Leading finance at a publicly held company is more than just numbers—it is about vision, leadership and building strong teams. Jack McCullough welcomes Lauren StClair, former CFO of NerdWallet, to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs podcast to discuss how she led the personal finance technology company through its IPO while maintaining its core values of transparency and innovation. Lauren will be one of the keynote speakers at our Spring CFO Leadership Conference in Boston on June 2-4.
On this podcast, recorded before Lauren left NerdWallet for another career opportunity, Lauren shares her unique journey from Stanford athlete to finance leader, highlighting the lessons she’s learned along the way. Tune in or read on as she dives into the evolving role of the CFO, the power of technology in scaling businesses and her practical advice for future finance leaders.
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We have a fantastic guest from a great company. She keynoted one of our conferences a few years ago, so I’ve been looking forward to this one. The guest is Lauren StClair. She’s the CFO of NerdWallet. If you watch TV, you’ve seen their commercials. I’m going to give a brief overview of NerdWallet. It’s a personal finance platform offering tools and advice to help users make informed financial decisions. That’s as simple as I’m capable of saying it. Lauren, welcome to the show.
I am super excited to be here.
I’m glad to hear that. How’d I do on the description? Maybe you can expand upon that a little bit.
You captured it really well. I’ll go into a bit more detail for our audience. NerdWallet is a platform that provides financial guidance to consumers and to small and medium-sized businesses. Our mission is to provide clarity for all of life’s financial decisions, and we achieve that by providing consumers and SMBs with trustworthy and knowledgeable financial information so that they can make smart money moves.
The company has been very successful. Lauren was the CFO who took them public. It’s a wonderful and important company, and we’ll talk about that later. Before we do, I want to ask a little about your early years. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Philadelphia.
I don’t know why I assumed you were in Northern California because of where you went to school, but did you have brothers and sisters?
I did. I have one younger sister. She’s in Chicago. She and I both moved out of Philadelphia for undergrad and stayed in those areas where we went to school.
I know you love sports. What sports teams do you and your sister root for? We are not presently living in some sports happy times.
While I moved coast, I will always be a diehard Philadelphia fan. My husband works for the Phillies, so we cheer for the Phillies, the Eagles and pretty much all the Philadelphia sports teams.
Your sister, too, or did she get taken by the Chicago Cubs?
She would still claim loyalty to Philadelphia, but she probably cheers for the Bears as well and the Cubs.
It’d be tough not to. They consume the city so much. I always ask people this question because I find it fascinating. What was your first job? I don’t necessarily mean your first professional job unless that was your first job, but your first job may have been when you were a teenager or a college student.
Early on, probably similar to a lot of people, I was mowing lawns and babysitting. Given that you had mentioned athletics was a big part of our life, I spent a lot of my early years, and I’ll call it even teenage and college years, doing a lot of different sports and activities. That could be coaching, helping younger players develop and also helping coaches during camps, clinics and things like that. That’s what I did as my first job.
My first job was at Burger King. Yours was a lot more interesting. I had paper routes when I was young. I’m not sure young people even know what a paper route is. It’s such a different world. For young people who may not know, I went from house to house and physically delivered the daily newspaper. In my case, the Boston Globe. Did you go to Stanford for Division I and play basketball?
That was part of the reason I moved so far away from home. I am super close with my family, so it was a tough decision, but to your point, I wanted to get what I thought would be the best from an athletic and academic perspective. Stanford really excels in both of those areas. That’s why I made the move out West.
It would be hard to find a school that excels in both the way Stanford does. I’m a Bostonian, so I am as proud as I can be about Harvard and MIT.
I hear there are some pretty good schools in Boston, too.
Nowhere near the athletic success that they had, although the MIT men’s basketball team did something that’s probably never been done. They made the Division III Final Four, and all twelve players on the team were their high school valedictorians.
That is an amazing fun fact.
I’ll go out on a limb and say not only that it’s never been done, but unless that team made it the following year, it’ll never be done again. They did get crushed in the Final Four but still proud of them anyway. You studied science and technology at Stanford. It’s interesting. When I look at the role of the modern CFO, there is probably no area better to have a high aptitude for than science and technology in particular. Did you envision yourself in the world of corporate finance with that background, or did it happen differently than you thought?
