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 […]
Inside The Real Estate Realm, CFOs Practice ‘Push-And-Pull’ Cost Management To Ease COVID-19 Disruption
This article was originally published on 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 […]
When Averages No Longer Matter | Mohit Daswani, CFO, ThoughtSpot
When Mohit Daswani stepped into the CFO office of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ThoughtSpot this past January, he ascended to something more than just another finance leadership position inside a SaaS start-up. Daswani, who was previously the head of finance and strategy at payments company Square, Inc., was joining a special class of CFOs distinguished by their […]
Five CFOs Reflect On COVID-19’s March Madness
This article was originally published on Forbes.com “Protect your people,” “Engage with customers,” and “Be agile” were among the early admonitions issued by a group of CFO “first responders” when asked to reflect on the month that seemingly began as business as usual and suddenly flipped on a dime. TRIAL BY FIRE Andrew Casey, CFO, WalkMe, […]
Your Business & Covid 19 | Tod Nestor, CFO, Energy Focus
CFOTL: When it comes to the Corona virus, what steps are you taking to prepare and manage your business going forward? Nestor: We so happen to have a fair amount of our product sourced out of China. So we’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. The impact of it, basically since the country […]
578: The Awesome Power of FP&A | Jason Child, CFO, Splunk
Less than a year after his arrival at Splunk—a fast-growing, San Francisco–based software developer—CFO Jason Child appears to have been fully repatriated to his native land. To be clear: The “land” to which we refer is not the code-crunching zone of software development but the turf of business growth and scale—a locale in which Child…
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Boomi CFO Says That Sales Productivity Often Suffers A Death Of A Thousand Tweaks
This article was originally published on Forbes.com For those finance chiefs who are apt to tweak their company’s sales compensation plan, Boomi CFO Carolyn Koehn has some curt advice: Stop. Or at least make your tweaks sparingly. “If you want to lose sales and have the sales team off doing exercises in game theory or whatever, […]
How Free Shipping Greased Amazon’s Flywheel
This article was originally published on Forbes.com A Finance Leader Looks Back at a Game-Changing Decision Inside the conference rooms of 21st-century businesses, few strategy debates have led to a decision as impactful as the one Amazon.com made in 2001. In the wake of the dot-com crash, members of Amazon’s fledgling financial planning and analysis, or FP&A, […]
When His Leadership Moment Arrived, Synchrony’s Future CFO Was Ready
This article was originally published on Forbes.com Before entering Synchrony’s CFO office, Brian Wenzel’s finance career had to maneuver through a downturn and a massive GE restructuring. It was roughly 10 years ago when Brian Wenzel realized that his coveted and time-tested career path inside GE Capital had become somewhat fogged over. He was not alone. […]
AFTERPOD: Putting a Fine Point on FP&A | An Interview with Grant Halloran, CEO, Planful
(A shortened version of this interview was originally released on CFOTL Episode #564. The following transcript is an edited version of the extended Interview.) CFOTL: We’re happy to catch up with our guest Grant Halloran this week. Grant is a course CEO of Host Analytics, which this week is rebranding as Planful. Now when a […]
555: Two Worlds, One Career | Mike Kaseta, CFO, Aerami Therapeutics
Few megadeals within the past decade have received as many recurring kudos as the acquisition of Genzyme, of Cambridge, MA by France’s biggest pharmaceutical company, Sanofi. The marriage of Sanofi and Genzyme appears to have exceeded expectations, allowing all of those involved in minting the newly merged entity to rightfully keep a feather in their…
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No Longer Serving the Metric-Savvy Few, FP&A Enters a New Data Dimension to Feed the Masses
At Digital Realty, the FP&A team wants to help its business leaders “complete the story” by supplying data that brings greater context to decision-making. We spoke with Glenn Snyder, Vice President, Corporate FP&A, at Digital Realty about the company’s push to help business leaders tell the whole story. (This interview was originally released on Episode […]