Victoria Thomas became CFO and co-owner of Kellymoss from a rather non-traditional background: becoming an emancipated minor at 17 in order to leave her small farm town, eventually becoming a self-made entrepreneur and now leading finance for North America’s most decorated Porsche racing team. In conversation with host Jack McCullough, she shares her career journey, and how she transformed a nine-employee operation into an 88,000-square-foot powerhouse boasting 135 employees and 48 national championships and redefined success.
Thomas also shares her candid insights on the power of “failure,” the art of the unconventional and how she leveraged her unique path to reshape finance and business operations, driving change in a male-dominated Industry, AI in finance and the CEO-CFO dynamic and a unique leadership partnership—with her husband. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.
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Listen to the podcast here
Welcome back, everyone. We have a great episode. I know you’re going to find this one particularly fascinating. My guest is Victoria Thomas. Victoria Thomas is the CFO and co-owner of Kellymoss, which happens to be the most decorated Porsche racing team in North America. The company combines championship motorsport, custom vehicle builds and luxury racing experiences. It was founded in 1988. It boasts 135 employees, 48 national championships and more than 100 Porsche products in an 88,000 square foot facility. Victoria, welcome to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs.
Thank you so much for having me, Jack. It’s a pleasure to be here.
It’s great to be here. I was excited by the opportunity to do this. Before we got on the air, I gave the analogy that, being in Boston, everybody thinks they know more about the Boston Red Sox than the manager of the Boston Red Sox. I suspect in your case, there’s probably a similar dynamic in play. Why don’t you fill in the blanks about what I might have left out about Kellymoss?
You did a great job. We’re a Porsche-centric brand. We wrap pretty much everything that we do around that brand because they are exceptional with supply and demand, and they have an exceptional product. The team is known for Porsche racing. We also do high-end Porsche builds. Our clients are affluent. Some people love the brand and can’t have access, and our membership gives you access to the brand in your home in a very special way. Innovation on and off the track is primary to who we are.
It’s a well-known company, but what’s something about the company that maybe people would be surprised to learn?
I would say the name. If you’re within the Porsche circles, the name is very big. People in Europe know who we are. It would be surprising that when I came on board many years ago, there were nine employees, and we ran about four cars. People would be surprised by how rapid the growth has been because we’ve been so strongly affiliated with the Porsche brand for so long.
The former CFO of the CFO Leadership Council, Kristin Larson, races Porsches. She told me she was at a race in Tilton, New Hampshire. Someone in the crowd had a heart attack, so they said, “Is there a doctor?” There were 17 amongst the racers that were there, so we were joking that the best place in the world to have a heart attack is a hospital. The second-best place is at a Porsche race, apparently. A lot of doctors drive Porsches.
Doctors are probably pretty well-represented.
I want to return to the company in a moment, but first, I’d like to discuss a little about your background. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a very small town outside of Madison, Wisconsin, with a farming community and a small school. The class sizes were about 100 people, so I didn’t have exposure to racing and didn’t have exposure to cars. Cars were not anything that were part of my lifestyle back then. It was a simple farming life.
You had a little bit of a non-traditional educational background for a successful CFO. I’d love to touch upon that a little bit. I know you were an emancipated minor when you were still a teenager. I’d love to explore that a little bit.
What you’ll see as a common theme is that everything about my life is a smidge non-traditional. I grew up in a home where I was always taught that there is no limit to what I’m capable of and who I can be. My family was quite entrepreneurial. I was always an outside-the-box thinker and lived in this tiny town on a farm. We were 15 miles from the little town where we lived. On the last day of school, I would go to the farm. I wouldn’t see any of my friends until the first day of school, the beginning of the next year. My parents were farmers. They didn’t have time to drive me around to visit my friends. I decided that I needed to get a job so that I could get a car so that I could go see my friends. I couldn’t get a job because I had no way to get to my job.
