Executive Leadership Blog

A CFO Success Story: Vinay Mehra, CFO of POLITICO

March 22, 2016 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

The following is from an interview with Vinay Mehra. Vinay became CFO of POLITICO in November 2015. Previously, Mehra served as Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of the PBS/NPR media organization WGBH, as announced in CFO Moves. This interview was edited for clarity.

Samuel: You’ve embarked on a new role. Why is this exciting for you?

Vinay: The primary reason I came to Politico is because they have built a new business model. I love going into businesses that are creating and inventing new business models. Politico has redefined how to make money in the media business without just being dependent on the advertising side of it. That’s something that really attracted me– they not only created a new business model, but they are also hugely successful in this new business model, and I want to be part of that.

Quick Takes from Vinay Mehra on…

What makes a good CFO?CFOs often forget that we are story tellers. And we need to tell a story with the numbers. We need to overlay the non-financial data with the financial data to complete the picture.Underappreciated skillsetThe most underappreciated skillset in finance is the cost-accounting mindset. Once you have a good understanding of true cost, and once you figure out how much of that is the standard cost, it becomes easier to manage and scale a business.

Not-for-profits

I find it very fulfilling. One tends to forget, in life, we all have the responsibility to give back to society. Whether it be money, or donating your time and skillset to a needy organization.

Working with a millennial workforce

This work force wants constant change and they’re not willing to stay with the status quo. Therefore they are constantly adopting new technologies, or adapting to new way of doing things.

Importance of good HR

The biggest assets here are the people. I really feel that HR is probably the most strategic department of this company. And that is where we have to make the investments.

Something to remember

The CFO is, in a way, the chief sales person. He is the one who sets the tone of what the organization is doing. He needs to keep providing a positive spin on how the business is doing. To be able to tell people the story even in the worst situation. He not only has to be a fabulous story teller, but also has to be a great sales person.

Samuel: You’ve had a good long run from your previous experience, in more of a television environment. And now you’re taking that to a new and exciting “new media” environment. What perspectives are you bringing to this new business from your years at WGBH?

Vinay: The first thing I can think of is that the most underappreciated skillset in finance is the cost-accounting mindset. The media business is heavily capital intensive. Having to understand the cost is really important. And thanks to my experience in accounting for 10 years, I had alot of clients – manufacturing clients, tech clients – one of the things they taught me was the concept of cost-accounting. Once you have a very good understanding of true cost, and once you can figure out how much of that cost is a standard cost, it make it much easier to manage and scale a business – rather than just focusing top line goals which is just the revenue side of it. And I think what TV broadcasting taught me is – that it is a business which is hugely capital intensive. For example, if we had 5 to 10 million dollars to make a TV show, we would have a very robust cost-accounting system. We would knew down to the penny, and down to an invoice, what everything was being spent on. And for which episode. So taking some of that same discipline is what I inherited from my experiences in the broadcast side of things and brought it into the “new media” side of things. And that was pretty hard to do – because you’ll have journalists writing their stories, and then they’re putting up their stories up on websites, or newspapers. And then you have to figure out how that translates to revenue – which are the stories that are actually driving traffic to the website, which are the stories that are driving revenue. And then figuring out the cost allocation system. So I think that going from old media to new media is where I found the benefit of having the ability to build a true-cost evaluating system.

On the revenue side, there is alot more diversity in the revenue field; more in new media than there is in the ‘traditional’ media space. Because the new media companies treat content as information, they don’t treat it as just content. The content that’s on the website should be driven by analytics. And they should decide what really makes sense to put on the website. But more importantly, let’s not just treat it as entertainment, let’s treat it as information. So there’s the mindset of it being an information company instead of being just a media company.

Samuel: What do you think makes you a good CFO?

Vinay: I think there are 2 kinds of CFO – there are CFOs who are very financial focused, and then there are CFOs like myself – CFOs who blend the financial and the non-financial data. What I have found in my career, what has made me successful is the fact that I am able to overlay the non-financial data with the financial data itself. So I can tell a story around what exactly is happening. And in every financial function I’ve had a small group of people doing data analytics. But they’re putting non-financial data and they’re trying to see if it tells a story. I think very often we CFOs forget that we are story tellers. And we need to tell a story with these numbers. Just by looking at the numbers it’s hard to tell a story, unless you have the non-financial information to overlay to show if there is some kind of a trend; or to show what is driving those financial numbers. So I would say that I am very much one of those people who loves to tell the stories behind the financial and the non-financial data.

Samuel: I also see that in your career you’ve been very involved in not-for-profits. How has that helped you?

Vinay: I think it’s very fulfilling. To be honest with you – one tends to forget, in life, we all have the responsibility to give back to society. And I personally found it very fulfilling to be involved in different causes – to give back to my city, my town, to my local cultural institution. And that’s one thing I would encourage everyone to try to do. It’s less about being on another board, its more about feeling how I’m able to give back. And giving back doesn’t necessarily need to be about giving money – it could be about giving your skillset, and your guidance to these organizations who don’t have allot of sophisticated management skills. They have a mission, and as long as you are in mind with the mission, you can help in many different ways. Helping to make it successful and running it like a business. Even a not-for-profit has to be run like a business and sometimes they lack the skillset. For me it was something very fulfilling, and something I’m glad I got involved with.

Samuel: And how did that benefit you? What impact did it have on you as a professional and as a CFO?

