Strategic leadership is key to driving innovation in renewable energy. In this episode, we sit down with a powerhouse in the space. Our guest, Ann Anthony, has led financial strategy for some of the most transformative companies in energy, including Oberon Fuels, where she is CFO. She shares her journey from financial management to scaling organizations, from securing billions in capital to navigating complex industry transitions. We also discuss the intersection of finance and strategy, the role of CFOs in mitigating risks, and how to build a high-performance leadership team.
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. My name is Jack McCullough, and I’m your host. You can follow us online at RockstarCFOs.com. We have a fantastic guest, and I’m really excited for this one. Ann Anthony is the CFO of Oberon Fuels. Oberon Fuels produces renewable, clean-burning fuel from organic waste, decarbonizing liquefied petroleum gas and enabling sustainable energy solutions. Anne, welcome to the show.
Great to be here, Jack.
I’ve been excited for it, but I will have to admit I wasn’t familiar with your company before you and I met recently. I did my best with the description, but maybe you can fill in the blanks a little bit and let readers know a little more about your company, because it’s a great story.
I’d love to. Oberon Fuels has been around since about 2010 and has recently focused on producing renewable dimethyl ether, DME. If we zoom out a little bit, basically, we specialize in taking waste from hard-to-abate sectors. Using chemical processes transforms those into decarbonized portable molecules, renewable natural gas, renewable methanol and renewable dimethyl ether. These can be blended into other fuels for use in transportation. They can be used as feedstocks, perhaps biodiesel or SAF, and can also be used in other chemical processes. Anything you can use natural gas for, you can use renewable natural gas for. Trying to decarbonize the world one molecule at a time.
Formative Years
The science is fantastic. Before we get into your career path, I’d like to talk a little about your formative years. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, a little suburb south of Philadelphia. I grew up as an only child, although I was a second-marriage baby. My dad had been married previously. His first wife had passed away. He had three sons with her who were older. My dad was a child of immigrants as was my mom. My dad did not finish eighth grade. My mom barely finished high school. I guess I was the precocious child. I was the only girl. The other children were sons. They weren’t quite sure what to do with me.
I went to school early, and I think I went to kindergarten when I was three or something. I started early and graduated early. I went to high school when I was twelve. I grew up in a very entrepreneurial household. My dad owned his own business. I wasn’t used to seeing, I’ll call it the 9 to 5, where Dad leaves with a briefcase every day. He was working in and out of the house, always talking about the interactions he had building his business and with his customers.
I grew up with that as my frame of reference. I also grew up in a household where women went to college to find husbands, not necessarily to make a career. I guess I knew fairly early on that I wanted more than that. I’m married. I love being married. I have children, but that was not necessarily the end goal for me. I started at Fordham up in the Bronx. Unfortunately, my dad got sick during my freshman year, I transferred to St. Joe’s and finished close to home in Philadelphia, The Hawk will never die.
I was fortunate enough to start off in a career that led me to where I am. I started in a management training program with a company, ICI Americas, that’s since been acquired, but I had an opportunity to start a little early, worked in treasury, and then went through a number of, I’ll just call them, accounting-focused segments over the next two years. I learned a lot about myself, like what I like to do. What’s interesting to me versus what do I never want to do again? It went from there.
Sometimes, that never-want-to-do-again thing is the more valuable lesson in what you do want to do. I’m curious. Did you study business right away, and did it at a relatively young age?
I knew from the get-go that I wanted to focus on some type of business. Math and numbers were always interesting to me. Finance, I think, was where I wanted to focus. When I was at Fordham, I took an accounting class. I’ll never forget. After the first exam, I think I got a 70 on this exam. I had never gotten a grade like that over my entire academic career. The teacher came to me and said, “That’s a great grade. You should think about studying accounting.” I was horrified. I was like, “What are you talking about? This is not a good grade.” He’s like, “No, you had the top grade in the class. You should see the kids that got 35s.” Again, I was like, “No, I’m going to stick to finance from here.” I prefer to make history as opposed to record it.
That’s the tagline of this show. They no longer record history, they make it. That’s interesting. It sounds like you probably graduated high school, then when you were sixteen, perhaps.