I ended up doing a bunch of research. I learned that if I were an emancipated minor, I could sign a lease. I could live somewhere in Madison in a bigger municipality, where I could take a bus until I had enough money saved up to be able to buy a car. I pitched it to my mom. I said, “Here’s the deal. I’m responsible. I would like to become an emancipated minor and move into town so that I can get a job, get a car and not be stuck here at the farm.”
I don’t know how I spun that in such a way that she believed that I was responsible enough that on my 17th birthday, I moved out. That’s exactly what I did. I came to Madison, started to attend school, and rode the bus back and forth. What ended up happening is they said, “You’re going to have to go to summer school in order to graduate because you don’t have enough credits in science,” or whatever it was. The school districts had different requirements for graduation. I was like, “No way. I’m not going to go an extra semester.”
I once again did a bunch of research. I found out that in the United States at that time, which was 1987, if you took your GED and scored in the top three percentile of the country, the school was mandated to give you a diploma. I’m like, “I’m on to something.” I had faith in my ability to learn. I took my GED, and I scored in the top three percentile. I dropped out of high school and scored in my top three percentile. The school that I was attending was forced to give me a diploma. Problem solved.
I realized that any employer is going to ask for my transcript, and then they’re going to know that I didn’t graduate in a traditional way. How shameful. I had to immediately go to college so that I could have people look at my college transcript and not my high school transcript. It was the same scenario. I was halfway through going to college. I was living on my own. I had car payments and all of this stuff. I had a huge debt in college.
I couldn’t afford to keep going to college because it was so expensive. I was doing it on my own. Once again, I went to the library, did a bunch of research, and figured out a way to get a grant to pay for my last two years of college. In my four years of college, I had straight A’s with the exception of one B-plus in my first semester, my freshman year. Step after step of going about life in this very non-traditional way, I can’t imagine that there are a lot of emancipated minors who are super close with their family. It was an opportunity for me to take control of my life differently. Not that I think that it was smart, but I learned my lessons from it and applied them.
For our younger audience, and we have a lot of younger ones, do you want to explain to them what a library is? They’re thinking that with all the world’s access, you can get anything without leaving your bedroom.
It used to be so much more difficult. You had to get yourself there and spend so much time groping through books and trying to figure out how to get the answers that you were seeking. Rooting out information in that environment was a skill set of its own.
I can imagine. Kudos to you and to your mother for allowing you to do that. I look back when I was that age. I can’t imagine suggesting that to my mother and father would have gone particularly well. That wouldn’t have been a very pleasant conversation. I don’t think so.
It was very interesting. She was surprised that I was going through with it. I think she thought that she would say yes. I would start to investigate how much an apartment was every month, and food, and all of that. I sink my teeth in pretty deep when I make a decision.
Even as a teenager, good for you. I’d love to chat a little about your career path. I know a couple of the stops you had along the way, but what were some of the early jobs? How did they prepare you for what you’re doing now?
Coming from an entrepreneurial family and realizing that I was able to fund half of my college education at a private college, which was quite expensive at the time, by doing research about grants and scholarships, I thought, “I’m going to start my own business.” It was called Scholar Connections. I rented an office. I worked at night. The point of it was to help other people find scholarships, grants and ways to pay for their education. A lot of people using traditional language would call that a non-successful business because I was in that business for maybe two and a half years, if memory serves. That business is not around today.
Is that a failure? The lessons that I learned from that, the first of which is that I was appealing to a client base that had no money to pay me whatsoever. I didn’t take that into consideration. I probably charged $40. I would spend hours in the library researching, trying to find you scholarships and grants. There are lessons about making your mistakes on paper, doing business plans, understanding your target audience
and running financial statements, so that you can have an understanding of what that will look like projected into the future. All of those incredible lessons apply to life, all through my failures, but I was never ever ashamed of not succeeding because I very early on learned to frame failure as where your lessons come from. I’m still such a firm believer in that.