Vinay: Sometimes, as a CFO, you tend to look at things are pretty black and white. Things are just numbers. But when you get involved with a non-profit, the thing that I’ve come to appreciate is – sometimes, when you are making an investment, you don’t have a true ROI, from a financial perspective. But you will have ROI from a human impact. Or from the bigger benefit of the people, or of this country. For example – when I was in WGBH, very often we needed build TV shows and I would say “hey – no one is ever going to buy this show, no one is ever going to agree to do a big sponsorship for it”. And while that’s true, someone needs to tell the story of lack of diversity, or to tell the story of some other area which nobody else is willing to put the money in to do, because they don’t see the financial ROI on it. But we have a responsibility to tell that story. So we’ll spend money on it because that’s really our core mission is – to educate people. So I would say it’s given me the appreciation to understand that sometimes in business you will make an investment in something that may not have a true ROI, but there will be other ways to measure ROI beyond the financial terms of things.

Samuel: What was most surprising for you when you showed up at Politico?

Vinay: The energy and the passion around their mission of providing political information to their audiences. They are all uniformly passionate about this subject. You know, it’s not often you walk into a business where everybody – from the administrative assistants, to the help in the kitchen – are all uniformly passionate about this stuff. It’s amazing. And it make everything alot easier, because everyone is aligned with the mission. Everybody is very passionate about what difference they want to make.

And the second thing – which came as a bit of a surprise for me – was the millennium demographic, which is a large proportion of our employee base – between 25 to 28. They’re working at a much faster pace than you or I do! And I love working fast and changing things, but this work force wants constant change and they’re not willing to stay with the status quo. Therefore they are constantly adopting new technologies, or adapting to new way of things. And they crave it, and they keep pushing for it. This has been a big surprise for me, coming from big corporations where change is so hard, and it’s so hard to get people on board, or to follow new ways of doing things.

Samuel: It must be a big change, coming from NPR-type of background, where you were truly middle-aged, taking a look at everyone around you. Coming from an environment where you were one of the younger ones, to an environment where you’re one of the older ones.

Vinay: Yes – and the other thing is I think their desire and energy for staying in the forefront of technology and processes – it’s in their DNA. You don’t have to tell these people – they live this every day – how can we do things better. They’re built this way. And I think some of it is maybe because you don’t have the luggage of a traditional media company and all the headaches of running a traditional media company. But this is a company that continues to innovate every day. In every way – from how to come up with new revenue ways, to how can we become more efficient to how to use new technology. It’s just blowing me away. And it’s very refreshing to be an environment like this.

Samuel: And how does that translate for your finance team?

Vinay: That’s where I would say I have work to do. Because the rest of the organization is so forward thinking that my finance team hasn’t kept pace, with their level of change. In some ways I think the finance team got comfortable with the old ways of doing things. As if it’s the only way to be doing things

Samuel: So what are you doing to put change into a finance group that needs to be changed a little bit?

Vinay: The first thing I’ve done is to physically relocate people from my finance team into business groups. The people who do invoicing and billings and collection for my ad business used to sit in finance, in a central location, and I’ve taken them out of there and said go sit in the unit. Go sit in the business. Go see what they do every day and be part of their workflow, instead of sitting separated on a different floor and communicating through emails. I think that’s given them a sense of appreciation how the business operated, that they never knew before.

Secondly, substituting some of the skill sets that are lacking on the team, I bring in new people. For instance, somebody with more experience and or somebody who is an expert in certain areas is going to have expertise in their DNA of the finance function and will be able to figure it out as they go along. Which works to a certain point, but then a lack of knowledge and a lack of expertise because of the hindrance.

And the third thing is technology. They are very advanced with leveraging and using technology here. And because of that, the business units have gone off and made selections of technology products to streamline their operations and their processes. And on the back end of things you have finance working on QuickBooks because they haven’t kept pace with the evolution and change that has happened in the business.

Samuel: What are you ultimately responsible for, at Politico?

Vinay: I have Finance, I have HR, and I have Operations. I have pretty much ALL the business operations of the business. Basically all the non-editorial side of things.

Samuel: Have you always had HR responsibility?

Vinay: I have. In different forms. In WGBH I had business managers in HRO sitting in the business units, who reported to me. So yes, I’ve always had some HR responsibility. Planning, strategy, all those groups reported up to me

Samuel: How does it feel to be responsible for human resources in an environment that’s growing, dynamic and where culture is a key part of the talent pool?

Vinay: To be honest – the biggest assets here are the people. They don’t really have any physical assets here. And so preserving that asset base is extremely critical, for the organization. And we are thinking about additional approaches – until now we took for granted that we’ll have 20-30% turnover and keep hiring new people. My philosophy is we need to find a better way of keeping this from happening instead of constantly dealing with this turnover. And I get excited about the fact that I can help influence and be a caretaker of the culture of the organization. I feel that it’s a great opportunity for the organization to be able get what they are looking for, from a cultural perspective. Sometimes I feel that an HR reports directly to the CEO of an organization, and they tend to take a more of an administrative function. I really feel that HR is very strategic and probably is the most strategic department of this company. And we have to make the investments here. This is where we need to put the most focus – to help make sure that we can keep our employees.

Samuel: What advice would you give to someone in finance that’s trying to work their way up and wants to become successful in their career? Advice that you wish someone would have told you?

Vinay: I would say that having an understanding of the numbers and the context of the business, the strategy of the business is extremely critical in this day and age to be a successful CFO. Early in my career, when I was in accounting, I think the reason why I was so successful with my clients is because I was able to focus on their business problems, not just their financial problems. Additionally, in some ways the CFO is also kind of the chief sales person. He is the one who sets the tone of what the organization is doing. He needs to keep providing a positive spin on how the business is doing. To be able to tell people the story even in the worst situation. And so what tends to sometimes happen is that we forget that we have the DNA of a sales-person. We need to use that. Whether we are talking to our salary employees, or if we’re talking in external shareholders or investors. And I feel that anyone who wants to grow their career in a finance perspective, not only has to be a fabulous story teller, but also has to be a sales person.

