Being a CFO is more than just crunching numbers. In this episode of Secrets of Rockstar CFOs, Melissa Hurrington, CFO and VP of operations at Premier Claims, shares her insights on a holistic approach to life and leadership. She describes overcoming imposter syndrome, being a servant leader and why she’s become a passionate advocate for women in business. In addition, she describes some of the challenges facing the property insurance industry and how it makes the cash flow cycle at Premier Claims more complex.

Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly edited and trimmed for clarity, follows.

—

Listen to the Podcast here

Hello, rockstars. Welcome to another episode of the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. I’m your host, Jack McCullough. We have a great guest, so let’s rock.

I’ve been looking forward to this guest for a while because I consider her a personal friend. Melissa Hurrington is the CFO and VP of Operations at Premier Claims. In preparing for this, and as I mentioned, I’ve known her for a little bit, but one thing I liked on her LinkedIn profile, she describes herself as the CFO and VP of operations, wife, mom, servant leader, keynote speaker, lifelong learner and a fierce advocate for women. We’re going to talk about all of those things. Mel, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been so excited to have this conversation with you. I’m honored and humbled that you wanted to have me as a guest.

I’m thrilled, too. By now, I know enough about your company, but you can certainly describe it not only better, but you CFOs take pride in their places of employment as you do. What can you tell us about Premier Claims at the 10,000-foot level?

We’re a public adjusting firm. Most people have never heard of public adjusting. We handle property insurance claims, advocating on behalf of the policyholder. We go toe to toe, head to head up against the insurance carriers advocating on your behalf to hold the insurance carrier accountable to appropriately paying out your insurance claim. I have teams that deploy all across the country when devastation occurs to make sure to be there to help clean up. Once it’s time for that insurance claim process to start, which can be very stressful and overwhelming, to be right there in the thick of it, standing in front of your house or sometimes, unfortunately, what was your house and help make sure that you get properly indemnified.

That was amazing to me because first, I just made a judgment on the company simply by the name of the company. You’re doing God’s work in some ways. You’re truly impacting the lives of those who are affected by storms and natural disasters and whatnot.

It’s been such a fun ride of learning an industry that I knew nothing about. I didn’t know it existed. It feels to me a bit like David versus Goliath. There are plenty of days we come to work and it’s like, “Who the heck do we think we are going up against these like big names, funny commercials, deep pockets?” It’s so much fun, and it’s so rewarding to see. Many times we’re dealing with companies that are completely shut down. Hotels that cannot serve guests, warehouses that to be completely emptied, production is shut down and it’s somebody else’s baby. It’s their business that they built from the ground up and getting them back into business, getting started, getting people moved back into their homes. It is so rewarding to do that work.

It’s great. It must be fun because every once in a while, David does meet Goliath and you go like that once and again.

We love celebrating around here.

That’s my knowledge of the Bible right there.

That’s the extent of it.

Early Love of Accounting

I always like to get a little bit of background on our guests. Where did you grow up?

I grew up born and raised here in Omaha, Nebraska. I’m still here. My whole family is here. Interestingly, even in seventh grade, I wanted to be an accountant. I feel that’s so lame, and I don’t tell a lot of people, but this feels like a safe space to say it. My parents owned a business that was affected by fraud, resulting in the loss of everything. In that court process, a forensic accountant was hired, and I was hooked. Thought it was so fascinating how it all worked. I asked so many questions. From there, it went exactly according to plan until I got out into the real world.

I loved [accounting] because I thought it was black and white…I had to really learn the hard way, get some scratches and bruises and bleed a little bit, to realize how comfortable you have to get in [the] gray [areas].

I went straight into my MBA program, and then I went out into the real world, and that didn’t go according to plan. Certainly, it wasn’t the direction I thought my career was going to go necessarily but I’ve always known that I loved accounting, specifically. I loved it because I thought it was black and white. You could get to the right answer, the balance sheet would balance. There’s so much gray in business, isn’t there? I had to really learn the hard way, get some scratches and bruises, and bleed a little bit along the way to realize how comfortable you have to get in that gray for sure.

It’s natural. It’s when I remember early in my career, and I studied accounting academically, I was surprised that business has gray areas, but I was [more] surprised how often accounting had gray areas. You tell people in the profession that it takes a certain amount of creativity to be a successful accountant. They’d look at you like and perhaps immediately thought, “You’re a fraud.” It’s interesting. You knew in seventh grade. You’re somewhere around our 55th guest and only one other person has shared that she knew that she wanted to be an accountant about that age. I’ll say you’re in good company. Was Davina Rankin from the company?

