The dynamic interplay of data and AI is fundamentally reshaping the CFO’s role. This episode features a conversation with Tod Crane, the astute CFO of Domo, a cutting-edge, cloud-based data and AI platform. From his roots on an Idaho potato farm to doing inventory counts in public accounting to navigating the complexities of a tech unicorn’s IPO, Tod delves into how his journey forged his financial acumen. He also discusses the crucial role of strategic partnerships, seamless transitions to life as a public company and the relentless pursuit of measurable value through insightful, data-driven decision-making.
To book a demo with Planful, click here.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Watch the video
—
Welcome to another episode of the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. We’re going to have a fun guest. My guest is Tod Crane, who’s the CFO of Domo. Domo provides a cloud-based data and AI platform that helps deliver smart data-driven decisions. From real-time data integration to custom maps in data products, Domo is designed to generate measurable value in real-time to any employee, any team, and any company. Tod, welcome to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs.
Thanks, Jack. I’m happy to be here.8
One of your colleagues wrote the company description, but how did I do? Maybe you can give a more thorough in detail overview?
That was great. I was very impressed. For a minute, I thought that was your organic knowledge of Domo coming through there. My team did a fantastic job with that. Jack, as you know, data is critical in this environment. Our product helps people get that data wherever it lives in their company, bring it all into one place, cleanse it, combine it, create actionable insights, and create meaningful views of that data that can be used by everyone in the organization to drive results.
It’s a product that I’ve used extensively over my time here at Domo. I’m passionate about it. I’ve worked a lot with our customers and I’ve seen how passionate they are about it. It’s an honor to be a CFO of a company where I have hands-on experience with the product and I’ve seen first-hand the value that it can bring.
That’s fantastic. The expression I heard was from one of the Sharks from Shark Tank. He said, “Data is the new oil.” I’m not sure if he invented it, but I heard it from him.
I agree with that.
How many companies can exist without data? I want to explore Domo later, but first, a little bit about your own background. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a small town in Southern Idaho. I grew up on a potato farm. We also raised sugar beets, wheat, barley, and a few other crops. We had about 1,000 acres that we ran, growing up. It was a fantastic way to grow up. I loved my childhood. It’s essentially a family business. My dad was an entrepreneur, and it happened that his business was farming. He worked with his father. My grandpa and my uncles all worked together and shared equipment and resources, but they all had their own land. To be able to go to work every day with my dad, my uncles, and my grandpa and work on the farm was a fantastic way to grow up.
Interestingly, you’re probably about the 60th episode. I’d say it’s surprising to me. You’re at least the sixth person who grew up on a farm, because I grew up in the city, and I find it surprising. The work ethic would certainly serve the CFO well. What’s particularly interesting is that about 4 or 5 episodes back, one of the CFOs grew up on a potato farm.
I probably know him.
In Idaho, to be clear. I’m not sure who it is, but when we go off, I’m sure Jess will be able to help us with that. It does sound like a fun upbringing. It’s great that you were able to spend that time with your family. Growing up on a farm and being involved in a family business with an entrepreneurial dad, does that impact how you approach your career now?
Absolutely. That’s what I credit my career choice to. As a kid, I was part of the family business and occasionally was part of meetings where my dad would meet with his brothers and his dad and talk about bills and who was going to pay what. The finances of the whole operation were always very intriguing to me. I knew he took out a big operating loan every year. It’s a big bet. You take out that operating loan and plow it into the ground. You plant your seeds. You pay for fertilizer, water, labor, fuel, and all that stuff to cultivate and grow those crops.
It’s hoping that the commodity prices, weather and all those variables that are outside of your control pan out so that you will be able to pay back that loan and have some money left over at the end of the year. That whole financial aspect of it, which my dad didn’t speak about a lot, was always intriguing to me. I wanted to understand it, and I was so curious about it. When it came time to go to college, I naturally went toward business and then toward finance.
I went to BYU down the road here in Utah. They have a very good nationally acclaimed accounting program. Once I learned more about the accounting program, I took a couple of accounting classes. I liked it and I thought, “If I like it, I might as well get into the program and go into a career as a CPA.” My upbringing on the farm and being part of the family business influenced the path I took with my career.
BYU has one of the elite accounting programs. You’re amongst the first. You stayed all the way to get the Master’s degree in accounting. Does Utah or Idaho have a requirement to have a Master’s degree to be a CPA?
