CFO THOUGHT LEADER

It was the type of role that any recent business school graduate could envy—not because of the position’s title (Chief of Staff) or how much it paid, but because of its proximity to management decision-making. The job is one that Bennett Theimann remembers well as he looks back on the days when he served as chief of staff for the president of Gruner + Jahr’s German magazine division. “It exposed me to that sort of very-high-level strategic thinking. We launched magazines, we sold magazines, we bought magazines,” says Theimann, who very often found himself finalizing some of the documents that Gruner + Jahr management ultimately used to brief its board. “My job was to help senior management translate their investment proposals, budget requests, or whatever they needed to get done, and very often they needed money,” explains Theimann, who adds that while the position was not officially a finance one, this early experience of being a “business case builder” later helped to propel him into a number of FP&A and senior business development roles. Theimann, who would step into his first CFO role in 2005, has now occupied the CFO office for several early-stage companies, the latest being Applicaster, a SaaS developer specializing in app development and content distribution. –Jack Sweeney 

It’s a story that Matt Hagel likes to share as he networks with fellow finance executives and accounting types. Back in 2017—only days after stepping into a finance leadership role at the online prepared meals company Freshly—Hagel was reviewing the company’s chart of accounts when he asked himself: “Why is Plant, Property, and Equipment (PPE) under Operating Expenses?” As he soon learned, this stalwart accounting acronym has long led a double life and is also used by various industries (notably healthcare and food prep) as a shorthand designation for Personal Protective Equipment. Three years later, the protective gear acronym is widely known from coast to coast—just like Freshly. In fact, since its PPE entry first drew Hagel’s consternation, Freshly has opened an East Coast kitchen and distribution center, an expansion that extended the firm’s geographic reach from 28 to 48 states and propelled its sales to nearly 10 times their early 2017 volumes. “I inherited a finance and accounting team of three, and now I have a team of 30,” comments Hagel, who located many of his new finance and accounting hires at the company’s three distribution centers, the newest of which opened in Arizona this past April. “From a cost accounting perspective, we have feet on the ground, so if any issues arise, our folks can quickly step onto the plant floor and determine the correct inventory number or provide whatever other information is needed,” says Hagel, who entered 2020 keen to sharpen his team’s focus on costs after years of marshaling resources and new plant capacity to accommodate growth. Then COVID arrived. There’s little doubt that the pandemic has been an accelerant on the trend of consumers turning to online for shopping experiences like Freshly that promise safety as well as convenience. (Such was the case for online car seller Vroom, which after record sales in March and April moved quickly to go public in June.) It’s enough to make you wonder whether Freshly management may be of a similar frame of mind. Reports Hagel: "Freshly is focused on building the best company possible, one that will be ready for the public markets or remain as a successful private company."  Perhaps momentarily escaping Hagel’s lines of sight is yet another option whereby Freshly is acquired by a giant inside the packaged goods space. Certainly, Hagel doesn’t have to look far when you consider that Nestlé is one of Freshly’s largest investors. To be sure, Nestlé’s move to acquire a minority interest in Freshly back in 2017 was somewhat out of character for the food giant that is generally known to swallow its quarry whole. At that time, Nestle was the lead investor in a $77 million round of funding. Just as the pandemic has accelerated the shift to online buying, so too has it appeared to draw Freshly and its big name investor ever more close. “This has been open-office at both ends. We have had a really good dialog that has helped us both to be successful,” comments Hagel. Back in March, Freshly engaged with Nestlé’s human resources team as it formulated its COVID response, which Hagel credits with having helped Freshly to avoid the mistakes made by other food industry players. For one thing, Freshly hired a number of health professionals to begin taking employee temperatures at every shift across its different locations. “The words ‘essential services’ weren’t even a term on March 9, and there was no way of knowing whether we would be shut down,” explains Hagel, who says that in the event of a state “lockdown,” Freshly has prepared printed laminated forms for each employee to use that would confirm their employment at Freshly. As the pandemic bore down on different U.S. geographies, Freshly issued a press release announcing that Freshly and Nestle would jointly be donating $500,000 to Meals on Wheels America. “What happened back in March was that there was a period of a few weeks when we had no new customers because there was so much demand by people who were already using our service,” explains Hagel, who adds that shelter-in-place ordinances quickly turned dinner clients into lunchtime customers. “People just needed more meals, and this transition to be more of a lunch solution is something that we never would have imagined happening this quickly,” Hagel observes.   Sign Up for Our Newsletter    