Yes.

She keynoted our [CFO Leadership] conference [last year]. She was funny. She’s like, “I took an accounting class. I realized I was pretty good at it.” I’m thinking you are probably more than pretty good at it.

I loved it. The accounting formula always balances. I was like, “This is perfect. It’s a little puzzle, and you’re going to get the answer, and you’re going to move on.” Now stuck into the analysis paralysis of budgeting and forecasting. Even this morning, I said, “Somebody needs to save me from myself. Stop analyzing it. Just step up, pay for a second, cross it off the list, what’s done is done. It’s just like tweaking this and changing this here and there because you’re never going to get to the right answer.” It’s been a lot of learning lessons along the way to get comfortable with that.

Indeed. I’d love to explore that path a little bit about your path to becoming a CFO. I should know this, but this is your first-ever CFO job, is that true?

It is, yes.

I’d love to learn a little about what some of the obstacles you overcame, and challenges faced, and maybe even some key mentors you had along the way. I know from prior conversations you had one in particular.

The biggest obstacle I overcame, to be honest, was my own mindset. I have debilitating imposter syndrome. It’s something I talk very publicly about all the time. We’ll save that conversation. Truthfully, that was the biggest obstacle, thinking I was incapable of becoming a CFO. To me, CFOs had it all together. They had all the answers. They were so much smarter than I am. Had so much more experience than I did, and were better leaders than I was. That was removed from the table as an option for me. That was, if I’m being truthful, probably the biggest obstacle along the way.

My career to date has been a little bit eclectic, and I think I owe probably little pieces of who I am now to each of them. I went into the traditional public accounting track doing everybody’s tax returns during tax time. I did a nonprofit audit, which I loved because you’re somewhere new, with new people, new processes and new systems every two weeks. That fed my curiosity and need for new all the time. The issue with that is that nobody likes the auditors. No one was ever happy to see me, and it just crushed my soul a little bit.

From there, I moved into the nonprofit space, and I fell in love with the fact that your work could be meaningful. As simple as that sounds, it had never really crossed my mind. I worked for a nationwide nonprofit that serves adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. One of the greatest joys of my life was going back there later on in my career. From there, I worked for a publicly traded larger company and learned a lot along the way about the different dynamics that come with being public. I worked for a brilliant CFO there who mentored me in so many ways, never in an official capacity, but certainly through day-to-day interactions.

How he led, how he showed up just as human. One of the bigger impacts on my career. I went and worked for a company in the hospitality industry. I, on the financial side, ran a conference center arena and ballpark, the food and beverage hospitality. Backstage, the concession stands, the beer lines at that concert. I love two things in this life besides my family, of course, but sports and music. There is nothing cooler than having your office be backstage at a Taylor Swift concert or the national championship game of whatever sport may be happening. Much fun.

I had two babies while I was at that job. The reality is Taylor Swift doesn’t do concerts on Tuesdays at 10:00 AM. Those late nights and weekends were killing. I was like, “What the heck am I doing here?” I fell in love with operations in that role. If you think about a concert specifically, you have 45 minutes before the concert to sell sometimes a million dollars worth of food and beverage. Figuring out the intricacies of how many beer lines you had when we switched—I was there when we made a big switch to credit cards.

Everybody went to events and showed up with cash. That was a thing if you can even remember it. Now everything’s cash-free. If you switched to credit cards, the world was pushing towards that, but it slows down your transaction time by like 0.35 seconds per transaction, and how much is that going to impact your beer sales? You cannot tap too many kegs because there’s not a concert tomorrow, so [they’re] going to spoil.

I really fell in love with the intricacies of operations there, but I got tired. I had a baby at home. I worked the last Olympic swim trials of Michael Phelps and that was 20-hour days. I was like, “Something’s got to give. I’m tired.” I went back to the nonprofit. Serendipitously, Kyle Maring, the CEO of Premier Claims, and I met each other. The conversation evolved from one thing to the next. All of a sudden, [I’m] a very risk-averse person, I found myself jumping all in to the Wild West of a startup in my first CFO role.

Servant Leader and Mentoring

It’s interesting because it strikes me that you’re in the best of all worlds, because while the company is not a nonprofit, it’s very mission-focused. I’m not knocking anyone’s career choices, but not a lot of us work for companies where we can truly say we’re making the world a better place. You’re one of those companies that can say that.

