The Rise of the Chief Future Officer

Megan - 00:00:18: Today, my guest is Joy Mbanugo. Joy is CFO at ServiceRocket, where she leads the company's finance, accounting, and workforce planning teams, and oversees strategic finance, forecasting, budgeting, treasury management, tax, comp planning, and more. Prior to joining ServiceRocket, she oversaw multiple teams and projects at Google, including Google Cloud Partnerships, management of Alphabet's financial data, and a treasury tax initiative that streamlined the cash management of $100 billion plus. Prior to that at BlackRock, she led the taxation of financial instruments, securities lending, including $3 trillion in assets under management, information reporting and withholding, and more. At Ernst & Young or EY, Joy provided tax and audit services to clients in international tax, financial services, and capital markets. Joy double-majored in African American History and Accountancy at Miami University, Ohio. She earned a Master's of Accountancy at Case Western Reserve University and rounded out her education with a Juris Doctorate from the Cleveland Marshall College of Law as a John C. Lewis Stokes Scholar. Joy presents on a myriad of topics from innovation and finance capital markets, career development, and diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Her mission is to push people to their limits to achieve ultimate success and challenge cultural stereotypes. She believes that companies should empower, not hinder, employees from exploring their intellectual curiosity, committing to a lifetime of learning, and moving beyond traditional corporate silos. Joy, thank you very much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Joy - 00:02:30: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited about this.

Megan - 00:02:33: Yeah, today we're going to be discussing team building and upskilling, as well as the role of CFO evolving into the chief future officer and what that requires. I'm excited to learn about you and your thoughts and experiences with this topic. So let's jump right in.

Joy - 00:02:50: All right, let's do it.

Megan - 00:02:51: First, and as always, let's start with you. If you could just give a little bit of background on your career and how it is that you got to where you are today.

Joy - 00:03:00: Yeah, so I'm from Ohio. I love to say that.

Megan - 00:03:03: Yeah, me too.

Joy - 00:03:05: What City?

Megan - 00:03:06: I grew up in a little town called Hudson. It was outside of Cleveland, between Cleveland and Akron.

Joy - 00:03:11: Yeah, I know exactly where that is. I started my career, funny enough, in Cleveland.

Megan - 00:03:17: Me too.

Joy - 00:03:17: At EY. I was an accountant there and absolutely loved it. And you know what's funny is I wouldn't have thought that that experience in Cleveland would have been so pivotal to my career. And I knew partners that lived in Hudson. Hudson's like a very idyllic, beautiful place anyway. So I was at EY for a little over 11 years. I started out doing pretty much everything, whatever the partners told me to do. Audit, business development, tax, state tax, corporate tax, pretty much everything. And while I was in Cleveland at EY, I went to Cleveland State Law School that night. I went to Case Western for my master's in accounting in Miami of Ohio for an interdisciplinary degree on African history. African American history, you can call it in a bachelor of science in accounting. So Cleveland. I spent about five years there, then moved from Cleveland. I had, as I was graduating law school, I had the opportunity to do a rotation in the national tax office in Washington, D.C. With EY. And so I was lucky enough to be selected. And that was really pivotal. All of my moves have been super pivotal to my career. So I left Cleveland because it's freezing, moved to D.C. To the swamp where it's super hot and just pasty in the summer, but absolutely loved it, had a great experience working with really senior partners. I was in the capital markets group. And that's really important to note because that helped me on my journey to becoming a CFO because otherwise I would have just stayed a tax nerd. But pivoting from just being a tax generalist into capital markets and capital markets tax was a huge jump for me and really helped kind of shape and change my career. So I was there for a little over four years. Then I had the opportunity to work in London. And I was in London doing capital markets, cross-border transactions, business development, and more tax and banking, just a whole hodgepodge of stuff that ended up making sense, that makes sense now as a CFO in London. And that was an amazing opportunity. I got to travel around Europe. I got to look at business beyond just the traditional American way we look at it, right? Like a lot of U.S.-based companies. Look at our offices outside of the U.S. It's kind of like satellite offices instead of people and cultures and how businesses are actually run outside of the U.S. And that was a pivotal role for me. Then I moved back to the U.S. To Silicon Valley, which I had no desire. Like, it's so funny. I did not want to move to the Bay Area. I wanted to move to New York because I had been working on big finance clients and you could not have told me that that's where I wasn't going to go and go make partner and so on and so forth. But I ended up here in the Bay Area, which is where I am now, and had the opportunity to go work at BlackRock, had the opportunity to work at Google. And Google was really pivotal because that's where I moved out of tax. So I was in the tax and treasury team. I moved out of that team to controllership, which made sense with my accounting background. I worked on an ERP transformation, then left that team, went to Google Cloud, which also was a really good move. Didn't know it at the time. But I had great mentors told me that there are two things I needed to do. I needed to go into the cloud business and I needed to go and I needed to take an FP&A role because my whole background was capital markets, accounting and tax. And so I did that and it ended up being great because it helped me land the current role that I have as a CFO of ServiceRocket. We're an Atlassian partner and assess. We build apps for Jira and Confluence. And so that's in a nutshell, that's how I ended up becoming a CFO.

