559: Establishing Your Work Ethos | Bea Ordonez, CFO, OTC Markets Group, Inc.
Release Date: 01/01/2020
573: CBD: Sizing Up the Opportunity | Alan George, CFO, Ojai Energetics
CFO Thought Leader
CFOTL: What are some of your top of mind numbers? George: The first thing that I look at is daily sales. I get a report that comes out in the middle of the night. I know what we did in sales the day before, and then I can drill down into it and say, OK, since I'm primarily a direct-to-consumer business, I want to see my traffic conversion and AOV. I want to see how we're doing relative to our forecast. I want to see how any specific programs are driving those key metrics. For us, specifically, traffic is a huge driver. We have really strong conversion and AOV. Traffic-driving awareness...
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572: Measuring the Efficiencies of Customer Acquisition | David Burt, CFO, ServiceTitan
CFO Thought Leader
CFOTL: What are your top of mind numbers? Burt: The first things that I look at on a weekly and monthly basis tend to center on the fundamentals. Once we're in the door with a customer, there's an opportunity for us to provide additional services that might add additional recurring revenue. This growth is really important because it allows us to forward-invest into areas of R&D, sales and marketing, and so forth. We are of a certain size today, but we have aspirations to be much, much bigger, and as we grow, we are enabled to do more and more for our customers more efficiently...
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571: Optimizing Your Pipeline's Velocity |Greg Wookey, CFO, Boulevard
CFO Thought Leader
Inside the world of retail businesses, Greg Wookey’s CFO career has advanced down a path that parallels the sector’s growing appetite for more sophisticated software. Such was the case roughly 10 years ago, when he stepped into the CFO office at Mindbody—a firm whose well-known software helped fitness centers across the country to manage the demands of their clientele—and such is the case today, as Wookey serves as CFO of Boulevard, a SaaS developer whose offerings are specially tailored to high-end salons and spas. This arena—in what Boulevard and other software developers commonly...
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570: Discovering What Makes Customers Happy | Sue Vestri, CFO, Greenphire, Inc.
CFO Thought Leader
CFOTL When it comes to customer measurement whatare you focused on? Vestri: I think that everyone tries to measure customer service and customer support in some way. In the past, we historically have done customer surveys and implementation after implementation periodically throughout the year. It's always challenging as to who actually responds and how you disseminate the information and make any use of it. We still do these types of things, but recently we've actually gone out and done some user forums where we've sat in the room with some of our users. To be honest, not all of the feedback...
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569: Growing Your Team's Knowledge Base | Raj Dani, CFO Ping Identity
CFO Thought Leader
Back in the early 1990s, with both feet firmly planted on an auditing career path inside Price Waterhouse’s Tampa, Florida, office, Raj Dani decided to take a detour into the accounting house’s M&A advisory practice. Over the next few years, the one-time auditor began providing deal-makers with financial and operational due diligence on their future mergers and acquisitions. “I became focused on cash and EBITDA generation, the strategic value of two enterprises coming together, and how you drive synergies and value for shareholders,” explains Dani, who says that his segue into...
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568: It's the Narrative that Matters | Lanny Baker, CFO, Eventbrite
CFO Thought Leader
CFOTL: What are your priorities as finance leader over the next 12 months? CFOT:" Here at Eventbrite, my priorities are to bring focus and simplicity. We just went through our planning experience for 2020. We started with 12 different strategic initiatives, and I'm happy to say that eight of them wound up on the cutting room floor. We've got four that everybody is really focused on. These four initiatives had 20 subprojects, and these, too, have been dialed down to four. We're just bringing focus and clarity and simplicity. I teased the team in our flash report. On the 57th page, we put...
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567: When Growth & Risk are Synonymous | Kevin Jacobson, CFO, LogicGate
CFO Thought Leader
Step inside CFO Kevin Jacobson’s office at LogicGate, and there’s little question that you’ll think you’ve entered a realm where growth and risk are often two sides of the same coin. In fact, LogicGate’s fast path to achieving “product market fit” was no doubt shortened by early customers who today wield a similar growth/risk mind-set. Four-year-old LogicGate, a provider of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software, now expects its workforce to expand to 170 employees before 2021. Says Jacobson: “I tell our team that going forward, we are going to be breaking records...
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566: Building Your P&L Culture | Scot Parnell, CFO DailyPay
CFO Thought Leader
We are nearly at the end of our interview with Scot Parnell when we ask him to explain what led him to accept the CFO position at DailyPay, a company with a pioneering technology inside the human capital management realm. This is a question that we had asked a little earlier in the interview, but this time we want to know what other factors may have contributed to his decision. Although Parnell has already put forth a compelling explanation of DailyPay’s unique offerings, he is happy to share a bit more with us. “This role was absolutely fascinating. I was at a place in my life where I...
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565: A Fintech Unicorn Burnishes its Risk Management Brand | Michael Tannenbaum, CFO, Brex Inc.
CFO Thought Leader
Tannenbaum: At Brex, pretty early on, I was kind of familiar with the banking landscape from when I had been in investment banking. The group that I had been in actually served regional banks, so I did a lot of regional bank mergers and acquisitions. Then, at SoFi, I had built a lot of relationships with regional banks. I think that when you start in fintech, there's always this belief that you're competing with big banks. That was a lot of the marketing positioning of my former employer, SoFi, but at Brex I saw this opportunity to partner with banks because I was familiar with the card...
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564: Synchrony Steps Beyond the Shadow of its Historic Roots | Brian Wenzel, CFO, Synchrony
CFO Thought Leader
CFOTL: Having splitout from GE- we would imagine there were certain business processes already in place at Synchrony, while others processes had to be reestablished or developed. Wenzel: The processes that have been developed are probably the core part of our business. We had to build everything from scratch. Even the processes for things like very mundane benefits in HR, and paying people, and for some of the regulatory reporting–we had to build all that up. But we did take a process from GE that was a very good process in the credit risk world, a very traditional process. You go out...
info_outlinePerhaps, 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 interviewed, landed the role, and then worked really, really hard to learn the business from the ground up,” says Ordonez, whose first CFO stint was with a joint venture originally formed with Bloomberg Tradebook known as G-Trade. Located on the island of Bermuda, the broker-dealer start-up no doubt found Ordonez an attractive hire in part because she was at the time an island resident.
Still, for all of those trying to decode shortcuts to the C-suite or uncover a coveted secret behind becoming a 26-year-old CFO, we’d wager that Ordonez’s words “worked really, really hard” perhaps best reveal her world of both today and 20 years ago.
As G-Trade grew, Ordonez became tasked with quickly adding talent to help answer the organization’s growing demand for financial and operational support.
“We were providing support for trading activities across close to 90 global markets and at the same time building a culture and creating a work ethic that even to this day I am very proud of,” recalls Ordonez, while once more drawing our attention to her unwavering appetite for the work itself.
“At times in my career, I didn’t have any personal life, and what time I did have, I used for sleeping,” confides Ordonez, who adds that today—more than ever before—she is achieving a positive work/life balance. –Jack Sweeney