Yes, Utah does. I’m not familiar with Idaho’s requirements. For Utah, you are required to have a Master’s.
They’re trying to make it a little bit easier than when you and I got ours. They’re trying to make the profession a little bit more attractive to young people because it’s not as sexy as it was when you and I started our careers. You worked on the family farm, but your first job when you graduated was you were with EY for about five years.
Yes, I was.
A Start In Public Accounting
What was that like? What type of clients did you work with? How did that prepare you for Domo?
I started my career with EY in the Salt Lake office, comparably speaking, one of the smaller EY offices. Generally, in the Big Four world, these smaller markets like Salt Lake, you end up with a little bit more of an eclectic group of clients. If you’re in the Bay Area, it’s all tech. If you’re down in Texas, it’s all oil and gas. Maybe if you’re back East, it’s more financial services.
In Salt Lake, it was a little more of a combination of a lot of different industries, which I enjoyed, and I was excited about. I had clients ranging from a company called Energy Solutions, which handles the disposal of low-level radioactive waste. We’re talking very low-level stuff, but they had a big landfill out in the middle of the desert in Utah, where they would dispose of that waste.
Does that explain why you have three years?
You do inventory counts. When you’re a young staff auditor, that’s one of the assignments you get. It’s part of paying your dues, if you will. You get to send out these inventory accounts. A lot of times, they’re on New Year’s Eve because it’s the last day of the fiscal year. Anyway, I got to go out to that landfill and count inventory. I’m looking at these barrels. They had one barrel roped off, and they’re like, “Don’t go past that rope.” I’m like, “Trust me. I’m not going past that rope.”
I was in a full-on hazmat suit. I had a counter on me to track how much radiation I was exposed to. They checked me in and out and made sure I wasn’t exposed to too much radiation. It’s one of the more unique inventory counts that you could probably be involved with as a young auditor. Anyway, that was one of my clients. I had an oil and gas company, a natural gas company that’s a utility here in Utah. I had some tech clients, Qualtrics, which is another tech company here in Utah. That was one of my clients, and then a few others. I enjoyed having a broad experience set with those clients.
I work with a lot of early-career professionals. I recommend to college students, if you are not sure what you want to do, public accounting is a great way to help figure it out. You’ll make a good living. You work with some tremendously smart people. You’ll be exposed to so many different processes and people in industries. Certainly, for accounting, it’s the best way to start your career. Not the only way, but I think it’s the best way.
Not the only way, but I agree. The network that you build is incredible. Your co-workers at your firm are spreading out and going to other companies. You end up with this organic network of people who are all over the place. Not only that, but all the clients you interact with. The different people at all these different companies that you’re auditing, you build relationships with them as well. To have that strong network or that broad network that early in your career is extremely valuable.
I have an undergrad degree and a master’s degree, and great networks, both the alumni networks, but they can’t compare for professional growth. I worked at KPMG. You can’t compare to the KPMG network. I’m not knocking anyone. I’m very proud of both schools I went to, but if you’re getting a job or staying connected to the Boston community, there’s nothing like KPMG.
At this point, CFOs are up and down. You can see the I-15 behind me in the background. There are a number of software companies up and down on I-15, where I have a good relationship with the CFO, all stemming back from my days at EY.
That makes a lot of sense. You left EY after about five years, and you went right to Domo. Was it a client? Can you tell us how you came across the Domo opportunity?
The experience I got in EY was tremendously valuable. Each year in public accounting, I don’t know how many years that’s worth in the normal years, but it’s worth a lot. It’s a lot of hours. It’s a lot of work, but you learn so much. My time there set me up for success later in my career. As I got to that point, I realized auditing is great, but it’s not my passion. I didn’t necessarily see myself doing auditing for the rest of my career.
I started to look around. As I mentioned, I had Qualtrics as a client. I had some exposure to that SaaS community. At that time, all the perks, the food, and the casual office environment were new and exciting. That appealed to me. Not only that, but the margins in software are tremendous. The recurring revenue model is very powerful. There are a lot of things about that industry that interest me.
Once I decided I wanted to start looking outside of EY, I had that software lens on. I applied for a controller job at a smaller software company. One of my mentors at EY, once he heard I was applying, said, “No. If you’re going to apply, you need to go to Domo. Domo is a unicorn. I know they have an opening right now.” He helped me get an interview. They had already selected a candidate. They hadn’t given him an offer yet, but they’d selected someone. I was able to sneak in and get an interview last minute. Luckily, they ended up choosing me to take that role, and the rest is history. I’m still here.