Megan - 00:07:06: Yeah. What an amazing career you've had.

Joy - 00:07:09: Thank you. Thank you. I feel like I'm losing my voice after saying all of that.

Megan - 00:07:15: And you've talked about how a big part of your working philosophy is pushing people to their limits to achieve ultimate success. So is there someone, as you look back on your own career, that provided that for you? Or have you always been very self-driven?

Joy - 00:07:30: I think I've always been very self-driven, but the reason why I've always been very self-driven is because of my family. And I would say it starts with my great-grandmother, who was just a driving force. And I mean, she's not living right now, but she was a pillar in the community. She owned her own store. She was a trustee in the church and people would be like, why do we care about some old lady being a trustee? Well, if you think about it back in the day, I would say this was in the 50s or 60s. It was not common or even 70s. It was not common for women to hold leadership positions in the church. And somehow my great-grandmother was able to do that. And just hearing stories about her always encouraged me to do more. And I think her influence on my grandmother, who she sent to college, which also is a super important note in my life, even though it isn't what happened to me, but my grandmother, it changed the whole trajectory of my family because education was important to her. She passed that on to my father and the two of them passed it on to my brother and me. And so the reason why I say, yeah, I've always been self-driven is really because of my family. So my grandmother continues to push me to this day, my dad, my mom, my brother, and now even more so from getting support from my husband and stuff. But really, I would say my immediate family kind of instilled that drive in me growing up. I could say to my mom, hey, I'm a CFO now. She'll be like, that's great, but what about becoming a CEO? And it's like, how many... I'm very early 40s. How many early 40 women CFOs do you know? And she doesn't care. She's like, you can do bigger, better. So a lot of it comes from our family.

Megan - 00:09:19: And women-led investments are something that's important to you, but why do you think that they're important in general?

Joy - 00:09:26: I think they're important in general because women are under everything. We're underpaid, we're underrepresented, we're underfunded, we're just under. And I don't mean that in a negative way or to kind of shed a negative light. But if women don't support women, nobody's going to fund us. And so I'm very passionate about, one, help when I have women entrepreneurs reach out to me and they need help with financial modeling. Hand on heart, I don't necessarily do it, but happy to connect them with people who can do it. Help them think about fundraising, raising capital. Should they even raise capital? Should they bootstrap? I think it's super important from that standpoint. But then also just from a wealth generation point of view, as time goes on and women either outlive men or find themselves single or breadwinners or whatever their situation may be, or caretakers of multiple generations of people, wealth generation is super important. And I think that's one way besides traditional investing in the stock market. That's another way of wealth generation that I think historically has not been open to women and definitely not women of color, just women on the margins. Right. Women who don't have access or exposure to these type of investment vehicles and investment opportunities.

Megan - 00:10:46: And switching gears a bit, but with macroeconomic factors being so unpredictable these days, and the technological landscape offering just so many different opportunities. Does it fall on the CFO to put a lot more thought into future planning and future proofing? And would you say that it falls on the CFO more than any other role in the organization?

Joy - 00:11:09: I selfishly am going to say yes. But that's me. And that's because it's sit in the middle of like the heart of all things tech. Right. And so coming from Google and working at a tech company where the CEO is an engineer and very tech focused, we don't have a CTO. So the CEO would probably think it's his responsibility and it is. But from an investment standpoint, it's my responsibility to think about that. I don't see how you can be a CFO right now and you're not investing in technology in some form or fashion. It doesn't have to be a full blown project or, you know, how I've gone through to ERP implementations. It doesn't necessarily have to be that, but it does need to be an investment in your team, in your team's learning. And your team's learning how to properly use either BART or ChatGPT or some of the. AI tools that are out there, Power BI, Tableau. Microsoft just came out with Copilot, which I haven't been able to tinker with just yet, but. That's super important. So, if you're a CFO. You don't need to invest in like a new ERP. You should be looking at FP&A tools that do predictive analysis. And even more than that, you should be investing in your team to learn about all the new technology that's coming out. Because if you're in finance and you don't invest in it and you don't know about it, you will l be left in the dust.

