The Source for CFO Thought Leadership

Episodes | CFO THOUGHT LEADER

874: Completing Your Visibility to Predictability Framework | Wailun Chan, CFO, Grafana Labs

No matter how many chapters Wailun Chan’s finance career ultimately spans, the decade that he spent at LinkedIn will always stand out. It perhaps goes without saying that as a finance career investment, a 10-year resume stint is increasingly rare today, and it’s not uncommon for a “decade investor” looking back on his or her…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:43:34)
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873: Pages from a Silver Lining Playbook | Michael Kopelman, CFO, Meow Wolf

Back in 2022, only three years after its acquisition of Warner Media, AT&T decided to leave the entertainment business and announced plans to relinquish its ownership of the giant media company. Just like many of his peers, Michael Kopelman has found that the business headlines of the past have everything and nothing to do with…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:53:21)
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872: Opportunities Along the xP&A Frontier | Dan Fletcher, CFO, Planful

During the early years of his finance career Dan Fletcher was accustomed to being the executive from somewhere else. When he first joined the asset management team at Allstate Investments, he was “the auditor from Price Waterhouse”, and when he landed inside an interim management role as a private equity advisor he was the former…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:55:07)
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871: Keeping in Stride in a High-Pressure Economy | Jared Poff, CFO, Designer Brands

One of the unspoken truths about interim CFO roles is that they sometimes don’t lead to an actual CFO role—a fact that has turned more than a few seasoned finance executives into chronic nail-biters.   For Jared Poff, who ultimately cleared all hurdles as an interim chief to land inside the CFO office at Designer…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:55:34)
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870: When Preparation Matters | John McCauley, CFO, Calendly

John McCauley is the first finance leader to tell us that his path to the CFO office began in a pool. Back in high school, McCauley relates, he was a rebellious student with less than impressive grades when a stubborn and no-excuses-allowed water polo coach knocked him from his wayward track. According to McCauley, the…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:42:47)
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869: Sharpening its Customer Focus | Ravi Narula, CFO, FinancialForce

Looking back, CFO Ravi Narula tells us that he wishes that he had become a “servant leader” sooner, as he references the familiar leadership tag signaling a mind-set focused on serving others. “If you asked me 15 years ago, ‘Do you have a servant leader mind-set?,’ unfortunately, I would have said ‘No,’” comments Narula, who…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:56:36)
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868: Armed and Sheltered From the Storm | Tom Fennimore, CFO, Luminar Technologies

The Goldman Sachs “anti-raid” team was between conference calls with an embattled client company when word came that a senior member of the target company’s management team had unexpectedly died. Looking back, Tom Fennimore says that the next few months of his early career years at Goldman then became a transition point—or period of accelerated…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:51:06)
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Ep 19: Why FP&A Designs the Questions

It’s no secret, professionals from various departments must work together to correctly calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer acquisition cost (CAC) or Lead-to-customer ratios. This episode we explore how collaboration and communication is always essential to ensure these calculations and others take into account all relevant factors. “The way I think about it is that […]

867: Energizing Your Data Relations | Donald Alvarez, CFO, Cyngn

Back in 1993, Don Alvarez was an auditor with Deloitte’s San Francisco office when specialty retailer and coveted client company West Marine went public. For Alvarez, the day began with WM’s management explicating the novel steps behind pricing its offering, which was followed by the requisite trip to a Bay Area printer. The long day…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:48:08)
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866: Metrics for the Masses | Jeremy Klaperman, CFO, Rho

Not unlike many of his CFO peers, Jeremy Klaperman spent the early years of his finance career in trying to rectify the damage brought on by the irrational market behaviors of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike most, though, he found that his repair duties frequently involved visits to a remote Japanese fishing village.…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:43:16)
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Ep 25: The Chatbot Chill: Why Business Will Be Anything But Usual

Our resident thought leader Brett Knowles explains how artificial intelligence is already being used to predict employee turnover, job satisfaction, and other key metrics, allowing managers to take proactive steps to improve employee engagement and retention. Brett & Jack discuss how AI-powered performance management systems are already tracking employee performance and are providing feedback and […]

865: Achieving a Strategic Alignment | Anup Singh, CFO, Illumio

It’s perhaps no surprise that the late 1990s came to mind for Anup Singh when we asked him to share with us a finance career lesson or insight from his past. It seems that our CFO guests have become ever more reflective on the period of years preceding the dotcom implosion as they seek to…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:36:17)
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