People learn a lot more from failure than they do from success. I’d almost challenged the premise that it wasn’t successful because it set you up for everything you learned. You didn’t make enough money, and you didn’t take the company public, but you were impacting individuals’ and families’ lives by what you were doing, even if you didn’t make a nickel off of it. You’re right. If you’d gone to Harvard and gotten an MBA from their B school, they probably would have advised you not to do that. Don’t seek out customers who can’t pay.
The path to learning, when you have that much emotion tied to it, is so impactful. Some of the hardest lessons are the absolute best resources you can find.
I can imagine. That’s great. You’ve had an interesting start. When you look back on your career, are there people that stick out, whether they were mentors, formal or informal, or individuals that you crossed and you look back and say, “I learned a lot from that person”?
Because my trajectory was so non-traditional, I would struggle to think of a single job that I ever had outside of when I was waitressing in high school, where anybody sat down with me and said, “This is the way you’re supposed to do the job.” I have almost always gotten, “This is your job. Figure it out.” What it comes down to is the people who believed in me. When I was outside of high school, I took a job at a company that is quite large now in our area, called Dave Jones.
It was a plumbing and heating contractor. I took a job as the office manager, and the position of finance manager opened up. He said, “I’d like for you to apply.” I looked through. There were 47 tasks listed on the job description. I said, “I’ve never done a single one of these.” He said, “I promise you. You can do all of it.” I did. That was the start of me moving up into these higher-level finance roles and being able to use the information of the financial statements as a tool for being an engine for the future. That came from that one human being besides my mom, the one human being who believed in me. It’s so powerful to be aware of what even a sentence can do to change somebody’s life.
It’s interesting because who would have thought that you’d be the CFO of Kellymoss coming from that? Along the way, you owned an accounting firm. If you could tell us a little about that. How does one own an accounting firm unless you started it or something like that?
I did start it. When the technology started to change such that paperless was a thing that was an opportunity, I had a company that was called Accountability. What we did is, step one is always operating from a known position. The beauty of it was that I had five amazing women, almost all of whom had their master’s degrees. They were incredibly intelligent, brilliant, and finance-minded women who chose to pause their careers and put having a family first.
What I did differently with Accountability is I said, “Commit to me the number of hours that you can work a week. I don’t care when it happens. You have to promise me you’ll raise a flag if you can’t do it. Get those hours done, or raise a flag. You can do it when the kids go to bed. You can get up early whenever you do it.” We were able to get small businesses to a known financial position and then be able to be on fractional CFO roles to increase cashflow, increase profitability, and decrease taxation for these small businesses.
Businesses that absolutely couldn’t afford that type of mindset involved in their business month to month, we provided that resource for them. It was a wonderful opportunity to be able to take this group of bright people, whose only option was to work retail. If they wanted to put their kids first so that their child’s schedule was the most important thing, retail was the option for them. A lot of people won’t know what it was like back in the day, before technology allowed you to operate remotely and all of that. It was very new. This was many years ago.
When did you work at Accountability or launch Accountability?
I did that when I got pregnant with my first child. I launched that around 1999, and it grew very fast. At the time, you had tax accountants who regurgitated the facts in a way that it was appropriate to be able to file tax returns and check that obligation box. Other than that, you didn’t have people who were parsing information as a tool. I never advertised anything. The ability for small businesses to recommend and make these decisions based on our real situation, our actual financials, to grow our business and be more successful, was rare back then.
I asked about the timing because I worked for a company called Accountability Outsourcing. It was a similar business model. I was there. I was brought in. A friend of mine owns the company. I worked for about a year and a half doing business development for them. They’ve rebranded the name of the company as Charles River CFO. It’s a very similar business model, even to the point of a lot of my colleagues being women who were young mothers.
Some of them work 9:00 to 5:00. For a lot of them, it was weird to get up at 6:00 in the morning and get emails from people that they sent to me. They were good people. They were on what at the time was considered maybe a weird career path. It’s a lot more common these days, for sure. You’re working in Accountability, and one of your clients was Kellymoss.
