1,043: Career Redefined: A CFO’s Move from Corporate Promise to Start-up Leadership | Aira Pineda, CFO, Scrubbed

But life had other plans. The birth of her son made Pineda reconsider the long hours and intense lifestyle required of a Big Four partner. Prioritizing family, she made the unexpected decision to leave the city and relocate to the countryside, where her son could be raised near his grandparents. This move led her to a small start-up called Scrubbed, a company with just 50 employees at the time. Her mentors thought that she was throwing away her career.

What Pineda didn’t realize at the time was that this decision would not derail her professional trek but instead redefine it. At Scrubbed, she gained broader experience in finance, and, as the company grew exponentially, so did her responsibilities. From consulting with clients to eventually becoming the company’s CFO, Pineda found her career full of unexpected turns. Her leap for personal reasons ultimately led her to a leadership role that she hadn’t anticipated—a twist in her journey that eventually set her on the path to becoming a CFO. –Jack Sweeney

“As CFO, you will frequently be involved in high-stakes decisions that affect the company’s short- and long-term success. Stay composed and rely on data-driven insights to guide your decisions. Remain objective, and always remember the importance of your role as a steward of your organization’s sustainability.” –Aira Pineda, CFO, Scrubbed

We have small and medium-size enterprises that need support for basic services like bookkeeping, accounting, tax, FP&A, fund-raising, and so forth, but we also have large clients—some, publicly listed—that need help with data analytics, data visualization, financial modeling, technical accounting memos, and so on. We can even help to prepare their 10-K’s for the SEC.

Another category of our client base is CPA firms that need staff augmentation. We have a lot of competent people who can provide high-value, specialized support for areas like external audit, M&A, and risk advisory—think SOX compliance, for instance. This is a big mouthful in terms of the services that we can provide, but we’re very proud of our scope.

I was in client service for 7 years before taking on the CFO role, so I know and love the satisfaction of seeing our clients grow. Scrubbed has grown during its first 10 years simply because our clients grew. We had no marketing other than word-of-mouth through our existing clients referring to us within whatever their particular network happened to be.

When I joined Scrubbed back in 2017, we had 50 people—and from a financial standpoint we have been growing at a clip of more than 50 percent per year since then. We are now a multi-million-dollar enterprise that originated from very humble beginnings as a start-up, and I have been privileged to witness much of this.

What sets us apart from our competition is that most outsourced providers operate in more of an administrative role. They provide a chair in an office, they manage the payroll, they manage government compliance—but then it’s up to the client to train this resource, or, you know, more or less take care of it.

We don’t approach things from an outsourced BPO standpoint. We look at our partners from the perspective of being a totally professional firm. We take ownership of the work product from creation to review. We think a lot about training and quality control. We happen to be mainly in the Philippines, but this doesn’t mean that the quality of or pride in what we do is in any way less than the best. We treat all of our work very seriously, which I think has been clearly evidenced by our growth.

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