I went to school in New York, which, in hindsight as a parent who’s seen my kids go off to college, I’m not sure how I would have felt about that, but yeah.
Energy Industry Journey
Anyway, so you’ve had a really interesting career. You’ve been in the energy sector not quite two decades. Am I fair to say that? I know you were in a tech company prior to that.
My first true foray into energy was in 2008 when I joined South Jersey Industries. Prior to that, I had worked in retail, in pharma, and in manufacturing. In the last manufacturing role, the company ended up being sold. I found myself out of a job again because of something that was totally out of my control. I saw an opportunity at South Jersey Industries. It was a little bit of a step back, but I thought, “Utility that should be fairly safe.” Little did I know, this was right before the financial crisis. I joined SJI on September 2nd, 2008.
Of course, two weeks later, the world started to melt down, but it was a fascinating time because it really opened the door in many ways for growth at utilities in ways that people didn’t necessarily think of. What I mean by that is the New Jersey governor called all the businesses and said, “How do we make sure people can work? How do we spur investment and opportunity within the state?” This was happening all around the country. A lot of the utilities said, “We need to replace infrastructure.” It’s expensive to do that.
You’ve only allowed us to do this via rate cases previously. “Is there a way that we can accelerate that investment, make our systems more safe, which only benefits the public, and we can put people to work? We can put the construction crews back to work,” the governor said. This just unleashed a huge movement. Again, across the country, not just in New Jersey, in the form of a tracker. Utility companies began to invest the money and recover that money more quickly than they would have normally. Again, tremendous growth at the utility.
SJI also owned a number of non-regulated energy businesses, so non-utility businesses, but all energy-related, and we saw tremendous growth there as well. Solar, we didn’t do wind, but there was solar. There were landfill gas-to-electricity projects. All things that ultimately were spurred by this focus on renewable energy. During that time, I was part of a team that grew. My talents were recognized. I grew along with it. I started as a general manager. I was promoted ultimately to treasurer and VP of the holding company, and some other roles along the way, and it culminated, I guess, with a tremendous amount of capital raising.
I’ve raised roughly $9 billion in my career, probably half of it at SJI over those eleven years. Also, a focus on M&A. We acquired a company during that time where we doubled our size, literally overnight with the close of the acquisition, doubled the number of customers, and doubled the number of employees. Again, very transformative for the organization. I had a great time, and I learned a lot while I was there. I had the opportunity to leave SJI and join KeyCapture Energy, a utility-scale battery storage startup. The mandate was, “Can you get me sold?”
They were PE-funded. Again, on this amazing growth trajectory, two founders who were super smart and knew the battery space probably better than anybody at the time. The PE firm that we were with, we probably had about a year’s worth of runway left.
More importantly, I think there was recognition on both sides [that] from a technology perspective, we needed assistance. Trying to identify, are there other technologies besides lithium-ion? Who’s the best integrator to work with? How do you evaluate a battery cell partner? Things like that. How do you get financing?
I rolled up my sleeves and went from a large organization with lots of support into one that was just scrappy and filled with smart people who also wanted to roll up their sleeves and get the job done. Ultimately, KeyCapture was sold to SK Innovation in December 2021. That was a successful outcome for them. I guess while I was at KeyCapture, I was tapped on the shoulder by some banker friends.
They said, “You should talk to these guys over at Opal Fuels. They want to go public. They want someone who’s been in natural gas, check. Who’s worked in a public company and feels very comfortable around public company processes and controls, check. Who’s raised a ton of capital, check. Met with that team, and this was during COVID. Everything was done virtually. Joined them and literally jumped into, “How do we go public as a SPAC?”
They had decided to go as a SPAC. It made sense for this organization. There was a lot of work to be done, obviously, working with the investment bankers to get the story told. Bigger picture, Opal was formed by putting together three existing portfolio companies of four to start their parent. There was a lot of redundancy in the back office that hadn’t been addressed.
