Good morning.
Controllers who have their eyes set on the CFO chair heard from finance chiefs at an annual convention about how to get there as they compete with those that have an investment banking background and MBAs.
There's more than one path to becoming a CFO, Brandi Joplin, senior VP and CFO at Sam's Club, told an audience of mostly controllers during a panel session on Wednesday at the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) conference in Las Vegas. The annual event brought together more than 3,500 accounting, tax, and financial professionals, according to the organizers.
“I'm fortunate that I work for an organization that has a diversity of experience among our CFOs and we kind of all push off of each other,” Joplin said. “The Walmart U.S. CFO is in my neighborhood, and we will go on walks. His strength is in a different area than mine." They have conversations about their tasks at work, and "we kind of learn from each other," she said.
Know the business
Joplin, who has worked in leadership positions at Walmart for 14 years in audit, accounting, and controllership, became CFO at Sam’s Club, a division of the retail giant, in 2019. Advice for accountants thinking about transitioning to the CFO role? "You need to get out into your operations and understand what's going on," she said. "Listen to associates and find out their challenges."
Mark Hammond, EVP and CFO at AssuredPartners, who started his career in public accounting and has spent more than 15 years at Deloitte, had the following advice: “You’ve got to be a great storyteller.”
“I think you've really got to hone your communication skills in terms of taking what is a highly technical complicated message and whittling it down into something that is very simple,” Hammond said. Storytelling skills are especially important for controllers to communicate with a wide range of stakeholders, he said. “Your audience that you're dealing with every day is probably the chief accounting officer and the CFO. They speak your language.”
Steve Robertson, CFO at HDMI Licensing Administrator, Inc., agreed with Hammond’s advice and shared a previous CFO experience. “That’s one of the things that was my biggest challenge going from controller to CFO,” Robertson explained. “I was thrust into the position when a CFO abruptly left. What I was not prepared for was having the right language of finance to communicate to the board. As a controller, oftentimes you're raised with a bottoms-up mentality, and board members have a top-down mentality. They want quick answers.”
An audience member asked about the impression that fewer CFOs, especially in public companies, have come up through the accounting track. One such analysis by the firm Crist Kolder Associates on the CFOs at a group of more than 650 companies in the Fortune 500 and S&P 500, found that in 2022, 50.2% had MBAs compared to 34.5% who had CPAs.
“I think the investment banking community probably would walk into the role having a better understanding of the business drivers, particularly if they're going through M&A and transaction kind of things,” Hammond said. The CEO and board want to hear the business story from the CFO in the context of “not just the math or the numbers,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to talk about what's going on in the business that causes those things,” he explained. “They want to know about top line, production, or sales. They want to know about economic conditions and how those impact your business.”
Joplin offered another piece of advice: “I would tell the accountants in the room to lean into technology, understanding A.I. and what's coming with machine learning because you need to think about the possibilities of how that can change the work.”
Enjoy your weekend. See you on Monday.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
