CFO Premieres

When asked about the experiences that prepared him for a finance leadership role, Brian Swartz, CFO of Cornerstone OnDemand, doesn’t hesitate to mention his tour of duty as controller for EaglePicher, a collection of businesses founded in 1842 that stubbornly has reinvented itself from one century to the next. However, as the small conglomerate was…

As she approaches her 20th year with BSI Group, Sarah Murphy repeats the word “variety” when asked why she turned a blind eye to other opportunities outside the company known to many as an exemplar of business standards. “There was always something new to move on to,” says Murphy, who, having spent the past decade…

When a company opts to recruit a finance leader from the “outside world,” it’s not uncommon these days for the future CFO to first serve in a provisional role—one that can provide a wide view of the business while allocating a little extra time for on-the-job learning. So it was for Constance Minc, a veteran…

“A CFO role was something that I had not yet really envisioned for myself,” explains CFO Erik Ostrowski when asked about the investment banking chapter of his early finance career. Still, Ostrowski says that he always found the challenges facing smaller or high-growth firms more interesting than those encountered by large enterprises. “I had a…

The recent opening of a Chicago office of ANGI Homeservices is one that the firm would like to replicate, but not in terms of size (the site has a capacity for roughly 100 sales representatives) or even necessarily geographic location. Instead, the home services player plans to duplicate the approach that it used to determine […]

In the late 1990s, when Ashish Parikh was working in Boston for Fleet Financial Group, he received a call from an uncle regarding a little-known hospitality company that his uncle and a number of partners had helped to establish and grow. The uncle explained that the partners were interested in hiring a CFO, and it…

Belatrix Software is a very different company from the firm that Horacio Yenaropulos joined in 2016. At that time, Belatrix relied on many decision-making processes that are more closely associated with family-owned companies than fast-growing multinationals. “It’s a whole new business today. Whereas we were already world-class when it came to delivering our offerings, we…

Among all of what is remarkable about Andreas Schulmeyer’s finance career, the timing with which he enters and exits different career chapters is most worthy of some added attention. For instance, consider his timing at Pepsico, where in the late 1990s he arrived inside Pepsi’s corporate strategy group—the beverage behemoth’s performance-minded brain trust headed by…

Finance leader Graham Ballbach views 2020 as the year when Riverside Insights can begin to satisfy its growing appetite for M&A. “We’ve been refining our processes so that we’re ready to go when it comes to tuck-in acquisitions,” says Ballbach, who has spent a portion of his first year as RI’s CFO in engaging business owners…

Asked to recall a moment of insight that she experienced during the course of her career, CFO Kimi Iguchi recalls a former boss (whom she describes as “a great mentor as well as critic”) asking her to rework a PowerPoint deck—once, twice, three times—in anticipation of a board presentation that he was expecting to give…