Building a thriving company in today’s complex financial landscape requires a delicate balance between data-driven decisions and people-centered relationships. This episode dives into that challenge as we hear from Matt James, CFO and chief acquisition officer of Oakbridge Insurance, a rapidly growing agency that has risen to be among the top 50 US brokerages. Matt discusses Oakbridge’s impressive trajectory since its launch in 2021, emphasizing Oakbridge’s unique approach of blending “small-town values” with corporate efficiency, and how he navigates the dual role of financial leader and M&A strategist. We explore his career path, from history major to finance executive, and how he utilizes a differentiated mindset to drive growth while maintaining a strong company culture.
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I’m excited for this episode because our guest is a member of the CFO Leadership Council, and I think we’ve recorded maybe 60 episodes. He’s only the third member we’ve had. It’s good to have a member on this program. Please let me introduce our guest. His name is Matt James. He has an interesting role. He’s both the CFO and the chief acquisition officer of Oakbridge Insurance.
Matt, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Jack. I appreciate you having me on.
Glad to do it. A little bit about Oakbridge. There are new insurance and risk management agency. Their focus is really on bridging the gap between small-tone values and corporate efficiency. I was given those words by one of your colleagues, I suspect. How did I do? Is that a good explanation? Maybe you can fill in the blanks.
I suspect that, too, maybe to give a little less marketing-greeted pitch there. Oakbridge Insurance is a specialty middle market insurance broker where we combine deep community relationships alongside resources of what you would find with a large multinational brokerage and offer that with best-in-class solutions and service to really small and mid-side businesses and individual clients in our footprint, which today is just in the southeast US.
I like to oversimplify the descriptions, mostly just out of fear of getting it wrong. I think if I had the CFO of McDonald’s here, I’d say they make hamburgers and leave it at that. I think I could probably add a little bit more about McDonald’s than that. I always like to ask the question, what’s something about Oakbridge that most people don’t know or that they might find a little bit surprising about the company?
I think that Oakbridge is very new in the marketplace. First day of operations, January 1, 2021. It is a business that’s purpose-built to serve the middle market space and has grown from really $0 of revenue in 2020 to about 150 million today, putting us in the top 50 US brokerages. I think our trajectory, our tenure, while it’s been short at Oakbridge, has built up a lot of legacy businesses and agencies that have been in their local communities in some cases 100-plus years. That focus on communities and relationships is something that permeates our business. While it feels big sometimes, it is really a small-town business.
Now that’s impressive growth. I mean, to hit the top 50 in a relatively short period of time. Kudos to you and the team. I look forward to getting back to that. I wanted to ask a couple of questions about just your own background, the early informative years. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina outside of Charlotte. You may be able to tell by my accent. A little place called Advance, North Carolina, believe it or not. I grew up there. The family is still there, but it was a great place to grow up and really fits well with our business today, as we think about those community-based relationships that I saw growing up and translate well into what we’re trying to build at Oakbridge.
That sounds like a great small town. I know you attended college at Wake Forest.
Yes, I attended a college at Wake Forest. I was a history major and undergrad. Very outside the realm of business. As I got to my end of my junior year, I wanted to explore the business side through a summer program. It was off to the races from there. I’ve declared a second major in my senior year and then continued on with a fifth year at Wake through a master’s in business program, which was a really great program to launch your career. Coming out of college in 2008 during the great financial crisis was an interesting time to be in the market as a first-time employee.
I can imagine. You got your MBA at Yale, and obviously, I’m older than you, but when I went to Yale, it was the school if you wanted to lead a nonprofit organization. Did you pick Yale because of that expertise, or did you envision a career in the nonprofit sector?
It has evolved. I graduated in 2017, and they have three key tracks now. That nonprofit track is their sustainability track. I was in the asset management track, thinking about where I had been in my early career in investment banking and private equity, and wanting to translate that further down the road. Just the faculty, the resources they have there with that asset management track, was something that attracted me to that program long-term.
