574: The Age of the Real-Time CFO | Mike Ellis, CFO, Flywire

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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…

573: CBD: Sizing up the Opportunity | Alan George, CFO, Ojai Energetics

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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…

572: Measuring the Efficiencies of Customer Acquisition | David Burt, CFO, ServiceTitan

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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,…

571: Optimizing Your Pipeline’s Velocity | Greg Wookey, CFO, Boulevard

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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…

570: Discovering What Makes Customers Happy | Sue Vestri, CFO, Greenphire

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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…

569: Growing Your Team’s Knowledge Base | Raj Dani, CFO, Ping Identity

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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…

568: It’s the Narrative that Matters | Lanny Baker, CFO, Eventbrite

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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…

567: Mining Opportunity Between Growth & Risk | Kevin Jacobson, CFO, LogicGate

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Step inside CFO Kevin Jacobson’s office at LogicGate, and there’s little question that you’ll think you’ve entered a realm where growth and risk are often two sides of the same coin. In fact, LogicGate’s fast path to achieving “product market fit” was no doubt shortened by early customers who today wield a similar growth/risk mind-set.…

566: Building Your P&L Culture | Scot Parnell, CFO, DailyPay, Inc.

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We are nearly at the end of our interview with Scot Parnell when we ask him to explain what led him to accept the CFO position at DailyPay, a company with a pioneering technology inside the human capital management realm. This is a question that we had asked a little earlier in the interview, but…

565: A Fintech Unicorn Burnishes its Risk Management Brand | Michael Tannenbaum, CFO, Brex, Inc.

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Upon being named CFO of Brex, Inc., in 2017, Michael Tannenbaum joined a realm of accomplished finance executives whose average age is 20 years greater than his. This is not the first time that Tannenbaum has advanced beyond his professional years, so the label of “whiz kid” has long since lost a little of its…