Episodes | CFO THOUGHT LEADER

When Pete D'Arrigo is asked to identify the business growth milestones that punctuate his 13-year CFO tenure at Envestnet, he pays passing homage to the company's 2010 IPO--before drawing our attention to a convertible debt offering made in late 2014: "This was an offering that put us in a different swim lane. It was the…

“It’s the economics, the finance,” says CFO Usama Malik, who quickly adds the words “and the accounting” to his short list of finance leader action items. Malik begins where most CFOs end--with the economics behind the business model. Everything else follows, he explains.   “This role is about applying a broader lens to an entire…

A little more than 13 years ago, when Nathan Feather joined PrimeRevenue--an upstart supplier of supply chain financial services--the 20-member enterprise was just signing up its first direct customers. "We were a complete finance function spanning a person and a half," explains Feather, who says that despite its sparse resources, finance was from time to…

As CFO Perry Wiggins recounts the different door-opening opportunities that allowed him to advance to the CFO office, APQC's finance leader doesn't hesitate to expose the seldom-mentioned sensation that frequently accompanies new responsibility--the feeling of being overwhelmed. According to Wiggins, the sense of being overwhelmed by new responsibilities is an experience that finance career-builders should…

A little more than 18 months ago, when CFO Kelly Steckelberg joined Zoom Video Communications, there were a number of key hires that needed to be made if the company was going to achieve its goal of selling shares to the public in the not-too-distant future. Three months after Zoom's IPO and one month after…

As Ronen Faier recalls the career-building ups-and-downs of being an entrepreneurial CFO, few memories appear to be more vivid than that of a meeting with Guy Sella, a seasoned Israeli entrepreneur, who invited Faier to lead the finance team of his solar start-up. Not yet a midsize firm, SolarEdge Technologies had only about $9 million…

Back in the early 1990s, while a senior manager at Ernst & Young, Elizabeth Salomon was selected to be an "Accounting Fellow" at the OCC--the nation's primary regulator of banks. Nominated by E&Y for the prestigious post, Salomon moved to Washington, DC, and was soon writing policy statements that would provide guidance to bank examiners…

If CFO Joe Aho's career DNA were uploaded to Ancestry.com, he would likely discover a family tree populated with no less than five financial planning analysts and 17 senior sales representatives. Needless to say, his career roots are multifunctional, with numerous titles and different tours of duty inside both finance and sales operations. Having joined…

It was the type of introduction that finance executives will invest decades of thoughtful career-building to receive. After dwelling nearly 20 years inside the capital markets and investment research corridors that scrutinize and energize the activities of publicly held real estate companies, Michael Knott was perhaps better prepared than most to receive an introduction to…

As for many CFOs, one company more than others dominates James Denena's finance career building years. Denena spent more than 10 years at Applied Materials of Santa Clara, California, where an executive development program encouraged him to move around inside the chip maker's sprawling finance organization. While Denena filled traditional FP&A and treasury roles, he…

Asked to supply us with a finance strategic moment, CFO Sean Sobers recalls an acquisition completed during an earlier chapter of his career. Convinced that the acquired company was capable of yielding only a meager profit, Sobers and the finance team set out to expose the company's shortcomings, only to discover the opposite. "It was…