That’s a great story. Perhaps not so much for the other candidate. First of all, I think people who aren’t from Utah tend to underestimate what an innovation hub it is. None of us is Silicon Valley, but in terms of creating new and important businesses, it’s up there with anyone.
Our CEO, Josh James, was one of the founders of the idea of Silicon Slopes. Rather than Silicon Valley, it is Silicon Slopes in Utah. It has become a very meaningful tech hub in the nation. I was looking at a graphic on LinkedIn that somebody had posted. It was the number of unicorns per 100 billion of economic output or something like that. It was very clear that California and Utah stood out well above a lot of the other states in the country. It has been exciting to see that continue to grow.
As a lifelong Bostonian, I’m not thrilled with that little bit of information, but I’m not surprised. I have deep admiration for what you accomplished within the course of my lifetime. You don’t know about Salt Lake or Utah that way.
Domo Journey
Sticking to Domo a little bit. You came in and you had about a ten-year run and grew into the CFO role, contributing to a lot of different roles, but I’m curious. If you could take us through that journey, or maybe some of the important mentors that you had along the way, and lessons learned that help you get ready for the CFO role when it becomes available.
The gentleman who hired me here was the VP of finance at the time. A tremendous mentor for me. He taught me so much about financial reporting. The role I started in here was manager of financial reporting. We were getting ready to go public at the time. Given all my experience with publicly traded companies from Ernst & Young, they wanted me in that role to help them prepare the S1 and Qs and Ks beyond that point, all the SEC filings, but he had done that role in a past life.
He has grown up through the same track that I was on and his mentorship was extremely valuable in terms of teaching me the ropes on how to do reporting and what reports we need in the accounting system and how we take those, put them over here, what the format of the report should be, what to watch out for, how to handle different things and how to build processes. All of that. He was an incredible mentor. I came here in 2015, and we ended up going public in the summer of 2018.
Leading up to that, everything we did on the accounting team was with an eye toward that IPO and making sure we had robust processes that had very strong cut-offs on our quarterly reporting. If you’re private, it doesn’t matter as much, but we wanted to make sure we had a nice, clean cut-off. We were practicing that cadence and that discipline and rigor that you need to have to be public. As I was in the middle of the S1, which is a huge document and an insane amount of work goes into it from both our side, the bankers and outside counsel.
We all work together on this document. It gave me a great bird’s eye view of the company. I feel like I could see the business through the lens of a banker or see the business through the lens of an executive. I also knew from the bottom how all those numbers were bubbling up, getting calculated, reported and getting into the document as well. That unique top-down view and bottom-up view of how it all came together set me up on this trajectory.
That makes sense. You reference the IPO. For most companies, an IPO is the biggest event in their history. Certainly, to this point, it’s the biggest event in Domo’s history. Fundamentally, it’s an event. The thing is, you’ve got one type of business before the IPO, and then you’re public. It is a different type of business. In your role, you aren’t yet the CFO, but you were in a leadership-type position and a critical part of the team. How do you make that transition from a small, fun, entrepreneurial type company to “We want to keep that, but we’re a public company, and it’s different realities that we’re dealing with right now?”
A big part of that is getting alignment on the metrics ahead of going public. What are our key metrics? What are the things that we are going to report on publicly every quarter, developing processes around how those are calculated, developing the definitions of those metrics, and helping everyone in the company understand how their team and their department play a part in those key metrics? Also, having everyone be on the same page. That’s important going into that, so that when you become public, the sales team knows what they do.
For us, billings is an important topline metric, and that’s a combination of the new business we booked in a quarter and our retention rate and what we’re able to build to our existing customers, so new and existing customers, and making sure the customer success team knows how critical it is that we have a good retention rate. The sales team knows what their target is that they need to hit. When you bring it all together, we hit our numbers that we’re committing to publicly. It’s getting that in place ahead of time and helping people know what they’re being held to afterward.
As far as maintaining that fun environment, there are plenty of ways you can keep doing that. Once you become publicly traded, there is a little bit more of a spotlight on your numbers, your costs and your margins. It’s easy sometimes to maybe completely cut out all the fun stuff. Some things fell by the wayside a little bit. We’ve found plenty of areas where we were able to say, “It doesn’t cost us that much to have this activity.”
