Lee Tsukroff, CFO and COO of Thorne, a health and wellness company focusing on nutritional supplements, personalized health diagnostics and wellness testing, joins host Jack McCullough to share how he’s helping shape the future of consumer wellness by blending financial discipline with purpose-driven innovation. From Unilever to Ben & Jerry’s to leading Thorne’s mission of personalized health, Lee reflects on his career journey, what it takes to lead operationally as a CFO and how AI and personalization are transforming the supplement space.
Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.
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We have a great guest, so I’m going to get right into it. I’m joined by Lee Tsukroff. Lee is the CFO of Thorne. Thorne is where health and nutrition intersect. The company empowers individuals to live healthier and longer lives through personalized science-backed health and wellness solutions for optimal performance. What could be more important than that? Lee, welcome to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs.
Thanks for having me.
Glad to do it. I usually butcher company descriptions. Although, as a user of your company, I don’t think I was too bad, but maybe you can fill in a few of the details that I left out, given my tendency to oversimplify things.
I’m sure my chief growth officer and brand officer would welcome me rather than you to have the opportunity to talk about where we’re at. Thorne is a company that’s been around for 40 years. Many people don’t look at Thorne as a company that has been there. We are a practitioner-led business. Back in the day, we started with naturopathic doctors. Supplementation back in 1985 was not what it is now. It has gone quite a long way.
What Thorne has done is we’ve kept the scientific, the clinical and the efficacy of the product where it started, so we are highly recommended by practitioners. That served as a catalyst once we started getting into our direct-to-consumer business and auditing the net. Within Thorne, we want to make sure we’re using the highest and best quality ingredients that are clinically-backed and scientifically-backed in order to give the consumer the best experience when they enter supplementation. We feel that Thorne has that differentiation in the market, having the best of who we were, who we are now and who we’re going to continue to be.
It’s a fascinating company. I’m looking forward to exploring it. Before we get into that, I’d like to chat a little about your own personal background. Where did you grow up?
I was a kid from the Bronx, New York. The family was all from New York. From there, I moved to Northern New Jersey. When people say, “Where are you from?” Typically, I’ll say I’m a Northeast New Jersey guy. I might get, depending on who’s looking across, some scowls of, “You’re one of those guys.” I would say to all people in the state of New Jersey that it is a great state to do a few things. We had grown up in Northern Jersey. It was my first stop along the way.
All you folks from the Bronx can’t help but mention the Yankees in a conversation. You know I’m from Boston, right? A lot of suffering at the hands of the Yankees in my childhood.
For whom I root for, and we won’t get too deep in, I’m the other New York team, which is a different story, or maybe a different episode. If you invite me back, I can tell you a little bit more about that.
I look forward to that because 1986 still hurts all these years later. Tell me a little about you when you grew up. You went to college. What did you study?
I studied at the University of Maryland. I came from a family that was middle-class. If I look back, I would say maybe at times, it was lower middle. It certainly wasn’t towards the upper. I came from a hardworking family. My father was a credit manager in a family furniture business. It wasn’t our business. He always talked about the things that he did. It was less about credit, but the stories he came back with. He worked in a town in Northern Jersey called Patterson. When I went to school in Maryland, I was looking at studying finance and getting into a career, which I thought was a Wall Street career, but I made the move from where I was down to the Bos-Wash area.
Your father worked in a furniture store in Patterson, New Jersey?
Correct.
It’s interesting. I don’t know if you ever heard the Harry Houdini thing. Harry Houdini died mysteriously, and there was a conspiracy of the vein that Elvis Presley was alive. There was a furniture salesman in Patterson, New Jersey, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Houdini. People were convinced that Harry Houdini faked his death and worked at a furniture store in Patterson, New Jersey.
My father is still with us. I’ll have to ask him that.
Ask him if he has heard that story. When you were a kid, what was your first job?
My first job was a busboy at the local Red Lobster in the town I grew up in. I was clocking shift after shift to put more money in my pocket to put away to buy my first car and have some fun outside. As a busboy in early high school, what was great about it was that there was plenty of food in the back if you got in with some of the kitchen staff, so I was never short of eating decently. It was a great first experience.
I would add, too, that because I wanted to put as much money in my pocket at the time as possible, one of my managers asked me if I wanted to paint the outside of the Red Lobster. What business do I have painting the outside of Red Lobster? He came with cans of paint, a ladder and brushes. I clearly oversold what I thought I could do. It took me many days to do that. That was my first experience, not only busing, but I ended up painting the outside of the Red Lobster.