Inder Singh started off his professional life as an engineer, only to learn that the large engineering projects that he aspired to someday lead often faced as many financial obstacles as they did engineering challenges. So, Singh says, he went back to school and earned an MBA in finance, allowing him to redirect his career down a path populated with unique and imaginative financing deals to support engineering feats as well as business transformations. One of the more innovative financing projects that Singh has helped to champion came along in the 1990s, when he was working as a business development executive for AT&T Corp. It seems that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was looking to upgrade its telecommunications infrastructure—to the tune of $4 billion. “Other companies were just offering typical bank financing. In our case, we said, ‘Let’s do an oil barter agreement,’” explains Singh, who says that the proposal involved having Saudi Arabia supply $4 billion of oil to Chevron Corp., which then would pay $4 billion in cash to AT&T, which then would build Saudi Arabia a $4 billion telecommunications network. “If you just think outside the box a little bit, bring your engineering skills, and bring some financial skills and common sense, you’ll see what makes sense for three different parties. And guess what? We actually won the deal,” comments Singh, who notes that the fact that Saudi Arabia may not have demanded such an imaginative financing solution is not important. Says Singh: “The fact that we put it on the table made us stand apart.” And so it goes for Inder Singh, whose imaginative approach to financing deals over the years has routinely set him apart from his finance leadership peers. –Jack Sweeney

At the start of his finance career, Mark Sargent says, he could not picture himself working for a large, big-name corporation. He says that he was drawn instead to smaller companies, which he believed would be more accepting of “creative types” or those employees more prone to self-expression. In Sargent’s case, an accounting and finance job was Plan B, or a “safety” occupation in case his aspirations to become a rock musician didn’t pan out. Interestingly, it was Sargent’s deliberate avoidance of big business that undoubtedly allowed him to quickly garner some of the experiences that finance career builders long to add to their resumes. “The very first job that I got was really a perfect fit: It was a small paper-making company, and I quickly learned that they were 9 months away from an IPO,” recalls Sargent, who was hired as a cost accountant but quickly found himself reassigned to oversee the implementation of a new accounting system intended to add some muscle to the company’s post-IPO reporting regimen. This was the type of early career experience that later helped Sargent to open the door to more senior finance and accounting roles, such as the operations controller role he took on at Spectrian, a Sunnyvale, Calif., technology company. After years of serving government and aerospace industry customers, Spectrian, in the mid-1990s, moved to supply its cellular technology offerings to commercial customers in light of the growing infrastructure opportunities driven by cellular phone usage. Not unlike in Sargent’s first career chapter, Spectrian went public within months of his arrival, increasing the demand for improved visibility into the numbers and challenging the finance team to routinely produce metrics that could help management to better set performance expectations. “I really consider it my inflection point in becoming a CFO and a leader,” explains Sargent, who adds that it was his breadth of visibility across the company and his awareness of being part of a team of highly skilled finance professionals that whetted his appetite for more and turned his finance career into Plan A. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: You first arrived at EPAM in 2017, can you tell us what was top of mind as you entered the office? What were some of your early priorities?  Peterson: I joined a company that was growing rapidly, that's got pretty solid profitability in it, a pretty capable finance organization. You kind of look under the hood, I guess, and what you're trying to do is make improvements without breaking anything. One of the things that happened is, the company had grown really quickly. And I think over a period of time sometimes you'll under invest in certain functions and I think that was probably the case with finance. I started by making some strategic hires, so strengthen the external reporting, the controllership and the tax schemes. And then from a reorganization standpoint, I've done a lot of things, but much of my career has been in FP&A, so I work with a head of FP&A who already had some ideas. When we organized the FP&A group, to not only support corporate leadership decisions, but to be able to take information, decision making down to the BU level and be more supportive of the different business units while of course continuing to support the senior leadership. Then I would say one other focus I introduced and not only with the FP&A team, but with the broader finance organization is to really focus on being more future or forward looking. I introduced a regular cadence around forecasting and processes that I guess would allow us to identify problems or bumps in the road. And the idea was it would give us enough time then to do something about it or if we didn't do anything, we couldn't do anything about it, at least we knew what was coming. That's really probably what I brought to the company in maybe my first year here.

Back in 2004, on the very day that Ormat Technologies, Inc., began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Eyal Hen began working in as an assistant controller for the geothermal energy company in Israel. The transition to being a public company opened a transformative chapter not only for Ormat but also for Hen, who—after having been with the firm for only a few short weeks—agreed to relocate to company’s new Reno, Nevada, headquarters. “It was a very small office at that time, with only seven people,” recalls Hen, who would for the next 11 years help to build out a U.S. finance team while accruing growing worldwide responsibilities for Ormat’s electricity-segment. Along the way, Hen says, a number of unforeseen developments helped to advance Ormat’s steady U.S. expansion, including the U.S. government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. “Ormat benefited from the response after it received $600 million in cash grants to build renewable energy power plants,” explains Hen, while citing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which stipulated that energy companies be offered government grants instead of tax credits. “This was an enlightening moment for me, as it demonstrated how much impact a government can have when a company is prepared,” remarks Hen, who says that Ormat went on to build renewable energy plants in rural parts of Nevada and southern California. After serving several years as a vice president of finance, Hen would leave Ormat and step into the CFO office for the first time at a life sciences company before being named finance chief for Rekor Systems. –Jack Sweeney

Filter: When we were talking at the executive staff level, it's from a mindset of accelerating around the curve. And so I think our CEO has really coined that phrase, but that's the lens that we're looking through and the question we're asking is what investments can we make now that will allow us not only to come out of this better, but accelerate around the curve. And allow us when we have changes in the macro environment to be tremendously successful.  

