There is nothing more exciting than earning a profit while making a positive difference in the world. Hetu Patel is the CFO of a mission-driven company that does exactly that: Thrive Market. He joins Jack McCullough to share how the membership-based online platform for healthy food balances purpose and profitability to commit to their long-term goal of making sustainable living more accessible and affordable for everyone. Patel also shares what his 12-year tenure at Amazon taught him about fostering fungible talents, making bold bets and continuously improving decision-making.
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, Rockstars, to another episode of the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. Hetu Patel is the CFO of Thrive Market. Thrive Market is an online membership that makes healthy living easy. Since its founding in 2014, Thrive Market has become a touchstone of a mission-driven company at scale. In 2024, the company generated more than $700 million in sales, delivering the highest quality, healthy food and sustainable products at affordable prices. Hetu, welcome to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs.
Thanks, Jack. Thanks for having me.
I mentioned before that I have family members who are big fans. They think what I do for a living is boring, but they’re going to be tuning in. No question about it. I can oversimplify things a little bit. Maybe you could share a little bit more about Thrive Market’s mission. You can share your own mission, too, if you’re so inclined.
You captured it pretty well, but we are a membership-based online platform offering the highest quality, healthy, sustainable products. Our mission is to make healthy and sustainable living easy and accessible to all. If you look at the world we live in today, millions of Americans are trying to live healthily, who have indicated wellness as their top priority.
There are several barriers to living that lifestyle today. The first one of those is that it’s time-consuming. People cannot find and shop for healthier products easily. In many cases, half of the American households are not within driving distance of a health food store. For many, it is confusing, not because of a lack of information, but often due to contradicting information. While online solutions solve for it, not all online solutions are very sustainable.
When Thrive Market was started, a little over 10 years ago now, it was with our mission and with the goal to break down all these barriers. We’ve purpose-built our platform to do that. For a $60 annual membership, members get access to a curated assortment of 6,500 or so better-for-you consumer staples, including more than 600 own-brand products that we have carefully innovated. That’s a bit about Thrive Market.
I love it when there’s a mission-focused company that’s making money too, that’s for businesses. It’s great when you can make money and make the world a better place at the same point in time. It’s such a critical thing because, myself and so many people I know, the effort is real. We are trying to lead healthy lifestyles, but it’s difficult. I probably eat within the top 10 percent healthy, and yet I’m perpetually embattling my weight, and I’m diabetic, and sometimes it’s frustrating. Thank you for making it a little bit easier for people to achieve their goals that way. Before we get into it, because I do think the company is fascinating, I want to get into your own background a little bit. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a town in Eastern India. It’s called Jamshedpur. It’s also known as the steel city of India, where, as the name suggests, there’s a lot of steel production happening. It also happens to be a place where one of the top business schools is located. My father was a finance professor at that business school, XLRI. I grew up in the residential complex right on the campus of that business school. By nature of that, an early childhood experience was a lot of conversations with my dad, who was a finance professor. At that point in time, I never thought I wanted to be in finance, but it had something to do with where I landed.
Another childhood memory, which over time had a greater impact on me than it had early on, was my mom. She had a couple of ways. She led our household. One was avoiding waste. She would not let anybody in the family waste food, water, or electricity. She was almost on our heels for that, and then eating clean. It was a rare occasion when we ate outside. We would eat anything, but it was largely prepared at home. A lot of what that bit was taken for granted then, but it had lasting impressions throughout my career thereafter.
When did you make it to the United States?
Right after high school. My family moved here in 2000. I completed high school. We moved to Columbus, Ohio, and I started my undergrad at Ohio State thereafter.
You referred to it as Ohio State. I was going to ask you, because you’re the first person everybody always calls the Ohio State.
Simply to avoid that comment, but it is the Ohio State. I think it’s officially the Ohio State now.
