581: Applying Your Fresh Eyes to the Role| Anthony Coletta, CFO, SAP, NA
Release Date: 03/18/2020
601: Championing Cash Flows to Disarm COVID | Hilla Sferruzza, CFO, Meritage Homes
CFO Thought Leader
Related Article From Forbes.com Years from now, when Hilla Sferruzza recalls her initial actions to buffer the impact of COVID-19 on home builder Meritage Homes Corp. (NYSE: MTH) of Scottsdale, Arizona, she will likely not forget the seemingly endless calls that she placed to land sellers across the country. “It’s not like I’m calling a manufacturer and telling them to bring less raw material to my factory. I’m calling land sellers in every one of our markets to start the renegotiation process,” says Sferruzza, who, as finance chief for the seventh-largest public home builder in...
info_outline
600: Charting Your Course to Survive and Thrive | Amir Jafari, CFO, Reputation.com
CFO Thought Leader
When Amir Jafari looks back and reflects on his path to the CFO office, he includes two character traits that have arguably long distinguished finance leaders from other functional leaders. “We in finance have high levels of accountability and integrity, and these are the things that we’re able to then transpose in terms of what we do and how we are able to lead as CFOs,” explains Jafari, who says that it was his ability to “transpose” these traits during a recent career chapter at ServiceNow that allowed him to ultimately gain the leadership experience required to step into a...
info_outline
599: Sharpening Your Customer Acumen | David Woodworth, CFO, insightsoftware
CFO Thought Leader
At the age of 31, David Woodworth was offered CFO positions at two different firms. The first offer came from his then current employer, where as vice president of finance he was keenly aware of urgent challenges that the company’s next CFO would need to address. The second offer came unsolicited from a smaller company in the same field, where he could expect to ease into the role and set the pace for his first 100 days. “It was a hard decision, and one where you wish there was a silver bullet,” says Woodworth, who opted to stay where he was, which was at a highly leveraged firm that had...
info_outline
598: A Bank for Your Financial Health | Thibault Fulconis, CFO, Varo Money
CFO Thought Leader
Earlier this year, when the FDIC approved fintech start-up Varo Money’s application to become a national bank, Thibault Fulconis’s latest CFO career chapter suddenly appeared to make perfect sense. Still, it was only two years ago that Fulconis’s entry into the land of fintech start-ups no doubt raised a few eyebrows among his former colleagues at BancWest Corp., where he most recently served as vice chairman and COO. “I was coming from a position where I had about 3,000 direct reports when I was COO to an entity where I had three people reporting to me,” says Fulconis,...
info_outline
597: Why RPA is Attracting More Than Capital | Tomer Pinchas, CFO, Kryon
CFO Thought Leader
Last February, following his arrival on a flight to Israel, Tomer Pinchas recalls receiving a startling text from the Israeli government. Having recently visited Italy, the text explained, passenger Pinchas must now agree to enter self-quarantine for a period two weeks. As CFO of Kryon—a Tel Aviv start-up specializing in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)—Pinchas, like most business travelers, was well aware of the recent spread of COVID-19. Still, the order to self-quarantine seemed aggressive to Pinchas, who at the time could not have imagined that in a few short weeks he would be...
info_outline
596: Optimizing Your Core Offerings Beneath 2020's COVID Haze | John Theler, CFO, Avetta
CFO Thought Leader
When John Theler stepped into the CFO office at SaaS developer Avetta last summer, among his list of priorities was the daunting task of better articulating supply chain hazards to management teams and industry at large. Nine months later, Theler has no doubt added a number of items to his list of finance leader priorities, but his articulation task has become far less daunting. Not surprisingly, it seems that his thoughtful comments on the perils of poorly managed supply chains have paled in comparison to the high-wattage exposure that COVID-19 has suddenly brought to supply...