I wasn’t taking on any clients. I received a telephone call asking if I could come in and help out. They were looking for somebody to come in as a consultant and determine the profitability of the different divisions of the company. For many small businesses, everything flowed to the checking account. That’s how they determined if they were successful. If there was money in the checking account, that meant that they were winning. If there wasn’t, they weren’t.
They didn’t know if they were making $100,000 a year in racing, and then losing $50,000 a year in the body shop, for example. I came in. I had a friend who still remains a great friend. His name is Steve. He raced cars out of high school. I went to high school with him. He raced cars out of high school. I called him, and he’s like, “My goodness, you have to go to that gig. You have to go meet with them because these people are it for Porsche racing.”
I came in to do the consulting. One of the first conversations that I had with the owners was when I said, “Are you aware of the fact that your highest-producing technician is your lowest-paid employee?” They’re like, “How could you possibly know that?” They ended up making me seven job offers. On the seventh job offer, I sold my book of business and came on board.
Seven job offers. They really wanted you.
I said, “The one thing that you can’t assure me is that someday, I won’t come in on Monday, and the business will be that you’ll decide to move to Florida or something.” I was quite apprehensive. I loved being in control. Also, as anybody who has ever owned their own business knows, it’s a lot of hours and a lot of work. I was very prone to waking up at 2:00 in the morning. Your brain starts going. Next thing you know, I’m in my office working away. I thought that I was going to be removing myself from that lifestyle. Roll forward a few years, and I’m an owner and right back at it.
There you go. You’re going to be an owner, probably most of the rest of your career, no matter what you want. It’s interesting because it sounds to me that it was a very small company with an extremely good brand with its own industry, loyal customers and 100 percent name recognition with the people that matter. They were good at that, but they weren’t good at business and finance.
No, not at all.
You came in, figured some things out, and made better decisions.
I applied standard procedures and common practices. A lot of times, especially in this industry, people are so passionate about what they do. Racing is wonderful. Bookwork, not so much. They drop an engine in a car, and they’re more concerned about getting that driver on the track. They never bill it. They’re like, “Did we use to have embezzlement before you?” I’m billing things. I brought in practices like having meeting agendas, all of this brilliant outside-the-box thinking. It was standard practice. They just hadn’t experienced it.
I wasn’t there or anything, but it sounds like the type of place people joined so they can do stuff. “I like the assignment that I’m working on. I want to put this engine in this car.” That’s great that you were able to make that type of an impact from a business background. It sounds like keep the fun entrepreneurial spirit of the company. I do want to ask, and correct me if I’m wrong. You’re working in a male-dominated industry, at least traditionally, when you joined. Did that present any issues or any particular challenges? You went in as a leader right away. It’s not like you worked your way from the bottom up.
I would say largely, the company that I was talking about, where the gentleman said, “I believe that you have the skill set to oversee our finance,” was construction. I was the only female. I was pretty accustomed to that environment. To my core, I believe that you can use challenges to be your fuel, or you can use challenges to make you a victim. I can assure you with absolute confidence that I was never underpaid in any role that I worked at, but that was because back then, women were paid quite differently. It’s still not great. We’re making progress. We’re not all the way there.
I felt like it was my job to keep a list. I would list all of the ways that I made the company money, saved the company money or brought value to the company. When it came time for my review, I didn’t sit there and hope that I was going to get more money. I said, “This is how much money I want, and this is why I deserve it. Here are all the things that I did this year, and it will cost you money to lose me.” That’s taking a scenario where there’s potential for you to be a victim of underpayment and taking all that power back.
That type of thing has always been something that’s fueled me. I’ve probably done better by being in scenarios that lean towards something that might feel unfair because I have figured out how to make that make me stronger. Everybody has the choice as an adult to be able to choose how they filter information that comes into them. I choose to filter that as something that is empowering. When I started to become eyes up to the fact that there were no women in the industry whatsoever, it was a telephone call from a woman named Lyn St. James, who was an absolute pioneer in the industry. She called and said, “How is the most successful Porsche race team in the world having a female owner, and I didn’t know it?”
