What do you do when your company has been meme-fied? Its brand solidified for the internet, Calendly found itself in that position, often seen as the scheduling app for venture capitalists who tell eager founders and even more desperate students to get in touch! by booking calendar time.

Calendly is trying to change its image as an individual user tool, finance chief John McCauley told CFO Brew, to that of an enterprise one. But the days of endless growth (we miss you, 2021!) seem like they are also in the past, so companies like Calendly are tasked with growing a startup without running out of cash cushion. Enter the CFO.

“Enterprise is the fastest growing part of our business today,” McCauley told CFO Brew. He said the company’s customers who spend more than $100k per year on Calendly have increased 100% YoY. McCauley pointed to a key customer, Asana, which has implemented Calendly internally: “We’ve seen Asana schedule more than 36,000 meetings and save over 9,000 hours.”

While many CFOs may have a tight runway, McCauley told CFO Brew that the company is not going to hide from the macro environment. “The opportunity is massive, and we’re just getting started,” he said.

Calendly was launched in 2013 by Tope Awotona, an immigrant entrepreneur from Nigeria who gathered $550,000, including his life savings, to get the SaaS startup off the ground. Awotona started the company after personally struggling to swap schedules to find meeting times with coworkers—a modern headache. The company raised $350 million in January 2021, bringing its valuation to $3 billion.

In the years since its founding, the scheduling tool—and the overall etiquette of inviting someone else to find time on your calendar—became a buzzy topic of conversation. Calendly has posted to its own blog to clarify how to use the platform in a non-triggering way, with posts detailing how to send links politely and claiming that scheduling has become more socially acceptable over time. Read more here.—KT

Coworking is a weekly segment where we talk to CFOs and others in the finance space about their experiences, their companies, and the larger economy. Let us know if you are—or you know—a CFO we should interview.

Tom Hood is EVP of engagement and business growth for the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) and Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), and CEO and founder of the Business Learning Institute.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did you find yourself leading a finance industry-driven organization of finance industry leaders?

First off, it’s a lot of fun. It’s just been a blessing. I’m a CPA, by background with the CGMA. I spent the first 15–20 years in a role in business and industry. I started out with an architecture firm that went into highway construction. I was a CFO there, and then moved into the association world for the Maryland Association of CPAs and then got recruited by AICPA-CIMA two years ago to take on this role and connect with all of the major senior finance people in the Americas.

What’s that transition from industry to association been like for you?

It’s interesting because it’s not that different from what a CFO does. When I went from CFO to CEO, a lot of the [work stayed] the same. Understanding the numbers is probably the biggest advantage of moving into a nonprofit—especially being able to understand what the numbers ultimately mean—and then it’s about building the network so it’s fun.

So it seems you’ve undergone a similar transition that many of your members have moving from the traditional back-office work of a CFO to the front-facing work of a 21st century CFO, or in your case, a CEO?

Yeah, I like to say that, as a CFO, anything that wasn’t sales or operations ultimately landed on the CFO’s plate, including things like community relations and citing asphalt plants, especially in neighborhoods where they were fighting us on those thing. It’s been that way for quite awhile and, in the current environment, it’s accelerated into a more strategic role leading to more CFOs being recruited into the CEO role. Keep reading here.—LR