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with Dergel Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

This blog originally appeared in Samuel’s CFO Blog

A CFO Success Story: Mark MacLeod

October 27, 2015 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

Mark MacLeod – Founder, SurePath Capital Partners

The following is from an interview with Mark MacLeod. Mark left his position as CFO of Freshbooks and started his own advisory firm – SurePath Capital Partners, as announced in CFO Moves Canada. This interview was edited for clarity.

SD: Mark, you’re not like other CFOs. You have gone in and out of being CFO so many times, and because you’ve been on multiple sides of the board table, I felt it would be interesting to hear your perspective. So to start off – which job do you prefer – the CFO Job or the outside advisor job?

MM: It’s not as simple as that. I live to do two things – One is to advise founders and management teams, and the other is to do complex financial transactions. The thing that I liked about being a CFO at start-ups is that they were often in need of both. When I created SurePath Capital Partners, I created a company that only does both those things. When I had been a CFO and had been a close advisor to the CEO’s that I’d served and got to work on lots of transactions, then I’m a really happy guy. If I’m the CFO of a company and it’s well capitalized and were not doing acquisitions, and we’re not being acquired – if we’re just kind of running the ship, then that’s not so great for me.

Quick Takes from Mark on…
Thinking out of the CFO boxYou need to go way beyond finance. You need to step up and fill other operating capacities.Relationship between CEO and CFOSynergy – if the CEO is the technical founder, take on the more outward-facing aspects; if the CEO is outward-facing and a rainmaker, try to take on as much of the internal operations as possible.

Create an informal network of your peers

There are always folks who are a little bit ahead of you in terms of scale and experience and complexity, and you can learn a ton from them. Branch out to other Venture funded CFOs.

Capable management

The whole thing about being a C-level executive in a venture backed company is that your competency and leadership need to scale faster than the company is scaling.

Keeping sight of the bigger picture

Remember to not only work IN the business, but to also work ON it. Similarly, to not just work IN yourself, but also to work ON yourself. Delegate lesser tasks to free up time to work on growing your capacity.

SD: Let’s talk about what it takes for a technology CFO to be successful. You’ve played that role, you’ve advised people in that role, what makes a successful Tech CFO?

MM: Well, I’d say it is the ability to go way beyond finance. I think, when a company isn’t fund raising, the financing role is pretty simple, and you have to find other ways to add value. Often the management teams at start-ups are incomplete and so there’s room to go way beyond finance and fill in other operating capacities. I’ve definitely done that a lot. I’d say within the finance realm, first of all you have to have a very clear understanding of all the nuts and bolts in the business, particularly because often those businesses are burning money and so you must understand ‘good burn’ vs ‘bad burn’. Most businesses these days hinges on profitable unit economics, and so even though the business as a whole might be in the red, if these customers are profitable, and you understand the nuances of customer mass, that’s kind of crucial. And then I would say the ability to translate. For example, if you’d just walk in to an exec meeting and rattle off a bunch of numbers and metrics, it’s sort of somewhat useful, but you have to go way deeper. As an example, if “churn” (the number of people who cancel your service) has moved in one direction, its somewhat useful to give the data points on the movement, but it is far more useful to understand the root cause and give good guidance. So again, it’s being able to go beyond the numbers.

The approach I’ve always taken to the CFO world is to define the role in a way that gives the CEO maximum leverage. What I mean by that is – if the CEO is very technical founder, then I’ve always tried to take on some of the outward facing aspects, so that the CEO would be able to be building and shipping product. Whereas if that CEO is a very outward facing CEO and a rainmaker, then I’ve tried to take on as much as the internal operations as possible, so that person could be out of the office and know that things are still running. To me the CFO is the right hand of the CEO, and therefore you have to govern yourself or kind of define the role in a way that has the most impact on the CEO.

SD: You’ve been a CFO on a full time basis and CFO on part time basis. What’s the difference?

MM: Huge difference. Again, take everything I’ve said about taking on more operating responsibility, in the context of full time. If you think about the core of a business – the core of any business in the technology business is building product and selling product, just to generalize. The rest is in support of that. In that context, finance is always important, but it’s not a core thing. It’s relatively horizontal. It can transfer the same functions from one company to the next. And so outsourcing the core nuts and bolts of finance makes all kind of sense. But where you run into trouble is when you outsource finance to someone, but then try to get that someone to do a whole bunch of other things – that just doesn’t work. So the big difference for me is that when I was full time I was going way beyond the finance role, whereas when I was part time I stuck to the core nuts and bolts of running a very tight back office, investor relations, budgeting, fundraising, reporting, etc.

SD: I’ve asked number of tech companies who are looking for finance help “what do you need?” and they said “well, we would like a Mark MacLeod”. You have a brand to you that says “start-up tech CFO”. How would you recommend they find their own Mark MacLeod?

MM: That’s a tough one. You know it’s funny. In retrospect, it might have taken the hard way to get my experience. My first start up was a client of mine and I came in with absolutely no experience and just kind of stumbled along. And because I was very focused on deals and fund raising in particular; if I didn’t feel like that company was on the trajectory to really grow massively, I’d move on. And that resulted in a bunch of things. I exited positively in a relatively short time frame, or me concluding that they weren’t going to be exiting in a relatively short time frame. But the point of all that is my learning and development was compressed and accelerated by moving to different companies and getting exposure to different start-ups, different stages in their life cycle, and that whole bit. So that’s one path.