I love that question. I know a lot of people are surprised to hear the answer. Neither finance nor the CFO role was on my radar growing up and even, quite frankly, throughout my undergrad years at Stanford. I went out West. I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. I could stay with athletics. I also went to school in Silicon Valley in 1998, not to date myself but to give some context around what was happening at the time.
I went out West. I saw all of the amazing opportunities some of my teammates and classmates were getting post-graduation and thought, “What an amazing opportunity.” Things were shifting and changing so quickly, and I had this inherent interest in understanding the tech space a little better. That’s when I decided, “I can always go back to medical school if I don’t like this.”
That’s when I changed to more of an engineering degree, and it was such a fun degree. I was able to pick all of the classes that were of interest to me. It was a combination of computer science and mechanical engineering with a focus on human-computer interaction. That’s what I was excited to learn more about. I thought that that would also help me get my foot in the door at one of these tech companies post-graduation.
That makes a lot of sense. There’s a shortage of accounting students. Therefore, there’s a shortage of young people entering the profession for several reasons. I always tell them, “A CFO is one of the most interesting jobs a person can have.” It’s not like back in my day. I graduated undergrad in the 1980s. For some reason, if you knew you wanted to be a CFO, you were probably best off starting in public accounting and then leaving and broadening that experience. At this time, there are dozens of paths to becoming a CFO. Studying technology may prove to be the best one for you. In the modern world, being a CFO is tough if you don’t have a digital mindset.
Many years ago, the path was a bit more linear in the sense that you might have studied accounting or economics or you got your CPA, and it was a very clear progression on how to get to the CFO position. That has changed quite a bit. The role of the CFO itself has evolved. In some ways, it’s more important than ever, given some of the macro volatility and what has happened across the globe over the last few years.
It is having different sets of experiences and being able to connect the dots and draw from other experiences, even if they’re not exactly related to finance per see. I do think that makes you more resilient. It makes you more adaptable and able to deal with some of the changes that, quite frankly, no one was ready for or could anticipate. Being able to be nimble in that way helps. The collective experiences helped to reinforce that, at least in my career.
When I talk to CFOs, and I haven’t been one for several years, the biggest skills they have, leadership and communication, are number one. Number two is problem-solving; at least, that’s what they tell me. Who’s better at solving problems than an engineer? Nobody. It’s a whole profession designed to solve problems.
Different mindset perspective. Being able to triage, being able to be resourceful or coming to a solution from a different mindset has been valuable.
Opportunities at eBay
I want to talk a little about your career, not all of it. You’ve worked for a couple of companies that I consider iconic. I’ll get 100% name recognition with our audience; I’m going to go out on a limb and say eBay and StubHub. I’m curious. What are some of the lessons you learned? Were there maybe some mentors you had along the way and things that [helped you grow] professionally? I believe this is your first job as the CFO. You‘ve been a country CFO, but this is your first [corporate] one. How did they prepare you to be the CFO?
I’ll even add another name. People will recognize the list. I started my eBay career at PayPal. At one point, eBay did own PayPal and StubHub. Part of the reason I had such a long tenure at eBay was that there were so many different opportunities. You think about e-commerce and marketplaces. You think about fintech. You think about all of the different industries. It was a great group of collective experiences.
Speaking practically, I tell everyone that’s where I grew up. That’s where I got all of my finance training. It was effectively on the job. EBay had incredible employee development programs, especially within finance. It’s something I try to bring to my teams. I’m sure we’ll touch on that a little bit later. One of the most powerful things they could do was provide me with opportunities in a way that both challenged and stretched me. They gave me opportunities I would’ve never had at another company. They also provided a tremendous amount of support, guidance and mentorship.
When I think about some of the folks who influenced me significantly, I think about someone like Bob Swan, who was the CFO when I first started and who brought over many of the practices and many of those programs from GE. He crafted those and made them more suited for tech and for eBay. in particular. Scott Schenkel, a former CFO and interim CEO of eBay, was also a huge mentor and sponsor. He provided me with many of these opportunities to experience, grow and prepare myself for the number-one finance job.
