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What's Rarely Measured Matters Most
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When Erik Wissig recalls his early years as a founder, one moment still stands out. The team had met its growth goals and earned their bonuses—but the company’s cash flow hadn’t caught up. “You need the cash to make those payments,” he tells us. That hard-won lesson reshaped how Wissig approached finance from that day […]
The post 1141: The Long Game of Resilient Finance Leadership | Erik Wissig, CFO, SureCo appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
The moment that stayed with him began at a marketplace where sales dashboards showed 40% gross margin—yet finance closed the books at 20%, Boon tells us. The gap, he discovered, lived in the shadows: rebates, discounts, and “free” services that never touched operational metrics. He manually traced economics to the client level and found margins […]
The post 1140: The EQ Playbook for Post-Merger Reality | Niels Boon, CFO, Cint appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
In this special episode of CFO Thought Leader—the first of three produced in collaboration with The Suite, Shaun Sethna (General Counsel and GM for the L Suite) maps where CFOs and GCs misjudge contract risk and how to collaborate effectively. He spotlights “locked-in” deals that still enable termination via vague clauses or missing notice-and-cure. Start […]
The post Bridging Legal & Finance: Closing Contact Risk Gaps – A Suite Voices Miniseries Episode appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
When Procter & Gamble asked Atsushi Kitamura to move from finance analysis into running a manufacturing plant, he didn’t hesitate. “They always give me next challenge to stretch me,” he tells us. Managing one of P&G’s large diaper plants in Japan forced him to apply finance in real-time operations—a proving ground that shaped his comfort […]
The post 1139: The Global Lens of Finance Leadership | Atsushi Kitamura, CFO, Astellas Pharma appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
On a quiet afternoon in Punta Cana, Michael Levine sat alone on a stretch of white sand. The turquoise water and silence offered the perfect scene for rest—until he realized what was missing. “I didn’t have my phone and I didn’t have my laptop,” he tells us. “That’s what makes me happy… I love doing […]
The post 1138: Stablecoins, Real Utility, and the Next Curve | Michael Levine, CFO, Fireblocks appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
She starts with tape from the field, not the spreadsheet. Listening to enterprise sales calls, Amy Foo heard customers whose usage rose and fell with seasons. Fixed per-seat pricing “wasn’t quite hitting the mark,” she tells us, so she piloted a pooled-seat model that flexed monthly within an annual commitment—turning smaller clips into “one to […]
The post 1137: When Finance Leads With Curiosity | Amy Foo, CFO, Ignition appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
When Joe Custer describes Intrado’s purpose, he begins with a story that traces back almost half a century. The company, he tells us, was born inside the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department when someone asked whether there might be a better way to connect a caller in distress with a first responder. “Turns out they were […]
The post 1136: From Projects to Playbooks: Making Transformation Stick | Joe Custer, CFO, Intrado appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
On his first day in investment banking, Clayton Kossl was “thrown right into the cauldron.” With few senior professionals in the small aerospace and defense group, junior bankers like him were expected to face company owners directly. “You had to understand the businesses inside and out,” he tells us. The experience forced him to blend […]
The post 1135: Where Strategy Meets Finance in the Ad-Tech Revolution | Clayton Kossl, CFO, Basis Technologies appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
“InvoiceCloud is not just payments,” Chris Sands tells us. Sitting inside the company’s finance organization, he sees a platform built to change habits—helping businesses shift customers from paper invoices and mailed checks to fully digital transactions. The success metric, he adds, is simple: “Do more of their customers stop receiving paper invoices, stop mailing in […]
The post 1134: When Finance Becomes a Force for Influence | Chris Sands, CFO, InvoiceCloud appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
When Kimberlee Duval arrived at Cymbiotika, the wellness company was preparing a leap few bootstrapped brands attempt—moving from direct-to-consumer to retail shelves. “Our two owners, Charlene and Shahab, have done everything direct,” she tells us. “They wanted to build an organization for the long term.” That resolve led the company to take on debt rather […]
