I have a very nonstandard path to the CFO office. I was an English major in undergraduate, and I didn't really know what to do when I left school. I ended up going to Poland to visit some friends for about a month, and it turned into a four year stay. And during that period I worked for a German guy who just kept giving me interesting things to do and a lot of opportunities to learn. Along the way, I recognized that there were some gaps in my experience. So I went back to get my MBA at the University of South Carolina, and from there, um, I expected I just thought of myself as a business person. Um, the most aggressive kind of recruiter for um, for my internship was from Ford Ford Motor Company, and it was a finance job, and I just kind of thought that's not for May, but they just kept, you know, really trying to convince me. And finally I agreed to do it. So I went down to Brazil and to the Ford plant in Sao Paulo and ended up loving the business and actually kind of enjoyed being being in finance I'll get to that in a little bit. Why? I like finance. Um, So I spent 10 years with Ford Motor Company in a variety of roles in finance, um, in South America, in the U. S. And in Sweden. And then, um, when I came back when we came back from Sweden, had a wife and two kids, we moved five times in 10 years, and that was just getting to be too much. So I decided to leave forward on because we didn't want to stay in Michigan. Onda. We picked to come to Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. And that's where I made my entrance into software. So I've been in software since 2000 and 11. Andi, I'm on my third company now, which we just sold about 10 day about four weeks ago. So very unusual path. Andi, the lesson that I take from that that I would give to anybody, and I tell this to young people all the time. Number one. The first job you get out of school is probably not what you're gonna do for your career, so don't don't don't get too upset about it. Don't get too worked up about it, I think second is, um if anyone offers to teach you something or give you an opportunity to learn, take it full stop. Don't worry what the job is, but the company is or what the functional role is. If somebody's gonna give you a chance to learn early in your career, take it.

Yeah, All right. So, finance in general, you could break it into two major chunks. There's the accountants who keep the books. And then there's the um it's called financial planning and analysis. It's the people who work with the business to help help make good decisions and execute on those decisions. So I'd like to think about the role of CFO who brings both of those things together in terms of table stakes and the high value functions. The table stakes are maintaining financial controls, right? How cash comes in and goes out of business, maintaining accurate, reliable accounts right and finally delivering reliable, accurate financial statements. That's kind of the basics. But if that's all you're doing as the CFO, you're not actually adding value because nobody in the business cares about your accounting or your financial controls. No customer is ever won or saved because of good financial statements, and no product is ever developed because of, you know, strong financial controls. So the high value three are number one enable everyone else to do their jobs to the best of their ability. So finance is part of an area. The business called DNA General Administration and that's where all the kind of the operating system of the businesses and that's finance HR people legal procurement, facilities, management, etcetera. I t right. So my and in a small company like mine, the CFO does all that. So I am the chief information officer in my company. I am our internal general general counsel. I am. Even though I'm not a lawyer, I am our chief procurement officer, and our chief people officer works for May. So, um and I love that. That's awesome, because that gives me the span of control to make everything easier for everyone else. Um, salespeople are great selling people. They shouldn't be thinking about what I t Should they buy, right? Um, they shouldn't be thinking about what, um, compliance. What are my policies in compliance with state law they shouldn't be thinking about. They should just be out there selling. So that's number one enable everyone else to do their jobs better. Number two is optimizing operations and processes around the business. So there is no place in a company with a really good CFO. There's no place where the CFO is not welcome and doesn't have an opinion. And then number three is bringing business acumen, an insight to every conversation. If you on Lee talk accounts and controls and numbers, the business tunes out and you're not effective. So you have to understand their business and their function not not as well as they do to do it. But you've got to know what they do and really understand that cycles they go through the process is they go through the challenges they face and the stories they tell themselves that sometimes they're just not true, right? So a good CFO is a generalist. First and foremost, um, they're good business people who your data and numbers to bring insight. But But again, if you're just stuck in the books and the debits and credits, you're not adding value to the business. The other cool thing about the CFO role is besides the CEO, it's the only role in the business that has a holistic, complete view of the company and the customer and the products. And that s O number one. That's why you have to be a generalist, right? You gotta be ableto bounce from a product management decision. Thio Marketing operations plan planning, meeting Thio, people you know, HR issues Thio getting on the phone with your outside counsel and negotiate, you know, working through a contract, you got to do all that, and that's that's a you know, that's what an eight hour day looks like for me. Eight or 10 hour day. Um, the CFO is the trusted adviser to the business, but you're also the credible challenger. The sea CFOs are really good. CFOs the best CFOs are great story tellers. They know how to take data, turn it into a story that a business person can really understand, get their arms around and then start making decisions about yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the major. So one thing is, if you're doing all that stuff, it's really hard to figure out how to balance your time or manage your time to get the right balance. Um, for example, when I came into this role, um, my chief technology officer So the top product person in the company was also running our internal. I t That's crazy, right? That's a distraction. And he wasn't doing it well because he didn't pay attention to it. So we had no access control policies we had. You know, we had old users who had been out of the company for 10 years or five years, probably. Um and, you know, we had a brutal tech sack because people just bought whatever they wanted and nothing hung together. So I took that over and pretty quickly it consumed me because we were so far behind. And that meant the CEO and the business people weren't getting the benefit of, you know, my acumen, my insights, my data. And that was a real problem. For a while, the CEO really had to kind of say, hold on Second, you need to really rethink this and the tactic that I used was I started. It sounds silly, but I started creating kind of functional chunks to my day. So my the first two hours of my day are all contracts. Um, so I review all of our contracts with our customers and with our vendors. So I do that between 7. 30 and 9 30. And then if it doesn't get done at that point, it goes on the desk, and I come back to it tomorrow. And people have to get used to the fact that they couldn't send me a contract at noon and get it back to them by 2 p.m. It's not gonna happen. Um, so it was about really sitting down and thinking about how much time should be spending on each of these areas. So I've got it now where I t I spend maybe half an hour a day and an hour a week with my I t team. Otherwise, don't talk to me about I t. Stuff because I'm working on something else and asking yourself what is through the what? What can I do that brings the most value to the business? And that's where I spend most of my time now. Um, other examples are I told you, um, we're humans, right? And we like to tell ourselves stories, and we kind of have accepted versions of the fact fax sales people, for example. Um, you know, have 100 different reasons why that deal didn't happen, right? And it's full often a lot of anecdotes, So that's really painful for me. That's really hard for me to help them get better, because we're just dealing with anecdotes. So in that example, what I would do is I sit down with the sales team. I start pulling a bunch of data. You know, what's our average cycle time? What's our win rate? What's our pipeline to close? One coverage? Yeah, our conversion rate. Just a bunch of data, right? And start building a model for what our sales cycle looks like. And then we go through that every month and every quarter. Build a forecast, and we know exactly all the assumptions. And so then if we don't hit the number, all we have to do is go back up the process and figure out where we fell down. And it's not an anecdote It's not that it was raining or we had a big snowstorm, So I you know, So I couldn't sell all the cars that were on my lot. No, its data. Let's let's let's get to the fax because then we know. Alright, The problem was we didn't create enough pipeline. So what are we gonna do next quarter to create enough pipeline? Um, some of the other pain points are and this is this is difficult for especially junior finance people getting in the room. A lot of business people think of finance as you know, either just a bunch of bean counters or scorekeepers. They don't always have the experience, um, of having a trusted partner sitting next to them, helping them make decisions better and execute better. And that's all we dio finance people. We don't sell anything. We don't develop anything. We don't cut anything. We don't support any customers and we don't service anything, right? So the only thing that we do that really brings value is when we can help everybody do their job better