I was very lucky because I got into start-ups very early, back in the late 90’s when anyone with a pulse was getting funded. The environment was pretty forgiving. So that could be a path today – someone who has kind of hustled around and has been involved in some fund raising, and has shown a propensity and an aptitude to be able to talk about things that are beyond the numbers.

But I’ll tell you… the whole thing about start-ups and venture capitalists is it’s all about the outliers. And while I’ve been part of some great businesses, the biggest learning opportunities and the biggest development, the most scope and the most exposure is when I was part of the outliers. Like Shopify and Freshbooks. So the point of that is hiring someone with that pedigree, even if they haven’t had the CFO title. If you’ve gone through Shopify’s growth, from 100 to 700 people, if you’ve gone through all the things that come with that and you understand how systems scale and you understand how to do really amazing investor reporting, and how to build sophisticated budgets and how to scale a finance function, that’s amazing experience. I’ve learned through trial and error that QuickBooks falls apart when you cross 100 employees. And then you end up having to go to a NetSuite or an Intact or something. Knowing that coming in, because you’ve come from a place with scale, would be pretty interesting.

So it’s really 2 different profiles. It is someone who is really helpful and has had some exposure through a few different companies so that they can pattern match. Or it’s someone who has come from a bigger company, one that the start-up aspires to be.

SD: Am I correct in saying that nobody can really hire Mark MacLeod because Mark learned it from the companies that he did the work in? I mean, you’re beyond that start-up age CFO that is young and has just enough experience but not too much, who’s not looking to take home too much cash and is more willing to put it down for the future. Do I understand that correctly?

MM: If someone wants to hire a Mark MacLeod, well a Mark MacLeod has been 2 decades in the making and is still being made, you know what I mean? They don’t exist. You have to hire someone who looks nothing like what I look like now. Hire someone who I was like 15-20 years ago, which means you’re really taking a chance. I got in because the environment was so frothy. And I would say that I stayed for 2 reasons – 1 maybe as you said, I don’t look like most CFO’s, because it’s never been just about the numbers for me, it’s always been about the strategic context around the numbers. So it was always the bigger picture. I’d say the thing that really helped make me stand out is I had a huge passion for venture capital. And for getting into the venture community and making deals happen. If a company is running out of money and hiring you helps them get money, then that should really sell itself. But in the early days that’s really how I got into a lot of start-ups. When I was doing the part time CFO stuff, the real sweet spot was that I would take companies and get them ready for the next round of funding, I would raise it for them, and then stay on as their CFO. That’s how I was kind of paying my way. So it’s a different context.

SD: What’s the ideal CFO for you to work with?

MM: I don’t know that there is just one to be honest. If I am helping a company fundraise or helping them prepare for an exit, I think that in both cases the deal will very much be driven by the strength of the management team. It’s not like I simply want a technician in there because I can handle the strategy stuff. I’d be more than happy to work with a very strategic deal-making CFO. I think that doing great big deals is a team sport, not like an individual hero sport. I think I’m equally happy to work with an internal deal maker, as I am to work with someone who’s got super tight back office. I think the takeaway is that one way or the other, we need both. So if the person is just the big deal maker and the back office is not super tight, that’s going to make it harder for me to do what I do. One way or another we have to have both the substance and the spot.

SD: What advice would you give to new CFOs who are just at the start of their career?

MM: Talk to peers a lot. There’s always folks who are a little bit ahead of you in terms of scale and experience and complexity, and you can learn a ton from them. You could also create an informal network, talking to other venture funded CFOs and the portfolio. Makes a ton of sense. I think this is true not just for CFOs but for any role. The whole thing about being a C-level executive in a venture backed company is that your competency and leadership has to scale faster than the company is scaling. And so in that context, having a coach who can help you work through issues and help you scale is super important as well.

SD: How did you make time for important things? Things that were related to your career and employer, but there was no deadline attached to it?

MM: I think I have a certain level of self-awareness. So I knew that I needed to not only work IN the business but also work ON it. And similarly to not just work IN myself, but to also work ON myself. I never have been the kind of technician who is always dotting I’s and crossing T’s. As a result I was able to push that kind of work down to the right level and that gave me capacity to work on growing my capacity, if that makes sense.

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with Dergel Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

This blog originally appeared in Samuel’s CFO Blog

A CFO Success Story: Aidan Cullen, CFO of CliQr

August 12, 2015 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

The following is from an interview with Aidan Cullen, recently hired as CFO of CliQr, as announced in CFO Moves. This interview was edited for clarity.

What has helped you become a successful CFO over the years?

I’ve always been a long term planner and thinker. I started my career in public accounting getting the fundamentals. I then went into internal audit consciously thinking about where I need to go for my success. That gave me an understanding of what’s underneath the hood of a company. From there I started to specialize in the functional roles and business partnerships, so I went to engineering and managed an engineering group worth about 120 million dollars. After that, I went into another company and managed a sales organization and was a business partner for sales services and support.

When you start to get into a specialized business like engineering, you look at all the portfolios and investments and really begin to understand how things roll in a company. Similarly, with sales you start to understand what incentivizes salespeople, what motivates them and how you get the most productivity out of them. Then you become more of a generalist and you start to move into and become more eligible for a CFO role. At that point you really have the depth to be able to go down a thousand feet and then come back up specifically when you’re dealing with the executive level management.