How do you think about taking existing resources and creating an accounting team and a finance team for what will be a public company in a couple of months? How do you identify talent? How do you figure out where the holes are? There was no SEC talent on board. You don’t need that in a private company. How do you put rigor into the financial closing processes? If you’re private and you miss your deadline, it’s, yeah. You’ll get yelled at, but there’s no bigger issue. But you cannot call the SEC and say, “Sorry, I’m going to be late.”
They don’t have a sense of humor about such things.
No, they do not. Again, how do you instill these things in a team while you’re trying to go through the bigger process? It was a fascinating journey. It was a lot of hard work, but a part of my career that I’m thankful to have had. Again, I’d raised a ton of capital, but never from the get-go. That was what was attractive to me about that opportunity, and I was there.
We had transitioned to a public company. We were dealing with public company things. We have to put processes in place now to do earnings calls and do your forecast, and have confidence in what you’re telling the street and all of those things. Again, I had done a lot of that when I was at SJI, but for many folks on the management team, this was new for them. I was getting calls left and right from female CFO in energy. There aren’t that many of us.
Most of the calls that I was getting were honestly not that interesting. I got a call about an opportunity to be the CFO of Oberon Fuels. I was fascinated with what I heard because it was an opportunity to come in early and be part of a staffing up of leadership, because Oberon is on the cusp of going to the next level. The opportunity to come in early and build with an eye to either going public or sale to a strategic, who knows, but you have to do the same things anyway without all the baggage of a company that’s been around for a while.
Oberon Fuels
What I find, and we’ll explore this a little bit further, is even though you’ve worked with several energy companies, they’re all such unique experiences along the way. You went from SJI to KeyCapture Energy, KCE, which was a PE-funded company. With the situation with Opal, I thought it was interesting because an IPO is fundamentally a financial transaction. The biggest one any company will ever go through, in most cases. It also has an impact on culture. You mentioned not so much upskilling the team but changing the skills that they needed to be at a public company, and then merging all of the companies into one. If I can get a feel, what was the cultural change of the company during what sounds to me like a relatively short period of time?
You’re right. Culture starts at the top. It was an interesting transition, I think, in many ways. Opal, as a public company, you need a board structure in place. Previously, they had had “board meetings.” It was the chairman of Fortistar and a handful of employees. Now, to bring on independent folks into the boardroom and to have a regular meeting cadence to do all of the public company governance, it’s a change.
People need to get used to it. All of the rules and requirements around disclosure. There were lots of conversations around, I don’t want to disclose that. It’s not Anne telling you to do this. This is what has to be done. The rules say we have to do this. Crafting the language that ultimately people get comfortable with, and over time, things get easier. It’s just always the first time. First, anything is always hard because it’s changed.
There was that aspect of it. I talked a little bit about introducing rigor into the process. That was probably the hardest part of the conversation with the accounting team. People want to come in every day and do their job, and they want to do it well. I fundamentally believe that, but what doing it well means changes over time. Getting people to go on this journey because, again, it was a change. It was going to require them to not only change how they worked but maybe what they worked on, given some of the moves that we made on the team.
In some cases, I need you to go get additional skills, and we’re going to figure out how we’re going to do that. We’re going to bring new people onto the team who have different skills that don’t exist here. It’s all changed. It required a lot of communication around what was happening to the extent that we could share it. Sometimes, you cannot always talk about this, but I had made a commitment to these folks from when I got there that I would be as transparent to this team as I could along the way.
I would share as much as I could. If I couldn’t, I would tell them that. I was lucky that I was able to get people to buy into what we were doing and why it was important to do that work early on. I think this is just one of the lessons that I’ve learned over my career. If people understand what you’re trying to do, they’re more willing to go on the journey with you as opposed to just telling them.
Being transparent gets people who don’t agree with you to follow you anyway. If they hate that she’s a straight shooter, I don’t agree with this, but I trust her and I respect her, and we’re going to follow. It makes all the difference. You’ve had a great run to this point. Oberon Fuels came a calling. I’d love to understand what that process is like joining them. Perhaps it’s obvious, but what was it about the opportunity that you were attracted to?
