613: Helping Others Get the Big Picture | Anders Fohlin, CFO, Medius
Release Date: 07/05/2020
624: Accelerate Around the Curve | Alyssa Filter, CFO, Clari
CFO Thought Leader
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.
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623: When an Opportunity Rises to Meet You | Sinohe Terrero, CFO, Envoy
CFO Thought Leader
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,...
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622: Elevating Your Organization's Financial IQ | Shane Hansen, CFO, Planful
CFO Thought Leader
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...
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621: The CFO as Science Enabler | Ivor Macleod, CFO, Athersys
CFO Thought Leader
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...
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620: When People Matter Most | Laurie Krebs, CFO, Red Hat
CFO Thought Leader
It was October 2019. Red Hat, Inc., was preparing to submit its latest quarterly results to its new parent, IBM Corp., and Laurie Krebs had just been named Red Hat software’s new CFO. As a senior vice president of finance for Red Hat, Krebs had worked closely with the former CFO and more or less assumed that the acquiring company would likely prefer to fill C-suite spots from its “home team” talent bench of senior executives. In fact, Krebs says that during the course of her career she had never truly aspired to be a CFO: “I often wondered who would want all of that responsibility,...
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619: Using Data to Power Up Ad Inventory| Ray Carpenter, CFO, Xandr
CFO Thought Leader
When Ray Carpenter retraces his steps to the CFO office at Xandr—an analytics and advertising company formed by AT&T’s WarnerMedia—he singles out two earlier roles as having been outside AT&T’s traditional finance track. “I actually got kicked out of finance for one role,” says Carpenter, referring to a stint as a marketer inside a start-up launched by AT&T’s emerging business markets group. “We did things that were uniquely different from what AT&T typically does when it launches a new business,” continues Carpenter, who in addition to marketing was...
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618: From COVID's Initial Shock to IPO in 60 Days | Dave Jones, CFO, Vroom
CFO Thought Leader
Not unlike the careers of his finance leader peers, the finance career of Dave Jones, CFO of online car seller Vroom, has been shaped and influenced by economic crises of the past two decades. Last month, as the initial shock of the coronavirus waned and the stock market rallied back, Vroom moved quickly to go public. Explains Jones: “We consulted with our board and our investors and decided that the time was right.” After pricing its IPO shares at $22, Vroom saw their value more than double on their first day of trading. This was not the first time that Jones had discovered a window of...
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617: Finding Your Seat at the M&A Table | Dennis McGrath, CFO, PAVmed
CFO Thought Leader
Dennis McGrath was only recently married and a new home owner when he was invited to a Phillies game by the CFO of AC Manufacturing. At the time, McGrath was working for Andersen as an auditor of a roster of growing companies, among which AC—a maker of industrial air-conditioning units—was perhaps not the most glamorous. “At the end of the night, the CFO told me that he wanted to hire me and would pay me a lot more than I was then making,” recalls McGrath, who doesn’t hesitate to reveal what allowed AC’s offer to trump all other opportunities. Says McGrath: “I went for the...
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616: Predictability and the Pipeline | Ashim Gupta, CFO, UiPath
CFO Thought Leader
When asked to share a few of the experiences that he feels prepared him for a CFO role, Ashim Gupta recalls what he characterizes as a significant accounting problem. However, it was not the nature of the accounting snag that Gupta wants us to know about but instead how his initial response to the problem was somewhat clumsy and ineffective. The event occurred more than 10 years into his finance career and did not lengthen the path to his next promotion because he had only just arrived in a new role as a divisional CFO for GE Water, a General Electric Corp. operating unit specializing in water...
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615: Validating Your Proof Points for Investors | Jeff Epstein, (CFO Emeritus) Oracle, DoubleClick, King World
CFO Thought Leader
In the mid-1990s, when Jeff Epstein was busy satisfying the M&A appetites of media clients for First Boston, one of his smaller, but more boisterous clients asked him to join the firm as its CFO. “It was the type of situation where if they had gone to a recruiter, I would never have made the resume cut because I had never been a CFO and I had never even worked for a CFO,” explains Epstein, who was 32 when he entered the lively entrepreneurial realm known as King World Productions. A one-time family-owned company, King World had seen its stature grow inside New York’s...
info_outlineEarly in his finance career, Anders Fohlin discovered that he could ratchet up his capacity to consume information and problem-solve simply by drawing pictures.
However, what had originated more as a personal observation would eventually evolve to something more as he discovered that his visuals could serve others.
“I started to regularly draw processes on white boards and paper to make things very visual for everybody and help others to get the full picture,” explains Fohlin, whose knack for creating visuals and goal of making things more visible “for everybody” led him to begin viewing routine meetings as opportunities for visualization.
Says Fohlin: “I found that process maps and gathering people in the same room was a really good way to spark energy and collaboration and have people feel that they were important and doing something more than just shoveling coal.”
Fohlin adds that his early efforts to create greater collaboration and inclusion ended up opening the door for him to various senior finance roles and eventually led him to the CFO office at software developer Medius.
Among the guiding principles that Fohlin says have influenced his leadership style and approach over time is the notion of transparency.
Ten years ago, while a senior finance executive at NASDAQ, he participated in a series of meetings to discuss the adoption of an activity-based costing model. “We would sit around the table and go product by product to explore ways in which we could improve,” he recalls, “and this was done with representatives from all of the different functions.”
Part of the approach involved sharing numbers more widely across the organization and downward to the workforce at large.
“If each employee can see the overall picture and what aligns their daily activities with the strategy and vision of the company, then they make better decisions,” explains Fohlin, who adds that today—as a CFO—he’s still drawing pictures. –Jack Sweeney