I think so. I don’t know if insurance carriers feel that way, but that’s OK. That’s fair. There was a piece of me when I fell in love with the nonprofit world that was good, better, indifferent. Like, “Was this going to almost ruin work for me?” When you are so mission-driven and you get those feel-goods, “Am I going to get them anywhere else?” I am in the perfect world here for a growing and scaling company. It doesn’t have a true nonprofits’ unique challenges of having to consistently do more with limited and decreasing resources, but to be able to come here and still get that mission-driven “feel good” about what you do, and truly understand how you impact the world around you, I love it.

It’s fantastic. We talked a little about some of the mentors you have. I assume that you’re probably a pretty coveted mentor within your company, both within F&A and across the enterprise. I want to understand your philosophy on being a mentor and the fact that you mentioned being a servant leader, specifically in your LinkedIn profile. What’s that all about? How do you execute being the servant leader to multiple people?

I’m a firm believer that I work for my employees, not the other way around. In a perfect world, which we don’t live in, but we can strive to approach, my job is simply to stay ahead of them and remove the obstacles they point out, so that they can maintain their pace. Do you have the necessary resources to get there? If you’re thinking of a marathon, like, “Do you have the water that you need, the training that you need, that 7 or 8 miles of sugar that you need?” I’m not a marathon runner, so I’m not sure why I chose that analogy for something I don’t even know anything about, but I imagine.

You need all of those things and those resources and like to stay out ahead of it and provide that encouragement of, “your right on pace.” One of my personal core values is empowerment. I very much believe in empowering my teams, and nothing gets me more excited than watching them evolve. Especially in the startup world, startups scaling up. It can be aggressive career growth for people. The expectation is that as an employee, you evolve and grow as quickly as the company evolves and grows.

It can be a bit of a pressure cooker. It’s not for everyone. Here in that startup space, I’ve told so many people who have worked with me almost from day one or at least year one, who have reported directly to me the whole time that I didn’t even recognize the person that came in for the interview. That person is such a shell of who you are now. Watching them evolve and grow is so important to me. I love mentoring other leaders, both inside the company and I mentor a handful of people outside the company.

Some of them are in the CFO space, some of them in their own journeys in life and different career paths. It’s something that I love. I will say I get as much out of mentorship as I imagine that they get out of it. It’s a good opportunity to stop and slow down. I always say half the time, if I’m giving advice or opinion, it always ends up being the exact same thing I needed to hear in the moment. Like, “No, maybe you should take some of your own advice and do that.”

It forces you to stop and pause and give perspective. I’m very lucky to have had many formal and informal mentors throughout my career. You asked it earlier, I didn’t even answer it. The one that had the most impact on me was a VP of sales who I asked to be my mentor. I grew up in a sales family. Both my dad and brother are national sales directors their whole careers.

I can hang in there with the best of them for sure. It’s different when it’s not family. I asked this VP of sales because there’s something about a salesperson, like when they walk into the room, they own the room. They are the person who controls the energy and brings the energy and can leave that lasting impression and can control where the conversation is going. Hopefully, fantastic speakers also, because they’re talking all day long. You have to have that gift of gab.

It was something I saw, yes, to be a CFO, you have to have the basics of accounting and FP&A. If you cannot do those things, you’re not going to be successful in it. The role has changed. I’m not spending much time in my office. I’m out in front of the company, in front of people, in front of banks or whoever else it may be. I saw so many characteristics in that specific VP of sales. I thought, “That is what I’m missing. I want to walk in and own it.”

Great instinct. I tell young people who are on the cusp of getting their first CFO job, I often share, “Look, there are probably a dozen controllers who could do the CFO job.” Functionally, they could do it because they know a lot of it, and they can learn the rest of it as they go. The ones who are really going to excel are the ones who are strategic, who think with the customer in mind, who understand sales, who understand marketing, who understand operations and who communicate effectively. To me, it’s a very wise decision to have someone as a mentor who has that sales type of background because what’s more important than understanding the customer?

Knowing what somebody’s objections are going to be before they even say it and lowering their resistance in a conversation because you’re saying the thing that they were already thinking and [you’re] eight steps ahead of them. It served me well in this role for sure.

‘Nebraska Nice’

Earlier, you referenced the CEO, Kyle Maring, and I know from prior conversations that you two have a great relationship. It may have even started out great, but like any relationship, it just requires work. I’m just wondering, what is that relationship dynamic like? You’ve been a CFO for a few years, so you might’ve seen this, but CFOs for ten years have been saying that their most strategic partner is the CEO. It’s been the last 2 or 3 years that the CEO is saying that the CFO is their most strategic partner, at least in my worldview. What’s that partnership dynamic like?