Excellent. I want to go back. What was the first job you ever had? Not your first professional job, but maybe as a teenager or a collegiate student.
A cart boy at the local golf course, which wasn’t a difficult job other than as the low man on the totem pole. You were expected to be there at 6:00 AM every morning on the weekend and during the school week to get the carts off as the sun came up. It was the early days of instilling a nice work ethic, but it was not that engaging from an intellectual standpoint.
How old do you have that job?
I was 15.
You’re getting up at like 5:45 when you’re 15 years old.
That’s a tough ass for a high schooler for sure.
I mean, I had a paper route that I felt like I had to get up absurdly earlier than when I was fifteen. It wasn’t quite that early. It’s funny. I don’t know if it’s true where you’re from, but I mentioned a paper to the kids in my neighborhood. They have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. It’s like, “What?” They used to have early teens and preteens, usually boys, physically pick up the paper and deliver it to your door.
I’m still of that generation where we had a physical paper come to the house every morning. I get it. I get my daily download of emails from my analyst group. It’s certainly evolved since then.
Early Career and Mentors
Interesting. I want to get to know your career a little bit. I like to ask this because everybody always has such interesting stories, but it’s about some of the mentors you had along the way, both formal and informal. I found out sometimes that the most influential mentors don’t even know that that’s the role they’re playing in people’s careers. I’m just curious, are there any mentors when you look back upon the career that you’ve had, “This person made a big difference?”
Yeah, I would absolutely agree with your comment about an informal mentor. I have never had a formal mentor-mentee relationship. Thinking back career-wise, there are two folks that come to mind. One, early career when I was an investment banker. Coming into that role, as I mentioned, I was a history major at undergrad, and had very little general business knowledge. I knew frankly nothing about finance or M&A.
My associate at our investment bank, Will Brown, who also went to Wake Forest with me, was frankly probably the biggest influencer on my career. Mostly because he had the patience to educate me while working through live deals in that investment banking environment. As you said at the time, I don’t think either of us considered it a true mentor-mentee relationship. Over those three years that we worked together, he was absolutely critical to my future success.
I try to check in with him once a year and remind him of that fact, even though we’re about the same age and that relationship laid the groundwork for what I could do in the future. Secondly, again, informal, but now, my dad was a great example growing up. His career spanned 50-plus years across the government and private sector, and just as a true example of a strong work ethic, tenacity to see a project or problem to the end.
I think that’s influenced me a lot because I think about my career, and coming from a non-traditional CFO background. He had, I would call it, an unlimited appetite for work. I remember when I was in high school, I was a very mediocre basketball player, and he would make a two-hour round-trip drive to watch me mostly sit on the bench for an entire basketball game and then return to work for another eight hours. I think that influenced me on just the persistence and ability to work and figure things out on a long-term basis.
That’s funny. I laughed a little bit. I was laughing at me, not at you. Parents are coming to watch me sit. It’s absolutely something I can relate to in the world of sports. I like sports. I just didn’t have a particularly high aptitude for that thing.
Me either. It was a fun thing to do.
The CFO Role
You learn some valuable lessons on the way in sports, make some friendships for life, and it’s all good. I was terrible at it. What can I tell you? My parents never pointed that out to me. You’ve had an interesting career. I’m wondering if you can walk us through, maybe some of the challenges you faced along the way, and how you approached them. How has this helped you become the successful CFO that you are?
For me, not having that academic background, not a CPA, did not spend a lot of time in class as a business major until I went through my MBA program. Early career was a lot of self-learning, a lot of on-the-job experience, and training in a very fast-paced environment. I was an analyst at an investment bank, working on several transactions on the M&A side, really enjoyed the problem-solving aspect of that.
The technical expertise comes as you get more reps around the finance and M&A side. I think that was a challenge early on, but as you get more and more reps under your belt, as you work with folks in the industry that are more experienced, to me, that’s the critical knowledge transfer downstream, early career. I think the other advantage that I had when I moved from an investment banking role over an in-house to a private equity role as an investor, one of our first transactions that we closed was a portfolio company where the CEO and CFO were retiring at the time of the transaction.