Along the way, there were so many other people. I’ll call out one more person who is an incredibly dear friend but who is still the best people manager I’ve had. She was the first person to instill what it meant to be a true coach and how to build highly effective teams within the workplace. I try to pass everything she taught me to my teams.
It occurred to me that you’ve worked for two of the most famous CEOs of our lifetime, Meg Whitman and then Elon Musk. I know Elon has been in the news a lot, and it hasn’t always been positive, but you have to give it to the guy. He may be the smartest businessperson on the planet since Steve Jobs’ passing. Even if you didn’t get to know them personally, being around the companies that these brilliant people created must have been something special.
To work with visionaries and a strong female leader like Meg Whitman, who maybe is not a visionary per se but can take those visions, execute them, get folks to scale and get companies to scale, was all in all a great experience.
I met a recruiter. He told me he knows Meg pretty well. He tried to talk her out of taking the eBay job. She was a candidate for a different job. The way he tells the story is hysterical because the company he wanted her to go to didn’t make it. He was like, “Thank God she didn’t listen.”
I’m sure she’s pretty happy with that decision. She feels good about that.
It was probably a top-30 business decision for her, to say the least. What a great run with some great companies. Then you came to NerdWallet about a year and a half before the company went public. I’m guessing you were recruited into the role. Maybe what was attractive about the role was the chance to take the company public. Am I correct in that assumption?
Yeah. Going back to my time at eBay, StubHub and PayPal, I am super grateful for the preparation and the opportunities. Working in different business units across different industries and having practical, functional experience in the various functions within finance gave me all the tools I needed to be the number one finance person at another company.
For me, I wanted to go to a company that was a little bit smaller and had the opportunities to grow and go through some liquidity or exit event and that needed the experience that I brought, which is getting a company to scale, getting it from the 1 to 2, preparing them, and giving optionality so that there was decisions, choices and options we had for the liquidity event.
That’s fantastic. When you spoke at the conference, you were on a panel with some other CFOs who’d done IPOs. That’s the holy grail for CFOs. It’s like you join this elite club when you’ve taken a company public. That’s great. You joined the company and worked for one of the co-founders, CEO Tim Chen. To me, how to develop a loyal partnership between the CEO and the CFO is the question I get asked the most. People are like, “How do I do that?” There’s a recognition that even CEOs say their most important C-suite partner is the CFO. If I can ask a little inside baseball, what’s your relationship like with Tim? Do you work on it, or are you lucky and have one of those relationships that you don’t have to work on?
It’s great. I admire Tim, and I’m so grateful for the experience and opportunity he gave me. The reality is it’s one of the main reasons why I joined NerdWallet. Tim and I, I believe, balance each other out very well. He’s the visionary. He has all the ideas. He loves connecting dots or seeing patterns; I love executing and getting things done. He took the company from 0 to 1. What I brought to the table was being at a larger public company with the experience to help scale.
We’ve had a very collaborative partnership during my four years at NerdWallet. It’s one of the most important things for me, and it’s one of the things I appreciate the most. We provide a nice balance for one another. We come [at] solving problems differently, so we have spirited discussions on what we want to do next, why and how we’ll get it done. It’s the balance of those two approaches that makes us successful and makes it a good partnership.
That sounds great. He is the founder, too. That creates challenges and opportunities. It’s not like they would only hire a thoroughly competent person for the company, but the outside CEO may not have the same passion as the CEO who started the company. It must be something special to work for a company that’s this successful, and yet the person who founded it in the garage or whatever it might have been is still running it as a public company. That must be great.
You took the word right out of my mouth. Passion is the biggest way I would describe working with a founder. What I also appreciate and admire about Tim, though, is that he is very open to feedback. He will listen. We will discuss and debate. We might not always agree on everything, but I know that he will at least open up and take the time to hear my opinion and understand the why behind it. That has been great to work with. As long as founders, in general, not speaking about Tim per se, can also adapt, move forward and be open to different ideas, especially as the companies move through their lifecycle, founders can continue to be successful leaders of companies.
High-Functioning Teams
That makes all the sense in the world. I always ask this question to my guests, but I particularly want to ask it of you because you are such a high-level athlete. You’re probably more competitive than the average bear, as they used to say on The Yogi Bear Show. To be clear, if people don’t know, Stanford was Division I. They’re high-level and hyper-competitive. A lot of people are paying attention to it. How has your career as a high-level athlete influenced your philosophy on building a team in business? I’m sure there are some parallels.