How about that? That’s so cool. It’s confidence. That thing serves you well in your professional life. Even though you had no qualifications, you went and did it, so good for you. You mentioned your first car. What was that?
My first car was a 1969 Camaro. It is a very cool car. My father had picked up an old one on the cheap, and then we bought car parts. I took my time and walked into quite a few junkyards. I learned a lot about cars. My father was an Army mechanic back in the day, so I learned quite a bit about it. It was fun bonding with family, and also learning things that I never knew about. I’ll talk about that in my financial career. It’s about getting into things and not having to muster up the courage to do things that you’re not as comfortable with.
That’s great. I want to talk a little about your career because you’ve had a fantastic career progression. One of your early, more senior roles was with Melissa & Doug. Maybe you can tell us a little about what that was, and maybe some of the mentors you had there who made an impact on your career.
What I’ll do is take maybe a step before them because Melissa & Doug were right before I came into Thorne, which is important. A bulk of my career has been in consumer goods. When I got out of undergrad, I was looking at banking. I had a short stint with Bear Stearns in the banking days. I then moved from Bear to Nabisco and got into consumer goods, which was neat. I had an opportunity to get out into real-life factories and see how things were being made.
I was the son, compared to my other siblings, who brought home Oreos and crackers. They didn’t care what I did as long as I came home with boxes of food. I got into a lot of cash flow forecasting at that point, and then moved my way into Unilever over a long career. If I think about mentors, things that I’ve done, and people, I separate them into a couple of different blocks. The things that I’ve done, the people I’ve done them with, and who was influential, if that’s okay.
If I look at the things that I’ve done, I spent a lot of time in finance. As an early finance professional, I have done things such as cost accounting, financial planning and reporting, and cash flow budgeting. I took a stint in the Treasury to learn a little bit more about how things work in a big corporation. I got involved in acquisitions, not being the one to look at bringing the company in, but to do the due diligence on it quite a bit, which helped in broadening my understanding of business overall. I did a bit of supply chain as well.
One of the guys who was influential in my career was a gentleman named Mike Polk. Mike was the CEO of the business in the Americas, which includes North and Latin America. Mike was not a finance guy, but recognized the importance of finance. He taught me and guided me to be a financial professional second and a business professional first. I took a lot of insight from that and that experience to be the best you can be as an enterprise leader before getting into your technical or your functional areas.
That mentor you mentioned, where was that?
That was at Unilever. Mike came in. He was a Kraft guy. He came in at a senior level within the Unilever business. At that time, we worked on consolidating quite a lot of businesses. They were bringing a lot of companies together. Mike ultimately got the big job, running the whole North American business and then the Americas business in North and Latin America. That’s where he and I first connected. I’ll talk about a connection to him a little bit later as my career went on.
Unilever, if I have my facts right, was your first-ever CFO job. Every CFO has their first-ever CFO job. Tell me a little about that learning experience. Did you feel you were well prepared for it? What were the big surprises along the way?
I appreciate that question. What I’ll say to people sometimes is that you don’t know you’re in the right role if you don’t have a nervous pit in your stomach, if you will. When you’re asked to take on a role that’s a little bit bigger than what you’ve done before, there is a little bit of uncertainty. Although you know each one of the pieces you need to do, the magic comes together with how you tie in all the experiences you’ve had to become that CFO and that leader, not just being good at what goes on in the factory, budgeting or planning.
I was the CFO of our North American ice cream business. We had brands like Ben & Jerry’s in that business, as well as Klondike and Breyers, if you’re from the Northeast. That was an amazing opportunity to get in with a business that needed a bit of fixing and working with some great people that I’m still close with along the way. I came in as CFO and partnered up with a few different people.
Similar to my comment on Nabisco about Oreos, cookies and crackers, when I went to Bring Your Father to School Day with my kids, coming in there with tie-dyed Ben & Jerry’s shirts and ice cream overruled the firemen, the policemen or anyone else in the building. It was a cool opportunity at the time.
I can imagine. How many children do you have?
I have two boys who are both in the city doing their own thing.
I would imagine coming with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream would make you very popular on Bring Your Father to School Day.
I’m not sure it helped them out in school, but it was neat while I was there.
I have to compliment you. In this conversation, you’ve listed about seven foods that one might describe as junk food. People reading can’t tell, but Lee is in extremely good shape. That’s not part of how your daily eating habits are.