Again, female CFO in energy, I was getting phone calls all the time about opportunities. Most of what I was hearing was just honestly more of what I was already doing at Opal. I wasn’t. “Why would I leave Opal to go do the same thing?” That just didn’t make any sense to me. I was attracted to the opportunity at Oberon for a number of reasons. I had the opportunity to learn about what they were doing. I thought it was interesting, decarbonizing very hard to abate sectors and taking a waste product and making something that is of productive use.
By the way, we’re making money at it, and it’s great for the environment. These are all win-win. Also, the opportunity to join early and build with an eye towards either an IPO or a larger sale to a strategic in a couple of years and being able to build and lay the groundwork that would enable that, call it growth and scale, over the next couple of years. My mandate was clear in the sense that we needed to go raise capital. We need to get capital raised to build it out. At that time, it was one project with a development pipeline.
Now we’re at two projects with a development pipeline, but really be part of the team to help progress those. I was part of, I guess, a larger hiring process. In addition to myself, we hired a COO who came out of the industry as well. Again, been there and done that. A VP of engineering has been there and done that. VP of project development who’d been there and done that. I felt very good about the people I was sitting around the table with. These are projects that at the end of the day with fully contracted off take, etc.
These are infrastructure money all day long. I was confident in my ability to raise money to get this done. Again, I like to build, I like to problem-solve. I just thought this is the perfect opportunity to do that. We are fully remote as a company. That adds a level of complexity in the sense of joining a brand new team and lots of new people starting at the same time. How do you build those bridges and build relationships with intentionality? Unfortunately, we were only able to spend a little bit of time in person with some very targeted processes to get to a place where we gel.
It was interesting because when prepping for this, Google searched you, as you might guess, and it was the first time I’d seen four executives join the company at the same time in the Press release, it was noted. That’s interesting. I always like to explore the relationship between the CFO and the CEO. In your case, Dr. Rebecca Boudreaux, just for one thing, it’s such a critical partnership. For years, CFOs have been saying it’s the most important relationship that they have. In the last 2 or 3 years, CEOs have been saying the same thing, that their most important strategic partner is not the VP of sales, and it’s not necessarily the top scientific person, engineer, or whatever. It’s the chief financial officer. What is your relationship like with Dr. Boudreaux?
Rebecca and I have a great relationship. We play off each other very well. I hesitate to say that we’re at the place where we can finish each other’s sentences, but we’re getting there. She was very clear in her vision, but I could tell she was comfortable in her own skin. For me, that’s important because I’m a straight shooter, and I’m comfortable in my skin. Sometimes, when you have to have challenging conversations, regardless of whether it’s a personal thing or a work thing, those conversations tend to go a lot better when people appreciate where you’re coming from.
It’s not meant to be a personal attack or anything like that. Unfortunately, sometimes I’ve seen along my career, not always directly working for them, but even just looking up, sometimes some big egos get in the way. I’m very fortunate, I think, in that Rebecca and I leave the ego at the tour bus door. We get to work. That’s really the case for everybody on the Oberon team. You roll up your sleeves, you do what needs to be done. We have those tough conversations. We have the good ones, too. We all feel confident in saying what needs to be said.
You mentioned earlier the fact that being a female CFO in the energy space, and even though it’s 2025, its CEO-CFO pairing in almost any industry is relatively rare. It sounds like it might be extraordinarily rare in your space, but are there any dynamics at play at that, or is that a non-event? It’s interesting that they have two women running a company that’s so male-dominated.
I have to admit, again, when I got that phone call and I heard it was a female CEO, I was like, “This could be interesting.” Honestly, once I got past that first meeting, that really became a non-event for me, truly. It is all about how do we work together. How do we grow this?
It should be, but I still think that just because it’s so rare, it’s an interesting topic for sure. You’ve had some great runs with all sorts of different types of companies, which probably gives you, if not unique, then certainly a very rare philosophy on what it takes to build a high-performance team. Not only in the world of finance and accounting but across an entire enterprise. I’d love to ask you a little about that. What do you look for when you’re building a team because you’re a transformative figure at the companies you worked at?
I am definitely not afraid to hire people smarter than I am. I know what I know, and I know what I’m good at. I know also what I’m not good at or maybe where I just don’t feel like I have the strength that is needed to really bring it home. I constantly look at, I’m starting from scratch, and what are the key components on the team that I need to hire for. If I don’t have anybody, then probably where I would have to start would be on the accounting and control side. Would either be VP of accounting or controller or whatever?
