Eric Emans, CFO of Nintex, tells us that his career has been built upon learning from mistakes and driving an expectations-based culture in finance: “I see the fear of failure as being so detrimental to so many people early in their career. In their mind, failing is often outsized, but most of the time, the things that you’re dealing with when you’re up-and-coming are expected to involve some failure. This is how you learn.”
In fact, Emans views failure as a critical learning tool. Starting his career in juvenile rehabilitation, he tells us, he gained unique insights into human behavior and communication that later influenced his approach to leadership. When he transitioned to finance, Emans was determined to understand the business holistically—not just through numbers.
Read MoreAt Bluecore, where he first stepped into a CFO role, Emans emphasized the importance of building strong relationships within the organization. He relied on mentorship and collaboration to navigate new challenges, openly seeking feedback from colleagues and industry veterans. This approach helped him to avoid common pitfalls and develop a nuanced understanding of financial operations.
As CFO of Nintex, Emans has continued to foster a culture in which team members are encouraged to go beyond their job descriptions. He uses the metaphor of the left hand and right hand to describe the importance of both controllership and FP&A in his leadership. “My head of FP&A and my controller need to be my right and left hands. Not only do they need to be talented, but also I need to be able to speak to them about almost everything going on in the company,” he notes.
Emans believes in empowering his team to think critically, challenge assumptions, and bring new insights to the table. “If a finance person just hands me back the analysis that I asked for, that’s great,” he reports. “But if they go further and provide additional insights, this is what makes the difference between a good organization and a great one.”
“I would emphasize the importance of embracing failure as a profound learning opportunity. To an extent, failure is expected, and people will more often judge you for how you learn from a failure than for the failure itself. I’ve found that this is a pivotal part of career progression that’s critical for shaping resilient leaders.” –Eric Emans, CFO, Nintex
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CFOTL: Tell us about Nintex … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Emans: We are a global company that, as we like to say, sets the standard for process intelligence and automation. We have more than 8,000 private and public sector organizations from 90 or so countries that are using our process platform to accelerate and optimize the path to digital transformation.
When I went to look at this company, I really was attracted to the role and aperture of the CFO here and what it was going to allow me to do, which was to actually run data and analytics and pricing. This is a wider scope of responsibilities than you would traditionally find in even the best private equity–backed companies.
Read MoreI really appreciated that aspect of it, but I also really liked our mission. I’ve always found that it feels as though finance itself has to constantly be giving back to the bottom line and scaling. Another thing that I’ve found over my career is that you keep people by making sure that they’re working on the highest-value tasks—and not on things that a machine or process could do. So, the technology here just resonated for me because it is enabling a lot of the stuff that I had been driving in my other organizations, whether as a line of business owner or CFO. Everything was a really good fit.
Now, of course, in this day and age of AI, our attention will need to be focused not on replacing functions and processes with it but on using it to make automation quicker and more seamless and to allow people to build newer and better products more quickly. What I really like about Nintex is that we give people time to work on higher-value things. Your employees are always your highest-value asset, especially in a technology company.
One other thing that I like about our company is its global scale, as I’ve spent most of my career in pretty much U.S. domestic companies. Nintex has offices all over the world—headquarters in Washington state, plus developers in Johannesburg and footprints in Melbourne, the UK, and so on.
jb
Nintex | www.nintex.com | Bellevue, WA