More than parallels. It’s probably the thing I’m most passionate about and is the piece that’s most important to me. Working for a company with a great purpose and a mission is fantastic. As a CFO, I love to have a company that has really good financials and is profitable, but for me, what makes day-to-day fun is the people I surround myself with. Even though we’re not in person as much as we were a few years ago, we’re still spending a ton of time with the people we work with, more so than our families or anything else.
It is super important for me to respect and trust the people around me and to build high-functioning teams. My first experience with that was in sports and youth athletics, and then I progressed in my career. That is something that I try to bring to the workplace as well. I believe high-functioning teams are a lot happier. They’re a lot more successful. You weather the tough times better and celebrate the good times even more.
That makes sense. It’s probably particularly important in your role because the whole company, as well as finance, transformed from an entrepreneurial culture, which I’m sure you want to keep, but you are going public, so no matter what you do, the culture has to change a little bit. Sometimes, the people who run the entrepreneurial company aren’t the same people who run the publicly traded company. Did that present any interesting challenges?
It did quite a bit. The word that comes to mind is balance. You need a good mix of tenure. You need a mix of people who bring the entrepreneurial spirit, but you also bring the experience of running things at scale or running a public company, understanding what good looks like and understanding how to get there. The balance of those two makes a difference for the team.
It’s also having the right folks around the table and having diversity of experience and diversity of thought. Even in my team, we’re spread all across the country. Even some of the cultural things are a great dynamic. We have good conversations. That is part of the dynamic that makes us good operators. We have discussions. We don’t all share the same opinion. We bring different experiences. It’s that debate and that sharing of information that ultimately leads to the best ideas or new ideas and trust in each other. Pushing forward, aligning and then taking that to our teams has been one of the biggest factors in our team’s success as we transition from private to public.
I remember when you spoke. The moderator was a little frustrated because none of you would take any credit for the success. You were thanking a third-grade teacher and that sort of thing. The team is so important. I don’t know a good CFO who doesn’t have a good team supporting them.
I’ll take credit for putting together a good team, but the reality is that I am not the subject matter expert in every single area, and I am not the smartest in the room. Getting those folks together is where I’ve helped the most. No person can do this alone, so you have to rely on your team. You better make sure you hire a good one and you trust them. At the same time, they can take your philosophy and start building their own team to trickle down throughout the organization.
A little about NerdWallet. Other than Super Bowl ads, the first thing I think of with your company is transparency. As a CFO, I know you have to like transparency and personal finance. The reputation is as clean as it could realistically be. How do you stay competitive while ensuring that the core values that the company espouses remain intact? Sometimes, that might be at odds.
You’re right. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of about working for NerdWallet, but it can be challenging at times. We believe in transparency, first and foremost. That’s how Tim founded the company, and that is what we believe is the value add we provide to consumers and small businesses. They know that if they come to NerdWallet, they’ll get all the facts, and they’ll get it in a very digestible way. They know there’ll be no surprises and that we have the consumer’s best interests in mind.
It’s the philosophy I have with my team. That comes to giving and receiving feedback and giving it at the moment so there are no surprises. When we have reviews or if someone makes a mistake, my ask is, “Raise your hand and tell us so that we can fix it right away. Let’s not make the same mistake over and over again.”
Everyone’s going to make mistakes, myself included. Having that trust and transparency allows us to overcome some of those challenges. When we hit a road bump, a speed bump or anything like that, that’s huge. It also carries into Tim’s philosophy and my philosophy about communicating externally. Being upfront about the challenges and celebrating successes has also been key for us in our journey as a newly minted public company and having folks know that they can count on us for transparency.
Has that changed at all since you went public? If it’s a core value, it should have, but you’re being looked at by all sorts of regulators with intimidating initials and stuff. Did it force a change, or have you been continuing the same best practice all along?
That’s the best part. We’ve been continuing that best practice. It was ingrained and instilled in the company when I got there. In some ways, it has become even more important. To your question about some of the regulations and things like that, it’s something that we believe is best for consumers. We also believe continuing with that transparency is in NerdWallet’s best interest.