Megan - 00:12:34: And when you think about the term chief financial officer, what does that mean to you? And what additional scope and definition does that give the role?

Joy - 00:12:43: So much additional scope. Like it's not just about technology. I talk a lot about technology and it's probably front and center because I just spent 45 minutes talking about the role of FP&A teams. But it's also thinking about, you mentioned the macroeconomic environment. I mean, it is so unwieldy right now. Like everything is just kind of delicate in the world. And as a CFO, I have to be thinking about the future rates may decrease. What does that mean from a borrowing standpoint? Should we borrow as rates decrease? Whether or not we need it or not, but just because rates are low. What does the future look like with the U.S. Election? What kind of economic stability or instability will that add, if anything? What do all of the conflicts, I can't remember what report it is, but there are like 31 running conflicts in the world besides the popular ones we see on TV day in and day out. What will that do if any of those escalate? Will we fall into like a global economic meltdown? And from that standpoint, I need to be planning along with my teams on cash preservation, protecting our balance sheet, protecting revenue, working with our customers, our clients, if they're feeling any economic pressure, working with them on payment terms. So absolutely do. I see myself as a chief future officer. And then beyond that, just how do we want to continue to grow. This company has had great growth. We had a big sale a couple of years ago. How do we continue on that same trajectory to continue to provide shareholder value?

Megan - 00:14:19: And continuing on the topic of instability. But yeah, the past few years have been crazy. So where people might be looking for security, it could be tempting to be conservative in the investments that a company is making. But it seems like making strategic investments in technology and as you mentioned, like, digital transformation is something that companies can't afford not to do. So do you see the role of CFO meeting someone older these days than in the past?

Joy - 00:14:53: Yes. Because in the past, I mean, it depends on what type of CFO you are. And again, I think sometimes my worldview is a little skewed. I will have to admit that because I'm in tech. And so my view is always tech. And I have to remember their consumer goods companies, et cetera, et cetera, that are out there. Have a different worldview. But I do think even if you're in consumer goods or any type of company that has supply chain, like, yes, you have to be bolder because think about it. I can't remember when it got so expensive to just buy a car because you couldn't get parts because they weren't being made. And so I think the CFO definitely has to be bolder from an investment standpoint and just bolder in their approach to their job. So no more can the CFO just be someone who provides financial reporting from their accounting, team, forecasting, like that's all table stakes and pretty boring. What CFO should be doing is taking that data, teaming across the C-suite and saying, okay, here's where we are today. Here's a couple of ways that could all plan out. I don't know. I can't predict the future. I don't have a crystal ball. But what I will do is make sure I preserve enough cash for us to make investments as they come up or preserve cash so that if things get rocky in the market, we're able to sustain or we're able to maintain our balance. We may not do great. You may not do poorly but at least we can weather the storm. So, I think CFOs have to be bold. Like I hate to keep saying, I get left in the dust, but if you're not, you will put your company at risk, at financial risk. If you're not bold.

Megan - 00:16:26: And switching gears a bit, but with analytics and soft skills playing such a big role these days, the skills gap can put strain on the recruitment process. So are you a bigger proponent of upskilling your current staff or looking in the market for already qualified candidates?

Joy - 00:16:44: I'm a big proponent of upskilling current staff. First, I'm going to talk about the human element. One, I've had so much opportunity. I just think it's a way to pay it forward. So if you look at my, I have a tax background and treasury background, but I was given the opportunity to pivot. And so if you don't give. Your staff the opportunity to pivot or upskill, they'll stay stagnant or they'll leave, right? And so, and when your staff leaves, unless they're like low performers, historical and institutional knowledge goes out the door and you can't undervalue that. So one, I just think it's the right thing to do from a human standpoint. And yeah, we can talk about economics and all that, and it may be quicker to hire someone else and blah, blah, blah. But I like to focus on what's right for people. Sometimes before numbers, which I know is at odds with being a CFO, but it is a good thing to do as a human to give people opportunities. Then secondly, I think it shows other people in the company that, hey, we have opportunities for growth in our own company. We don't always have to look outside of our company for opportunities. Like there's a whole engineering team and I always tell folks in the engineering team where I look at them like, hey, if there's anyone who's like super keen on data analytics and you want to join finance, if once I get roles, open, I would love for someone to switch over to my team. We don't need to go out and get an external hire. That person could add so much value to my current team and help upskill my current team without having to go out and hire someone new.