When Envoy CFO Sinohe Terrero is asked about his career chapter at Etsy, the online marketplace founded in 2005 and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, he begins by explaining how back in 2008 Etsy’s finance function was really just a loose grouping of tools and people. “I'll never forget that I once had to go meet the bookkeeper, and he was like in Coney Island,” explains Terrero, who says that the financial mind-set at Etsy during its early days was that data trumps accounting—or, to put it another way, that data was strategic to the business and therefore should be kept in-house, whereas accounting could be outsourced to Coney Island or wherever. “Etsy was a marketplace, so the transactions occurred in big volumes, but we didn't send invoices. We didn't really have AR. Everything is paid by credit card on the Web,” points out Terrero, who quickly became tasked with establishing more traditional processes in preparation for bringing the accounting function back in-house. “Because of the nature of Etsy’s business, the accounting function initially really didn't have to grow as much as the data function,” says Terrero, who notes that even as Etsy’s finance department evolved into a full-capacity function, the data mind-set still loomed large. Says Terrero: “Understanding the transactions of the business on the data side was the primary responsibility.” Later, Terrero recalls, it was his focus on data and the growing volume of Etsy transactions that led him to back a strategy that not everyone was convinced was a good idea. According to Terrero, there was debate inside Etsy over whether the company should be charging fees on payments received by sellers inside the marketplace. At the time, certain Etsy executives believed that the firm’s mission should simply be to enable the sellers to sell more, which would then result in more transactions. “We argued that the fees could be a revenue source and that, given the volumes we were seeing, the strategy could be game-changing for the company over the long term,” remarks Terrero, who says that he was joined by a number of influential Etsy executives on the winning side of this debate. Says Terrero: “When you look at the percentage of revenue that these fees now represent for Etsy, you see that they’re actually pretty sizable.” - Jack Sweeney  Sign Up for our Newsletter

CFOTL: Having only stepped in to the CFO office in April, what is the vision you have for the role of CFO?  Hansen: I’m really keen on having Planful be a world class FP&A organization and definitely be one of the best users of the Planful platform. I think that’s important for us as an organization to eat our own cooking so to speak. On the second initiative of covering the basics, particularly in times like these where there’s high level of uncertainty, we need to be able to iterate on company plans and department plans. We need to be able to adjust budgets and investments and offer forecasts that illuminate some of the potential paths forward. So I’m talking about basic competencies here like a direct method cashflow forecast that we really don’t want to mess up. So that’s what I meant by make sure we’re proficient in covering the basics. And then finally accelerating growth. I really want to begin with our end in mind and work backwards from there to uncover the activities that are critical for us to do over the next couple quarters. And maybe if I gave an example there, what actions would we need to consider to improve our customer life cycle or our customer experience that will ensure our customers are getting the optimal value from our platform so that we have low customer churn and a very strong platform to grow from. …I believe part of the job of being a finance leader is to elevate the financial IQ of the entire organization. And I think we’re seeing the role of the CFO in particular and the finance organization at large expand and change to meet that challenge. And I think that the old style perception of finance as a service desk is going away and transitioning more towards a strategic advisor role for the entire organization. And so the ability to have business users in marketing, and in all corners of the business have access to their budgets, to their plans, to the information they need to make their decisions and be a part of the elevation, we’ve seen that pay dividends.

When veteran CFO Ivor Macleod first contemplated joining an early-stage pharma company, the condition  known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was not appearing in nightly news headlines and was yet to be ranked as the  number one cause of death among COVID-19 patients. Nevertheless, ARDS captured his attention—or rather, Athersys did.  The Cleveland, Ohio–based company, with fewer than 100 employees, met one of Macleod’s foremost criteria in that the company was  focused on the area of medicine known as “critical care”—a space that Macleod characterizes as having  “high unmet medical needs.” “It was the science that attracted me and not necessarily the capital structure,” explains Macleod, when asked whether he may have preferred to join a privately held firm instead of a public one. As the former CFO of F. Hoffmann–La Roche, Inc., North America, and vice president of finance for Merck Research Labs, Macleod knows better than most the risks being taken and the high rate of failure when it comes to introducing new medications. “You take big swings at big diseases, and you are not always going to be successful. So you have to be prepared for failure,” explains Macleod, who says that he came to view “the job” of finance leadership in pharma as being one of enablement. Says Macleod: “I didn’t want scientists to be worrying about resources. I would take care of that. I had to make certain that they had all of what they needed to continue on their path.” Last January, when he entered Athersys’s CFO office for the first time, he would have only a mere few weeks to work alongside his new colleagues before the spread of COVID-19 within the U.S. led management to encourage employees to work from home. Suddenly, as the disease spread, ARDS began to garner headlines, and last spring, within a span of 6 weeks, Athersys was granted FDA approval for a COVID-induced ARDS study and subsequently began populating designated sites with patients.    “There is no known treatment for ARDS,” comments Macleod, who appears to be savoring his role as an enabler of science now more than ever. –Jack Sweeney Subscribe