I actually got to sit in that head of finance seat by default when we acquired that business for really six months until we identified a new CFO. That experience, being hands-on, being in the weeds, really helped me get a love for the business and understand the operations side. After that’s when I finally transitioned into a full-time operating role as our prior business, as head of finance, and now as CFO and chief acquisition officer at Oakbridge. It was certainly an evolution, and it was not a direct path from Big Four accounting to in-house to CFO. I think that there are many paths to get into the seat.
It’s interesting because I was actually on a different podcast as a guest, and that came up. I got my first CFO job, I think in 1997, and this was early dot-com stuff, so there were a lot of what were considered young CFOs at the time, but we all had the exact same resume. National CPA firm accounting manager, controller CFO, because the economy was uber hot, we may have gotten the CFO job. A lot of people felt sooner than we deserved. We didn’t pay our dues, so to speak. That was how you became a CFO. Now you can come to be a CFO through many different avenues, and your case study is one of those, I think.
I think it depends on what the need for that CFO role is. I’m very strategic in my role. I have a number two who runs our accounting department. He’s absolutely critical to the business, and he is that accounting mind and keeps everything on track from that historical reporting lens that you a lot of times associate with the controller function in the CFO seat. I think surrounding yourself with the right people and finding somewhere that has a need that you can meet in that CFO role is something that is more diverse than it was even 10 years ago.
I may have gotten the job, and I’d like to think I was a little bit strategic too, but I think I got the job because I was a good controller with an MBA, more than because I had some strategic mindset. When I look at controller jobs today, they’re very similar to what I did as a CFO 20 years ago. This isn’t false modesty or anything like that, but I’m not sure that I would have gotten a CFO job based upon at the same path if I were born twenty years later. Perhaps I would have evolved differently if I had to. I couldn’t get a modern CFO job. I just didn’t have that strategic ability at that point in my career.
To me, there’s such an ability to absorb information outside of the traditional route of 20 years ago, with a CPA and then an MBA. To me, folks who want to get there can. It seems like it can be done more offline through experience than the traditional path you saw before. We have a wealth of resources at our fingertips today.
I know you work at the PE firm was Harvard, if I have my facts correct. You also worked at a company called Prime Risk. I’ve heard you refer to having a differential mindset. I’m wondering if you could elaborate on what you mean by a differentiated mindset. You’ve mentioned having a differentiated mindset. I’m wondering if you could elaborate on what you mean by that and how those experiences shaped that.
To me, approaching those roles, particularly as an in-house private equity investor with a problem-solving mindset, the size and scale of the business we focused on was certainly not a fully mature business. There was a lot of work to do when we would acquire one of those businesses and then have to either bring in new talent, bring in new resources, or deploy capital.
Thinking about the business at a strategic level, thinking about the business with a forward lens on the business versus just on a historical performance basis, I think is something that you develop with that investor hat on. Translating that to Prime Risk, that was a private equity-backed insurance brokerage business where I actually got to know our CEO at Oakbridge.
That was something again, we built from scratch through both acquisition and organic growth, and really thinking about road mapping and how all the pieces fit together. More of that strategic problem-solving mindset than purely execution and technical expertise. To me, I think that diversity of background helps me understand how operations work with accounting, work with marketing, and work with sales. I think that in today’s environment, wearing all of those hats in some way is critical to being successful in the CFO seat.
“On a day-to-day basis, I may spend 90 percent of my time in the CFO seat and 10 percent on M&A or legal, and the next day it flips. I think that keeps me engaged in the business, keeps me intellectually stimulated.”
Juggling Jobs
That’s great, Matt. You stole my next question because I was going to ask you, it’s hard enough being a CFO, but in your role, you’re doing traditional CFO type of work, and you’re also doing legal M&A functions. I’m wondering, how do you juggle those three things? They’re related, but they’re also not related. I’m sure you have a lot of other responsibilities outside of those three.