It depends on the day. We fight like husband and wife or brother and sister, but it’s rooted in respect. I think both of us have forced each other to grow so much. He is a true visionary CEO as well. Most CEOs have to be a little bit, but he’s that like serial entrepreneur, visionary CEO. “I want this whole new idea done yesterday for free. Why aren’t we going fast enough?” If anybody’s worked for one and they know the type, it can be a little bit exhausting. He is naturally like fast, go, figure out how, don’t tell me no. I am naturally conservative, risk-averse and dig my heels in the sand.

“You cannot just do that. It’s not that easy. Hold on, let’s think through it.”

We are this good yin and yang to each other. He pulls me along; I slow him down. At the end of the day, it’s rooted in respect. He jokingly and lovingly will sometimes come into my office, and he’ll be like, “I always know I can come in here and have Melissa ruin a good time.” [I respond,] “You mean to save the business from your crazy idea because you were about to go chips all-in on something that you thought about last night.”

Brings them back down to reality, but that’s a hat I’m willing to wear. He has pushed me so far outside my comfort zone. We have done things together and achieved things that have exceeded my wildest imagination. He is from upstate New York. He’s a go guy anyway, very direct.

In Nebraska, there’s a saying, “Nebraska nice.” We’re very “careful.” Certainly not like Boston, Jack. [We’re] fish out of water there. In Boston I am like, “People yell at cars that are going past them, got it.” I’ve never once used my car horn in my life. I can be very Nebraska nice to you, and it has been so refreshing to have somebody come in that skipped the niceties.

We have an issue, here’s what we’re going to do about it and get straight into it. We’re very close. We’re very direct with each other. He calls me up to greatness all the time: “No, you really can. You are capable of this. You can do more. You need to think outside the box here. You’re being stubborn. You’re being too conservative, push it a little bit further.”

I like to say that I keep them at least slightly on track. There’s a healthy conflict between us, but the one thing that I will say, that we can fight it out with the best of them. I’ll tell you that much. But typically when we fight, we fight in my office and people will walk past. We have floor-to-ceiling windows and people will be, “There go mom and dad again.” When that door opens, we are on the same page every time. Let’s work this out. Let’s come to an agreement. I suppose that is what I’m trying to say—there is no groupthink happening here.

My ideas aren’t all great, his ideas aren’t all great, and we have no problem saying that to each other. He for sure, and he would say it if you asked him, I am his right-hand man. I am the person that he would go to for what’s next, bounce an idea off or anything else. We talk a lot in the CFO Leadership Council about the change to the CFO being very strategic. I am without a doubt that strategic partner to him. My voice matters. It has a place. We work it out in our united front.

That sounds great. I have a hunch that your company will receive a number of resumes from individuals who want to work for someone like him.

We have a good time.

My first CFO job, the guy I worked for, he was just very complex. For me as a first-time CFO, I really struggled with it. I was lucky because I happened to be friends with the guy’s wife. She gave me advice that was invaluable. One thing about him, he was a very smart guy. He had a bachelor’s and a master’s from Cornell. He was also in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame of all things. She’s like, “You have to remember when you’re talking with Bruce, he’s a scholar. One of the smartest people you’re going to come up against. He’s also a dumb jock. You need to figure out which one of those two you’re talking to. If you need to talk to the other one, you have to bring him back to that.” Sometimes you need the dumb jock.

Here at the office, people will come in and be like, “Kyle sent me this email or Kyle sent me this text, and I know you speak Kyle.” I read it off. Here’s what he meant by that. I speak Kyle fluently.

Cash Flow Challenges

I’d like to discuss some of the challenges your company is facing. I guess the obvious one is what are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities in the next year is facing Premier? Especially you’re probably more hard hit than a lot of companies with the volatility that seems to be the new way of life for all of us.

The volatility is wild. We as public adjusters, without getting too much into the nitty gritty, but I do think it’s a fascinating and important context to the conversation, we’re in a very complex cash-flow company. As public adjusters, we are straight contingency fee. We take a percent of the check. If we get nothing released, we are owed nothing. There’s no fine print anywhere. It is a straight agreed-upon percentage of the check. Get $10 million released, and take the percentage of that. Get $10 released, and that has in fact happened before, take your percentage of that.

We work mostly on commercial property insurance claims. Those claims take on average 6 to 9 months to pay out. As a scaling company, we have been faced with this challenge consistently, from a cashflow cycle perspective. I have to work on those claims. I have to inspect those claims. I have to travel to the claim. I have to have the attorneys who are going to review the policies on the claims for a company that [hasn’t become] cash flow yet. We’re in a very complex cash flow company, especially [in trying to] scale.

