CFO THOUGHT LEADER

CFO THOUGHT LEADER

CFO THOUGHT LEADER brings you first hand accounts of CFOs who are driving change within their organizations. Our interviews capture their actions so that you can learn what might work for your organization. In addition to their company history we share the career journey of our spotlighted guest: What do they struggle with? How do they persevere? What makes them successful?

Episodes

March 17, 2024 48 mins

In the world of finance, where leadership roles await those who distinguish themselves along a select number of familiar paths, Aaron Alt’s journey to becoming a CFO stands out for its breadth and depth, transcending conventional boundaries.

Starting in law, Alt quickly found his groove inside the legal world’s cornucopia of M&A advisory services. It was here where he would realize the potency of focusing beyond legal parameters—a ...

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Twelve years ago, when Matt Wolf was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, he likely would have been alarmed to learn that his future finance career would be largely impacted by drinking and driving.

Such was his destiny, though, as after a 5-year stint with the investment bank in London and New York he began to fill in his itinerary with positions in both the automotive and alcohol industries—most recently, as the CFO at DRINKS,...

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Jakson Peters's journey from humble beginnings to becoming a global CFO is a tale adaptability, and continuous learning. Born in Brazil, he had initial career expectations far removed from the finance world that had their roots in the start of his working life as part of the family's milk delivery business. This early experience,...

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On this episode of Controllers Classified, host Eric Zhou welcomes Sean Soper, the Head of Financial Operations and Accounting at Alchemy, to shed light on the disruptive technologies shaping the trajectory of accounting and finance. Alchemy provides the leading blockchain development platform and as such, much of the conversation narrows in on the possible applications of blockchain in accounting.

Sean begins the discussion highl...

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Perhaps no single experience better reveals the breadth of challenges that regularly test even the most stoic of finance career-builders than that which confronted Eric Bouchard a little more than a decade ago at Bombardier, Inc.

Tasked by management with negotiating the establishment of a new aerospace facility, Bouchard navigated through complex discussions with the Moroccan government, balancing the interests of Bombardier and t...

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At the very beginning of our talk with CFO Chermaine Hu, she revealed an irony about the CFO title that we rarely get to expose.

To wit: The very title toward which any executive has invested so many illustrious career years conveys ownership of what might seem to be a less than illustrious role—or at least one requiring little future endeavor.

“I have always struggled with the CFO title,” explains Hu, who notes that the moniker ca...

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Looking back at his 26 years at Intel Corp., Jeff Woolard has more than a few moments of important discernment from which to choose when we ask for a single finance strategic moment.

Nevertheless, without hesitation, he takes us back in time to when the giant chipmaker was experiencing a recurring mismatch between the products that it was developing and the market’s purchasing trends—specifically in the PC sector.

“If you were to m...

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Joining Intel Corp. in 1999 as a recent college graduate, David Freeman began his finance career as part of the tech giant’s plus-size finance team that supported various business groups. Looking back, Freeman finds that few aspects of the tech giant’s business were more influential in shaping his early career years than the company’s direct and “confrontational” culture.

“They expected excellence,” he recalls. “They expected detai...

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Planning Aces co-hosts Brett Knowles and Jack Sweeney discuss the strategic efforts of two CFOs leading organizational turnarounds, and a third CFO, who offers key organizational insights from an earlier career chapter. Emphasizing simplification, strategic focus, and leveraging both human insight and technology, Marc Suidan of Beachbody, Emma Brown of Medius and David Freeman of Starburst share their experiences in cutting costs, ...

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Lessons from Craig Wert’s finance career reveal the power of adaptability, problem-solving skills, and the ability to seize opportunities in unexpected places.

Having started his career without a clear road map to the future, Wert later found that his liberal arts background and early experiences in investment banking had laid a good foundation for a career that might have led in any number of directions.

What began to set Wert apa...

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When PwC partner and relentless champion of shareholder value Marc Suidan stepped into the CFO office at The Beachbody Company in April 2022, intrigue was bound to follow.

Certainly, a struggling fitness and health company may not be viewed by many as the optimal door-of-entry to the operations side of things. However, for Suidan—a 17-year PwC veteran—Beachbody was without a doubt an ent...

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On this episode of Controllers Classified, Brex’s CAO Erik Zhou is joined by Sowmya Ranganathan, OpenAI’s Controller. The conversation begins with a discussion on Sowmya’s career and her diverse experiences as an auditor and as a finance leader at both public and private tech companies, including Square and Rippling prior to OpenAI. Specifically, she highlights some of her insights for accounting during periods of business hypergro...

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It’s the type of story that we can’t resist repeating, and one that without question underscores Eric Jenny’s entrepreneurial spirit. Still, the entertainment value of his tale of zapping wasp nests with a homemade rubber band gun for a dollar a pop was at risk of eclipsing the more traditional milestones that populate a career path otherwise defined by strategic decision-making and an innate ability to identify and capitalize on o...

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It was during a 9-year tenure at food giant ConAgra Brands that Alejandro Castro became involved in a companywide initiative that would forever alter his approach to leadership and strategic thinking.

Born and raised in Mexico, Castro had begun his professional voyage at Price Waterhouse, where he launched a public accounting career from the accounting house's Mexic...

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Not unlike that of many of her CFO peers, Rachel Stack's journey toward becoming a CFO has been punctuated by pivotal transactions.

No single example of this turns out to have been more complicated or rich with lessons than what Stack refers to simply as "the take-private of Zayo."

However, before the path forward for Zay...

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Looking back on his days with GoDaddy, Sam Kemp recalls a pivotal page in the domain registry giant’s strategic M&A playbook.

As he prepared to present to the executive team his analysis of a recent acquisition, he included a simple slide to convey data that would challenge the company’s conventional thinking around acquisitions and how—free from the limitations of this thinking—GoDaddy’s newest acqu...

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On this episode of Controllers Classified, Brex’s CAO Erik Zhou is joined by Angelina Hendraka, the CAO at Redis. The conversation begins with a recap of Angelina’s diverse experiences across financial services, biotech, and SaaS companies. Angelina notes that while KPIs shift based on business strategy & industry, the transition from one industry to another in her career has felt seamless given finance is the universal language of...

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It’s an all-too-familiar tale among the ranks of senior finance executives: A private equity firm acquires a company, reshuffles the finance team, and reserves the top finance spot for one of its own portfolio CFOs.

At Qlik, though, this story had a less familiar ending—or at least one that did not include a portfolio CFO. Instead, back in 2016, when Thoma Bravo acquired King of Prussia, Pennsylvania’s Qlik, a seasoned veteran of t...

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Elizabeth Mann began her career as a mathematician in academia, spending a decade in the field. Her initial plan had been to become a professor, on a path that would start with a Ph.D. and a postdoc.

However, something was missing. Eager to engage more directly with the world at large, she pivoted her career toward finance.

Mann found a door of entry at Goldman Sachs, where after initially filling a quantitative role involving comp...

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This episode of Planning Aces sheds light on the critical role financial leadership and strategic planning plays in guiding companies through turbulent times and the importance of balancing short-term opportunities with long-term strategic planning. Each of the featured finance chiefs faced unique challenges related to the pandemic’s impact on their businesses, and their responses offer valuable insights into effective financial le...

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