Quick Takes from Aidan on…

Growing from Controller to CFO:
A lot of us are very technically and operationally qualified and the next part of that is the chemistry and the synergy that you have with the executive team.How to move upwards and onwards:
If you build up and broaden your experience and your accomplishments and consistently perform… I think that will open any door.Networking and a new job:
We spend so much time trying to build a network and then when we get into a new job we tend to forget about that network.Why CFO Peer Groups are important:
It’s very important to keep a close check on what challenges other CFOs face in the market these days.

Building your network:
You should value your network and you should always think about building and expanding on your experiences.

You went from an engineering organization to a sales organization, both of which have very different requirements and very different world views. How did you transition at an early age to those perspectives? What did you learn from that?

I suppose I was just fortunate. I got in to the engineering role and the engineering VP at that stage got promoted to the general manager of a business unit that had a value of $1.7 billion dollars. So I was fortunate to move in with the VP and become the general manager’s number one finance person – the CFO. When I moved into the sales company, I specifically moved in as the number two. They didn’t have a CFO at the time and I moved in with the COO. The main concerns they had, operationally in the company, were in getting the financials restated due to the software changes that were going on, specifically around revenue recognition. In the company that I joined, several of the competing companies had their financial statements restated. Fortunately, because of my operational background in external audits and looking at the business side of things, I was able to take that role on and I spent a good year really reengineering the sales organization – specifically from an operational perspective. So that was just a bit of fortune and I just stepped up to the role. And when you actually have a bit of experience behind you, it’s nice to have that exciting challenge.

I’ve seen that a lot of CFOs who – while they were certainly smart – were at the right place at the right time. What was it about you that helped you get to that first CFO role?

I think it’s my assertiveness. It’s a little bit of planning and being willing to step up – having the energy level to step up to the next level and perform. As you start to get in, a lot of us are very technically and operationally qualified and the next part of that is the chemistry and the synergy that you have with the executive team and also with the CEO. It’s that business partnership that makes it all gel together.

What were some challenges you faced when you and the CEO thought differently? What have you done in your career that has made that CFO/CEO relationship work?

I think there are a few you areas that I would look at. The first that comes to mind is the ability to scale a company from, say, a 20 million dollar company to a 100 million dollar company. There are certain roads and paths to take. You would first look at the financial portfolios system or the ERP system and ask: which is the best one to scale? What are the key resources that you need to have? Each time you have to make some decision it impacts the business and may impact the CEO and executive team. So they’re truly critical decisions because they have a long term impact. That’s more the long term side of it.

On the operational side, I have the skills that I need from a sales operation perspective that I can use to go underneath the sales organization and understand the key issues associated with productivity, the sales model, the pricing and so forth. Because of this, sometimes the CEO or the VP of Sales do not see eye to eye with me. Through my perspective on certain things, I can justify it from the numbers, from looking at the facts, looking at trends, building them out and being able to start to perfect models and sales projections. Because of this, I started to gain respect from my peers and especially the CEO and then I moved forward and it got better. Everything started to get better.

What can you share about the process that moved you forward to your new role?

I think the key is networking. If you build up and broaden your experience and your accomplishments and consistently perform – especially in the CFO capacity – I think that will open any door. I think that’s the key to success. In my case, I’ve worked in many companies and I’ve met a lot of VCs and board members. I consistently keep in contact with them and these doors remain opened and the friendship and partnership are there.

One of the VCs on the board here opened up the door for me and connected me with CliQr. From there it just took the normal steps to get the position. I have kept in contact with all the top financial recruiters over the years – whether I am looking for an opportunity or not. If I can touch base, even if it’s only once a year, I’ll try to keep an eye on them and say hello. We spend so much time trying to build a network and then when we get into a new job we tend to forget about that network. And it doesn’t take much to maintain these relationships.

What tool do you use to ensure that you stay in front of everyone you want to stay in front of on a regular basis?

That’s a difficult one. I don’t have any specific tool. I kind of identify it and put it in my calendar on a quarterly basis. I do like sports, though. I tend to see if I can play golf with some of the executives. I might go to an event with them. Some of the banks that I deal with invite me out. For example, one of the financial recruiters is having an event here and it’s typically at an event like that where I catch up with my peers in the industry and have a drink and socialize.

Another process that has worked for me in the past is I will meet with CFOs on a semi-annual basis.We go to lunch and without getting into numbers we discuss the business process and we go into networking. The world of finance changes an awful lot. Technology changes and business and financial market changes. It’s very important to keep a close check on what challenges other CFOs face in the market these days. I enjoy that. We spend time together sitting around the table and then we reconvene in another six months’ time. It’s a great forum for keeping pace with what’s going on in the markets.

What are you excited about joining CliQr?

CliQr represents a fundamental shift in the IT market. We’ve seen the internet bring a lot of change. It has changed almost everything. The cloud is today’s internet in my mind. It has the ability to change everything about the way business interacts with information technology. CliQr is pivotal in this change. It plays a major role. It’s a transformation from the old rigid data centers to today’s desire to logically place applications across diverse environments and include the data centers across private and public clouds all in one place. This is what CliQr does. In my mind, the market’s real, the product is very very real and we’ve got really smart investors in the company (like Google Ventures and Foundation Capital -to name a couple). My colleagues here are very smart. It’s a nice working environment. To me, these are all key ingredients to success.

What are some of your objectives to help the company along and make a bigger impact in its success?

The major one is to scale the company. CliQr is at the point where it has gone through with a Series C and financing and we’re at that stage of growth. The next stage is global expansion and building out the enterprise and the sales into the various geographic regions. Those are the major challenges and in confronting them I bring in head counts and business processes. I did the same thing at Gigamon, where I expanded and brought in a new ERP system for a manufacturing company and broadened the sales geographic regions.

