The way John Cappadona sees it, School of Rock—the company that he joined as CFO back in March 2019—just became another business. “We are deriving 100 percent of our revenue right now from something that did not exist 2 months ago. We were an in-person education business. We had to pivot immediately to deliver a […]
Can Customer Data Expose The Path To Economic Recovery? Just Ask Eventbrite CFO Lanny Baker
This article was originally published on Forbes.com Ask any chief financial officer inside the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) realm why they are better prepared than most CFOs to navigate the country’s impending recession, and chances are that they mention the pools of customer behavior data now streaming into their forecasting models. Ask the same CFOs which SaaS developer’s […]
A Once-in-a-Lifetime Event for CFOs | Amir Jafari, CFO, Reputation.com
“We’re in a world that is highly abnormal. There’s a ‘sense of pause’ that’s been created. For me, this is a unique opportunity because when the world is standing still, we have the ability right now to validate our vision,” explains CFO Amir Jafari of Reputation.com. For Jafari, the current environment demands that finance listen […]
While Deemed “Essential Businesses,” Home Builders Look Beyond 2020 for Recovery | Hilla Sferruzza, CFO, Meritage Homes
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. […]