In the NFL, when the players introduce themselves, Joe Smith, the Ohio State University, but that’s the actual official name, and that’s how they brand themselves. It’s like the Juilliard School or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There are only a few that I could think of that do that thing. Anyway, you studied computer science, which in 2025 was probably a masterstroke for a CFO. It’s digital savvy, about as important as finance and accounting for the CFO at this point. What made you pick computer science? Did you envision a career in finance at that point?
I did not envision a career in finance. I love programming, and I thought that was what I was going to do. I love the program for multiple reasons. It’s fascinating how you can break down a complex problem into logical components, solving those components in a very logical, analytical manner. The sheer power of programming to solve large-scale problems and make lives easier was fascinating.
I still love that aspect of tech today. I was fortunate enough to be on campus and be able to take other courses. There was always this bit of curiosity. I minored in economics, took a lot of business classes. My vision then was to pursue a career in tech. It was my first job after school that opened up more of an interest in broader business aspects and subsequently finance. That was my undergrad focus at Ohio State.
I noticed you did an internship along the way in Zambia.
That was much later, during my MBA summer break, which was a wonderful project. Back to sustainability. It was about helping a nonprofit organization scale a business idea. Somewhat, it relates to Thrive Market as well, like focusing on the triple bottom line, people, planet, profit. The idea was simple, and I’ll briefly mention it. One of the researchers had found a way to reduce human-wildlife conflict by growing pepper. This person, a PhD, happened to be part of the family that owns Tabasco.
They grew pepper all around the village. It reduced the number of elephants entering the village, humans hurting elephants and elephants hurting humans. Now we’ve got all this pepper growing across. What do you do with it? Part of it went to Tabasco, and part of it created a brand of Elephant Pepper sauce. Our goal was to help scale that business, figure out a business plan, etc. That was a project we spent three months or three weeks in Zambia on the ground and three months working remotely for that organization.
That’s fascinating. I’m going to have to double-check with Jess after this, but I think you’re the first person who has done an internship in that particular role out of all the guests we’ve had on this. That is so cool. Anyway, you’ve got an MBA at Haas. You’ve got this world-class education, computer science at Ohio State, and an MBA from Haas. Tell us a little about your career path. What was your first job coming out of grad school, and what was that like? Maybe some of the most important lessons that you learned along the way.
I’ll take a step back. When I came out of undergrad, I went to a company called Mettler Toledo, which makes precision instruments and services globally. It was a unique program for early career, which was a rotational program. I started off as a software programmer, but had an opportunity to do rotations in finance and marketing, and supply chain. That triggered this interest in cross-functional aspects of the business and getting deep into various functions. That led me to do the MBA apart from having grown up in that context, as I had mentioned earlier. Berkeley was phenomenal in that aspect, not only in terms of exposure to various industries, be it in Silicon Valley, but also in developing some of the corporate finance chops.
Coming out of MBA, Amazon wasn’t as big then, but it was a job that I did not quite appreciate how impactful it would be, as it eventually ended up being. It was the greatest decision in hindsight because when I joined, Amazon was $20-something billion. When I left nearly 12 years later, it was $500-something billion. I got to be part of various core businesses that were very rapidly growing. That experience itself was irreplaceable in terms of my growth as a finance leader and generally as an operator.
I’ve theorized that in the old days, GE was considered the best source for corporate finance leaders. I think Amazon Finance has now taken that mantle on. It’s changed finance more than any company within our lifetime. When you look at Amazon, I’ll call them Amazon alums, there are so many of them that have gone on to be CFOs at thriving companies afterwards. It’s a remarkable opportunity.
It definitely is. There are a few aspects in which Amazon has done it right in terms of developing finance leaders. One aspect is promoting the fungibility of talent. Amazon isn’t fearful of making large bets and trying new areas, but it often takes leaders who have spent two, three or four years and have the Amazon DNA, the culture, the speed of decision-making and putting them in a new business context and solving the problems there. Less of that domain-specific knowledge, more like, “How we innovate at Amazon.”
