552: Making Customer Outcomes Top of Mind | Valerie Burman, CFO, Guidespark
Release Date: 12/01/2019
563: Energizing Your Entrepreneurial Mind-set | Stephen Grist, CFO, Bohemia Interactive Simulations
CFO Thought Leader
It was back in 2002, Stephen Grist says, when he first punched through a surface of rigid assumptions to grasp the innovative levers that would propel him into the ranks of strategic CFOs. At the time, Grist was the CFO of Viatel, a technology company whose management and sales teams were eagerly seeking to reestablish the company’s footing along a growth path after having recently emerged from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. With its bankruptcy in the rearview mirror, the company emerged with an unbridled appetite for growth—but one that was perhaps lacking in long-term vision. Says Grist:...
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562: A Window Into the Future | Anna Brunelle, CFO, Kinestral Technologies
CFO Thought Leader
Asked to reflect on those experiences that she feels prepared her for a finance leadership role, a cash flow statement quickly comes to mind for Anna Brunelle, CFO of Kinestral Technologies. Only months into her first industry finance job, Brunelle was tasked with preparing her company’s cash flow statement, and she didn’t like some of what she discovered about the business. “I realized that there were a couple of businesses that the company had acquired a few years earlier that had some elements that were kind of dragging down our profitability,” explains Brunelle, who after digging a...
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561: Identifying the Levers for Efficient Growth | John Evarts, CFO, Mediafly
CFO Thought Leader
Ten years or so ago, the expression “never waste a downturn” became a popular maxim among business leaders who viewed the economy’s downward spiral as an opportunity to trim waste and restructure portions of their businesses. The expression also summed up the mind-set of a unique class of executives who, despite a bleak hiring environment, viewed the period as being potentially transformational for their careers. Such was the case with CFO John Evarts, who entered the downturn as a CFO for a not-for-profit and exited as CFO of Mediafly—a small content asset management company that in...
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560: When Your Tactic Becomes Your Strategy | Raman Kapur, CFO, Moogsoft
CFO Thought Leader
Years from now, if Silicon Valley’s glitterati were ever to gather to celebrate the opening of a National Cloud Computing Museum, CFO Raman Kapur would make an excellent tour guide for the facility’s finance wing. In fact, he could just chart the trajectory of his career from the dot-com bubble forward to help the world at large to better grasp how the cloud opportunity has grown and reshaped the finance business function. Our tour could begin at Intuit, the accounting software developer that Kapur joined in 2001 while seeking shelter from the dot-com bubble burst, where he quickly found...
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559: Establishing Your Work Ethos | Bea Ordonez, CFO, OTC Markets Group, Inc.
CFO Thought Leader
Perhaps, unlike most of her professional peers, when Bea Ordonez first interviewed for a CFO role, she got the job. At the time, perhaps no one was more surprised than Ordonez, whose finance resume—while impressive for a 26-year-old—still lacked a number of C-suite prerequisites. Twenty years later, she still resides in the C-Suite, having filled a number of consecutive CFO and COO roles over the years. Nonetheless, she credits her first CFO tour of duty with having opened the door for everything that has followed. “On paper, at least, I was woefully underqualified for the job. I...
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Holiday Bonus | Family, Discipline & the Roots of Leadership | Charmaine Spence Rochester, CFO, Chester County Hospital
CFO Thought Leader
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Holiday Bonus | A Career In Step with the World |Andreas Schulmeyer, CFO, Better Choice Company
CFO Thought Leader
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558: Achieving Ongoing Customer Value | David Ertel, CFO, Vizient
CFO Thought Leader
CFOTL: What metrics are top of mind for you? ERTEL: Largely defined, most of Vizient's revenue is—I'm going to put it in air quotes—"subscription-oriented." Some of it is literal subscriptions, whether SaaS or other offerings, but much of it is driven by multiyear contracts that operate as subscription services, such as for clinical data or for a group purchasing organization. While on the one hand this provides great visibility on future revenue, the challenge with these types of organizations is to not just sit back and rest on your laurels. What offerings enhancements do you put forward...
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557: Sharpening Your Finance Team's Growth Mind-Set | Bill Ruckelshaus, CFO, Extrahop
CFO Thought Leader
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556: Preparing Your Organization for Change | Amy Shelly, CFO, The OCC
CFO Thought Leader
CFOTL: What are the numbers or metrics that are always top of mind for you? Shelly: Ninety-five percent of our revenue is driven by the volume that we clear, settle, and risk-manage every day, which is something that we don't control. We charge a clearing fee for our services, and as a low-cost service provider, I can't just charge any old amount. I'm very cognizant of how much volume we clear every day because our budget is based on an average daily volume rate. I'm also very cognizant of expenses. I'm okay with spending money, but I want to do it in a smart way. Last year, we began...
info_outlineHad Valerie Burman entered the CFO office a decade ago, you wonder whether the role would be as good a match for the accomplished finance executive as it appears to be today.
Back in 2007, after working nearly a decade in M&A as an investment banker, Burman exited a banking career to take on a corporate development role at Business Objects, a French software company that was soon to be acquired by SAP.
Post acquisition, Burman quickly found a groundswell of opportunities coming her way inside SAP, where she would serve in a variety of roles involving technology partnerships, business development, and product management.
Fast-forward a few years, and we find Stanford Law graduate Burman serving as general counsel first to Mindjet and then to crowdsourcing innovation upstart Spigit.
“I would say that working from those perspectives—although it is a bit of a roundabout way to become a CFO—has really led me to a place where I can be a CFO with a business-minded, strategic approach,” says Burman, who points out that along the way, she was given the opportunity to closely observe the board room decision-making behind certain acquisitions designed to drive growth.
“The breadth of experiences that I have taken with me are not necessarily specific to my core finance role, but speak to my ability to understand cross-functionally what’s important to my peers,” Burman observes, while underscoring the growing cross-functional role that finance plays in business today.
For just as Burman’s resume has evolved, so too has the role of CFO. – Jack Sweeney
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