This other thing we do every year, everybody loves it. It’s part of our culture. We’re keeping that. You have to make sure you have a balanced view of it. It’s maybe easy for a CFO to say, “Cut it all. It’s not necessary.” Understanding what people felt was part of our cultural identity, and making sure we kept those things was critical in keeping that culture alive, even in the post-public world.
You mentioned Josh James. He’s not only the CEO, he’s also the founder of the company?
Correct.
It’s interesting because there was a study by Accenture a few years ago. Not that long. They concluded that the most important relationship within a company is that between the CEO and the CFO. Since you both guys, I can say you’re playing Batman to his Superman, but what is that relationship with Josh like? How do you maintain that professional strategic partnership? I’m going to go on a limb that he’s going to say it’s his most important professional relationship, and I’m sure it’s yours as well.
I feel like that has been the biggest focus for me. It’s making sure that he and I have a strong relationship because I grew up here. I’ve been here for ten years. I understand the business. I’ve got a deep understanding of business. I understand how the numbers work, and I could handle a lot of things. This CFO and CEO relationship is new to me, so I’m figuring that out as we go.
Josh has been fantastic. You mentioned that mentors are important. Josh has certainly been a major mentor for me and continues to be. I’ve spent time thinking about what makes our relationship successful. A big part of it is him feeling like I’m on his team and vice versa. Sometimes, I’ve seen situations where the CFO feels like they have to push back almost out of principle on every decision that the CEO is trying to make. It’s something where they have to feel like you’re on their team, and you have to feel like you’re on their team as well.
That’s been one thing that I’ve worked on when he has an idea, or something that he wants to try. He’s a visionary. He’s not afraid to shake things up and do something a little bit different. I’m open to it, and we can have an open conversation about it. If you’re the person who shoots things down immediately, people are going to stop coming to you. It’s having that open dialogue, being open-minded and being willing to hear people out. A lot of the ingredients that make a successful relationship anywhere factor into having a strong relationship with a CEO for sure.
Did I imagine that? Did I compare you guys to Batman and Superman? What made those words come out of my mouth?
I like it. Everybody wants to be Batman. Nobody wants to be Robin. I feel like you elevated both of those roles and went Batman and Superman, which I thought was great.
There you go. It’s interesting what you said about the relationship because I remember my first CFO job. I’m a pretty basic person. It’s not hard to figure out. I’m not very complex. It’s good and bad, but the boss was. One of his best friends was on the board of directors, and this guy was an All-American football player, Division III or Division II, maybe. Whatever it was, Columbia. Plus, he graduated from Columbia with a 3.9 GPA type of thing.
This guy told me about Bruce. He said, “Remember, there are two Bruces. There’s the scholar. The guy who went to Columbia and got a 3.9, then there’s the dumb jock who plays football and loves cake parties. Always remember which one you’re dealing with at a given moment, and remember they both have their roles.” You wouldn’t have put it in those terms, but it sounds like you do have that thing. You understand them as people, and you’re able to make him be his best version of himself, but crowded in the reality that the CFO brings.
There’s a human element to every relationship, regardless of the titles or reporting structure that’s involved. That’s so critical to always be focused on that human element because that’s what drives our behavior as humans. It’s those core foundational feelings, motivations, and mindsets. You have to always keep that stuff in mind.
Analytics and AI
Given your work at Domo, an analytics company, I would assume more so than your average CFO, you’re expected to have an analytical mindset and framework when you go to the job. Does it create any pressure? Do you think your job is, if not unique, at least a little bit rare relative to some other CFO jobs?
I think so. Probably in a couple of different ways. You’re right. There’s clearly an expectation here that I’m using data. I’m using as real-time data as possible because we have access to our platform, which is what it’s designed to do. Also, given that I’ve been here for many years. In the early years of my career at Domo, I was building content. I was connecting to the data sources. I was combining them, doing calculations, building out these dashboards and data products that I was sharing for myself, and sharing out with other people in the company and with the executive team.
I’ve been part of that end journey as well myself, which gives me a deeper appreciation of that as well. There’s pressure to be using data here, but it’s a joy. For me, using Domo is one of my favorite parts of my job, and being able to get into the data and spend less time gathering and asking for data. More time looking at it and figuring out what it’s telling me, and making sure we’re taking the action. In any business situation, you’ve got to have the data to make decisions and once you have the data, getting that in place, getting boots on the ground, getting initiatives in place, getting them working, and seeing what works and what doesn’t, and when it starts to work, leaning in and getting the result you want.