One of the things I say if we’re going to meet people around is that things in motion stay in motion. I think about business as well with that. How do you take momentum and continue to drive with it, regardless of what business you are in? I appreciate that.
No problem. Before we get into the role a little more, I’d like to chat a little bit about leadership lessons along the way. You’ve worked in Melissa & Doug and Unilever, two great brands. You’ve worked with some great companies along the way. What did you learn from a leadership perspective that’s helped you excel in the role?
The question hits at the heart of what I believe in and maybe some of my values. I would start with authenticity. One of the things I do when I come into new teams is I take a visual. I put a bunch of animated pictures there, like cartoons, places I lived in, teams I like, and my wife and the two boys. On the bottom right, I have the words authentic, transparent and open doors.
When I think about leadership lessons, those are the three that are foundational. I don’t believe, without having those as a leader, that anything I say next will come out. When I think about leadership lessons, be the expert that you need to be in the technical area that you’re in, but listen to ideas and thoughts. Don’t go in with a preconceived notion that you know the things that maybe somebody else is telling you genuinely. It sounds a little cliché, but it’s almost the listen twice and talk once type of concept that I would bring in.
Also, the other leadership is to be prepared to say yes. A lot of CFOs might have a mystique when they’re talking with investors. The CFO may not want to go do something. I want to be a giver of spend, a giver of opportunity and a giver of ROI. A leader is always looking past the question that somebody’s asking you or past the topic. It’s about two or three steps forward. Those are some of the things that I think about as I lead the teams that I lead.
That’s fantastic. You’re with Thorne. I’d love to understand a little about how that opportunity came about. What about it was appealing to you?
I’ll take a step back. When I left Unilever, I worked for Newell Brands for a couple of years. Mike Polk, the mentor I mentioned, was the CEO down there. I worked for him for a little bit. It was a big CPG. It wasn’t at the level of Unilever as a $50 billion company. It was about $6 billion. Different channels, different products and different customers, but the playbook was a lot of the same that I’ve done before.
I had an opportunity to join Melissa & Doug. At the time, it was about a $300 million privately held business. I was working with the founders. I got into this purpose-driven business about real play, screen-free. At that point, I had full operational ownership and full financial ownership of that business. I did that for a couple of years. We sold that business to a second investor who wanted me to stay on.
During that tenure, what I learned was that you can have a purpose-driven business and still make money, drive and move forward. I knew that from my prior days, but it left a remnant with me that I wanted to take to my next opportunity. In Q4 of 2023, we had agreed to sell the business, and I knew I wasn’t going to want to stay with the big corporation that bought us.
I had an opportunity to learn about Thorne. L Catterton is our investor. I met with my business partner, boss and CEO, Colin Watts. I was looking for an opportunity to get into a brand that can do well with people, whether it’s helping kids grow and develop. In our category, which I touched on a little bit earlier, consumer wellness is about helping people stay healthy longer. It’s about healthy aging and performance.
If I think about those three together, along with what we’re trying to do in the business, it was exciting to have the opportunity to come here. For me, that was the first thing outside of the significant growth opportunity this business has. When I did get into the market, I had a great opportunity to look at Thorne as a brand. I loved the brand. I loved what it did. I loved the purpose. It landed me in a great opportunity once I got on the ground.
On the website, the phrase that caught my attention is you’re redefining what it means to live healthier and longer. It doesn’t get much better than that, I suppose.
It hits us all on different levels, whether you’re a 20-year-old who is going to the gym every day, you’re a woman in her 30s doing Pilates or you’re in your 40s and you’re a professional who’s playing pickleball at night. No matter where you are, we believe that Thorne can meet you on that journey. It’s cool to be part of that.
That’s great. I noticed you have the CFO and COO roles at Thorne. Is the CFO role not challenging enough for you? Is that it? Are you a little bored with just one job?
I wish that would be the case. I appreciate that. When I came in, I came in as CFO. The company was going through with the investor. They took the business private. We put in a whole slew of new leadership. The former CEO was moving on. I had an opportunity given my background, having spent a lot of time around the supply chain. I’ve worked in the supply chain at Unilever.