That diversity of experience is something that I enjoy. On a day-to-day basis, I may spend 90% of my time in the CFO seat and 10% on M&A or legal, and the next day it flips. I think that keeps me engaged in the business, keeps me intellectually stimulated, as I jump from different things across the organization. It’s certainly a balancing act, particularly when a lot of stuff hits at once. We typically close deals on the first of the month. We had a closing this morning.
It’s also a month in close for us. There’s a lot going on this month in. That ebb and flow and trying to balance that with not just responsibilities at work, but also responsibilities at home, and thinking about work-life balance is always a struggle. To me, the other end of the spectrum is where you might have a 9:00 to 5:00 job that’s very consistent on a day-to-day basis. For me, that doesn’t fit well for keeping me engaged. While this is stressful at times, I like this type of environment more than the clock-in, clock-out environment. I find that that’s engaging for me.
That’s fantastic stuff. I just have to ask this because I find the timing interesting. You joined Oakbridge during COVID, late 2020. I’m curious, talk us through what that transition was like, and how do you get to build relationships that way? I think five years later, maybe we figured that out. At the time, we certainly hadn’t.
Twenty-twenty was an interesting year. We had just sold our business, Prime Risk, at the end of 2019. Our COO, Robbie Smith, who was our CEO at Oakbridge, reached out. At the time, it was not called Oakbridge. He was writing a business plan alongside a couple of insurance brokers that he knew about building a new type of insurance brokerage, thinking about the focus on relationship building. Honestly, a lot of the lessons that I think we learned from the last round with Prime, we wanted to improve upon those.
He reached out there in COVID middle of 2020. Helped write the business plan alongside him. Went out to the market to raise capital. Having sat in that seat as a private equity investor. Going to market and not meeting any of your investors in person was very strange. Thinking about relationship building, you spent more time on the phone. You had many more meetings than you would typically have for that process on the capital raising side.
At the end of the day, we identified a great partner as our first partner for Oakbridge, and eventually met them in person when the world freed up a little bit in ‘21. The beauty of the early days of Oakbridge is that the communities we’re in, they’re very closely knit, and a lot of the agency partnerships we engaged in, they knew each other from other industry events, working either as friendly competitors and adjacent geographies or alongside each other on certain accounts.
We were able to build a little bit of culture early on. We intentionally focused on that as the world reopened in 2021 and beyond. That cultural aspect for such a people-heavy business like ours is critical. We spend some part of every day thinking about that and ways to engage across our footprint because we are a very spread out business, 50-plus offices across eight states that have been built over a less than a five-year period. You’ve got to be very intentional about how you build a culture in that type of environment.
I’d like to talk to you. I Googled Robbie Smith a little bit before the conversation. Seems like he’s an entrepreneur in an industry that perhaps people don’t immediately think of as being an entrepreneurial nature, but he’s a bit of a visionary, a game changer. How do you develop and maintain a relationship with Robbie? It sounds like you got to know him before you we’re partners in this as well. That probably helps.
That’s true. We knew each other from the early days of Oakbridge, from Prime. Robbie is our CEO. He’s one of the great leaders and mentors in the insurance brokerage space. 30-year-plus career. We have a very symbiotic relationship where he has, I’d say, the subject matter expertise and insurance, and combining that with my M&A and finance background. That helps us make a very powerful team, particularly when we’re in front of potential acquisition targets.
We’re out in the field every week meeting with folks that may want to be a part of the Oakbridge organization. Our relationship is very close-knit. He’s basically the first and last person I speak to every day at the end of the workday. We function as a single unit, particularly around the M&A piece. Outside of thinking about how the roles are different from CEO to CFO, he drives culture, develops strategy, and sets the vision for the broader organization. From my seat, I help support that alongside our other C-suite leaders with storytelling through that lens of data.