That does a couple of things well. The ability to get into a new business, adapt quickly, zero in on what matters and then impact that business. At the core, that is a skill, to your point, why Amazon has become a good pipeline for finance leaders. It’s that approach to building leadership and talent within finance over the years that has produced great results.
You left Amazon, which must have been a tough choice, to go to Imperfect Foods. Walk us through that decision, why Imperfect Foods and what that experience was like.
I went to Imperfect Foods. It was not an easy decision at that point in time. I had a great trajectory at Amazon, and I started in a leadership development program. As I mentioned, it was a lot of scaling businesses. I spent time in operations, leading full P&L for the sports, outdoors and toys division in the U.S. I led the finance team for Prime and then Amazon Advertising in its growth stages and its private brand business as an operator.
All those aspects helped me get to the business fundamentals quickly, going into a new business, connecting business results to inputs that drive it and being an enabler as a finance leader, figuring out how to get something done, the deep dive, applying good judgment and crafting a solution. Most importantly, all those experiences taught me how to improve the quality and speed of decision-making. That was a path of corporate finance experience I came from. A lot of CFOs come from either that path or broadly two other paths from investment banking or from audit. That operator/corporate finance path was mine.
The reason I joined Imperfect Foods was a couple of fold. One is to get the set of experiences I otherwise didn’t have to be a CFO, but also, equally important is the mission. Imperfect Foods was a very mission-centric company around reducing waste from our food cycle. It goes back to the example I was giving about my mom, who was very, in her own way, obsessed about reducing waste.
I spent about a year there. It was 2022, we were out raising, and it was the post-COVID period where demand had started normalizing, and the industry was right for consolidation. In my time there, I ended up spending time overseeing an M&A transaction with Misfits Market. I completed that transaction and then was back in the market, at which point the opportunity of Thrive came around.
I want to ask you a little bit back on Amazon, because every person I’ve spoken to that’s in your position had mentors, formal and informal, along the way. I’m assuming you had some phenomenal ones during your journey at Amazon.
Numerous. It’s been, I wouldn’t say any of those relationships formally started as a mentor relationship, but over time, it ended up so. One of the earliest ones was even pre-Amazon at Metler. He was a great manager. His name is Scott Fee. One of the approaches that shaped me as a leader that I learned from him was that he had this usual piece about walking up to my desk, striking up a casual conversation and sharing a problem. Invariably, I would go back in my subsequent one-on-one and share my idea of a solution to solve that problem.
He would brainstorm with me and let me execute on that. It was only much later that I realized that those conversations were not casual. He very likely all along the way knew what needed to be done, but planted that problem, let me come up with a solution and tweak the solution until it is what needs to be done. The key takeaway I got from it was that it was a key element to groom someone. Having them go through the solutioning process. The level of ownership that comes with it. With that ownership comes accountability to execute and deliver results.
Some of that is very embedded in Amazon culture as well, which is where you are getting to. That approach has helped, and I saw that approach much more in a magnified way at Amazon. There are a few other things at Amazon from various leaders that I learned, and I’ll emphasize more on the learning aspect. One was that mistakes are part of making big bets and focusing on inputs. I was leading the finance team right before the first-ever Prime Day.
The first-ever Prime Day was successful in that the sales blew past our forecast. It was a failure if you looked at all the external trends, which was Prime Day Fail, because all the deals were running out as soon as they went live. It was much bigger. We came to the brink of shutting down, like our servers. Our fulfillment network came to the brink of max capacity and breaking down, but we saw through it.
It was a follow-up that was a learning moment from one of the key leaders. It wasn’t about why we got it wrong. It was about how good it was and how we can improve. The meeting began with the emphasis that Prime Day was a huge success. That mindset about accepting the risks that come with thinking boldly, executing on big ideas, and focusing on improvement was a big takeaway from several leaders at Amazon, including in this example.