Not just touring distribution centers and factories, but having worked in manufacturing facilities, I was given the opportunity to take on the COO as well as the CFO role. In my CFO role, I have IT working underneath me as well. I think about taking those pillars, if you will. I’m working on decision-making about how to make things move forward more quickly. It can almost be done instantaneously. When I’m speaking with my CEO or other members of my leadership team, what I can bring to the table is a holistic perspective. It’s not just about, “We need this as an ROI.” It is investing in capability, capacity and quality. If you’re looking at a CFO, they shouldn’t be opposed to one another. What I’m able to do is bring that together and talk to the business in a fulsome way each and every time I’m interacting with anyone.
I’m seeing more CFOs take on those operational and strategic roles. I think that’s great because they bring so much to bear to that role. You can’t do that unless you can completely trust the finance and accounting team around you. You have to have a world-class team if you want to be operational and take on COO-type responsibilities. I’m curious. What’s your philosophy on building a world-class team?
That’s right. If you look at talent, the importance of having the right talent, and the right people in the chair, the adage of the triangle about people process enabled by great technology in finance goes a tremendously long way. The first thing, and you said it well, is about how you can’t be trusted and valued outside if you can’t do the things that you’re getting paid to do well. It is building simple and straightforward processes in the business that enable the business to understand how we do business planning, as well as finding the right people.
I’ve brought in some strong talent around financial planning, strategic finance and the controlling function in order to do that. While Thorne was in the public market, there were a lot of things that needed to be changed and needed to be fixed. Not a blunt instrument approach to break everything apart, but a little bit more surgical to make sure that we can build the right capability. When I say capability, what I mean is having the data and the insight available.
In my office, what you would see is on the board, it goes from data to information to insight to action. One of the things in my role is moving from data to action as quickly as possible. There’s a lot of great data out there and a lot of great information, but what is it telling you? In finance, there’s the control side of the business that must get done, but it’s also about forward-looking insights. It’s important, as I built the team, to make sure that we’re always thinking of forward-looking insights, not just the control of the business.
That makes sense. One thing you mentioned earlier was your relationship with Colin Watts, the CEO of the company. He’s the one who hired you. My members, the one thing that they ask me probably more than anything else, is, “How do you build an effective partnership with the CEO? CFOs, for years, have said the most important partnership they have is with the CEO. Rightly so, I suppose, but it’s been reciprocated. CEOs didn’t necessarily view the CFO as the most important partner until the last few years. That doesn’t just come naturally, and it’s not just because you have the right title. How do you build a productive, strategic relationship?
I love that topic, and I love that question. If you look at financial professionals and speak to other CFOs, a lot of them, in their own way, will probably say that the function has moved so far towards the control aspect to the business partner aspect and the strategic partner. For me, with Colin, and having worked with many different CEOs, the reason why I came to Thorne, or one of the reasons, was that he’s got an unbelievable consumer background. He brings to the table the vision of where he wants to take the company. I recognize, as a business partner, that he can get into any lane he wants to get into, but he gives degrees of freedom.
Why we’re successful is that I feel like we both have radical candor for one another. There’s nothing that he won’t say to me or that I won’t say to him in a safe environment. He and I are aligned with the CEO on where we want to get to. Are there times when how we want to get there might be different? Absolutely, but that’s where the candor and alignment come in.
He and I are able to have those conversations. It doesn’t mean we need to agree on everything along the way, but the destination and the North Star we’re trying to get to are certainly and fully the same. That helps because if you don’t have the destination locked in, you can be zigging and zagging. That could breed frustration. Certainly, trust is earned, but the trust he has for the function and the trust he has when I come to him is not about trying to increase EBITDA for the sake of EBITDA. Some of my team would smile when they read this. I mentioned I want to be a giver of investment. He and I work together to do that day in and day out.
That sounds good. One of the challenges, too, that CFOs have is making sure that finance and strategy talk to each other, so to speak, and that they don’t live in silos. Strategy takes into account the financial realities, and finance is there to support the strategy or strategic execution. It sounds like you probably have a good feel for that. What tips can you give our readers on how to make sure those two are blending?
Strategy needs to be transformed into action. I do think there needs to be the right metrics and deliverables for that strategy. It is knowing what great looks like in the strategy. Great could mean we’re raising awareness from X to Y. Great could mean our performance marketing is working at a certain level. Great could mean our gross margins are growing.
Taking a strategy and breaking it down into tactics, and then those tactics have metrics to them, is incredibly important. The role of the CFO is that she or he should be the one that should be doing that. It’s great that we want to double the size of the business. It’s aspirational, but how do we do that? How do we break it down into pieces? The way that I operate is always thinking about the destination, and then planning it back right to left. If you think like that, a lot of times, you’ll figure out that you’re going to need to do something earlier than maybe you thought you were going to have to, and you can anticipate a little bit earlier.
