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577: Rethinking Sales Productivity | Carolyn Koehn, CFO, Boomi
When finance leader Carolyn Koehn looks back on her career to identify the experiences that she feels best prepared her for a CFO role, she shares a candid observation: “I went to places no one else wanted to go.” Such was the case in the late 1990s, when she moved to Bogotá, Colombia, for Nortel…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:32:18)
576: Finance & the Beat of the Drum | Guido Torrini, CFO, Celonis
It doesn’t take long for CFO Guido Torrini of Celonis to draw our attention to the burden of the growing pools of data within organizations and the great irony that is afflicting many corporate finance departments today. He’s referring to the fact that while at no time have finance organizations had more data to help…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:56:23)
575: Using Openness to Achieve Greater Employee Engagement | Anup Singh, CFO, Illumio
Among the more novel approaches that CFO Anup Singh has recently used to help advance a more open working environment at Illumio, of Sunnyvale, California, was the creation of a channel inside the instant messaging application Slack through which employees can access Illumio’s finance leader by tagging their queries with an unassuming “#CFO ask me…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:44:04)
574: The Age of the Real-Time CFO | Mike Ellis, CFO, Flywire
Knowing that Mike Ellis has been the CFO of several growth companies, we can’t help but ask him about his tour of duty at the Massachusetts Port Authority, where the experienced finance executive served as controller from 2006 to 2009. Although the Port Authority is not exactly the type of employer that you would expect…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:36:01)
573: CBD: Sizing up the Opportunity | Alan George, CFO, Ojai Energetics
Among the different experiences that Alan George credits with having prepared him for a CFO role, one office meeting looms large. After he had spent days and nights preparing his first presentation for the president of a portfolio company, George recalls, the meeting came to an abrupt end when the executive reached across the table…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:34:10)
572: Measuring the Efficiencies of Customer Acquisition | David Burt, CFO, ServiceTitan
Years from now, when finance leader David Burt is reminiscing about his varied career chapters, you might imagine a captivated listener politely interrupting the veteran CFO with the question, “Excuse me, but what exactly was your profession?” This is a query perhaps more likely to be asked of veteran CFOs than other seasoned business leaders,…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:50:06)
571: Optimizing Your Pipeline’s Velocity | Greg Wookey, CFO, Boulevard
Inside the world of retail businesses, Greg Wookey’s CFO career has advanced down a path that parallels the sector’s growing appetite for more sophisticated software. Such was the case roughly 10 years ago, when he stepped into the CFO office at Mindbody—a firm whose well-known software helped fitness centers across the country to manage the…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:34:42)
570: Discovering What Makes Customers Happy | Sue Vestri, CFO, Greenphire
In the past, Sue Vestri has told friends that she has achieved CFO success by routinely working herself out of jobs. Vestri is not alone. Certainly, many of her finance leader peers have helped to create some exciting M&A deal-making chapters only to be “written out” of the newly merged business’s future script. “Being put…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:40:39)
569: Growing Your Team’s Knowledge Base | Raj Dani, CFO, Ping Identity
Back in the early 1990s, with both feet firmly planted on an auditing career path inside Price Waterhouse’s Tampa, Florida, office, Raj Dani decided to take a detour into the accounting house’s M&A advisory practice. Over the next few years, the one-time auditor began providing deal-makers with financial and operational due diligence on their future…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:34:57)
568: It’s the Narrative that Matters | Lanny Baker, CFO, Eventbrite
When it comes to time management, finance leaders tell us that it’s often easier for them to manage time offsite than inside the traditional office environment, where calendar appointments and consecutive meetings can swallow up entire days. Still, few CFOs have shared with us as novel a time management solution as that of CFO Lanny…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:49:41)
