are the copilot or the chief of staff to the business unit presidents, with whom they help to make decisions on how to allocate capital and how to grow the organization,” explains Kelley, who adds that the central finance function remains responsible for the training and development of all finance professionals. Meanwhile, Kelley says, in addition to helping to drive organic growth, finance helps the company to flex its working capital muscles.   “Our investment thesis about which we talk to investors is that we have a unique ability to generate an outsized amount of cash flow,” reports Kelley. “We are committed to driving free cash flow in excess of $300 million annually, and we want to grow our EPS 10% a year.” –Jack Sweeney   Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021 

When asked about a personal habit that has served him well over the years, finance leader Puneet Pamnani raises his voice slightly and seeks to mimic the delivery of his wife’s tone:  “This is what you do for a hobby? You read company annual reports?” To which Pamnani defends his favorite pastime with the retort: “I find them interesting!” Although it might seem difficult to imagine this exchange taking place on sandy beach vacations and holiday escapes, it nonetheless remains an example that Pamnani uses to illustrate his relentless curiosity for how businesses operate and perform.   According to Pamnani, this curiosity has led him to regularly attend the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the major event for many value investors and fans of Warren Buffett, among whom Pamnani proudly includes himself. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Pamnani’s reading pastime is one that Buffett has long enjoyed and encouraged others to pursue.    “I’ve been to every Warren Buffett annual shareholder meeting in the past 10 years,” says Pamnani, who quickly adds: “But not the last one, that was hard”—signaling the environment related to COVID. Of course, Buffett is renowned not just for the investment and business insights themselves that he serves up but also for how he serves them up using clear, concise language that every investor can understand—and it’s here where Pamnani’s relentless habit and professional life are perhaps about to converge as at no other previous time. “The CFO arrives at the center of the process when a company goes public,” explains Pamnani, who back in 2018 entered the CFO office at KORE Wireless, a provider of mobility and network connectivity solutions that is expected to go public later this year. Helping KORE to realize its IPOs ambitions is just latest chapter of a transaction-driven career in which at times Pamnani has worn multiple hats, including those of CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer. “As a privately equity–backed firm, KORE has been very commercially focused, but it’s now time to balance that out, and as we maintain our focus on revenue and profits, we need to be more focused on compliance in order to become one of the best publicly listed companies of our size,” observes the increasingly investor-minded Pamnani, who tells us that he keeps a volume of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders on a shelf nearby. “These are his actual letters, word for word, compiled as a book. You also can also find a summary on Amazon—but this is not a plug,” remarks Pamnani, who, perhaps like Buffett, just wants to share his methods. –Jack Sweeney Leave rating & review   Signup for our Newsletter GET MORE: Order now The CFO Yearbook, 2021