Where do you hope to take this?

I think one would always love to take it to IPO. Companies are not sold now, they are bought. So the strategic intention is to build this up to a company that can go IPO. I have not brought a company to an IPO process yet. I’ve filed an F1, but I’ve never been on the other side as a public CFO.

What advice would you give people trying to build themselves up on a path to success as CFO?

You should value your network and you should always think about building and expanding on your experiences. Try to look at the end of every year and assure that you’ve added some accomplishments to your resume or background. I think it’s important to meet regularly and get a pulse check with your peers to see if you’re keeping touch with how things are working out. Specifically, your skill set versus the market. Finally, I think it’s good to follow smart money. These days we’ve got some super VCs in the Valley. They do an amazing job and when you can actually get a line through to these VCs, they truly do mitigate the risk that we have as CFOs. In looking at opportunities, these are the people you should start to follow.

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with Dergel Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

This blog originally appeared in Samuel’s CFO Blog

A CFO Success Story: Christine Russell, CFO of UniPixel

June 30, 2015 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

The following is from an interview with Christine Russell, recently hired as CFO of UniPixel, as announced in CFO Moves. This interview was edited for clarity.

SD: Congratulations on your move to UniPixel. What are you excited about in your new role?

CR: I have been a Silicon Valley CFO for 30+ years and I’ve been involved in all kinds of different technologies. I’ve worked in many different industries, but there is a fundamental formula consisting of three elements for success that I’ve found in my companies and if they have this formula to start with, then they are going to meet with success.

First, the company really needs to be serving a large market (in the multi-billions) and that way in your growth cycle if you’re capturing only 10% of market share, you’re still a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. I’ve never enjoyed going to companies that are targeting a niche market where you don’t need 80% of the market and you’re a 200 million dollar company and there’s nowhere to go from there.

The second criteria is the product needs to be something that’s really useful and can be differentiated in the market. It can be either technological advantages, cost advantages, usability or some combination of these. It has to be something that people really need, and not something that we need to go out and convince everyone they need. Finally, the CEO needs to be a leader – somebody thoughtful, decisive, and with a bias for action. They need to have an impeccable reputation in the industry. Someone I’m really proud to present to investors and who customers can stand beside. To me, UniPixel has all of these elements – a multi-billion dollar addressable market in touch screen devices that have both technological and cost advantages and a CEO with a deep background in display and optical and who has run public companies before with great success.

Quick Takes from Christine on… The formula for a great company:
1) Serves a large market.
2) Creates a useful and differentiated product.
3) Has a really well-rounded CEO.Networking: Successful networking means making lifelong friends and giving back.

Successful Female CFOs: Executives need to make their career a priority. There is no such thing as balance. It’s a compromise. It’s what you choose to do with your life.

Females on Boards: Recruit your board by individual, irrespective of race, sex, country of origin. Hire the best for the board. Period.

Managing your Board: Over-communication and transparency creates trust.

The Best CEOs for CFOs: Confident CEOs are able to share their powerbase with the CFO and treat them as a trusted partner.

Advice to up-and-coming female CFOs: Be absolutely fearless. Brainstorm with your other executives, and shut up and listen – you will learn a lot.

SD: How do CFOs get matched with great companies? What did you do to get to this company?

CR: I was approached for the UniPixel opportunity by a colleague who I knew in Silicon Valley for many years. He introduced me to the CEO, Jeff Hawthorne, and told me that he had worked with Jeff before and that he was an excellent and effective CEO. He told me that Jeff was respected for his deep knowledge in the display and optical industry. So a personal recommendation is extremely valuable. Always.

The way I joined my prior company was through a board member who was a committee chair who I knew from professional organizations. So again, it’s about who you know.

SD: How did you become so well networked?

CR: First of all, because I don’t really like the concept of networking, I think of people as friends. Friends help one another. I’ll tell you a little story about how I came to know some of these people, especially the gentleman who recommended me at Vendavo: I belong to a professional organization called Financial Executives International and I always enjoyed attending the Silicon Valley meetings. One day they approached me and asked if I would be willing to become the president of the organization. I was doing an IPO for a company at the time so I said I was too busy. I was set straight by one of my corporate outside lawyers. He looked at me and asked if I enjoyed going to the organization and if I found it helpful. So I said oh yeah, the people are wonderful. And he said, so when do you give back? I left his office and I immediately called up the board and told them I would accept the position. I have no idea how I did that while I was doing an IPO, but I did it, and then those people went on to become very good friends of mine and they really helped me. They help you and you help them.

SD: Most Senior Finance Executives don’t do enough networking.

CR: No they don’t, and I think they’re missing an opportunity to meet people who can be a lifetime friend and find out about opportunities that go both ways. They look out for you and you look out for them. And I will say that executive recruiting certainly has its own place. A search firm located me through my LinkedIn profile for a previous position that I held at Evans Analytical Group.

SD: If you look at the percentage of women at the CFO level, it’s not representative of the number of females in finance. What is your take on that?

CR: First of all, I think there are more women in HR and finance than there are in many other positions. I think that you have to have a certain amount of ambition and time that you’re willing to devote away from your family if you want to see the executive staff table. I was once on a panel where one of the panelists got a question asking a woman how she balanced her work and home life. Her response was you don’t. She devoted a lot of time to her work life at the expense of her home life. There is no such thing as balance. It’s a compromise. It’s what you choose to do with your life.

SD: What are your thoughts on the social discussion about females on boards?

CR: I’ve always thought that you should recruit your board by individual, irrespective of race, sex, country of origin, or anything that is unrelated to finding the best people you can who will accelerate your business. I know I’m going against the grain by saying that, but I think that a board member has to be highly qualified to be a board member. Especially in these times of challenges and activist investors. You need to have the very best qualified individual you can find.