I want that person to be top-notch inside and out from a technical accounting perspective. I know enough to be dangerous on the accounting side, but from the technical accounting and the documentation perspective, I can read it, I can edit it. Please don’t ask me to write it. That’s probably where I would start. I would layer in somebody with FP&A, etc. FP&A is something that I’m probably a little more comfortable with, along with treasury.
That’s where I grew up in my career with raising money and also, again, looking forward to forecasting. Again, I would be focused there. The thing that I look for is obviously technical competence is important, but I look for somebody who can solve a problem. Are you intellectually curious? Do you want to know not only what this thing is but how does that thing impacts this, that, or the other?
Can you connect the dots? I guess that is maybe what I’m trying to say a little more eloquently as opposed to, “Here it is.” Nothing in business or life is, here it is. There’s always another element to it. In our role, I really believe that yes, we have to prepare the numbers, and they have to be correct. We also, as a partner to the business, have to be helping people look around the corner. It’s our job to parse the information and try to find whatever nugget of information is there that can help us figure out the next thing.
We can continue to drive and grow the business. If something’s going wrong, figure out what are we seeing here so we can course-correct it. Again, I want people who have that innate ability to question and look at it a little differently. Don’t just accept the numbers are what the numbers are. No, what if it’s this instead? Think about it.
I love what you said about hiring people smarter than you. In my case, it would be difficult for me not to do that. I heard a saying it was one of the previous guests, they mentioned A players hire A plus players and B players hire C players. The point was that the best leaders they’re looking for people who are as smart as them. As CFO, why not bring in a VP of finance who’s smart enough to do my job? If I stay here, it’ll make me more effective. You don’t want a person who’s just going to follow your instructions, even if they don’t make sense.
Honestly, I want the team to look good. If the team looks good, I look good. If somebody on the team is not carrying the water, we all look bad. I am a believer. I live together, die together. Again, so to your point, you like you want those people who are better than you are to lift up.
The CFO Role
Makes all the sense in the world. I’m going to apologize in advance for my next question, but I am legally required to ask you about generative AI as a host of a show focused on CFOs. I know this is an area that you’ve developed a lot of expertise in, and you’re very curious about it, and you’re using it to your firm’s competitive advantage, but how does Gen AI change the world for startups as they map their future for their organizations? What’s your philosophy on using it, and what are some of the ways that you’re going to keep using it? What are some of the concerns you have, too, as a financial leader?
It’s a double-edged sword. As a startup, you’re short on funds, you’re short on people, and you’re short on tech. You look at AI, and you say, “Maybe this can help me bridge the gap.” It’s in every tool that we use at this point, just by default. The double-edged sword, though, is that you need to be a little cognizant of, as you’re signing up for various software. In the license agreement, have you explicitly given permission to that tool to now train on your data? If there are trade secrets, it’s in a Word document. I want to make sure that those trade secrets are protected.
There’s become a little bit of a conversation within Oberon about how should we be thinking about AI. Again, it’s embedded in everything. It’s in Zoom now. You can record a meeting just like we’re doing. As you think about various meetings that you have as a leadership team, do you want those meetings recorded? Are you going to be talking about things or sharing information that you don’t want a record of for whatever reason? It just comes back to just be mindful of how are you using the tool. What information are you sharing?
Is this something that, if it got out into the public domain, would cause us harm? Just trying to level-set that. We put in a policy and training last year on that for the Oberon team. That’ll continue to get refined as AI continues to develop. I look at it and say, potentially, I think it’s an opportunity for us because I don’t have a ton of legacy systems to deal with. Our technology is bare bones. As we think about what that next generation of technology looks like for us, I’m hopeful that AI is probably a component of it.
That’ll help me continue to build out the team with an eye toward working smarter. Not necessarily hiring fewer people, but maybe I’m hiring different people onto the team. People that are more analytical and that some of the repetitive stuff can just get handled. Also, I think if we look at it from an operations perspective, we’re operating a facility in Brawley, California, where we make renewable dimethyl ether.