She made me lift my head and start looking around and paying attention to the opportunity there to be a voice and raise awareness about our sport as an amazing sport to get involved in as a female. For me, what an amazing opportunity that I have. Think about it in accounting or finance. You’re head down doing your thing. There’s a lot of alone time to be able to lift my head and be far more public about what I’m doing because I can change an industry. You can count on one hand the number of female professional team owners in the world of sports car racing. I have this great opportunity to use my voice and bring change.
There’s 51 percent of the population that we can invite to the table. There’s no position in motor sports that requires you to be a man. It’s an awareness thing. People never think about it as an opportunity. We did the first-ever motorsports patch for the Girl Scouts. We bring the Girl Scouts in. We turn down the impact guns, so they’re not as powerful. We have them change a tire. We have them do these competitive things where they can learn about the different careers. There’s a lot of playing and fun that I get to do that’s so outside of some of the traditional things, but genuinely making a difference in the industry.
That’s the coolest thing ever. Did you love fast cars before joining? It sounds like your friend did, but maybe you didn’t.
Steve loved fast cars. To this day, I am not a fast car person. I have done hot laps with our race car drivers because I have to hold my head high and say that I understand the experience. We do off-road safari builds. That’s like playing in the snow and the sand in these cars. That’s the same degree of adrenaline, but it’s at 45 miles an hour and very safe. I love that. The actual racing, I’m not a fan. Just between us, I don’t enjoy it. I’m thrilled that we’re in cars that I feel safe having clients in, but I don’t enjoy that.
What’s the fastest you’ve ever driven?
I was a passenger at 165. For sure, when I was in high school, I went over 100 in my car. It was completely stupid. I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. It was peer pressure. I don’t enjoy that fast.
I’ve never been anywhere near 160. If a train or a plane counts, then I have. That’s pretty incredible. As a podcaster in the CFO community, I could lose my license if I don’t ask you this question about generative AI. I’m curious how you’re using that and other advanced technologies, too, within the finance function at your company.
I would say that I am living inside ChatGPT all day, every day. My husband and I were joking. He needed to do a task that had to do with creating a lot about torque sensors. It’s like having a personal assistant full-time. There needs to be parameters. It can get things wrong. It does 80 percent of the heavy lifting for you. For me, when it changed was the recognition that AI has all of this information available, and I don’t. I need to stop telling it what to do.
I need to start telling it to ask me questions about what it needs from me to give me the best answer. That was a complete game-changer in terms of me getting a higher degree of accuracy. With every query that I might do, investigation, creating charts or all the thousand ways I use it all of the time, it’s always, “Ask me one question at a time, the top three questions that you need to know to provide me the best answer.” That changed things for me.
Can you think of an example where AI improved decision-making or workflow, whether it be in finance or business operations generally?
There are so many tasks. I’m very careful about what information goes there. There’s never any company information or anything like that, but big batch data for us, being able to list out a whole bunch of data and have it recognized as trending. Some of that stuff is so time-consuming and difficult, and it’s instantaneous now. It is being able to provide a listing of information and say, “Here’s the context,” giving context about information. “Put on your CFO hat. What are three things that I might not notice that I’m missing as I review this report?” It’s different things like that. You can get this wealth of information back.
I am on the United States Chamber of Commerce Small Business Council. That’s a group of 68 small business owners that get together twice a year, go to DC, go to Capitol Hill, and talk about the things that are on the table at Capitol Hill and how they affect me as a small business owner. The R&D tax change was enormous to me as a business owner. It is being able to have them understand the impact of being foisted with such significant fiscal damage to us. It is being able to be a part of the solution, again, as opposed to waiting to see what happens. There’ll be bills, and there are things stuck on the backside of them.
The people who are voting often aren’t even aware of what the impact is. Being somebody who says, “I’m going to take charge of my life. I’m not going to be a victim of anything, sitting around feeling like a victim of the tax law changes of R&D,” I said, “What can I do? This was something that I could do.” When we were getting together with the Small Business Council, one of the very important topics was AI.