The second part of that is the hardest. Getting the result and making changes is the hardest part. The data shouldn’t consume much of your time at all because you need as much of your time as possible to put those things into practice and drive results. If you’re having to spend a significant amount of your time just getting the data, asking questions about it, finding mistakes and not trusting, having people go back and work on it over and over again, that is precious time wasted that should be spent driving results in the business.
I forgot who said it was a good quote. It’s like, “Data will not replace human judgment, but it’ll make human judgment a lot more effective.” One doesn’t replace the other, nor would you use judgment over data. You’re a smart fellow. You’ve got two decades’ worth of experience that tells you this. Let’s use the data to make sure that my ferries hold water or make sense, and open your eyes to things. It sounds like that is the approach that your entire company must be doing.
I don’t think it’s necessarily different from what other companies are doing, but we’re able to short-circuit a lot of it and get to the applying human judgment piece faster and more effectively than maybe in some situations where the data is harder to get to.
This generative AI thing, you heard it from me first. It’s going to be big. That’s my takeaway. If you only take away one thing from this episode, that would be it. How are you using AI internally? In the past, technologies have reduced costs, saved time, and created certain efficiencies, but this is the game-changer in our careers.
Absolutely a game-changer, and we are just on the very tip of it, the very front end of it. I’m excited to see where it goes. What’s great about it for us is, to effectively deploy AI, you have to have data, especially in a business environment. You’ve got to have the data, and the data is scattered. It’s in a different place. You’ve got to be able to pull that all together. You’ve got to be able to create usable, meaningful data sets that you can apply AI on top of.
Not only that, you’ve got to cover it. It’s got to be secure, and you have to have controls over who can use them, what data they can use it on, and make sure that whatever model you’re applying isn’t going to grab that data and push it outside of your organization beyond the firewall, while they go train their model on. Domo makes it easy for people to do that.
We had our earnings call. We give the example, and one of our customers was able to build an AI agent in our product in 37 minutes. That speed to value. Once you have Domo and you’ve got all your data in there, to be able to go apply AI on top of that so quickly is a game-changer, whether it’s Domo or another platform.
Being able to harness the power of that generative AI, you’ll be able to direct it to go do specific tasks and give it instructions and say, “Go look at my forecast data. Come back and tell me if anything looks off. Go look at my GL. Tell me if there are any transactions that I should probably go review because they fall outside of these predetermined criteria.” There are endless things. That’s two of a million things that it could do. I’m excited to see how we’re able to evolve with it internally. It’s exciting to see what our customers are doing with it as well.
That’s exciting. You took my next question from me, Tod. I was going to ask if you could give me an example of how one of your customers is using Domo or AI, but you said 37 minutes.
We had a customer. They sent an email to one of our sales reps. We have this ten-part AI webinar series we’re doing. They were watching a recording of one of the first webinars and following along. We were walking them through step-by-step on how to create an agent in Domo. They were so excited that they were able to create a meaningful process and employ AI in that process. They sent us a note and said, “In 37 minutes into the webinar, I had a working AI agent.” They were thrilled beyond belief.
It takes me 32 minutes to cook breakfast, for God’s sake. That’s crazy. It’s exciting. You’re a CPA to this day, I suspect.
I’m inactive at this point, but yes.
Financial Leadership
You’re not going to be doing certain things like that, probably. A real space system is critical on so many levels. To communicate with non-financial people, we rely upon KPIs. I’m curious, what are some of the most meaningful KPIs that you use to explain business results to people who aren’t as sophisticated in finance and accounting as you are?
I mentioned it earlier, but the recurring revenue model is the SaaS model. It boils down to ARR or annual recurring revenue. You’ve got this book of business. Call it $300 million, that’s going to renew every year, and it comes down to retention and the new business you’re bringing in. First and foremost, you want to retain as much of that recurring revenue as you can every year. That’s what we call gross retention or retention metrics. It’s super important. If we’re retaining 90% plus or 95% plus of that base. That’s incredible because that’s less of the hole in the bucket. You can compare it to a bucket.