There are ebbs and flows of it if we are remaining flat, but certainly, with scaling, it brings unique challenges. Some of the biggest challenges that we face is there’s a certain reality with insurance carriers. If you take premiums that they paid you minus checks that they write for damages or losses, whatever it may be, they are not profitable. They have massive, multi-billion dollar losses. As companies, they’re profitable though, because they take your premium and they invest it to the tune of, I think, Allstate, was $45 billion in annual investment revenue.

That brings them to positive as a company. When the market is volatile, when those earnings aren’t there for an insurance carrier, they get a bit slower to write the checks. Mother Nature is big mad. The storms, whatever the cause, we don’t have to have that debate here on a CFO podcast, but you cannot deny that they are more frequent and more intense. I would not want to be the CFO of an insurance company and have to figure out how you’re going to do that. We have more and more multi-billion-dollar loss events like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

We had a tornado that hit Omaha right in our backyard I think it was estimated to do $8 billion in damage by the time all the claims and everything were filed. It’s happening more and more. Although we all would argue differently, that the premiums aren’t changing that much. That top-line cash flow for a carrier isn’t changing, but there are more and more losses getting paid out. If the market dips, that’s how they survive. We survive based on them writing checks. If they don’t have the ability and cash flow themselves to write the checks, like, “Where the heck does that leave us?”

We are hyper-focused on efficiency. That’s not unique to us. It’s every company is doing it, but there’s a reality for me: it will get tougher and tougher to get the carriers to write the checks. I think it will be longer and longer between filing the claim and getting the check written. We still have aggressive goals as a company of scaling and growing, and we still have financial needs that we need to meet.

We have to do more with less. It does feel like for the last two years, it’s been a constant topic of conversation. We’re tiptoeing around a recession. Is it going to happen? Is it not? We seem to have fared just fine so far. Should a true recession happen and the market collapse, where does that leave us exposed in an already complicated cash flow process? Those are the things, it’s not exactly how you answer the question, but certainly, that’s what’s keeping me awake at night in my role.

That makes sense. It has to be frustrating because there are so many variables that negatively impact your business. It didn’t sound like very many of them were really within your control if you can’t influence the weather.

Your control is how you react to it. The weather especially, it feels like a pro and con of, “There’s more people that need our help. There’s more people, statistically, not opinion, that are receiving denials from their insurance carrier.” In terms of business development, the world is our oyster here. There are more people who need help with their claims, but I think there’s a less and less likelihood of them getting paid out quickly and at the level where we feel like the insured is properly indemnified. With this hyper-focus on bringing in the same amount of cash flow, we have to do more with less and get strategic.

I’m legally required to ask you the question. Gen AI and other modern technologies, how are you using it at Premier, not only to create a more efficient organization but to give yourself a lasting competitive advantage? I know probably a lot of CFOs, cybersecurity, and data privacy, those are job one’s for you. Yet there’s this technology that you cannot ignore.

We are all in on AI and we have been for about 18 months and it’s so exciting the possibilities and it layers across every single department across the company. I am not at a place where I trust it necessarily, especially generative AI for end-to-end automation. We’re integrating AI and generative AI. I call it in draft form. Nobody should be starting anything with a blank page. Let it serve as a draft. Let it start to pull research for you...We built a proprietary software in-house, where we will virtually monitor properties of former clients.

I know which property you own. I know the square footage of it and how many floors it has because at the end of the day, hail is going to impact your roof. If I can take your X amount of square footage divided by two floors, then it’s reasonable to assume that your roof is X amount of square feet. I know the opportunity of the claim size there. We have that layered over weather software. I know within fifteen minutes, the property that you own, how big it is, how big the potential claim is, the size of the hail that fell.

I know you have 1.75-inch hail that fell for three and a half minutes X angle and impacted your property and potentially you have a claim that you might need help with. A lot of that is AI-based. Certainly, integrating AI into our customer service is huge. How can we keep our insureds updated? I view AI as like, let’s automate the mundane stuff and let’s use the people for building relationships.

Especially when you start talking hurricane response, it’s a different beast. It’s emotional. There are so many complex human layers to a hurricane response. If I can have my customer service team on the phone checking on you as a human and not giving you the update on “Here’s where your RCB is at. Can you give me your contents list?” We can handle all of that for you. I can give you an AI chatbot where you can pull whatever information you want. “Here’s where we’re at with the carrier. When is my inspection?” It can spit it out for you.