The post 1133: Finance That Explains (and Scales) the Why | Kimberlee Duval, CFO, Cymbiotika appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
When Steve Sutter joined Celigo five years ago, he stepped into a company positioned not as another SaaS app but as what he calls “the infrastructure, the piping, the plumbing” of business automation. Celigo, he tells us, moves data between systems like Salesforce, NetSuite, and Snowflake so companies can “create very sophisticated business processes” without […]
The post 1132: Infrastructure First: Where AI Actually Adds Up | Steve Sutter, CFO, Celigo appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
In 2008, Beth Gaspich stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, ringing the bell as RiskMetrics went public. What made the moment extraordinary was its timing—amid one of the most volatile markets in decades. The IPO decision, she tells us, came “down to the wire.” After months of preparing the S-1, long […]
The post 1131: Building an AI-Ready Finance Engine | Beth Gaspich, CFO, NiCE appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
When David Obstler joined Datadog in 2018, the company’s co-founders had already built momentum with a product that observed modern cloud workloads. What struck Obstler was the alignment with a powerful long-term trend—the shift from legacy, on-premise systems to modern cloud applications. “It was a product that had a lot of product market fit in […]
The post 1130: Building Resilient Finance in Uncertain Times | David Obstler, CFO, Datadog appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
On her first day as CFO of UHY, Laura LaPeer asked a simple question: “Do you guys do Copilot?” She had grown accustomed to using Microsoft’s AI assistant for tasks ranging from summarizing documents to creating slides, and she wanted it in place immediately. The request, she tells us, reflected both her pragmatism and her […]
The post 1129: Turning Transactions into Strategy | Laura LaPeer, CFO, UHY appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
In 2018, Brex made a defining decision: rather than rely on middleware providers like Stripe or Marqeta, it built its own payments infrastructure from the ground up. That move, Ben Gammell tells us, gave the company a direct integration with MasterCard and the ability to issue corporate cards in “over 50 plus local currencies.” The […]
The post 1128: Capital Discipline in a Usage-Based World | Ben Gammell, President & CFO, Brex appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
When Damon Lee reflects on his first conversations with C.H. Robinson’s CEO, he recalls how natural the alignment felt. “We spoke the same language. We were finishing each other’s sentences,” Lee tells us. For a finance leader whose ambition had long been to step into the CFO chair, the clarity of vision he encountered at […]
The post 1127: Lean Finance in a Volatile World | Damon Lee, CFO, C.H. Robinson appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
When Holly Grey first examined Horizon3.ai, she saw more than a cybersecurity startup. She saw a technology that could change the way companies safeguard themselves. Traditional pen tests, she tells us, are human-driven, vary widely by auditor, and usually happen just once a year. Horizon3.ai, by contrast, “started out as a technology alternative to pen […]
The post 1126: Turning Signals into Strategy in Hypergrowth | Holly Grey, CFO Horizon3.ai appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
At 30, Jay Peir stepped into the CFO role at SunPower, a high-efficiency solar cell manufacturer. The appointment came after leading M&A and venture investments at Cypress Semiconductor, where SunPower was the largest portfolio company. “I had my first CFO experience at the age of 30,” Peir tells us, recalling how corporate development responsibilities opened […]
The post 1125: Finance Lessons in the AI Era | Jay Peir, CFO, Pigment appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
When Craig Foster talks about artificial intelligence, he begins with scale. Pax8, the enterprise marketplace where he serves as CFO, connects vendors like Microsoft and CrowdStrike with 43,000 managed service providers. Those MSPs, he tells us, serve between 700,000 and 800,000 small and midsize businesses worldwide. Against that backdrop, Foster describes how AI is reshaping […]
The post 1124: Rewiring the Marketplace for the AI Era | Craig Foster, CFO, Pax8 appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
The pivot began when Jim Rogers raised his hand. Groupon was shifting from mobile daily deals to a goods business in Europe, and—still early in his career—he volunteered to help lead the finance work. That step, he tells us, bridged his path from technical accounting into FP&A and set a pattern: seek out the build […]
The post 1123: From Accounting Rigor to Strategic Leadership | Jim Rogers, CFO Tempus AI appeared first on CFO THOUGHT LEADER.
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