That facility has been operating for a number of years. There’s data there now that, from an AI perspective, we should be able to use in a predictive way that’ll help us identify yields or the tweaks to processes from a maintenance perspective. If you think about when stuff happens in the facility and you have to replace a part. All of that’s tracked. Is there an opportunity now to get smarter about how we think about plant operations? Huge opportunity.
It’s the biggest opportunity and the biggest threat, too. That’s why CFOs have to balance it and then perhaps not pursuing it as aggressively as other members of the C-suite. When I talk to CFOs a lot of times, their first reaction is cybersecurity threats and data privacy type of threats. Perhaps a VP of marketing, not that they’re blasé about it, but it’s probably not a top-of-mind issue of marketing.
They’re not thinking about that.
If you give away your customer’s credit cards or something like that, it’s not too good.
That’s a problem.
Another big role of CFOs that I think is underappreciated is their role as risk mitigator. Again, being a novice, to be kind about my knowledge about your own industry, I’m guessing that perhaps you guys have more risks that CFOs face than some other industries. How do you approach risk mitigation in your role as CFO?
Again, as a startup, we’re doing a lot of firsts. We’re contracting for off-take for a project that we’re trying to build. As you think about an off-take contract and all of the potential what-ifs that can happen there. If it’s a take-or-pay contract and I cannot fulfill my end of the bargain, what does that mean? It becomes the proverbial decision tree. As you think about what level of risk is acceptable for a business like this. If I’m willing to take that risk, how do I offset that risk elsewhere?
I don’t end up with a ton of death by a thousand paper cuts. A ton of tiny little risks that, on their own, would, honestly, not matter, but if you think about how they could potentially all cascade. Worst-case scenario, they all end up happening in a similar timeframe. That could be catastrophic for a business. It’s interesting, too, because I come out of, I’ve worked in larger organizations, and other folks on the team have worked in larger organizations.
We’re balanced with a couple of folks who’ve grown up in Oberon. They, by default, have a smaller view of the world. Again, having those conversations around what this would mean to us. As an organization, how would we deal with it? Again, what would it mean from a financial perspective, a reputational perspective, and an operational perspective? Just trying to hash through all of that is a fascinating exercise to go through and then to document all of those risks. It’s always interesting.
Again, when you’ve someone who’s lived in a larger organization and you read a contract, you have to make sure that you’ve put yourself in the right frame of mind. Something that would have been an appropriate risk at one of my prior employers potentially is not an appropriate risk for Oberon Fuels at its stage. Again, just making sure that you’re thinking through with clarity, what does that mean? Again, as a team, do we have a plan, a way to work through it?
As I said, it’s a bit of an underrated thing, but I’d love to ask a little about Oberon. You told me before we started that it was named after one of the moons of Saturn.
No, Uranus. I guess when the founders were trying to figure out how to name the company, they were focused on a planet that produced a lot of methane, a gassy planet. That would be Uranus. There are 26 moons. This presents lots of opportunities to name projects. Every entity and every project within Oberon is named after one of the moons of Uranus. Not coincidentally, I don’t know, they also tend to be Shakespeare characters as well.
The moons of Uranus are named for Shakespearean characters. I never knew that. I remember in micro, I would name things after the places on a Monopoly board or something like that. I think your team’s a little more intellectual than the two I was.
It’s funny because one of our feedstocks is manure. If you had told me when I joined Oberon that probably one of the most used emojis on our Slack channel is the poo emoji, I would not have believed it but it gets used a lot.
Challenges and Opportunities
Only imagine that it would. There was a fun little detour. I am curious. What are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing your company over the next couple of years? It seems like you might be at a bit of an inflection point, given the relatively recency that you brought in this world-class executive team.
From a challenge perspective, this is not unique to Oberon. Any company where we are always facing that. How do we scale? How do we make sure that we’re not overhiring? We’ve seen plenty of companies that have raised a ton of capital go out. They hire a ton of people, and then they sit there and burn their cash, and that they just hired too early or they didn’t hire the right people. That’s a separate conversation.