Megan - 00:18:18: And I'm just curious, but upskilling, does that require like investments in education or how do you go about upskilling?

Joy - 00:18:29: It can. Like my current team, everyone is super keen to learn more about AI to get AI training and it will cost, it won't be expensive. There are a couple of people who have good classes. They're all over LinkedIn. You can find them. But then there's also a lot of free training. There's a lot of free education, Udemy, Coursera, YouTube, even LinkedIn. There are a lot of LinkedIn courses that people are doing. I'm part of several CFO networks. I go to all of these talks and I forward them on to my team. I said, every free thing that you could possibly attend that would make you better at your job, you should do. And you shouldn't do it just for the company. You should do it for yourself because it'll make you more marketable when you go out to the market and you're able to speak to these things. So yeah, it can be a bit of an investment, but I think one of the things in all of my spare time, which I don't have, I want to put together a guide for people in finance of all of the free things I've seen on the internet, particularly LinkedIn, that will help you upskill, whether it's financial modeling, whether it's being a strategic finance business partner, whether it's AI, I have seen, whether it's treasury management, whatever it is, I've seen free training for it on LinkedIn and even some of the accounting firms provided.

Megan - 00:19:08: And oftentimes it seems like HR departments only see like what the job description is and can't really translate. I can't really translate like previous skills into what a role is looking for. So what advice would you give for people out there who want to make a pivot and who are just discouraged at the moment and feel like it's just not possible?

Joy - 00:20:16: You have to change your mindset. I remember at some point, probably in between BlackRock and Google saying to myself, I don't want to be a tax or capital markets person anymore. I've seen enough in my mind. I've seen enough and what else could I do? And so I started talking to my mentors and trusted advisors. And some of them gave me direction. And one person said, well, why not try to be a CFO? Like you can, why not try that? And at the time, I don't think I had enough skills to be a CFO at that particular time. I would say after probably the cloud role at Google, absolutely. The FP&A role at Google, absolutely. So one advice I would give to someone trying to pivot is. Ask for help. Don't be afraid to ask for help and or ask for guidance. I think sometimes we get you, we can be embarrassed or it seems like, oh, you're not smart or you're not technical. You're not this, you're not that. If you go ask for advice, but go find someone senior, either in your organization, somewhere you've worked before and ask for advice. Like I still ask people for advice. And then you just have to find the intestinal fortitude within yourself to make a change. Like you're not going to get further ahead if you don't ask. And even if someone tells you, no, I've had plenty of people tell me, no, I've been rejected from plenty of things. It may not seem like it, but I have had rejection and no shoved in my face more than I care to admit. But I didn't care. And I think sometimes people have to just not care, not care what people think about you, not care about what this person said no to, because someone else may say yes and just seek opportunity where you can find it.

Megan - 00:21:59: And how do you approach the problem of retaining your very best employees? And how do you balance retaining those employees with holding back someone's career?

Joy - 00:22:11: Yeah, that drove me crazy in my career. I remember when a partner at EY saying to me at one point that I was going to regret moving from whatever office I was in. I was very young. He was probably 20 years older than me. I was in my twenties. I just laughed to myself, like I'm not going to regret this at all. Like I'm betting on myself. And so I don't believe in pigeonholing people to their particular role. Now, do they need to do their day job? Absolutely. Like you have to do your day job and you have to do it well. But I also like to give my team and people who work with me opportunity to do more outside of their job, just because I feel like it'll make them just a better, I don't want to say worker, but just better in general from a business acumen standpoint. So high performers who want to do extra work, I give it to them. And maybe not extra work, but one, some companies have things called like 20% assignments. So I love a 20% assignment because it gives you the opportunity to step outside of your role, work with new people, upskill potentially for free, talking about investment, upskill for free. And you feel like you're adding value if you're doing something where you feel like you might not be adding value. So I have someone on my team. Who is in workforce planning, but kind of moonlights as a data analyst. And so I said, well, why don't you help? Why don't you become like the baseline or the repository for our strategic plan, our three-year outlook? He's been super excited. And I think providing that type of opportunity to people on your teams, if they're high performers, is invaluable.