I can have my reps on the phone checking on you as a human. “Are you doing okay? Is everyone adjusting? Did you find a place? We like to send out all the smoke signals to anyone, especially in a hurricane response. [They] need places to stay and we have helped people get into apartments, have helped people get into temporary office spaces, whatever it may be.” If they can spend their time doing that instead of doing the updates and things, that’s really powerful.

Certainly, our actual public adjusters use it quite a bit as well, again, in draft form, but help pull the code in that specific county. Things come to you instead of having to go out and do it. Trust but verify, certainly, with all of those things. It’s a little bit of a rabbit hole that you can go down and go round and round, but hyper-focused on specifically generative AI and then anything that can be automated.

The shutdown happened, and it happened so fast and furious. Everyone’s head in the company snapped to me. It was the last thing I was expecting.

That’s the name of the game. I want to chat a little bit about some of the things we discussed earlier. Before you and I knew each other particularly well, I followed you on social media and more CFOs are embracing social media over the last couple of years. I’ve seen a big change. I won’t say in the last year but in the last three years. You were among the first CFOs that I knew anyway, were using it effectively. What was the attraction to social media? Why did you see this as a tool before a lot of your peers did?

I was very self-serving. It was a very specific moment in time. That moment was COVID. I won’t bore you with that too much. COVID, like those early days, like you were still going to work. It was still very, “Is this going to be a thing? Something’s bubbling up, so much anxiety. The world hadn’t shut down yet.” The shutdown happened and it happened so fast and furious. Everyone’s head in the company snapped to me. It was the last thing I was expecting. The books are closed. The projections are done.

“Why are you asking me? I’m just the CFO.” Everyone’s head snapped towards me, and it was the last thing that I expected as the CFO. I had never been through a global pandemic, either. I didn’t know when I had so many anxieties. All of the anxieties everybody else was feeling from a health perspective, “Is my family going to be okay?” From the leadership perspective of just the natural, “How are we going to become remote overnight? How are we going to make sure that our team’s accountable?”

All of those things, then some real anxieties and fears that we were property insurance claims. To do that, I have to visit the property. What’s the game plan when nobody’s going to go outside? It was crippling and suffocating. I was so certain in my head that I was going to be the CFO that had a company crumble to pieces in a global pandemic because I didn’t have it all together. Everyone else appeared to. They all appeared to have a game plan.

I’m a big believer in utilizing your network. I leaned into my network and I called and texted and emailed and linked in anyone I thought would send me a response, which is like, “What’s your game plan? I’m freaking out.” Person after person responded and said, “I don’t know; what’s your game plan?”

The level with each response felt like a 50-pound brick just being lifted off my shoulders, “I thought I was the only one.” I thought everybody else had it together. My husband took a picture of me sitting at our kitchen table because I didn’t even have a home office. I had no need for it. My daughter was crawling up on my lap. I am business casual from the waist up. I wear yoga pants and fuzzy slippers from the waist down.

She’s crawling all over me during a Zoom call. He took this picture and I was like, “I’m just going to say the quiet part out loud.” I posted that picture to LinkedIn. A long post, but essentially I said, “This is hard as an employee. This is hard as a leader. This is hard as a business. This is hard for someone who counts on a business for a paycheck to come from them. This is hard. Give yourself grace, give the people around you grace.” The post went unexpectedly viral. I like to joke that had I known it would, I would have liked to do my hair before he took that picture or something, I swear.

I’m sure that the imperfection of it made it perfect.

It was. It was spontaneous in the moment for sure. I had message after message from people saying exactly what I was feeling like. “Thank you. I thought I was the only one. I thought it was just me that was freaking out. I thought it was just me that didn’t know we were going to make it through this.” It was like this micro-moment that led to a true macro-movement for me, of I’m just going to say it. I’m just going to be the voice, frankly, that I needed.

I tell everyone, I reiterate all the time, “It’s very self-serving.” Most of the things that I say on social media are the things that I needed to hear in the moment. It’s the things that I need a reminder of, it’s the perspective that I need to force myself to step into those shoes and look at it. More than anything, just publicly, what an opportunity to be the voice that would have meant so much to me in those moments, those spirals of “I’m not cut out for this. I’m not capable of this.” It’s been an unexpected journey, but certainly a fulfilling one.

It’s interesting because every time there’s a crisis, it seems like the perception of CFOs goes higher. I don’t think it’s that employees don’t trust CEOs, but they know that CEOs are always silver lining, glass-half-full types of people. That’s great. That’s what makes them CEOs. Sometimes the CFO, even if they say the same thing, she says what she means and she means what she says.