info_outline
595: The Flight to Digital | Virpy Richter, CFO, Awin Global
CFO Thought Leader
It was supposed to be the type of introduction that would help to break the ice between a new business leader and her direct reports. However, the words spoken by the managing director (MD) became frozen in time. Or at least this was the case for Virpy Richter, who at the age of 27 had only recently relocated from Germany after having accepted a promotion to oversee the finances of her company’s Dutch operating unit. “This is the German girl from our central unit. Be nice to her. She is just visiting us,” Richter recalls the MD saying, as her 25 direct reports curiously stared back at...
info_outline
594: The Art & Science of Raising Funds | Chris Mausler, CFO, PeerNova
CFO Thought Leader
When it comes to raising money from the investor community, finance executives often find themselves standing in line for job assignments that promise to make them active participants in the process. Such roles allow aspiring finance leaders to check off one of the more essential items on the demanding list of prerequisites required of high-growth–firm CFOs. For those executives who have climbed the accounting career ladder or toiled for years in an FP&A cubicle, the “money box” is often one of the last ones to get checked off. Such was the case for finance leader Chris Mausler,...
info_outline
593: Energizing Your Customer Borders | Jim Emerich, CFO, Narvar
CFO Thought Leader
For many future finance leaders, the year 2020 is destined to provide the dark moments of doubt that sweeten the upsides to be savored in years to come. Certainly, few business lessons are more widely cherished than those related to challenging economic times—and few are summoned more by finance leaders when it comes to explaining their business-building philosophies. Such is the case with Narvar CFO Jim Emerich, who in recounting the experiences that have prepared him for a finance leadership role always singles out the year 2001, when the September 11 terrorist attacks disrupted an economy...
info_outline
592: Beyond Disruption, Capitalizing on New Opportunities | Sameer Bhargava, CFO, Clark Construction Group
CFO Thought Leader
Having built a successful career in private equity—including 13 years with formidable Carlyle Group—Sameer Bhargava was probably not the most likely candidate to fill a CFO position at Clark Construction Group of Bethesda, Maryland. The two businesses belonged to strikingly different worlds. Whereas Carlyle populated its world with leading-edge investment vehicles and innovative global assets, Clark has left its mark with signature skyscrapers and civic projects that are credited with transforming public spaces in a big way. Still, both Washington, DC, area–headquartered businesses share...
info_outlineCFOTL: Share with us a finance strategic moment?
Coletta: The most recent strategic moment that sticks with me goes back two years to when I moved to our North America organization as CFO. We were on the battlefield of innovation and the cloud business, and we were carrying a big share of the company's business, with high expectations on the street already. We had a business that had been a bit bumpy in the beginning of the year, but we had a solid team that was always seeking to improve itself. To me, it was, Okay, what do I bring to the table and how do I change the dynamic here? The good news was that we had a lot to work with, but the bad news was that when you are public and in a very exposed environment, you never have as much time as you’d like. It's very important not only to deliver quickly, but also to change or invert some trends.
I really make sure that I bring value to the business. My team and I give advice and make fact-based decisions that really form a success plan for the remainder of the year at any given time. The strategic moment for me came at the end of the year. We had a very sound acceleration and great financial results, and the team got recognized as Finance Region of the Year. We had gotten employee engagement going up, as well as leadership trust. Service attitudes with regard to the business were way above the benchmarks, and all of this was performed with quality, so we had gained in predictability, efficiency, energy, and credibility. Obviously, the credit goes to the team all together, and this takes an entire leadership team really rising to the occasion. But it's quite powerful to see how dynamics can change and how you can sustain success when you focus on the right things.
This strategic moment for me was then when I entered that office and got so much responsibility put in front of me. There were a lot of areas to improve—I won’t say “fix”—but to improve. At the same time, we had a very high run rate, and some areas were doing fairly well. We had a business environment that was quite steady, a big customer base, and so on. So, how do you really drive change in a short period of time, which in this case was the seven months left in the year to make an impact and turn the ship, so to speak? We have been riding this wave ever since. We have a lot of positive momentum across the board on the business front and also in finance, and I think that inverting some of the trends at the right time was critical. You learn a lot about yourself. You also learn a lot about the ability to drive change and people. To me, this was a very strategic moment in my career in terms of really having the ability to build on everything that I had learned before and everything that I had seen in different capacities in order to really move the needle quickly.