The Chamber of Commerce in Jacksonville, Florida, invited us to come out. They did a marketing brief on each of the companies that were coming to their facility. There were 18 people. The amount of brilliant information that they were able to share with me about marketing opportunities within my company that I hadn’t thought of was shocking. All they knew about the company was the company name.
That is impressive. Amazing time to be alive, isn’t it?
It’s crazy. Speaking to R&D, one of the more recent ways that we ended up using it is where we keep track of the different research and development items that we’re working on every year that are potential revenue for the future. Back in the day, when you applied for the R&D credit, there was a handful of questions that they asked you. That’s exploded into, “Prove your two models of testing.” It’s so involved now.
Being able to enter a couple of paragraphs about what you’re doing, listing out the context of the role that they should have, “Ask me three questions,” having them explode out all 21 questions or whatever it is on the R&D form, and then having to parse that with your team saved so much time. It would probably take us and the team about 40 hours. I would say that it dropped all of that to an eight-hour process. How can it possibly know about its research and development on things that don’t exist? It is brilliant.
It’s amazing. When the internet came out, I was thinking, “This is the biggest game-changer within my lifetime.” It seems like the internet is going to be number two to generative AI. I’m not sure how it’ll all play out. I know a lot of people who are still using it to improve the quality of their email communications. The potential there is interesting. I want to shift gears a little bit. One of the most frequent questions that I get asked from our members is, “How do you build a healthy and strategic relationship with the CEO of your company?”
I married him.
That’s an interesting answer right there. We could end it right there. Andy Kilcoyne is the CEO and also your husband. Not unique, but the first time I’ve come across it. Tell us about that dynamic.
There are a lot of fun little stories that are buried in that. Probably, the first one is that Andy came from a racing family. This is a little bit about his background. His dad was a car chief for Paul Newman. He came from a racing family and ended up working at GM. He still loved everything about racing. He was one of the subcontractors for our team who would fly to some of the races and physically work on the cars. I went to a race event at Road America in Wisconsin.
I was in the middle of a meeting. I saw this man, who was on our team, walk over to the garbage. He had a tool in his hand. He walked over to the garbage. He set the tool down. He took out the garbage, came back, put in a new garbage bay, and then went back to what he was doing. I was like, “I want to hire that guy.” I would have no way of judging how he handles the mechanical, what he was physically doing on the car. I knew how he thought. I asked him to come in for a job interview. We got to the point where there was going to be a hire.
I said, “Here’s what the offer is.” He said, “Respectfully, can you articulate to me why it is that I would cut my salary in half to come work here?” I said, “Are you happy? Do you enjoy your day? The 40 hours a week that you’re putting in, does it light you up?” He accepted half of the salary, came, and worked here. He was an engineer. He worked in our race shop. He was promoted to the head of the race shop, and then our general manager, and continued to work his way up. An interesting side story is that when people hear that I am a co-owner, the immediate assumption is that it is my partner. Along with that, the immediate assumption is that he brought me into the business to do the books.
What’s funny about it is a lot of those boxes check, but I hired him to bring him in. I tell people, “If you assume that he brought me in, it doesn’t make you sexist. It makes you understand statistical probability.” I’m not a fan of people trying to backdoor people into thinking, “I’m pro-women because I’m excited about growing our sport, but I’m not anti-men.” Just because you think that way does not make you sexist.
It’s interesting because you said people understand probability. The first thing I thought of when you mentioned that misconception that people have is that people are playing the law of averages. If you come up with 50 scenarios like that, probably, the majority would be people who perceive it.
It’s you making a wise decision based on what information has been presented before you. With his engineering mind and my background, we would very frequently ideate and come up with the same answer from two different approaches. What we quickly learned is that we complement each other well in terms of how we work together. There were a lot of heavy things that were happening here at the business that we had to solve for. We were spending 70 hours a week lit up by the opportunity to be able to take the marketing from “We do racing, and we’re everything to everyone,” to narrowing that funnel down to “Our deepest roots are in Porsche. We’re only focused on Porsche.”