Early on, Tim decided to go slow to go fast, as he calls it, and build relationships with users for the long term. That might mean foregoing monetization opportunities in the short term that create bad user experiences. If you have the user’s best experience in mind, you create these really good opportunities, so they come back to you again and again. That’s how you end up monetizing for the long term. We believe it’s a much healthier way to do business.’
Efficiences and Experiences
That makes a lot of sense. I’m not only curious, but I’m legally required to ask the following question as a host. How do you use generative AI and these other emerging technologies in finance and across the enterprise to give your organization a competitive advantage? Fundamentally, it’s a technology company, right?
Exactly. My answer will probably be a bit more around technology in general versus AI in particular, but we can go into more detail on AI if you want. We think about it in two big ways. One, how can we be more efficient internally? How can we get code written better and faster and get products to market? How can the finance team, in particular, get vendors paid faster? How can we close the books even faster? How can we provide better reporting and better insights for our business so that we can help with better decisions and better customer experiences? That’s one, the internal efficiencies.
There’s also a dynamic of leveraging technology to create the best user experiences. How can we take a man different data sources that we feel are incredibly valuable, but how do you combine those in ways that you can create personalized recommendations and experiences for users at scale? Those are the two ways we think about technology. One is staying up-to-date on all the tech that’s there, what’s the easiest way to get some of that new tech implemented, how to experiment quickly and how to fail fast and then move on. Those are all mindsets and the philosophy that we leverage internally when it comes to deploying new technologies.
It makes sense. I’m sure you, especially with your educational background, recognize the importance of investing in technology in a very competitive space. Yet, you’re a finance person, so you have to ensure that it’s done in a fiscally prudent and responsible way. Is it a juggling act, or is it part of the job?
To a certain extent, yes. This is the beauty of technology because it allows you to automate and scale in ways that weren’t possible years ago. It’s something I always talk to my finance leaders about. We need to stay on top of these new technologies. We need to stay on top of best practices, even if it is better tools and better processes to help the team handle that scale.
To your point, we have to be prudent and fiscally responsible. As the finance team, we have to lead by example if we’re going to ask the business to do the same. How can we help the business grow and scale without scaling our costs or our headcount as quickly as the business is growing? The reality is that you can do things in lower-cost geographies, but at some point, you have to leverage tools and technology to help you do that.
I have a friend. During COVID, technology is what kept him up. He’s a barber. It’s about the simplest business one could have. He used technology because he couldn’t have multiple people in the room. He used all sorts of technology. You booked the room. It then became a natural thing. He is a great guy and a very smart guy, but technology may not be something that he’s passionate about. There are very few businesses that can’t flourish without technology in 2024.
Especially as a public company with real reporting requirements, timelines and deadlines. You need to make sure that you’re getting through what I call the table stakes. You need to record and report as quickly and as accurately as possible. We also want to free up time for folks to do the analysis and do the thinking to say, “It’s not about this report. What is the report telling us? How can we use data to inform the business on what’s working well?” or, “If it’s not working as well, how can we pivot? How can we try something new?” For me, it’s as much about the practical reality of closing the books as a public company, but it’s very much about creating space for our team to do the thinking and what I call the value add and the fun part of the job.
Beyond GAAP
I know what you do, but the inside of the business is a bit mysterious to me. You’re a non-CPA CFO. You have to do the GAAP thing. You’re a public company. A rules-based system has value, even if it has limitations, too. What are some ways outside of GAAP that you evaluate company performance and, perhaps more importantly, communicate that to the non-CPA types relying on that?
Maybe I’ll use one that’s connected more to financials, and I have a lot of thoughts on other metrics. One step we took at NerdWallet was to introduce and define a non-GAAP metric, which we call non-GAAP OI, to better align how we hold people accountable internally so that folks externally could also understand how we’re driving the business so they could hold us accountable as well.
For us, it was really important to make sure that we considered all the costs of running this business. When you think about stock-based compensation and capitalizing internally developed software, that can get confusing for managers, especially new people managers. What we tried to do was create a metric that incorporated the true cost of running this business, and the true cost was defined by a headcount.