If you have a retention problem, you’ve got a big hole in the bucket. Water is leaking out, and you’re putting water on the top with your new business. If there’s more coming out of the bottom than it’s going in the top, you’re going to have less water. Your business is going to shrink. You’ve got to make sure your retention rates are strong and your new business performance is strong. That helps the business grow. In a nutshell, those are the two biggest things we’re focused on in terms of driving growth in the business. That’s better retention and better performance on the new business acquisition.
I also grew up as an accountant, and I was quite skilled at it. It was difficult when I got into leadership roles to translate a gap, which nobody wanted to hear something new. It took me a little bit to get KPIs. You’ve had an interesting career, particularly for somebody who has only worked for two companies in your professional career, yet you’ve had some very interesting, some very varied experiences with two of the best-run companies within their own industries. It doesn’t get any better than EY. I say that is a KPMG deal. Certainly, in Domo, what you’ve accomplished there speaks for itself.
When you look at the nature of financial leadership and how it’s changing, I go back to CFOs, where the best accountants would become CFO. I know that wasn’t the case when you got your first day of your job, but how do you see financial leadership changing going forward? It’s been a heck of a run, and it’s certainly going to change more and more.
It will for sure. This has been very apparent to me, especially working with Josh, who’s a very visionary and forward-thinking CEO. He wants me to be a strategic sounding board. He wants me to be able to say, “Tod, come into my office. Let’s sit down and talk.” He’ll want to talk about strategy. He wants to talk about things like, “How do you think we can drive more revenue? What changes can we make to have better retention? How can we drive more RPO? How can we have more multi-year contracts? What can we do to harness these great customer relationships we have and drive our business forward?”
As I said, we had our earnings call. That whole process of preparing for an earnings call determines what we’re going to say in our prepared remarks and what we should and shouldn’t say, what metrics we should focus on, and which ones we should not. He’s looking to me to help guide him through that and provide, “Here’s one area that would be good to focus on. Here’s a change we can make in the business that would drive the results we want and get the reaction we want from the street.”
It’s not surprising that he is evolving me into a more strategic role. Not just like, “What are the numbers? Hand off the numbers,” and then we’re done. What that means for me is I have to have strong people on my team to do that. I’ve got to have a strong controller who’s making sure all the numbers are good. I’ve got to have a strong head of FP&A that’s making sure our financial forecast is solid and we’ve got something we can rely on.
When I’m in a conversation with the CEO and I’ve got to pull up our forecasts and start looking at where things are headed, I can feel confident that my FP&A team has something reliable that I can use, and we’re not going to make a bad decision because it’s off. It has evolved to a more strategic role, and that puts a lot more pressure on my lieutenants to make sure that they’re performing at a high level.
That’s fantastic. I’m curious because you mentioned Josh wants you to be more strategic. Is that a perception shared throughout the C-suite? I think CEOs now recognize the strategic value that a good CFO can bring. I’m not certain that the rest of the C-suite is necessarily bought into that. What has your experience been?
You’re asking how the rest of the C-suite would view the CFO?
Your VP of sales and engineering or whatever.
To a large extent, they do. If they don’t, I would feel like that’s something a CFO would want to address. For me, especially as I thought about our conversation about what things I would bring up, relationships are so critical, not just with the CEO but the rest of the executive team. You’ve got to have those deep relationships. As you do that, you get more and more opportunities to work with them, where they can come to say, “Tod, I’m struggling with this. What do you think? What do you think we should do here?”
The more of those natural organic opportunities you have to have those conversations, the more they will view you as a strategic partner and someone they can go to for advice. If they don’t view the CFO that way, it’s something that can be fixed and something that can be addressed, and should be addressed by expanding those relationships.
I remember my first job. I was a smart-ass, but I called the CFO, and I was twenty years old. The CFO is one of those old-school folks. He said no to everything. I call them the CF-No. Unfortunately, for me, it spread throughout the company. I thought I got over there, but I didn’t. Anyway, this has been fun. One thing I always like to end on is an underrated aspect. The CFO’s job is hard, and people who haven’t been a CFO don’t appreciate the level of stress and responsibility. What do you do outside of work to have fun and achieve that elusive work-life balance?