This is probably the dumbest question you’ll be asked today because the answer is pretty obvious, but I will ask you anyway. You joined Thrive a couple of years ago. I’m curious how the position got on your radar, and what it is that attracted you to the role?
It started with the recruiter outreach, even when we were closing the transaction, and at which point I had punted for a bit, and then it came back. There were a handful of things that resonated with me. What I was looking for was still a very mission-driven company. The second aspect that was super important to me was a company that was building truly for the long-term versus optimizing for the short term. Thrive Market checked the boxes on both.
The mission at Thrive Market that I described has been the same from day one. A lot of decisions were filtered through that lens. A lot of the underlying business model at Thrive Market has been built with a long-term focus, hyper-curation, membership model. That resonated with me. The third, which was a huge plus, was that it’s still a co-founder-led company where the focus on the mission, the passion for it, and the ability to run and grow this business is still the same as it was on day one.
The co-founders, Nick Green, who is the CEO, and Sasha Siddhartha, who is the CTO, are both super actively engaged in the business. What that brings is continued member obsession for us. We avoid getting very process-centric and continue to maintain that day one obsession about members and creating value for members. I think those things resonated with me. It’s a space that is super challenging and interesting. Nobody has done this very well. We had a business model where we could scale to be a meaningful-sized company, profitable, do well for people, and do well for the planet. That uber-goal closed it for me.
I think it’s fair to say that CFOs are not embracing generative AI and some other advanced technologies as quickly as the rest of the C-suite. It’s understandable because they’re dealing with data privacy issues and security and whatnot. To an extent, other functions may not be as concerned about them. You’re on the cutting edge of all of these technologies. How are you using AI in your work, and what are the biggest opportunities for CFOs to make their finance departments more efficient?
To be very transparent, it’s things that we internally deliberate and talk a lot about as well, because many are in that exploratory phase. What does it mean for us? What is the right strategy that creates maximal value, A) for the business, B) for the functional group? Let me talk about things we are doing first for the business and then for the functional group as well. As a business, we found success in deploying generative AI in member services, and we did that early and grew.
The second area is through our member experience. We have a lot of data about our members and their preferences, both explicitly stated when they join and take our onboarding quiz, but also implicitly stated based on what they search for, what they click on, and what they add to their cart. We built AI personalization on this data set to streamline the cognitive load of grocery shopping for all our members, making sure they’re able to build a cart faster, easier, and able to discover products that resonate with them. That’s another area where we’ve seen tremendous success building member-facing solutions leveraging AI. That is very much a differentiated advantage for us in this space.
When it comes to finance specifically, the areas where we found a lot of immediate value are relatively simple but also powerful. We get a lot of sentiment across multiple earnings calls and analyst questions, and releases. It has provided a very quick way of generating insights about each quarter of what the trends in the industry are, what the analysts are focused on, and what the common responses are.
In a great way, that helps put the context of our business performance, being able to get that in a very quick fashion with our finance group. We are still on the journey of figuring out what that AI layer on our internal data is to streamline our processes much faster. That would be something that the solution will become quickly available and adopted over the next couple of years.
The other thing that I think about your company is that you’ve got a unique perspective on balancing purpose and profitability, which I read on your website at some point. Can you share how Thrive scales responsibility and maintains its focus on sustainability, affordability, healthy living, and yet remains a profitable, well-respected company?
It’s a great question and comes up a lot when you talk about Thrive Market. Purpose and profitability are not mutually exclusive for us. It’s mutually reinforcing to a great extent. One of the ambitions for us from inception has been to prove that a company with a strong mission can grow responsibly and deliver meaningful shareholder value. That intent from the get-go has been a key for us.
In a private market, like I talked about, this triple bottom line philosophy, with the internship example you talked about, we’re doing that at scale. We measure our success in terms of people, planet, and profit. We’ve structured our business as such as well. We are registered as a public benefit corporation. Maybe that’s one of the lesser-known facts, but that requires us as management, our board to make sure that we are making every business decision through the lens of the mission we have stated.
