CFO THOUGHT LEADER

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

A brief summary of this episode

Serving as a corporate finance executive for an organization on the perilous journey from “small and private” to “large, publicly listed, and thriving” taught Catalant CFO Anitha Gopalan what to hone in on as a finance chief. That experience and others like it also sharpened her gambling chops. She says that her Silicon Valley start-up experience showed her “how important and relevant it is to completely understand the company story and strategy” along with “the drivers that create value for shareholders.” Aligning corporate finance’s activities with that plan and its related plot points enables CFOs, she adds, to “optimize everything you do depending on what you are betting on and where you are doubling down.” The 20-year corporate finance veteran is now betting on her dynamic leadership skills to help Catalant to accelerate and scale its mission of enabling client companies to revolutionize their human capital strategy.

The executives and staffers profiled on Possible’s web site are described by the non-profit integrated healthcare provider as “possibilists” – “people with the perspective to embrace extraordinary challenge and the grit to get remarkable results anyway.” The term suits Possible CFO Pavan Makhija, a former investment banker who possesses dual undergraduate degrees in math and religion, a master’s in financial engineering from Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, and a passion for social issues. The former Lehman Brothers and Barclays controller is also an avid story-teller. Here, he narrates his anything-is-possible career trajectory while sharing how the Lehman bankruptcy – and his use the firm’s balance sheet as a powerful narrative device at an arduous time – educated him on his CFO path. Makhija also describes the challenge of applying all of his financial engineering and management skills to guiding a mission-driven organization that provides affordable (and often free) high-quality healthcare in the U.S. and Nepal.

Whenever he’s faced a difficult crossroads in life or business, Varnonis CFO Guy Melamed focused squarely on goals – sticking to them and scoring them. Despite playing for Israel’s under-21 national soccer team and fielding alluring offers to continue his playing career there, Melamed chose to leave his home country. He attended Boston College where he simultaneously played soccer, studied accounting and business, and learned English. His stick-to-itiveness helped him earn a B.A and an M.S.A. while becoming the first Israeli to get drafted by a Major League Soccer (MLS) team. After a year with the Colorado Rapids in the U.S. and a stint in the U.K.’s Championship League, Melamed decided to focus exclusively on his business career, joining KPMG as a CPA. Despite lucrative offers from private industry, Melamed opted to remain at KPMG and, later, EY, because, at those points in his career, he says “knowledge and experience were more important to me than making more money.” The pursuit of those goals also paid off by delivering him to Varonis, where he gained valuable experience helping to guide a booming cybersecurity company through an IPO.

Before joining Tableau four years ago and taking over the CFO seat last July, Damon Fletcher worked through a progression of experiences that could serve as a career roadmap for up-and-coming finance chiefs. After earning his Master of Accounting degree, Fletcher joined PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, where he worked closely with one of the fastest-growing companies in the world during the early 2000s. His early-career work included M&A valuations and integrations, extensive travel, valuable guidance from savvy mentors and risk management expertise earned during the depths of the global financial crisis. He has straightforward advice for aspiring finance leaders: Get out of your comfort zone. That means seeking out assignments in new areas of corporate finance and the business, gaining exposure to new industries, and accepting roles that require moves to new regions. Here, he discusses his role with the leading visual analytics company – including a valuable collaboration with the sales team—and the unique payoff of emptying your email inbox at the end of each day.

Cloud ERP + Time = Strategic Influence When Kote Lomidze became World Learning’s CFO four years ago, he immediately began enhancing the functionality of a cloud-based ERP platform the global educational non-profit had implemented six months earlier. The work, which Lomidze oversaw in a very hands-on way, generated valuable returns as measured in dollars, time and influence. Thanks to his technological savvy, Lomidze and his team spearheaded the adoption of applications that streamlined timesheets and improved the collection of vendors' banking information among numerous other benefits. In all, Lomidze and his team spearheaded the adoption of 10 applications, which greatly reduced the time the function spends chasing data and closing the books. “We spend more time analyzing the data and translating that data into actionable outcomes,” he says. Less time on reconciliations also translates to more time supporting decision-making that “influences how the organization is run,” adds Lomidze, who discusses all of the tools and knowledge he deploys while operating with a for-profit mindset to help sustain World Learning’s mission well into the future.

After starting his career in a Big 4 accounting firm and then steadily ascending through numerous (and varied) corporate finance roles over nearly two decades, Michael Hug possessed a clear vision for his CFO tenure at the world’s largest publicly traded timeshare company. “I didn’t want my team to just be the people who come in, count the money and deposit it in the bank,” he notes. “Rather, I want us to be embedded in the business – to have a great relationship with our business leaders … while helping the organization to achieve its goals.” Hug assumed his finance chief role as Wyndham Destinations was spinning off its sister company. That timing gave him the unique opportunity to build a senior corporate finance leadership team – including the heads of investor relations, treasury and internal audit as well as a chief accounting officer – from scratch

Prior to joining Sysmex, a medical diagnostic testing equipment and information systems technology company, five years ago, spent his formative years in Siemens where his varied experience covered every aspect of corporate finance in addition to stints as the head of strategic projects for one of the conglomerate’s companies. One Garini’s guiding principles as a finance executive is to get as far away from his desk as possible and deeply engage with broad and diverse group of stakeholders. Over the course of a career that includes leadership positions throughout Latin America, Europe and North America, the Brazil native has embraced that principle to its extreme. Garini, who speaks four languages, exhorts his rising managers and executives to “train themselves to be global” by seeking roles in new regions to gain exposure to new cultures, languages, market environments and business perspectives. Guest:   Alex Garini Company:  Sysmex America Headquartered: Chicago, IL Connect: www.sysmex.com