One of the things that I had talked about with Rebecca when I joined, and we’ve tried to institute, is milestone-based hiring. What is the trigger that justifies adding this headcount? As we think about trying to get these two projects to FID, Financial Investment Decision, and then start in construction, when should we hire the plant manager? When should we then start to hire the operations folks to bring them on board and trying to tie it to commercial operations and move back?
COD minus six months or whatever is really how we’re looking at it. Adding folks to the engineering team. If we’re going to have these two projects in construction, but we have three others that we’re trying to move through development, through front-end engineering and design. What is the milestone that we need to hit in order to unlock additional engineering hires trying to approach it from that perspective?
A company like Oberon, again, not unique to us, anybody that’s in the renewable energy space or the biofuel space, I think we’re hoping for some additional clarity. Given the new administration, there have been some rules that were finally guidance issued for some of the PTCs, Production Tax Credits. I think we’re waiting to see ultimately how the Inflation Reduction Act gets treated as a result of maybe the Tax Cut and Jobs Act getting extended.
Do things come out in the wash? As part of reconciliation there, are things like that. Again, a lot of these things are emerging markets. We produce renewable dimethyl ether, which has a number of end uses for it. You can blend it into propane to lower the carbon intensity. It can be reformed to make hydrogen and can be transported in existing infrastructure.
Solves a huge problem there. Is the market for hydrogen, is it that robust? No, it continues to evolve. We’ll have to wait and see how some of these things play out and just make sure that, again, you remain nimble enough as an organization that you’re ready to take advantage and continue to drive where you can in the market as opportunities present themselves.
I think that’s great. One thing that is a challenge for CFOs is they’re solving it, but it used to almost be strategy and finance, separate buckets. As a CFO, you’re probably the only person in your company unless you’re one in 100 companies where the CEO used to be a CFO who’s both a strategic thinker and a financial expert. How do you make sure that the finance and the strategy don’t live separately, that they support each other and understand the realities of each other?
I guess I look at it and say, at the end of the day, it all comes home to roost in the numbers. To keep them separate, to me, doesn’t make a lot of sense. I look at it and say, “I want to be the strategic partner to the business.” If I’m not part of the strategy conversation, if I don’t understand it or if it’s happening elsewhere and then we find out about it later, it’s a little counterintuitive.
It feels like you’re automatically setting the business up with one hand tied behind its back. I think where it can be a little challenging is pulling the conversation to a place where strategy can mean lots of things. Lots of big ideas. How do we take that big idea and grounded in a place where we can get to an actionable plan? Take it from just the big idea, this thing in the ether, to how are going to do it? What does that mean? What’s the timeframe to do that? Is it a multi-year thing? Is it a six-month thing? How do you translate the big idea into an actionable plan?
Again, finance can support. We said we were going to do this. We’re not seeing that in the numbers. We said we were going to invest X number of dollars. Looks like we’ve spent two X. Are we seeing the results that we anticipated as a result of that investment? That’s how you be the partner to the business. Now, understand the plan and then try to find the tripwires, if you will, that tell you if you’re not going in the right direction and bring that back to the business. Again, we can make actionable decisions.
That makes a lot of sense. I’m curious, what are some of your favorite, but not obvious, KPIs that you use to measure success at your company? You want a traditional CFO. You mentioned growing up in FP&A and in treasury as opposed to grew up in controllership. I’m assuming you’re probably a fan of KPIs to get a better understanding of the business.
Honestly, at this point, because we are in growth mode and we’re focused on fundraising to get these two projects built, I think from a KPI perspective, it’s burn rate. Are we spending faster or slower than what we originally expected to spend? For the operating facility that we have in Brawley, we do focus on ultimately yield. Is the process converting as much dimethyl ether as what we expected? We use a particular catalyst to help do that.
We’re focused as well. Are we using more or less catalyst than what we expected? It also comes down to capital that’s been raised to date. Again, are we deploying capital effectively? We’re still in that early growth mode where I don’t have a roster of typical KPIs that I’d be focused on. When these projects get built, there’s a whole host that comes to mind around production and uptime and versus nameplate capacity and all of that, but we’re not there yet.