The insurance brokerage space has an immense amount of data you can work with, looking at performance metrics, building other critical KPIs that will help solve problems that bubble up across the entire organization. Supporting the execution of his plan, his vision, and his strategy is something that I spend a lot of time doing. It’s rare in our day-to-day that if Robbie is on a call or at a meeting that I’m not with him. We have a very close working relationship.
That sounds perfect. Funny when you said he’s the first person I speak to at the beginning and end of the day. I was thinking you’re working a pretty long day, like one of those 21-hour work days, but you do go home and do normal family-type things, I hope.
I do go home. We have a one-hour time difference. I’m usually on the phone with him at 6:15 to 6:30 my time. The wife and the three-year-old have not gotten up for the day yet.
Oakbridge’s Growth and M&A
I know that story pretty well. I want to ask, I know your culture at Oakbridge just from visiting the website and other sources that I’ve heard. It’s critical to you. It’s not just going in and doing it. I think I saw the phrase on your website, people process purpose. Can you share a little bit of behind that? It strikes me that those aren’t just words. That’s something that you’re trying to live by. Maybe you can share your philosophy on building a strong culture.
I think, particularly when you think it comes to the team and in our finance and accounting group, know, the beauty and the downside of Oakbridge is that it was a startup that we started from scratch with some early adopters of the business plan in 2021. Because of that, we have the advantage of being able to build the accounting and finance organization from scratch as well. I was lucky enough to identify an extremely strong number two, Tyler Higginbotham.
He started as our controller, now serves as our SVP of financial operations. I think identifying that talent, to your point, this business being so much about people and relationships, ourselves, people form relationships with the clients. Internally, we spend a lot of time talking about cultural and relationship building. We don’t have our assets right up and down the elevator every day. We’re not a manufacturer or anything like that.
Identifying the right talent early on, I think, has made a huge difference in our success because we have grown very rapidly through both acquisition and organically. I think for our business, with enough time, you could train anyone on the insurance side of the business. You could train most people on the accounting side of the business. To me, focusing on identifying folks that have the right values and have the right drive is more critical than anything else that you can speak to.
When I say values for us at Oakbridge, it’s problem-solving, it’s a sense of urgency, it’s a high sense of accountability, from the accounting team and finance team, as well as the accuracy and timeliness of reporting. Of course, it’s a proactive mindset. The last thing that we look for in our team is the ability to translate the accounting language to our various leadership groups because that storytelling aspect is hugely important.
We’re constantly in front of our outside investor talking about growth in the business, where we want to invest, and making sure we have folks that can speak to that through the lens of an investor, through the lens of our different leadership groups throughout the organization, is critical. The people aspect for us at Oakbridge is very important.
“We spend a lot more time on the front end of [the M&A] process than you would in a typical acquisition or partnership environment because we want to get it right and not bring the wrong folks into our environment.”
Matt, you keep anticipating my questions. I was going to ask, you’ve grown largely through partnerships and mergers and acquisitions and whatnot, but those are business transactions, they’re financial transactions. They are also cultural transactions. As a CFO and one of the visionaries of the company, how do you navigate the cultural complexity beyond just the financial part of it? Your company’s new, but I’m guessing some of the companies you acquire aren’t so new. You’re probably acquiring companies that were alive when our grandparents were children or something.
Yeah. We have firms that have joined us that have more than 100 years plus in their local community. When we are looking at an acquisition, our four key criteria are they culturally, financially, operationally, and strategically accretive. The number one thing that we have to check the box on is culturally accretive.
Through that, if we cannot check the box that we have a like-mindedness about how they operate the business, how they think about engaging with clients, and how they think about a highly accountable service organization. We’re passing on that deal. Our process to make sure we have the right people in the organization comes very early in that partnership discussion.
Typically, after two, three or 4 meetings, we’re able to tell if our values are aligned on client service, on how we treat employees, customers, our third-party vendors, and our carrier relationships. We spend, I’ll call us a serial acquirer of businesses. We spend a lot more time on the front end of that process than you would in a typical acquisition or partnership environment because we want to get it right and not bring the wrong folks into our environment.
