CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Beginning his career in audit at PwC Moscow, Georgy Egorov gained a foundation in finance’s finer details before transitioning into high-stakes investment banking. Across seventeen years with firms like Goldman Sachs and UBS, he navigated complex emerging markets and forged trusted relationships with mentors. This journey refined his ability to think both broadly and deeply. Later, he leapt into tech-enabled biotech and climate tech startups, where he learned to reshape strategies and build finance infrastructures from scratch. Today, at ZeroAvia, Egorov’s blend of traditional finance rigor, global perspective, and entrepreneurial spirit defines his unique path to the CFO office.

It’s a story that Verizon CFO Matt Ellis seems to enjoy telling and one that he has undoubtedly related more than once before.

One evening while in high school, Ellis was working at the fish counter of a local supermarket when he received some feedback from the store manager.

Earlier in the day, the man had asked Ellis to clean a number of shelves beside the counter, but Ellis had soon become busy with fish patrons and hadn’t able to complete the task.

More than 30 years later, Ellis easily retrieves the store manager’s words: “I’m not disappointed that you didn’t get it done—I know that you were busy with your normal stuff. What disappoints me is that if you had only told me, I could have arranged to have someone else to do it.”

This is a classic management lesson that many business leaders have communicated before, but when Ellis presents it, the message is endowed with renewed relevance for finance.

It is easy for us to imagine Ellis retrieving the store manager’s lesson to enlighten a young finance analyst—or perhaps even his own approach as he prepares to brief Verizon board members on looming strategy snags.

“This taught me two things: One was the value of communicating bad news as early as possible, and the second lesson was the way in which he gave feedback—ranting and raving is not the way to get through to people,” explains Ellis, who even today seems to muster genuine appreciation for—and perhaps even marvel at—the store manager’s evenhanded demeanor.

It’s not surprising that Ellis shares a lesson that reveals the power of communication in finance. This is no doubt a skill he acquired early in his career and that has co­­­ntributed to his ongoing ascent in responsibility and reward.

Having worked beside CFOs at Tyson Foods and Verizon for nearly a decade, Ellis arguably understood the CFO role better than most when he eventually became a CFO himself, at Verizon.

Asked what advice he would have given himself in the first week of his tenure, Ellis responds that the parts of the CFO role about which he was most uncertain turned out to be those that up to that point had not been part of his experience.

“It’s the interactions with the other members of the senior leadership team that become different,” he reports. “It’s the importance of one-on-one communication—not the group meetings to which I had become accustomed before.”

Here, too, Ellis’s communication skills have no doubt served him well. –Jack Sweeney

Earlier this year, when the FDIC approved fintech start-up Varo Money’s application to become a national bank, Thibault Fulconis’s latest CFO career chapter suddenly appeared to make perfect sense.

Still, it was only two years ago that Fulconis’s entry into the land of fintech start-ups no doubt raised a few eyebrows among his former colleagues at BancWest Corp., where he most recently served as vice chairman and COO.

“I was coming from a position where I had about 3,000 direct reports when I was COO to an entity where I had three people reporting to me,” says Fulconis, whose banking resume, rich with senior leadership roles, spans nearly 30 years with roots inside BancWest’s parent company, BNP Paribas.

While certainly not the first banker to find a door-of-entry into the realm of fintech start-ups, Fulconis, in light of the FDIC’s recent approval, became the first CFO of a fintech start-up that is able to hold customer deposits—much the same as in the world he left behind.

Until recently, fintech firms have partnered with community banks to actually hold customers’ money, while start-ups like Varo have traditionally handled only the consumer interface and mobile app technology portion.

Who better than a seasoned banking leader to help architect a finance function capable of responding to the breadth of consumer activities on a national scale? “When I arrived at Varo, we were at version 76 of our financial model. Now, a year and a half later, we are at version 180,” says Fulconis, who routinely expresses his fondness for Varo’s nimbleness. –Jack Sweeney

Last November, CFO Bob Feller achieved a career milestone of sorts when he celebrated his fifth anniversary as Workforce Software’s finance leader.

“Prior to this, the longest that I have ever stayed anywhere has been four years,” explains Feller, who says that the cadence of his CFO career transitions is normally in step with those of other tech sector CFOs, who are known to job-hop every three to four years.

Still, Feller mentions his recent anniversary to draw our attention to his resolve to help build Workforce into a formidable SaaS challenger inside the realm of workforce management software.

“It reminds me of when I started at Salesforce and we were up against Siebel—which was then acquired by Oracle—and everyone thought that we didn’t have a chance,” says Feller, who held controller and VP of finance roles during a four-year stint at Salesforce. Feller says that Salesforce’s singular focus as a SaaS company allowed it to overstep its merged rivals, who—while many times the size of Salesforce—failed to exploit all of the maturing advantages of the SaaS model.