Megan - 00:23:46: What team building techniques do you employ? And how do you measure the success of these programs? Are there metrics that you look at? Sometimes those things are hard to gauge as far as the return.

Joy - 00:24:00: Yeah, I don't have quantitative metrics. I have qualitative metrics. So I believe in teaming. I don't know how you can be in finance and not team. Some people are probably listening to us and saying, duh, but other folks may work in silos. Like it is easy to get siloed in your own world, especially finance. And even I'm guilty of it because I'm like, here are the numbers and this is what the numbers should be. And this is what I think. And it's like, whoa, time out. You got to talk to sales. You got to talk to marketing. You need to look at campaigns. You look at how we're building pipeline. So I like to come up with projects. I like to look at things like setting sales targets. That's not just something that sales ops and sales should be doing together. You definitely should have the finance team involved because who's building out the forecast? Hello, the finance team. So having those three teams work together. Is Super important. And the way I measure success is by the tone of the team when they present their data, their project or whatever. If I get a call or a ping before the meeting and it's not positive and it's like this person do this, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, the project wasn't successful. And I'll tell that person, why are you on the phone with me? Why aren't you having this conversation with the people on the phone? If I have to get involved in your project, I don't think the project is successful. And I've seen that happen. But if I get on the phone and everyone's super excited and they've worked out who's presenting what and it makes sense and it's something that I can use and it's something the company can use, that is success to me.

Megan - 00:25:35: And thinking back on your first few months with ServiceRocket, how did you go about familiarizing yourself with the business, first of all? And secondly, how did you build trust amongst not only your team, but also other leaders?

Joy - 00:25:52: Yeah, so familiarizing myself with the business, don't want to say easy, but that was probably an easier transition for me because I was in, I just left Google and I was on the partnerships team. And so I understand the cloud space very well. I understand the partnership space and services and SaaS, just business in general. There are similar tools that Atlassian, we're in Atlassian partner has that Google uses internally. So the transition from like a tool and the what of the business was relatively easy. The transition to the people and building relationships, not hard, a little bit harder than something I had to work at. I had, I met the CEO. Two years prior to joining the company. And he was looking for a CFO at the time because he was moonlighting as a CFO and tired of it. And he did his own ERP implementation because he's crazy. I love him, but he knows he's crazy. He's absolutely crazy. He did it himself. And I'm glad he did because it makes my job easier. But he also provided the right environment for me to meet the rest of the exec team. And positioned me in a way that it didn't feel like threatening. It didn't feel like I was overbearing or the person coming in to say no all the time. The way that the CFO brought me in was more of, hey, I cannot do finance anymore. We're getting too big for me to do this. I need help. And so Joy is here to take over that function for me. And so I think providing that soft landing and having met him before and then the CRO, I met the CRO, I should mention this, I met the CRO two years before taking the role definitely helped. And so I spent a lot of time relationship building even now because I'm still new. There are people who have been there 10 plus years and I've been there almost one. And so spending time, coffee chats, pinging people, making sure the team from the C-suite on down to the most junior person knows that I'm available. I have CFO office hours. I have an open door policy or open chat policy. I think that was important or continues to be important to relationship building and for me being successful and for my team to be successful. It's not just about me. It's about my team as well.

Megan - 00:28:08: And last question for you. But as you think about the future, what is it that keeps you up at night?

Joy - 00:28:16: I saw his question. I laughed because I have two things. One, I have a six week old. So he keeps.

Megan - 00:28:21: Oh, wow. Yes.

Joy - 00:28:23: I was like, she probably doesn't mean that. But I would say the economy. I mean, I know that's probably cliche to say, but this is such a crazy time. Like every day I open up the news, something else significant that could just put the world, just tilt the axis of the world, I feel like is happening. And so definitely the economy and not only how it's impacting our company, but how it's impacting our clients, especially when I see just this week, I won't name the companies, but a lot of companies announce layoffs. Like that's going to impact our customers. And if we have a customer who's laid off, that could be a project gone or lost revenue. And so that definitely keeps me up at night, besides the baby.

Megan - 00:29:11: Joy, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Joy - 00:29:13: Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.

Megan - 00:29:16: Yeah, I really enjoyed speaking with you. And thanks for finding the time to be here with us to share your experience and knowledge. And I wish you all the best. And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.