Hopefully, we’re all like that, but CFOs in particular are known for that thing. It’s great that you were able to step up, and I’m sure you are extraordinarily helpful to dozens of other CFOs going through the exact same thing. It’s the name of the game. It’s a very lonely job. I found that out when I became one that I know there are divisional CFOs and whatnot, but you’re one of only one sometimes in companies and who do you turn to in those moments?

No one’s coming to save you.

Advocating for Women

You’ve made it clear from your social media and just other situations I’ve been with, in your own words, a fierce advocate for women leaders, which I think I support very strongly, although I also recognize I’m a background player largely. What inspired them? Did you envision yourself that way when you were in high school and college or is this something that just came along?

There’s probably always been a little piece of me that’s been a bit like, “I am a woman, hear me roar.” I don’t know if there was a defining moment in my career where I stepped into that. It’s just something that I’ve always believed in. My dad sold power tools growing up. That’s what he did in a national sales manager for a large power tool company. I wanted to go to his shows on the weekend and take the power tools. At one point it was like a little bit of a sales shtick of like, “Look, the tools are so easy, my eight-year-old can use them.”

There was always a little bit of this rough and tough and tumble version of me, certainly growing up, that fed into it. I just believe wholeheartedly that women belong in all places where decisions are made. One of the best quotes out there by RBG for sure. They do, and it’s time for change, and change doesn’t come without resistance. It doesn’t come without people feeling uncomfortable. It certainly also doesn’t come without people willing to stick their neck out for it.

I don’t know what it is that made me willing to stick my neck out for it, but it’s something I believe so passionately in that I want to leave the world in a different place than I found it. That’s probably too big a statement, like who I think I am, but I want to leave the company in a different place than I found it. For me, the fire reached a new level when I had a daughter.

I had my son first, love him, but there is something unique about being a woman in the C-Suite raising a daughter and I got here. I did it, but I did it on the heels of other women who paved the path for me for sure. It lit a fire for me of, I want Layla, my daughter, to be in a place where she is seen for all of her unique qualities and all of her value and doesn’t have a ceiling placed on her or isn’t told to stay within a box or to tone herself down in any way. It’s just something that’s become a true passion for me.

Good for you. I was probably a typical late 20s or early 30s guy. Hopefully, I wasn’t sexist in any way. For me, the reality hit when I became a CFO because I always heard that stuff that women make 59 cents on the dollar and some other things. I simply didn’t believe it until I had access to payroll. I remember seeing engineers, literally making 59 cents; it was almost exactly the number that you read in the media. I saw great engineers being paid less, who are women being paid less than men who are not as good.

By the way, [they] reported to them. It’s like, so you had somebody making more than their boss, and they weren’t as good as their boss. Their boss wasn’t their boss just because they were older and because they were there first. It’s stuff like that. Stock option distribution. It’s like, “What?” It just angered me. People can live with anger or they can be outspoken and try to do something about it.

I cannot change the world, but I can change the room that I’m in or leveraging the LinkedIn platform in a way. We certainly aren’t going to solve the problem on this podcast, either. For me, there was this real, not a light bulb moment, but like a light bulb turned on in my head. At some point, I wish I could tell you exactly when that, yes, there are massive systemic issues, but women have to own our piece in this, too. We will never be paid the same for men if we don’t ask for the same as men. We aren’t going to reach gender parity. We’re not going to have 50 percent of women in CEO seats in Fortune 500 companies if you don’t apply for the job because you don’t think that you’re capable of it, or you don’t think you’re qualified enough for it.

Nobody’s going to give it to us. I realized that that’s where I can make an impact. I can challenge the norms, but a lot of the norms are us. We’re running this 100-yard dash and do the men have a second advantage that’s given to them? Maybe it is statistically proven, yes. Women were throwing out this barrier and this one and this one. Suddenly we’re running 100-yard hurdles while they’re running a 100-yard dash of hurdles that we put up ourselves.

Crying foul when we reach the finish line a little late. It’s never going to change the advantage that someone may have had ahead of us. There are some harsh realities that as women, we have to face. Imposter syndrome is not unique to women. It’s across all genders for sure. I think we let it get to us a bit more. That’s easy to do when you also have societal and systemic pressures on you.

It’s easier to believe those thoughts to be true. Again, like you’re not going to get paid the same if you don’t ask for it. You’re not going to get the job if you don’t apply for it. You’re not going to get the venture capital funding if you don’t ask for it. We have to do our part in this as well. A lot of times we build this wall that we have to get over.