Feller believes that this rivalry was similar to one that Workforce has today with HR software behemoth Kronos, of Lowell, Massachusetts.

“With every deal that we close, we pretty much take market share from Kronos,” says Feller, while naming the widely known rival that is roughly 15 times the size of Workforce.

Says Feller: “We like to say that we’re ‘Zeus to Kronos’—and if you don’t know your Greek mythology, just search on ‘Zeus, son of Kronos’ and you will discover just what Zeus ended up doing to Kronos.” Needless to say, there’s a reason that Zeus, and not his father, was known as ruler of the gods. –Jack Sweeney

CFOTL: Tell us about your arrival at Workforce and what this career chapter means for you?

Feller: How has my career evolved? I tend to be a builder and a fixer. I come into situations when some kind of a transformational event either has happened or is about to happen. This obviously goes back to Salesforce, where I had to build a team as we were building the company and prepping for an IPO, and has continued on to Workforce, where the company was founder-led for a number of years. You know, the founder did a great job in building the company, but it was really his first job out of business school. His first job out of business school was being our CEO. This happens all the time. The company did a lot of things well, but on the administration side, there was a lot of work to be done.

When we were acquired by Insight Venture Partners in 2014, I was the first hire that they made. They were looking for an experienced SaaS CFO who really knew how to put together not just a team but also the appropriate SaaS company metrics—the KPIs—and who knew how to work with a private equity firm and build a team to support that. Yes, this took time, but this is part of what I do to transform an organization. It’s not like I come in and aim to replace everybody. There’s a lot of great talent in these companies. It’s really putting them in the right place and in a position to succeed and then making sure that they know what they’re in for when they’re coming out of what the company used to be and going through the transformation into what it’s going to be.

The way we think about community is important. It’s not just our employees—our employee community— but also the greater communities that we’re part of. We’re a global company. We’re part of the Michigan community. We’re part of the Sydney, Australia, community. We’re part of the London, UK, area community. We try to do a lot to support community activities everywhere.

Among the learnings that Dev Ahuja has gleaned from his three-decade-long, globe-hopping finance career, perhaps none has delivered a more enduring instruction than that which followed his very first hop.

By his own account, after Ahuja had reached the summit of Novartis’s finance executive ranks in India, the drug giant invited him to occupy an office at its Basel, Switzerland, headquarters. Here, Ahuja was promised, he would be able to apply his flourishing financial acumen on a more global scale.

“I thought that I knew what it took—I came with a lot of confidence rather than in a mode of humbleness and wanting to learn,” comments Ahuja, who let us know that his first years at headquarters did not always go as planned.

Ahuja reports: “The Swiss don’t mince words."

Confronted with his shortcomings, Ahuja set out to get things back on track—beginning with a hefty dose of self-scrutiny.

“I had done a miserable job because I really had not made the effort to build relationships and take the time and make the effort to understand the cultural nuances,” remarks Ahuja, whose track change paid off with a Swiss stint in the roles of group controller and head of Basel’s finance operations that stretched to 5 years.

Still, Ahuja’s Swiss experiences would prove to grow even more valuable in the years ahead, as he would come to occupy the CFO offices of Novartis Korea (3 years) and Novartis Japan (2 years).

“Novartis was very active when it came to developing people across geographies, but my case—where I would end up living in five different countries—was not very normal,” observes Ahuja, whose fifth nation became the U.S. after the drugmaker’s $46 billion acquisition of Alcon opened the door to a number of opportunities for him.

Announced in 2010, the Alcon deal was to present post-merger integration challenges that in part led Novartis to relocate Ahuja from Korea to Japan, where the Alcon integration tasks were more pressing.

“We accomplished a lot in Japan in a short period of time, and it seems that Alcon U.S.—which was twice the size of Alcon Japan—was in need of some of what we had learned,” recalls Ahuja, who tells us that at the time, a son had recently relocated to the U.S. for studies.

With little delay, it seems, Ahuja was headed to Fort Worth, Texas, to serve as CFO North America for the drug giant’s Alcon division—a business that years later would nab business headlines when Novartis opted to spin it off.

According to Ahuja, he has been able to apply his Swiss “lessons” at each career move, including his change when he departed from Novartis in 2016 to accept the CFO position at aluminum products giant Novelis.

It seems that regardless of whether a move has involved geographies or industries, Ahuja has been able to apply the benefits of his time in Switzerland.

Says Ahuja: “When you fail, you must make up your mind to take every lesson from that failure and act on it.” –Jack Sweeney