Stock-based compensation is still a cost of doing business. It might be a non-cash cost, but it’s still a cost. It was important for us to hold managers accountable, too, and then provide that transparency externally. That’s one way we use non-GAAP financials to hold each other accountable and share things externally.
Quite frankly, there are a lot of different metrics that inform revenue. Revenue, in my mind, is an output metric. It’s really about what the upstream levers we have to pull… to generate more revenue, especially given where Tim has set the long-term vision for the company. The long-term vision is to be a trusted financial ecosystem and to have folks engage with the platform more regularly to get folks to connect more information so that we can do some of those personalized recommendations at scale that I had mentioned.
Some metrics would be things like how many registered users we have, how [many] we get within a particular period…and what type of revenue they generate. These are what I call the engagement metrics. This is important for folks to understand where we’re headed. I also think it leads to healthier, stickier quality revenue that investors appreciate over time.
My first CFO job, like many people who got CFO jobs around the time I did, I got the job largely because of my controllership skills. I was a CPA, and not to be modest, but a good one. To an extent, it held me back. I’m not slamming the credential at all, but when we’d talk about revenue, I’d talk about GAAP revenue, and I was the only one in the room who cared about GAAP revenue. It’s like, ‘Tell me about your company’s backlog. Tell me about this quarter’s bookings and how they are compared to last quarter.’ We do some meaningful forecasts on sales, but when you tell them you have a sale and that you have to recognize the revenue over three years, I’m really excited to be sharing this, and everybody’s rolling their eyes at me.
They’re like, “What are you talking about? What does that mean?”
They’re like, “Why do you think I care about this stuff?” I’m not knocking on the profession I grew up in, but it’s important to recognize that in the modern world, it has its place and probably always will, but it has inherent limitations. I used to advise people, “Use KPIs when you’re talking to non-financial people.” I now tell them, “Even when you’re talking to financial people, if they’re the right KPIs, they’re going to be more meaningful than anything you can share with GAAP.“
Don’t knock yourself too hard or your profession. We need really good controllers and accountants. It’s what I call the checks and balances, keeping everything in order and making sure you have the proper controls in place. To your point, I don’t have that background. One of the things I always think about when I build my teams is, “Where do I have my blind spots?” or, “Where do I know I don’t have the experience or the background and the skills?” I make sure that I hire those people around me. My controller is typically the number one job I hire when I come into a new place because I know it’s not my area of expertise, but it is critical. I do appreciate that there are people like you who love their job because I’m not going to be a CPA.
That’s great. NerdWallet has been such a success story. Kudos to you and the team. I want to shift gears a little bit. Back when I became a CFO, it was largely backward-looking. In fact, at the start of the episode, the woman who does the announcement says, “CFOs no longer record history. They make history.” The evolution, or the revolution if you prefer, is ongoing. How do you see the role of the CFO changing in the months and years ahead? Perhaps more importantly, how should people early in their career prepare to take advantage of that? It seems like it’s growing.
I couldn’t agree more. The role of the CFO has already shifted dramatically over the years, and it will continue to evolve. It will be really interesting to see how this role plays out in the future. There are so many macro challenges, whether it’s geopolitical, whether it’s the cultural nuances and changes like technology itself and how quickly it’s shifting and changing how we work together, or whether it’s the fact that we used to all be in an office together and a lot of folks are remote or in some hybrid form. There are so many changes.
Keeping folks aligned, prioritized and focused on the right things is all part of my job responsibilities, and then making sure things are properly communicated, as well as the blocking, tackling, and reporting that we talked about in terms of a CFO. What I try to tell my team is, “Every time we close the books, it’s backward-looking. It is the historicals. That is important. Let’s do it as quickly as we can,” but it’s really, “What is that telling us? What do we think about moving forward? How do we think about changing how we’re doing things from a business perspective? What is this telling us, and how does this better inform where we’re going?”
To me, I spend the vast majority of my time thinking forward, thinking about business decisions, thinking about priorities and making sure that if we need to pivot or shift, I’m aligned with Tim and that the leadership team is aligned. We’re cascading and communicating those messages accordingly and also setting up, “What are the right metrics for success? How will we measure success as we think about strategic opportunities?” That is the reality. I spend much more of my time forward-thinking and forward-looking versus looking at historicals.