We were having that explode the brand awareness as opposed to the opposite, that type of thing, building the first websites and implementing the first operating software. Such a fun thing about the financial statements is that you take these things that seem so completely unrelated. You spread that trend line out enough, and you can start to make assumptions based on it, all of that type of stuff. We were lit up by growing this business. Ultimately, we joke that because we lived and breathed this so much, we didn’t have any other opportunity to be able to meet anybody else or date anybody else, so we ended up together.
It was the first time I ever in my entire life was willing to date somebody that I worked with. That seemed like a recipe for disaster. I told him under no uncertain terms, “I absolutely will not date you.” I did not know that he was lit up by a challenge that was only more fun for him. It turned out that my relationships had always been unsuccessful because I’m such an obsessive workaholic, and him the same. We’re more tactical in our day-to-day. At night, we’re very strategic. We’re at our best when we’re going nose-to-nose problem-solving. It’s been successful.
His background is in engineering and design. Yours is vision, culture, finance and strategy. Between the two of you, you’ve got everything covered.
Yes, exactly. He’s very quiet. He contemplates. He has to percolate and think things through for quite a long time. I’m right off the cuff, and I’m loud. If you say, “Who is Kellymoss?” Andy will say, “We work in automotive.” If you say, “Who is Kellymoss?” I’ll say, “We are the winningest team in Porsche history. No company has had more podium success with this brand in the world than Kellymoss.” We’re so different, but coming together for one common goal.
His answer wasn’t exactly chock-full of information. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh, but when you said that your husband was quiet, that made me chuckle. Poor guy. When I was preparing for this, one thing that I learned to admire about you is your philanthropic sense. You founded an organization called Race Forward and also Be Your Own Hero. I’m not sure if you founded it, but you’re running it at this point. I’d love to learn a little about those, and our audience would as well, and how these organizations reflect your values.
One of the things that became extremely important to me was when I recognized that only three percent of motorsports were women. It was when I first raised my head and started to do an assessment of our industry.
That’s three percent of the drivers?
It is three percent of the careers in motorsports.
Drivers, I wouldn’t believe.
That included the women who were doing hospitality. Pretty much in every team, the women were in hospitality. In terms of all of the other areas of motorsports, it didn’t dawn on people. It was an awareness problem. It was not men saying, “We don’t want women in motorsports.” For sure, in every industry, you have a subset of people who enjoy that type of banter. My experience was never that men didn’t want women in motorsports. It didn’t dawn on men, and it didn’t dawn on women. In order to raise awareness, what we did was start to work with sponsors and partners to raise funds so that we could bring on drivers. It is because it’s the most visible position in motorsports to say, “This is an incredible place to have a career,” and raise awareness.
In 2023, we ran the first-ever female and Porsche Carrera Cup, North America. In 2024, we ran the first-ever African-American and Porsche Carrera Cup 2024. The beauty of that is it quickly spirals into the conversation. The ability to be able to talk about this, the ability for me to be able to talk about it with you, Jack, is that your reticular activation system is constantly filtering for, “Does this relate to me?” When you’ve got 11 pieces of information that your subconscious is disregarding towards the 40 pieces of information that it’s regarding, we’re now making that more relevant to people.
They say, “Yes, this could be a career path for me.” In a very short period of time, our C-Suite is half women. We have women technicians. We have women truck drivers. We have women engineers. We have women who manage the tires. In every area of our sport, there’s no limitation based on gender in our sport. The more people who see it, the more of those numbers are clicking up over and over again. It’s been wonderful to be able to use a platform to be able to change an industry.
Work-life balance is so critical for executives. You’ve got a lot going on here with this cool company, fast growing, a lot of stuff, and a couple of philanthropic things. I know you’re also on the board of Women in Motorsports North America. There are only so many hours a day. What do you do for the work-life balance when you’re not being your professional self?