SD: How have you as CFO managed to get the best relationship possible with the board that you had at various companies throughout your career?

CR: I have learned to over-communicate with the board. I will communicate very regularly and frequently and I wait for people to tell me “Christine, quit calling me!” Then I know that I’ve done enough communicating. I’m very transparent with them if there are problems or issues. If there is anything they don’t like about something, they can talk to me about it. But over-communication and transparency create trust.

SD: Some CFOs have said that the CEO can sometimes get in the way of effective communication with the board. What’s your take on that?

CR: I think that’s a valid comment. Just as there are all kinds of personalities of people in the world, there’s all kinds of personalities of CEOs. Some are very transparent and some are very controlling, but you’re not going to have someone become CEO if they don’t have a controlling personality. Some are more concerned about protecting their relationship with the board and trying to keep that relationship exclusive, seeing as it’s about power. More confident CEOs are able to share that powerbase with the CFO and treat them as a trusted partner.

SD: Where do you get the energy for all of the many accomplishments you have had in your career?

CR: I don’t know what else to do! I don’t have hobbies, I don’t play an instrument, and I can’t sing or dance… I’m a working cat! That’s what I do. And I’m good at it and I think as long as I have the ability to contribute and help create jobs, companies and ROI for investors, I’m going to keep doing it.

SD: What advice would you give to a young female CFO?

CR: I would say that you have to be absolutely fearless. One of the things that I did wrong earlier in my career was I thought I had all of the answers, but if you don’t get buy-in with some of the other members of the executive staff, it doesn’t really matter. Enter in the brainstorming conversations with the executives. Ask for everyone’s ideas, no matter how crazy those ideas may be. Create a common mind rather than coming in with all of the answers. Shut up and ask others what they think!

SD: What are you most excited about in your new role?

CR: I’m really excited about this being a pivotal time for UniPixel. We just acquired the Atmel touch film technology and the production facility in Colorado Springs. We are combining the best aspects of the UniPixel technology that we worked on with Kodak and the Atmel technology to come up with something that is more than just one plus one. I’m also very excited about the CEO I’m working with. The number of people he knows and who greeted him at a recent information display convention in San Jose was very heartening for me.

I recently visited the newly acquired Colorado Springs facility and the energy level there is amazing. These people are now able to work with a much smaller, more nimble and flexible company rather than being under a small vision of a large company. The energy level there is still like a start-up.

SD: What is the top thing you need to accomplish in this new phase of the company?

CR: Finance and admin are thinly staffed. I have to get comfortable with a minimum amount of support and identify the positions that I need to upgrade, as well as bringing in proper software and processes for finance. Even though that’s a lot of work, it’s an advantage because you’re not inheriting someone else’s ideas for a business.

SD: Is there something that you feel you would like to tell the CFOs who read this blog?

CR: Stick together! Form groups and partnerships. Join professional organizations and become a cohesive group so that if you’re ever in a bind –finding yourself in need of a boilerplate template for a sales commission plan for staff delivered software, for example – you can pick up the phone, email or text another CFO and ask if they have ever dealt with something similar. Those kinds of professional contacts and friendships are amazingly helpful and allow you to shortcut so many of the things that you would otherwise be handling alone.

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with Dergel Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

This blog originally appeared in Samuel’s CFO Blog

A CFO Success Story: Craig Foster, CFO of Amobee

May 19, 2015 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

The following is from an interview with Craig Foster, recently hired as CFO of Amobee, as announced in CFO Moves. This interview was edited for clarity.

SD: Congratulations on your move to Amobee. What made you want to move there?

CF: I thought Amobee was an incredible opportunity. I’ve worked at a late-stage private that then went public. I’ve worked in Investment banking, consulting to those types of companies. My first CFO job was at Ubiquiti, which was a ride into the public company landscape. I thought Amobee was a great opportunity to work with a very late-stage private company (we are actually a division of SingTel) with aspirations of becoming our own public entity. I thought that really fit well for me.

SD: What are some of the challenges that you are excited about at Amobee?

CF: Amobee is a very young company, a product of 3 different transactions that have come together. My investment banking background has a lot to do with M&A, those types of transactions. These were 3 companies that needed to come together as a single operating unit on worldwide basis. I think it is going to be really interesting bringing them all together.

SD: What’s the size of the company right now?

CF: We have about 450 people currently, and doing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.

SD: What experiences have you had in the past that you feel will really help in your new opportunity?

CF: A long time ago, I worked for LoudCloud. They were a late-stage private company, and they were all over the place. It was a high growth company that was trying to find its sea legs in terms of an operating business model. You had an incredible amount of talent from a management stand point. There was a lot of great energy that went into the company. When I worked at LoudCloud, I saw the entire life cycle of the company right in front of your eyes. From a VC Start-up, it then became public company and the business model was challenged then we ended up selling. I thought it was great to live through both the entire up and down of a corporate infrastructure.

After leaving LoudCloud is that I went to business school to get more training. I had this great experience with LoudCloud, but I really wanted to consult to companies that were facing the same issues. How do you deal with High Growth? How do you deal with changing business environments? What’s the best path for exit? Those are key points of any company’s life cycle, and to be part of that was pretty empowering. I chose the banking path because I thought it would be the best way to work the most companies as quickly as possible.

SD: When did you realize that you wanted to become a CFO and that was the path that you wanted to take?