That has allowed us to make healthy living accessible to everyone, but do it in a way that reduces our environmental footprint and generates positive financial results as we’ve gotten to profitability. These priorities are interconnected for us. On the planet side, we have been carbon neutral in shipping from day one. We’ve done that with highly vetted partnerships for carbon offsets, as well as carbon reduction initiatives in-house. In 2018, we became the first scaled e-commerce company with zero waste certification for our fulfillment centers.
On the people’s side, we give away free membership to those in financial need, also free membership to teachers, military, and first responders. Both of these then come together as we create value for people and the environment. It deepens the engagement of members who join us. It creates a sense of loyalty and relatedness. When we internally survey, half of our members say that they join Thrive Market for the mission. When they relate to the mission, what happens is they’re proud to speak about it and share with their friends.
One of the top reasons new members cite and how they heard of us through other members. That drives this member acquisition engine, making our member acquisition more efficient and effective. I think it’s interconnected, and it reinforces being focused on people, planet, but then also driving profitability and business growth. It’s hard to get it right always, but the fundamental is to start with that and build around it. This is what Thrive Market has been successful in doing so far.
I also want to explore because it wasn’t obvious to me, membership economics, as opposed to a lot of ways you could go about this. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to with that particular model. I’m wondering, does that give you any particular structural advantages? What was behind the decision to go that direction?
There are several structural advantages, but for membership, it creates value for all parties involved: members, brands, and then structural advantages for Thrive Market as well. For members, it is a trusted destination for curated, better-for-you products with the highest quality standards. Our store has 100% non-GMO products with more than 700 ingredients, which then members rely on us to choose the best of the best of what’s available. We offer member-only pricing and promotions to them, and access to innovative products that we launched through our own brand.
There’s real value creation for the members. On the brand side, they get access to high-intent consumers who are focused on healthy living to launch their products. We are highly selective. Less than 5% of brands that apply to get on Thrive get on Thrive, which then helps this notion of endorsement of a brand being on Thrive, of being health and wellness focused.
It also allows brands some protection because our pricing is behind the membership wall to offer sharper pricing to our members. All those then combine, like members get a great selection that they can trust us on sharp pricing. For us, it draws committed members. Yes, we spend on acquiring new members. More than 90% of our members are in the annual membership program. Once they join, the way they get the most out of the membership is by engaging more and purchasing more.
The more they purchase, the more likely there is to renew their membership and start a positive flywheel. It takes out the need for us to spend money on engagement marketing. That’s one structural advantage. The other one is capital efficiency. We collect membership fees upfront, which helps with working capital, but then also offsets a meaningful portion of our member acquisition costs almost immediately.
That efficiency is important. The third component is member evangelism. When somebody signs up for membership and they feel good about that, they become evangelists. It helps drive an efficient member acquisition engine. There are multiple advantages of this membership model for members themselves or brands, and then structurally for us.
My day job is running a professional association. It is a membership model. I was having trouble envisioning how it would apply to yours. One thing we share, our best salespeople are our members. It sounds like maybe your best salespeople are your members, too. No disrespect to any of my colleagues who might be tuning in, but members who love us, there’s nothing better.
Being focused on members is super important, delivering value to our members. The positive second-order effects continue.
That sounds good. You touched on data a couple of times earlier, and I heard the expression about a year ago that data is the new gold. I think it was Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank that I heard it from. I don’t know if he came up with it, but you have access to incredible data, and I’m curious. In addition to giving your members a phenomenal shopping experience, how else do you use data to drive advantage and make you a better company?
Multiple ways. I touched on it so that member experience of personalized member experience is a big application of that data. We have ways to go. We still don’t yet use ML, and we don’t yet use generative AI. We’ve got ways to go and are continuing to trade on it. That advantage is in many other aspects of the business. One area that may be a good example is our own brand innovation engine.
