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772: Inside the M&A Quarry | Andy Watts, CFO, Brown & Brown
Asked to highlight his experience in mergers and acquisitions, Andy Watts doesn’t need to weigh and measure the many deals that he has helped to execute over his three-decade-long finance career. Instead, Watts quickly points to the 2000s, when, as CFO of a division of Thomson Reuters, he sold off businesses responsible for nearly half…
766: Making Decisions with the Customer in Mind | Cassandra Hudson, CFO, EngageSmart
Back in 2008, Cassandra Hudson was interviewing for a senior accounting role at a small tech firm in Boston when the CFO casually shared some “insight” into the company’s future. “The CEO really wants to take this company public, this is probably never going to happen—we’ll likely sell in the next couple of years,” Hudson…
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755: Serving the Creators | Craig Foster, CFO, Picsart
During 2018, the very year Craig Foster joined Bright Machines, the San Francisco–based company had already been spun out from contract manufacturing firm Flex, raised a headline-grabbing $179 million in Series A funding, and shed its original moniker, AutoLab AI. By all accounts, the manufacturing start-up, which promised to use a combination of robots and…
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752: Making Your Company More Valuable | Howard Wilson, CFO, PagerDuty
Among today’s career building finance pros who view the CFO office as their ultimate destination, Howard Wilson might be labeled an off-road commuter. Whereas most finance leaders have shared a common view as accounting and finance milestones fell away in their rearview mirror, Wilson entered the finance realm from the merge lane – where his…
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743: Winning with Employee Success | Michael Rosen, CFO, Power Digital Marketing
"Be patient. It was in my nature to come into a company and try to make an impact as quickly as possible. Having worked with many companies, I have realized that it takes time to learn a company and its culture and that this is a component critical to making the right decisions." –Michael Rosen,…
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739: The Rules of Play | Craig Abrahams, CFO & President, Playtika
"Being self-aware of your strengths and weaknesses and building a team to support you is what will determine your success in the role. Think like an investor thinks, it will help you spot trends before they become issues." - Playtika CFO & President Craig Abrahams It was after he had worked 3 years as an…
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737: The Future Before Us | Chris Kuehn, CFO, Trane Technologies
"Keep up the work ethic and humor, and you've got more control over where you spend your time—with family, friends, work, volunteering—than you think." –CFO Chris Kuehn It was a complicated transaction that Ingersoll Rand’s then-CEO Mike Lamach challenged his finance and operations people to address by “turning over every rock in the company” to…
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683: When It’s Time to Sit in the Driver’s Seat | Stéphane Berthier, CFO, Uniphore
When Stéphane Berthier joined Uniphore of Palo Alto, CA, as CFO this past January, the move no doubt raised more than a few Silicon Valley eyebrows. For more than two decades, Berthier had served a list of prestigious Bay Area tech companies as a top audit partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers, where his impressive tenure had originally…
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682: How the Flywheel Effect Creates Long-Term Value | John Collins, CFO, LivePerson
When CFO John Collins is asked how his background in data modeling and strategy is influencing the role that finance plays inside LivePerson, the artificial intelligence (AI) software firm that he first joined 2 years ago, he draws our attention to the mountains of data accumulating alongside most businesses today. “Given the volume of data…
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680: Making Sales Success a Must-See Metric | Ron Knutson, CFO, Lawson Products
As the newly appointed CFO of Lawson Products a little more than a decade ago, Ron Knutson realized the significant infrastructure and technology investments that would be required to meet the productivity goals that he was expected to help drive. In anticipation of the investments that would need to be made, Knutson recalls, he first…
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643: The Rise of People-Centric Finance | Katie Rooney, CFO, Alight Solutions
Back in 2015, Katie Rooney was only 7 months into her first industry CFO role at Aon when her boss asked her to exit the office. “He came into my office on November 1 and said, ‘I’m retiring, and I want you to take on my role. I’m leaving in 8 weeks,’” recalls Rooney, who…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:29:49)