CF: I was really enjoying my banking career. I was the lead banker when we took Ubiquity Networks public, and I had a very good relationship with the management team. When Ubiquity was making a CFO change after the CFO announced he was resigning, I put in a number of candidates I knew from my time in banking. After they went through the candidates, they said “why don’t you take the job”.

At the time I really hadn’t considered the CFO path.

I think in the back of your mind when you’re doing investment banking you kind of wonder what the end game is. At some point you don’t want to be 60 years old and getting on a plane 7 days a week for hour long meetings. Some of the people in investment banking move into a corporate development role, some down cycle their investment banking and work for a smaller firm so they can have a little more career control.

When I heard about the opportunity, I said to myself that while I hadn’t really thought about the opportunity, the upside is absolutely tremendous. If I was thinking of an end game for my investment banking career, I couldn’t think of a better opportunity to walk into a multi-billion dollar company from Day 1 and assume the role of the CFO. It was the chance of a lifetime.

SD: You moved from investment banking to a CFO role where it wasn’t part of your plan but it was an exciting opportunity. What are some of the things that surprised you when you made that transition?

CF: I’ll tell you why I really liked the role, then I’ll tell you about what surprised me.

Everyone in investment banking sees themselves as a top tier McKinsey consultant, except they know a lot about finance. The issue is that when you’re in banking, you’re really not accountable for the end game of the deal. You’re putting two companies together from an M&A standpoint, but at the end of the day you don’t live with the transaction. The execution of the transaction becomes someone else’s problem. You can package an IPO, but you don’t live with the company and have to be there for the next 10 earnings cycles. You’re not empowered, and you don’t have much accountability passed the transaction.

As I started thinking about what I would like to do in my career, I thought that having 1000% accountability for transactions and decisions that you make would be really exciting.

That’s how I talked myself into that this is something I could do, and that I wanted to do.

I’ll tell you what my biggest concerns were – and then I’ll tell you what my biggest surprises were.

When I first started my career, I did public company accounting with PwC in New York. I did that for 3 years as entry level, early career kind of stuff. I then moved away from the core accounting. My initial concern was “how long would it take me to get back in the fold of day to day accounting operations so that I was comfortable signing the financial statements?”

I knew that was going to take a lot of effort on my side, besides the fact that the company had a lot of strategic and operational changes that they needed to make. It’s a line by line understanding of where the dollars are going before you can get comfortable. I had to lock myself up. It took me the better part of a couple of months to get to the point where I felt that I was extremely well versed where the company was and where it was going.

And then what surprised me was that you kind of think of a company as an entity, using a battleship analogy, where it’s really hard to turn a company because it has its own trajectory and culture. What I found was that in a company with 500 people or so, is that you can make impactful changes very quickly and that was the biggest surprise to me. You can come into a new organization with new ideas and make substantial changes and have them permeate all the way through the organization. And you can see the results almost instantaneously.

As an example, when I started, the company’s DSOs were in the high 60s. I was told that this was the industry standard that’s the way it’s done. We objectively looked at the problem and said there are ways to make some changes that will fundamentally change the way that we look at this, how we collect money and close the gap between what we’re getting paid and what we’re owed. At the best, the company got that down to 24 days. That was a substantial improvement.

One person can come in and really make a change for the better. I was a little bit naïve thinking that, regardless of the leadership, making change is very difficult within an established organization.

SD: CFOs are sometimes looked at as Mr. or Ms. “No”. How did you connect with your peers and what did you learn from that experience?

CF: I was fortunate that I did not walk into a situation where we had a tremendous amount of cash constraints. We were in a high growth mode, so it was more like “what is the most opportunistic way to leverage our spend so we can get higher returns”. Our recipe for success was making individual business units accountable for their time and expenses. Meaning, if you’re building an R&D project, how are you budgeting your time and the resources that you have, that meets the deliverables that are in front of you.

Plans change, projects change, scope changes. As long as there is a dialog and have a collaborative way to think about the end game, as long as there is accountability, everyone is on the same page. At the end of the day, you can say that either it was a successful venture or it wasn’t, and you have some way to benchmark it. It’s not that you’re sitting there saying no. You are empowering people so you can make the right business decisions.

SD: What career advice do you wish you were given before you started your MBA?

CF: I wish I had made the move to CFO sooner.

SD: How do you manage all those multiple goals that you want to be able to accomplish with only 24 hours in the day?

CF: We are around the world, so I use Skype a lot. I have a lot of business partners here, a team that supports me, and I’ve empowered them all, in certain aspects of the business, to affect change. I think they were a little bit afraid to do that, for fear that will be some ramifications of making those decisions. I’m using the leverage points that I have, which are the people that I work with. In some cases, I have seen some major gaps in the finance function that need to be automated, and we’re making investments to automate those. I believe we will be able to find a lot of efficiencies based on those two pieces.

SD: What do you find exciting about the environment at Amobee?

CF: Strategically as I was thinking about my next position, I wanted to get closer to software. I’ve been working in a hardware environment, and everything is software driven, even if it’s hardware. The differentiation is in the software layer. I wanted to get closer to a company that was using software to differentiate itself.

The industry that I work in, digital marketing for mobile, has a lot of “me too”. Our company is built on an analytical platform that allows you to analyze and justify your marketing spend against how it is being received in the field. I thought this was really empowering, and I like models that is extremely differentiating in a ‘me too’ environment. What I saw here is a company that has great technology, a very powerful sales engine, and needed a lot of help on the finance side to get things coordinated. For me, this is a project within a project within a project, and believe that if executed correctly, we can accomplish great things. I think this is a very exciting opportunity.

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with Dergel Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

This blog originally appeared in Samuel’s CFO Blog

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