To be perfectly honest, my average work week is somewhere between 75 and 80 hours. My secret about how I get as much done as I do is that I am awake by 3:30, seven days a week. I get almost four hours of uninterrupted time where nobody is putting anything on my to-do list. It is 28 hours a week of me knocking things off my to-do list that most people don’t have. The truth of the matter is, I love what I do, and I get to have a nice variety.
I’ll have some oversight on the marketing stuff, which is a little bit more creative, casting the vision in terms of what direction the company is going, and then head down churning on the financials. I get to wear a lot of different hats in the vast majority of the time. A lot of our drivers are the heads of enormous companies in this country. I get to sit and have a meal with people that you would pay $500 to see as a keynote speaker, because the people that we have on our team are incredible. I get a lot of diversity, and I get a lot of great conversation. The connections that I get to make with people fill me up.
We should all aspire to be like you. I want to get back to the CFO stuff. I always love to get my guests’ take on how the nature of financial leadership is changing. I’m particularly interested in your perspective on it because you do have an unconventional background, and you strike me as a person that you’re not going to play by the rules. You find your own path. That’s pretty obvious. I don’t have to speculate on that. How do you see CFOs changing in the years ahead?
The absolute focus on communication, the shift from data reporting and then trying to use that as your best guess towards the future to being able to go find a lot of the information from frontline people, as opposed to giving them information, extracting that information from them and having them part of the communication cycle, to me, it feels like it’s quite new. That could be my life experiences in the places that I’ve worked in and the people that I’ve worked with. There was often more of a sense that the more information people have, the more likely they are to complain about things. You held fiscal information tight as opposed to sharing it. You provided them information as opposed to them providing you with information.
On our org chart, Andy and I are at the absolute bottom. We serve every single person who works in this company. The leadership team serves all of the people who then directly serve our client base. It’s the same philosophy when it comes to the finance part. It’s a collaborative communication to get the team the information that they need to be successful. That’s us taking from the difference between the accounting and the finance, and being able to work together to provide the information necessary. It is not to extrapolate the most profit, but to extrapolate the best work-life balance for them. I want our employees not to check a box so that they can get to the weekend, but come in and feel lit up by the contributions that they’re making, the changes that they’re making, and the things that they’re doing.
We have a sexy product to do that. If we build a new car, it’s very likely going to be in a lot of publications around the world. We do have the big advantage of getting to see the team hang over the wall and cheer on their driver when they take the checkered flag a lot. We get to see our work published. That built-in team feeling is part of our culture by design, and what we do, but also making sure that the mundane things that people have to do every single day to get the job done. It’s not fun to do a credit card reconciliation. That’s not a blast. You have to endure some of that. There has to be enough involvement and pride in what you’re doing to be able to say, “Yes, I feel prideful about how I spent my day.”
Typically, my final question is something you’ve been giving since we started talking, but I’ll ask it anyway. We tend to have a younger audience base, at least from my perspective, a lot of CFOs and first-time CFOs. I’d love to get your advice for the next generation of financial leaders.
My strongest piece of advice would be to pause and appreciate the moments where you feel like you fail. When I feel like I fail, I have a visceral, physical pullback. If I’m doing this physically, I’m like, “Pay attention. There’s a big lesson here.” When you feel like you physically want to withdraw because you’re embarrassed or whatever, use that as a flag to say, “This is my moment to learn and grow.” Be proud of that. There’s this thing that you’re supposed to come out of the womb and be perfect. Recognize that those moments of failing are your powerful growth moments. Take responsibility for your life. Take responsibility for your successes and failures. You’ll be the best version of you.
That’s an amazing answer, Victoria. Thank you. I also want to thank you for your time here. I know you have an awful lot going on. With that, I’d like to give you the final word.
My final word would be that today’s CFO is the engine that is driving the future, turning insights into foresight and turning foresight into action. There’s a lot of pride in what we’re doing. We’re from the back office. Now, we’re at the forefront of driving our future.