We believe that even small pockets of that can bleed out through the rest of the organization. We have folks that want to be supportive, bought into the model, and really drive that culture, not just today, but long term as we think about perpetuating the business to the current generation and next generation of employees and shareholders throughout our footprint.
Distributed Equity
Fantastic. I’m going to ask this, and you can correct me if my observations of your industry are a little off base. In my opinion, or my observation, there are not many industries that are as data-centric as the insurance industry. At the same time, there aren’t all that many industries that are people-centric and relationship-centric like the same industry. That’s going to be complex. How do you balance adopting new technologies, using analytics for decision-making, but not losing the people side of the business, which is critical? You’re laughing at me, I hope, in a good way.
I’m smiling because this is a huge project that we undertook in 2024. We went through the process of identifying our next investor at the end of ‘23 and set out our plan for the next five years. One of the immediate things we wanted to focus on was building out our data lake and our proprietary dashboarding system.
For us, we want to push information data out to both our sales team as well as our leadership team to help them manage the business. We have scaled so quickly that as a year one at let’s say 30 million in revenue, you can manage the business by feel. You can manage the business by making weekly calls to folks in different geographies or different offices, talking to your line of business leaders, your GMs.
As the business has grown, we have to focus more on the data piece. There’s a ton of great data in this business that you can use to make decisions. Think about investment ROI, where you want to spend your dollars across the organization, and what has the highest return. Really, from the piece, I think that we spent a lot of time on the beginning of this year, once we had our new data lake and data project built out.
It’s education on how to use that out to the field. We have a strong bias towards incumbency from our acquisition partners throughout our footprint. We want folks that have been in a role in a likely smaller organization to be able to move upstream, have a broader role at Oakbridge, and serve the entire business. We spent a lot of time meeting with those line of business leaders, with our regional leadership, to talk to them about what metrics are important.
What KPIs are important? What’s within and outside your scope as a leader and a manager? Where do you have the ability to influence the budget and the outcome? In our business, we have a distributed equity model where 48% of the business is owned by employees. We want folks thinking not only with their employee hat on, but also with their shareholder hat on. Having those data-driven insights has been critical to this next phase of growth for us.
That’s great. You mentioned KPIs. I always like to ask, do you have a favorite KPI, or maybe not favorite, but most useful for? When you’re talking to other people that they rely on?
For our business, we really look at it on a per-employee basis. The key KPIs there are revenue per employee and contribution margin per employee. Revenue less employee cost. That per-employee metric, it both tells you where in certain pockets of the business where you have more capacity, but also where you’re in the pockets where you’re getting stressed. You may need to add a head. You may need to add help or technology in that sector to help continue to build that out, because that revenue per employee metric. There’s a Goldilocks range that you want to focus on, and both sides of that range are problematic as you grow as quickly as we do.
I know intuitively what you mean by Goldilocks range, but just kudos. I’ve never heard that expression before. Fantastic. If you think I’m not stealing that from you, you are badly misjudging me.
How about it?
There you go, but I want to ask so because you’re not a traditional CFO but you are a CFO, and that brings certain mindsets and bluntly certain fiduciary responsibilities. You don’t want to snap the innovative spirit in the entrepreneurial mindset that’s made your company so successful. How do you advise people to juggle those two things? Discipline, doing all the right things that you legally require to, but “We’re on a rocket ship here. I don’t want to be the one to slow it down.”
We focus on keeping the entrepreneurial spirit down at the local office level, down with our partners. All of our field leadership, our former owners of their business, and producers or salespeople in the business. They really understand the high-touch nature of service, the importance of client service. We try to balance that by supporting them through data insights. We really think of the entire corporate team as a service to our producer-centric model.