It is elusive and getting more elusive. I have a family. I’ve got a wife and four kids, ages 4 to 11. We have a lot of family activities, all the time, that keep me busy. We’re a big skiing family. I taught my four-year-old how to ski. Now, all four of my kids are skiing to varying degrees of competency, but they’re all skiing. If I do get a rare chance to get out on my own, and years pass, I will have spent a lot of time backcountry skiing, which is a hobby I truly enjoy. Not just because of the exercise and getting away from the noise and out of the fray and into the mountains, where it’s nice, quiet, and peaceful.
You have to have a broad knowledge of a lot of different things. There’s avalanche safety. You have to be careful you’re not going to get buried in an avalanche. Have your eye on the weather, watch the weather patterns, and read the avalanche forecasts. When you’re out there traveling, looking at different hazards, evaluating your route, and avoiding danger.
For me, it’s also a mental exercise. It’s exciting for me to plan a trip and successfully navigate through different terrain, choose the day at the right time, find the snow conditions, and do it safely. It’s a fun hobby and something that a lot of people here in Utah enjoy. It’s certainly been a good source of work-life balance for me.
What do you call that avalanche safety? That’s a thing. Enough people have been harmed. Have you ever seen an avalanche?
Nothing big. I’ve seen some smaller ones, and I’ve seen the aftermath of some bigger ones. Unfortunately, we do have a few fatalities most years here from it. It’s a real thing. Also, if you’re educated and make smart decisions, you can go out and enjoy the backcountry very safely.
I saw what I was told, and I was assured it was a small one up in the Canadian Rockies. You might imagine that they don’t have them in Boston, but it scared me.
It’s no joke. They’ll snap full-grown trees in half like toothpicks.
On the other hand, it was weird because I was far enough that none of us were in danger, and it was strangely beautiful because I heard it. I was thinking of a bomb, dynamite, or something. I was surprised how loud they were, but it was interesting. Anyway, it’s great that you have four kids and you’re able to find time to do all of those things with them. Are any of them better at skiing than you yet?
They’re getting close. My eleven-year-old is incredibly daring. She’ll take off down a run where it’s steep, bumpy, and icy. She’ll bail off the side and go for it. I’ll follow her down, but she’s getting there for sure. It’s fun to see your kids progress like that.
By sixteen, she’s going to be beating the old man, I bet.
There’s no doubt about it.
Wisdom for Future CFOs
That’s great. Anyway, this has been a lot of fun. I know you’ve got a lot going on. My final question for you is, what’s the advice that you would give people a little bit early in their career than you, sort of the next generation of CFOs?
It’s two things, Jack. One, I would say relationships. I know I brought that up a lot, but it’s so critical. As I was coming up through my career, I always understood that the more relationships I had, the deeper relationships I had, up and down and across the organization, it could only benefit me. I always went out on my way to get to know people outside of my organization, the sales team, the customer success team, the consulting team, HR, legal, and the executives, everybody.
If I had a chance to interact with executives, I made sure I took advantage of those opportunities. They knew who I was. If there’s anything I could do to provide value to them, I would take advantage of it. Relationships are number one. Number two, you’ve got to always be on the lookout for those big moments. Those big career-defining moments. You’ve got to see when they’re coming and be ready to take advantage of them.
A quick example I’ll give for myself. This was several years ago. We had a new CFO. He happened to start right before an earnings call. It became incumbent on me to get him up to speed on where we were as a company, what the forecast looks like, what I would recommend for guidance, how we should address the earnings call, and the tone we should have. Because of my close involvement with the earnings call process up until that point, I knew I was ready for it, but I also made sure that I was extra ready for that meeting.
We met over the weekend. We were here for a Saturday and a Sunday. It’s me, the CEO and the CFO, our head of IR and maybe one or two other people. They were looking to me to explain the model, explain the guidance and give that suggestion. I made sure I was ready, and I showed up the right way and took advantage of it. I think that was one of the key moments where people thought, “Tod could take that next step and become the CFO.” I would encourage those who have that aspiration and want to progress in their career to identify the key moments and be ready to take advantage.
That is extraordinary advice. As I said earlier, you get a lot going on. Four kids and a full career. I’m grateful for your time. I like to give you the final word.
Again, I’ll come back to relationships. I encourage everyone to take stock of where they’re at with their relationship building across your company and find ways to strengthen those. It’s more than a work thing. In life in general, you see these studies about the happiest people in the world. People who have relationships, friends, family, people who love them, and people they love. As I think back on my career and my life, that’s what it comes down to. I would encourage everyone out there to take some time to do the same.