That’s great. That leads me to a question. I’m curious. You’re a non-CPA CFO. I was a CPA when I was a CFO. They both bring different strengths. I’m imagining that you deal a lot with KPIs, particularly when you’re dealing with non-financial types. What are some of the favorite KPIs you have to frankly help run your business effectively?
If you look at a balanced scorecard, we’ll have KPIs of our own brand, KPIs around people and KPIs around the P&L. In consumer goods, the one KPI, P&L-wise, in consumer goods that is incredibly important is gross margin, the fuel for growth. There are companies that, if you don’t have that KPI as a gross margin, you’re not going to be able to grow.
In our business, I look at brand investment, decomposing it in terms of working, non-working and what we are doing. Brands that are starved for brand investment will go the opposite way. Any CFO knows that she or he can deliver a quarter, a half, or a year by looking at brands. Brand metrics are incredibly important to look at.
One of the key ones is employee engagement. How engaged are the employees in the business when we think about achieving the strategy of the company? You could be on a great leadership team. You could be with great leaders. What I’ve seen is that if the organization that you’re working with doesn’t understand where you want to get to, and they’re not as engaged, you won’t be able to deliver those results.
If I think about SG&A, time to close, things that promote efficiency within finance, records and reports, some of these small metrics that are two or three clicks underneath are incredibly important to make sure you have the right financial control, if you will, of the business. If your company has debt, you might look at compliance and leverage in a different way. You might look at working capital in a different way. If it were the top three, it would be about gross margin effectiveness. Are we feeding the brand at the level that we want to feed it, as well as do we have an engaged employee base to help deliver the strategy?
That sounds good. You’re making my next question easy because I could lose my license if I don’t ask a CFO about generative AI. It turns out you’re using it directly with your consumers on their health and wellness journey. I’d love to understand what that’s all about and how your consumers are benefiting. Do you call them consumers or customers?
Consumers. AI is overtaking us. It’s a tidal wave in a positive way. What we believe in at Thorne is about personalization. Personalization doesn’t mean that I’m creating a supplement just for Jack. Personalization means if Jack had trouble sleeping and he falls asleep, but he wakes up in the middle of the night, or somebody else has a gut issue, or somebody else is a little bit fatigued.
What Thorne is looking to do is meet the consumer where they are. By using our 40-year practitioner heritage, all the information we have from our science team, and all the clinical information, we are creating an ecosystem of personalization that we can serve up to our consumers in a way that, via AI, they can interface with that information more cleanly.
It’s not about AI replacing the scientific and clinical bases. It’s about serving it up via AI in a way that we can answer Jack’s question much more quickly and much more matter-of-factly with all the information. Some of the things that you’ll see being rolled out, we’re excited to be taking some of this on. We see this as a breakthrough within our category and in the company. Using AI in that respect to meet our business needs is incredibly important.
The other side of it is in the day-to-day that we encourage in the business, like, “How do I get the things done that used to take me this long and compress it to do it even shorter?” The main piece for us is using AI to serve it up, not replacing, at least in our category, the efficacy that we’ve built up over the history of Thorne.
That makes sense. I want to ask you about this a little bit because you’re in an industry and work for a company that is very competitive, always evolving, and always innovating. You want to invest in those things to hold your position. On the same hand, you’re a finance person at heart. I interviewed another CFO. I used words like financial discipline. She corrected me and said, “I’m just chief,” but I don’t think she is, despite that. How do you manage those two things, where you want to grow and invest in the R&D and innovative products that you need to stay competitive, and yet, you need to do it in a way that’s very fiscally responsible?
When I speak to the leadership team, there’s a lot of, “I want to do. I need to do.” I break it down into, is it aligned with the strategic profile of our business, number one? Are we meddling in something that is non-value-add? First, for me, in my order of operations of thinking, is it tied to our strategic intent? If it is tied to the strategic intent, it’s always about the multiple ways we can play in that space. Is it a build versus a buy? Do we need to go out and invest at a deep level now, or can we earn our way into investing over time?
We’ll look at DCF modeling and straight ROI. There are some investments, particularly in a business like ours. We believe that in getting Thorne supplements into consumers, we’re going to have to spend more on the brand level. When you start spending upper funnel brand investment, it becomes something a bit more difficult to measure and track.