We want our production and sales team leading the business. They’re the ones with the relationships. They’re the ones driving organic growth. Oftentimes, they’re the ones bringing new M&A and partnership opportunities to us. We like to be that support center for them while trying to maintain keeping them within the lines of the road. There are times when folks may try to color outside the lines, but we have a lot of folks that are shareholders in the business, and we have such a high employee participation there.
We have a little bit of a self-governing model internally where folks help with that, but also making sure that they’re not just thinking about the immediate need for the client, but the long-term shareholder value creation is something that we emphasize a lot across the entire organization. That’s how we think about it through our distributed equity model. There are times when we have to help folks pull back a little bit, but so far that’s worked relatively well.
I want to ask you, being a CFO, a pretty busy job, and particularly with a rapidly growing and evolving company like the one you’re in, but do you do anything in your professional life outside of being a CFO? Do you serve on any boards, either philanthropic or otherwise?
Sure. One thing that I’ve been involved with really since I graduated from the program at Wake Forest back in 2008 is serving on what they call their market insights board, really to help folks that are coming out of that program, which traditionally don’t have an undergrad background in business. They typically have a liberal arts undergrad background, are combining that with this master’s program, and are looking for their first role in the marketplace. To me, that program was so valuable, particularly coming out in 2008 with the macroeconomic environment like it was.
I felt like that was important to give back to my alma mater because of that, and spend a lot of time with them thinking about how to prepare students for the workforce. What are the leading trends that we look for from a hiring perspective as an employer, and help those kids network and find their first role in the workforce? Spend a lot of time there. It’s also nice. It’s near my hometown. Going back to campus is always a treat. Spend time doing that outside of the day-to-day grind of Oakbridge.
That’s great. Generally speaking, again with the job being stressful, although I can tell from this time together, you actually love your job. Doesn’t mean it’s not stressful, and it doesn’t mean it doesn’t take a lot of time, but how do you find time for work-life balance?
Work-life balance has always been tough for me. I think one of the great benefits going back to the COVID era of this work for home or hybrid environment, that it allows me to take little bits in the day, connect with my three-year-old who’s often at home, and connect with my wife. That’s been something that’s, I think, a big benefit of this new normal of the hybrid workplace.
Outside of that, I think it’s important to start the day with something outside of work, whether it’s a walk outside, going to the gym, something like that, that’s critical. I usually have something on the calendar that is in the athletic realm, not to say to myself that I’m athletic, but something to look forward to and focus my attention on outside of the day-to-day. Also, a great time to catch up on reading and podcasts, and things like that. That’s where I spend most of my time outside of work time.
I assume you’re a regular listener to this show.
Regular listener.
Though we get all sorts of data on who tunes in, and it’s interesting because it lists by country. We have a reader from the Vatican. I mean it’s, but it’s more, it is not deeply religious. It’s not the point of the conversation at all. How did some of the Vatican even know that the secrets of the Rockstar CFOs podcast existed?
It must be the highest per capita.
Could well be. That’s great. I want to ask you, and I always like to close with this. A lot of our readers are millennials. A lot of them, like you, are in their first CFO job, or maybe they’re approaching their first CFO job. I’d like to you like to give you the opportunity to hear. What advice do you have for the next generation of CFOs? What should they be thinking of, whether it be relationships, skills, or whatever you think?
There are a lot of different things that are important. What I would say, coming from that non-traditional background, when there’s an opportunity, whether it’s in the finance function or elsewhere within the organization, raise your hand, especially when you’re looking at something for a cross-functional team or project.
I think the CFO role will continue to evolve into a more strategic position that partners to the CEO. Raise your hand and get involved, even if it’s outside your scope or your comfort zone. I think that’s a great way to build relationships and skill sets across different functional areas. The last thing I would say that is important, I think, in this role is the problem-solving aspect. Speak up when you see something that needs to be fixed in the organization, and make sure you come up with a solution.
I think that illustrates your ability to impact the organization on a larger scale, outside of just a historical reporting function or that controller-like function. Those are the two things that I’ve tried to do over my career that have been, I hope, impactful in developing into that CFO role over the last five years.