In a typical traditional retailer, more often, how that works is you look at a SKU from a brand that’s selling well, and you look for a co-manufacturer to make the exact same SKU, and you stock it as an own-brand product right next to it, and there’s a cost advantage. For us, it’s a little different approach. We have the insight into what members are looking for and they’re not finding, what members are buying and they’re not liking, and what are the areas where there are gaps where we can up-level our ingredient quality and introduce products that fill the gap in the assortment.
We use our own brand innovation engine to drive new products in that sense. That engine is fueled by the data that we are able to collect about our members from the search, what they’re finding, what they’re liking, and identifying gaps in our catalog. That’s one area. The other area is having better visibility and predictability. Our membership model drives a little bit of predictability in our business.
Nearly half of our sales come from scheduled orders, so where members have added products to their schedule and get a box at the set frequency, and they get to edit it, and so on and so forth, but that component drives a certain degree of predictability. That predictability and that data help improve our supply chain planning, both from a procurement perspective, as well as labor planning in our fulfillment centers, to make sure we are able to serve the needs of the member in a timely way in the ways they come to expect of us.
I love it when the guests are not CPAs. I have nothing against CPAs. In fact, I used to be one. I spent several years at KPMG. Your perspective is a little different. I’m wondering, what are some of the KPIs that you use to evaluate, measure, and report business success?
At a business level, it’s easy to track outputs, but the real key or judgment is how do you boil it down to track inputs, which are controllable by the teams? Oftentimes, revenue profit is not directly controllable. You have to break it down to two inputs. Those inputs link back to member experience. How do you track a great member experience and ensure that we are continuously delivering value to our members and lining up inputs on that?
A lot of the metrics I like to focus on are member experience. One high-level indicator is that, over time, we are increasing product sales per member, which is a key indicator of how much members are using us. We want to see that progress in the right direction over a period of time. The other, at an organizational level, is tracking velocity and quality of decision-making and making sure the decisions that are two-way door decisions, if you will, that we can easily reverse.
We’re not spending too much time analyzing and slowing us down. We’re running efficient two-way tests and making a decision, and doubling down on the test work and scaling back if the test doesn’t. The ones that are consequential decisions, making sure that we’re looking at the right set of inputs and analysis to make sure we get those right.
Those critical decisions that are harder to reverse often have an impact on member experience. We want to spend time honing those decisions. At the organizational level, not necessarily a metric as such, but it’s the velocity and quality of decision-making by enabling reversible decisions to be more experiment-driven and then focusing on getting the hard-to-reverse decisions with more depth and analysis.
Earlier, you mentioned the CEO, Nick Green, who is also a co-founder of the company. That puts an interesting dynamic on it because one of the most popular programs we have is that strategic partnership between the CEO and CFO. It’s so different. When I was a CFO, I reported to him, and that was it. If he gave me an order and I’m thinking of one particular guy, I either did it or if I couldn’t do it, I was free to walk out the door, I suppose. It wasn’t a partnership. Today it is. I show up, maybe he’s a little bit higher and whatnot, but truly, the best CEOs and CFOs view themselves as partners. How do you work on that relationship, and the fact that he’s a founder, does that play into it in any meaningful way?
You hit on it. It’s a super critical partnership for success. Let me answer that, but give you a little bit of context, and I’ll share about my background. Let me share a bit about Nick as well to put my answer in a little bit of context. Nick could not have had a different professional trajectory than I did. He started Thrive Market ten years ago, but it wasn’t his first company that he founded. He went to Harvard for his undergrad. During his undergrad, he founded his first company, which was education-based, making education more accessible to many.
He sold that company, moved to LA, and right after, he started Thrive Market with its mission, and he’s been at it for ten plus years now with the same passion for executing and growing. Me, on the other hand, as I talked about, maybe a safer career professional trajectory, working at a company after my undergrad for four years, doing an MBA, like Amazon, is a great growth company, and then honing my skills there. We come from very different professional trajectories. There are other differences as well. Nick is a visionary. He’s got bold ideas, and he can rally the team around those ideas in a way that people genuinely buy into the vision.