Diving With Sharks
In my career, they still used to call us bean counters. I’m not even sure exactly what that means, but in defense, we call marketing arts and crafts. It wasn’t like they were picking on us. It was a good-natured fight. Bean counters no more. It’s really about making things happen. One of the things I enjoy doing, partly because I like to get to know people a little bit, is changing the perception of financial leaders. I often ask this. Do you have a fun fact or an interesting hobby? Maybe you’ve taken a phenomenal vacation somewhere that you’d like to share with the audience.
Some people would love to know this fun fact because, traditionally, people think that CFOs don’t like taking risks or are more risk averse. In my personal life, I’m a little bit more comfortable with risks. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to live abroad in several countries. I’ve traveled a ton. I’m up to 64. I also love scuba diving. I love scuba diving in these places. My fun fact is I’ve been diving with great white sharks.
That’s more of a scary fact than a fun fact. That’s one of those things like who was the first person that thought that was a good idea? Were you scared the first time?
I was excited, but at the moment, incredibly intimidated. They’re very smart animals. They will come at you from all angles and all sides. It ended up being a rush. I was way more nervous than I thought I would be going into it.
I can imagine. I’ve heard that if one comes after you, poke them in the eye. I’m not sure if there’s any truth to that, but I’ve heard that a number of times, like The Three Stooges.
I’m not sure we’re that quick or that fast. That’d be great, but they’re pretty powerful in the water and we’re not so powerful.
I remember coming across a sand shark or something. It was a shark I could pick up and throw, yet I was terrified. The mouth looked like any other shark. I was like, “This twenty-pound animal is going to eat me,” and I ran. It wasn’t my finest moment. That’s great. You told us before that you did have an interesting, fun fact. I wasn’t anticipating that. I would’ve been satisfied that you played basketball in college, but that’s great. I like to wrap things up with any advice you have for the next generation of CFOs, things they should be thinking about that you think in the category of, “I wish I’d thought of that when I was starting out.”
I have two pieces of advice. The first one is don’t be afraid to raise your hand. We’re not all going to check every single box when it comes to a new job or a new company. If you have the passion and the interest, raise your hand. What’s the worst that can happen? Someone can say no, but what happens if someone does say yes?
I always remind my team, “You’re never at that title. You’re never at that level. You never have that job until you have that job.” Even myself, I was never a public company CFO until I was one. It’s the collective experiences that you have that give you these opportunities, so have the courage to raise your hand when something interesting comes up. That’s the first one I give.
The second one, for me, I’ll classify as prioritized. Let me explain that a little bit more. I’ve always valued hard work. It’s something my parents taught me very early on and that my coaches continue to reinforce. I also felt like earlier in my career, I tried to take on everything. We all know that trying to do everything all at once, you won’t be great at any one thing. Given where we’re at, given the amount of information and data that we have to process, and given all of the different functions in finance in particular, you’re not going to be great at any one of those. It’s okay to say that.
Most importantly, prioritize. Create the space. Know what’s material. Know what’s the most important thing for you, whether that’s in the workplace or at home. We can’t do everything, and we certainly can’t do everything very well. It’s okay to set boundaries. It’s okay to prioritize. It’s okay to say no to things. Be clear on why you’re saying no and help people with a little bit of context on that.
You don’t have to take on everything all at once. That’s something I tried to do, especially early in my marriage. I felt like I was failing at everything. For me, one of the biggest lessons learned was to prioritize and be clear and honest with yourself on what’s important to you so that you can say no to the things that aren’t that important or material.
That’s great advice. Do you know the TV show Parks and Rec?
I do.
Ron Swanson, one of my favorite characters, said to Leslie, “Don’t half-ass 2 things as 1 thing.” That’s not exactly what you’re saying.
Philosophically, it is very much aligned.
This has been a lot of fun and, more importantly, a great source of information for the audience. I do want to thank you for your time. Also, I’d love to give you the opportunity for the final word.
Thank you for having me. This has been great. I love talking about my career. I love talking about teamwork. I’m always happy to discuss. People can find me on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to talk, especially about team development, what’s it like being a public company CFO or what’s it like in that transition. I’d love to talk with you again in the future about all of those things. It was great being on the show today. Thank you.