Tie it to strategy. Make sure you have the metrics where you can measure, “Have I been successful or not?” Make sure that you’ve evaluated more than one option when it comes to that. I do believe in the optionality of looking at different ways to play before you go out there to invest. Lastly, it’s okay to be bold. Understand the unintended consequences of a bad decision. What’s going to happen with a bad decision? There are decisions that may not work out, whether it’s an acquisition or some investment, but don’t let it determine your business outcome. Make sure you’re holistically thinking about it.
I want to ask you if you are a fan of UFC.
We do partner with UFC.
That’s why I asked.
I was at one of the events. I was part of the partnership. I’m aware of it because we’re invested in it. Before Thorne, and I’m not sure if my UFC partners would love it if I said it, I’ve heard about it more from my kids. I’m aware of it, but it’s quite an experience going to see my first UFC event. What I take away from UFC is the performance side of it.
What we do with UFC is all about investing in the performance of the athlete. What’s neat, working with the UFC, is that the UFC, unlike other professional sports organizations, mandates what their athletes can use. It’s great they’re using Thorne. It was great that the winner was a Thorne athlete. That’s a great question. Albeit with a little smile, UFC is highly interesting.
Good for them. Some people may think the worst, but they’ve gone years without any doping-type situations. It’s a very clean company.
They take that very seriously. If you look at Thorne and other great brands they work with, it is high in terms of the quality, efficacy, and all the certifications, so they don’t run into issues.
I want to switch gears a little bit. I know you and your wife do some philanthropic work together. The whole having a life outside of work is easier said than done, but tell us a little about some of those philanthropic things that you do together.
I appreciate it. If we look at family, family is important to us. If I look at a couple of areas that family members have been stricken with, either chronic illness or disease, what we try to do is get involved with those charitable organizations and lead certain things with them. Without necessarily naming the two, we do participate and make sure that we can give back.
It’s less about cutting the check, but it’s about how we can help these organizations think differently about doing things in a way that they can bring and promote the things that they want to bring. It does feel good. Doing good feels good. There’s this full circle aspect of it. I’m not a karma guy. I do believe that you can influence your own outcomes. It is something that’s important to her and me.
I’m like you, though. I’m not a karma guy. If I do good things, it’s because I want to do good things. Bringing it back, I have one final question for you. You’ve had a great career. You learned a lot. I’m sure you’ve been a great mentor to people along the way. What’s some advice that you would like to share with our readers who are in the pre-CFO type mode? What are the things that they should be thinking about to have a lucrative, healthy, and impactful career?
There are several different things that I would say. I’ll approach it through a couple of different lenses. Some apertures will be a little bit wider than others. The first would be, don’t be afraid to take roles early in your career or even mid-career that other people don’t want to take. Do things that are going to differentiate you. Differentiation is important. It doesn’t mean to act differently. It means to have another notch on your tool belt.
There are some people who might not want to work in a manufacturing facility because it’s a manufacturing facility. There is somebody who might not want to move to an area for different reasons or get into a particular role. Some roles are differentiated, which gets your stomach a little bit knotted up. That helps.
The second would be, as you move forward in your career, if you are seeking to be a CFO, you do not have to be a technical expert in everything, but you need to know enough about what you need to know. Have the discipline and the courage to raise your hand when you don’t know something and bring it in there. Be humble in terms of how you think you approach. The third is to lean into decisions. When you’re passionate about something, listen, act, and lean into it. As a CFO, don’t sit in the background. CFOs are not just there to say, “Does this number make sense?” or, “Does this number work?” Lean into strategy.
The last one would be, be an enterprise leader first. It’s much easier said when you’re later in your career, but if you think of yourself as, “I am a business leader first across my business of which I’m the CFO or I’m a financial professional, I’m going to put context around everything I do in a way that’s going to be the right thing for the business,” you will increase your credibility significantly with the rest of the business around you. You’re not just looking at, “I have to do a budget exercise.” It’s about, “What investment do we need to drive the business forward?” If you dial it back in, you’re going to bring people around you much more quickly than you would otherwise.
That’s great advice. This has been a lot of fun. I’m sure that the readers are going to get some great stuff out of it. You get a lot going on, so I want to take a moment to thank you for being here. Also, I’d like to offer you the final word.
The final word where I would leave is lean in. Don’t wait for things to come to you. Find the things that you’re passionate about. Step forward, lean in and take the risk. I appreciate the time. This has been a lot of fun with you. It was nice to see you.