He is great at building authentic relationships with all stakeholders, internal and external. On the other hand, I fuss about the details. I think about scaling efficiently as an organization and as a business. This difference has helped us to have a strong CEO-CFO relationship. With him as a visionary focusing on long-term strategy, culture, innovation, inspiring the organization, and then me playing the integrated role, like translating that vision into execution, aligning resources, driving financial discipline, and making sure the trains are running on time.
That division works well and is very complementary. As a CFO, I feel like I can enable him to focus time on what he likes most as a visionary, and then I will pressure-test all the big ideas to make sure that they make financial sense, operationalizing them in a way that makes sense in terms of sustainable growth, financial outcomes. As a CFO, it’s not about saying no to those ideas. It’s about vetting them and figuring out the when and the how for those ideas.
I’ve been fortunate to have that understanding with Nick in the ways we operate. That has been a key to that. It also boils down to personal connection and mutual trust despite having different strengths. There’s no replacement for that. I feel fortunate enough to have that with Nick to make the decisions in the business much swifter and more sensible.
I want to now get your perspective. You’ve worked for some great companies, done some great things. I want to get your perspective on how you see the nature of the CFO role evolving in the years ahead.
The CFO role, I believe, has been evolving even over the last couple of decades. We will continue the trajectory over the next decade, maybe at a faster pace. The trajectory of that evolution, and you’ve seen it as well, is being more from purely financial steward to becoming a strategic partner. What does that mean? What does that take?
It means there’s a deeper appreciation and understanding of the cross-functional dynamics of what it takes to get something done. I talked about this, but as a CFO, I believe it will be increasingly important to improve the speed and quality of decision-making. A lot of tools might improve the speed, but it will be equally important to make sure the quality of those decisions is pretty healthy.
Being that connective tissue between data, focusing on insights and Intel, where there’ll be continued evolution to make that easier. Connecting that to the strategy and ensuring that the team is resourced to appropriately execute, versus having a lot of half-executed ideas on the plate. Being able to navigate through that is critical, and it will become even more critical for a CFO role in the years to come. At least that’s how I view it.
That makes a lot of sense. I’d love to get any advice you have for that next generation of CFOs, maybe the ones that they’re not quite in the role yet, but they’re on a path and they’re going to achieve it within the next year or so.
A couple. One, raise your hand for messy situations. Oftentimes, we’ll be presented with messy sticky situations in a business, but I’ve been in many of those. Each of those for me has been a crucible moment, like a high-pressure situation. You come out on the other end due to that high pressure with a very different leadership transformation in you. As many of those crucible moments as you can get yourself into, you come out stronger and accelerate your professional development.
That is increasingly important because it may not just be financial. Doing at least one or two cross-functional roles gives you a much deeper appreciation for what it takes to get something done. That would be one. Raise your hand to get yourself into those tricky, challenging situations. You come out stronger as a leader.
The other component that feels closer to the CFO route is recognizing the strengths that you have and what stripes you haven’t had to have the holistic CFO role. I talked about my career path being more from a corporate finance operator perspective. You talked about CPA background, which is super important, and having an investment banking skill set is super important. Identify what you have and where you want to complete yourself in terms of the other two. It can be through hiring a team that has those jobs, and having a network of people who can help you in those aspects is super important as well to be well-rounded as a CFO.
I think that’s great advice. I know you’ve got a lot going on these days in a busy, growing company. I’m grateful for the chance to have gotten to know you. Our audience, I’m sure, is grateful for the wisdom that you’ve shared. I want to give you the final word.
It’s been great to be on this, Jack. Thank you. The final word, at least for those aspiring finance leaders, would boil down to staying curious and relentlessly focusing on value creation in the business versus planning, reporting, and gatekeeping, but value creation in the business and staying curious.