One thing that I find admirable about you is you’ve always found time, and you’ve got a lot going on as a CFO for these. They’ve all been transformative when you’ve worked for them, but you’ve always found time to do philanthropic-type work. You’re on the board of Bancroft. I’d love to understand a little about your role there and maybe what attracted you to taking that particular organization on.
I was fortunate. I met Toni Pergolin, who is the CEO of Bancroft, through another organization that I’m part of, the Forum of Executive Women. Toni was looking for board members. It is incredibly hard to get folks to join a not-for-profit board. She was looking specifically for folks in New Jersey. I was employed at SJI at the time, but who could help advance the growth of the organization?
Bancroft has been around for well over a hundred years and serves a, I’ll call it a neurodiverse community, folks that perhaps have traumatic brain injury. They may be autistic or have some other cognitive issue going on. We serve our individuals through a combination of school, in-home programs, residential programs, etc.
She was trying to figure out how do we steer this organization forward. It is at the end of the day, it relies on government funding. Typically from the state. They were seeing an influx of folks from around the country. If there’s no opportunity or facility in your state that can serve your particular need, then your state typically looks elsewhere. They were seeing opportunities to take folks from literally around the country. They had raised public debt. Again, as a not-for-profit organization, but raising debt in the public markets to fund growth.
I appreciated the mission. You don’t understand until you have the opportunity to see firsthand how impactful this can be for families. Families struggle to find care for these individuals, and it can tear families apart. Again, you don’t appreciate it until you have the opportunity to see it firsthand. I thought the mission was just admirable. I’m happy to give my time and proud to sit on the board with lots of other smart people.
As the father of two autistic adults, I do want to thank you and the organization for doing what you do because I can attest to the difficulty families have. As you might imagine, I’m a reasonably well-connected person. I have lived here my whole life. Even for me, it’s very difficult to get the services that my children need and deserve.
I always like to close our episodes with any advice that you might have for the next generation of CFOs. Things you’ve learned over the years that you just love to pass on and people who are maybe in their first-ever CFO role are going to achieve that in the next month or year. You’d like them to know to help them be successful.
I think I’ll answer it in two ways if you don’t mind. For people who are early in your career. To be honest with you, when I was much earlier in my career, people would say to me, “Are you interested in being the CFO?” I’d be like, “No, that’s accounting. I don’t want to do that.” I think the role is so much more than that. It’s just that the accounting piece, the thing that I said up front that I didn’t want to, I didn’t like to do, and I didn’t want to ever do again.
In reality, it is not the lion’s share of the job if you have the right team. Take the opportunity to learn as much as you can, not only about whatever your particular job is but how it relates to the other jobs around you. There’s something to learn in every task that you do, regardless of how repetitive or silly it might seem at the time. There’s something to learn there that you can apply to something in the future. You just have to trust and go with that. For someone who I think is a little closer to the CFO role, I think it’s important to stretch.
I was very comfortable raising capital, $9 billion. At one point, it just seemed like it became fairly rote. For me, it was important to get out of my comfort zone. Key Capture was getting out of my comfort zone, getting out of a large company, and having to go back to rolling up your sleeves. I had two people who were amazing, but that was my staff, and getting to, again, stepping back, peeling back the onion, rolling up your sleeves, doing the work, having to raise capital for a company that is startup stage is very different than one that is an investment-grade utility been around forever. It forces you to get out of muscle memory and relearn how to do it.
I think it’s important to figure out a way to challenge yourself. Take some experiences or opportunities to do something that is just a little different because it forces you to think differently. Sitting in this seat, you have to think differently. You cannot just rely on it, this is how I’ve always done it. Again, because whether it’s a turnaround situation, it’s a growth company like I’m in, it’s a company where everything is firing on all cylinders. You have to think differently in order to stay ahead. Otherwise, you will fall behind. Somebody else is going to sit in that seat and think differently.
That’s some wonderful advice. I know you have a lot going on, busy with everything you do, but if you have a moment, I’d just love to give you the chance for the final word.
We talked about a lot. I guess the final thing that I will say is I love my job, and hopefully that comes across. To me, it is not a job. It’s just what I do. I hope that for anybody, that’s what you find, because then it’s something you enjoy and that comes through in your work.