It’s like, “Nobody asked you to build that wall.” There are enough walls that we have to climb because of the realities of the world, but so many of them we put up ourselves. I just realized that like, that’s the impact that I can make, whether it’s one person, whether it’s 500, time will tell, but seeing helping other women believe in themselves, make the ask and demand change that those little micro-moments can truly turn into something major.

That’s fantastic. I want to wrap this up. Just a couple of questions for you. I’d like to change the perceptions of finance and accounting professionals. Maybe there are people who think we’re a little dull. I’d like to ask you like a fun fact. Do you have an interesting hobby or an unusual hobby? Is this something that you did in your childhood or just anything that changes the perception that people might have about finance and accounting people? I think I know what yours is, but I’m going to let you say so.

We’ll see if it is or not. A fun fact about me is that I was a dancer. I thought that’s what I was going to do with my life. A classically trained ballerina in the ‘90s, fell in love with hip hop because who didn’t in the ‘90s fall in love with hip hop? I know you didn’t. You love your rock bands but I fell in love with hip hop. If you would have asked 16-year-old me, despite the fact that knew I was going to study accounting, getting a college degree was a non-negotiable to remain in my family, I was going to move to LA and be in music videos. That’s what I wanted to do with my life. I ran a dance studio for a while. That’s a fun fact about me: Somehow, I went from a super creative side to a straight accounting CFO track, but music and movement is still a very much part of my life to this day.

I got it right, by the way, I did. I remember because when I interviewed [you] for Forbes, that came up. That’s fantastic. A lot of times I do ask people about the work-life balance thing. A lot of them admit that they fail at it. They’re being a little hard on themselves because we’re all doing the best we can with it. Do you have any secrets that have made it work? You certainly have more so than most.

It doesn’t feel like it some days. I’ll tell you that much. It’s about priorities. A couple of things. My catchphrase is: I’m a wife first, a mom second and your employee third. I’m not interested in rearranging that. I’m very fortunate to work for a CEO who is understanding of that. He might not have been. It tells you, he was single and childless in my original interview with him. I was like, “I know this is nails on a chalkboard for you, but you live, sleep, eat, breathe, die, Premier claims that I’m not going to. I have a whole family back home and I’m going to be there for that.”

It’s about priorities. Shonda Rhimes in a graduation commencement speech said once, “If you see me succeeding in one area of my life, I promise you I’m failing in another.” It’s so accurate. How I help prioritize, and there was a video I saw once, I’ve never been able to find it again. If you find it, send it to me, I would love nothing more than to give credit where this video came from: “We’re all juggling a bunch of balls and it’s about knowing which one is glass and you cannot drop because it’s going to shatter and which one is rubber, if you drop, it’s going to bounce.”

That’s the big thing for me is like, what are the moments that I need to be there for? Which ones are rubber and are going to bounce? A super quick example, as we wrap up here, we had a law firm that we work very closely with on insurance claims. They flew their whole firm to Omaha, Nebraska for a day and they planned a whole dinner. By all traditional norms, I should have been at that dinner. I was like, “It’s just going to be a no for me.” It was like, “Do you have something going on tonight?” “I don’t.” I would love to say that it was a choir concert or a baseball game.

It was just going to be a no. I put in my day, I’m going to go home. I’m going to see my kids after school. We’re going to eat dinner together as a family. You guys can catch me up if something important happens after. Guess what? Nothing important happened besides bonding, some thanks, gratitude and relationship building. I will give that to you during the work day, and I will work most nights of the week. After my kids go to bed, I don’t have a problem getting the laptop back out, but [if] it’s about 5:30 to 8:30 PM, I’m in mom mode. I’m nobody’s CFO. If the building’s on fire, call the firefighters. Don’t call me.

Thanks a lot. That’s so cool. This has been great. I really enjoyed the time and I know our readers are going to think it’s fantastic. The final question I have for you, and it’s almost redundant with the last 50 minutes or so, but if you could think of one or two kernels of advice for the next generation of CFOs? It can be anything, things they should be studying, how they manage their career, whatever it might be.

My biggest piece of advice is to work on your EQ. I firmly believe that IQ can be outsourced to AI. There’s going to be a certain level of competence that’s required, but IQ can be outsourced, and it will be outsourced. Work on your emotional intelligence. Put in the work. Read the books, do the podcast, do the training and spend a ton of time in front of the mirror. Work on the EQ is as you climb the ladder and get into the roles: EQ is going to take you so much further than IQ ever will.