It’s like a CFO’s fever dream.
Picture it now: You’re settling in to the first day on the job—shaking hands, learning names. Suddenly, a horrific twist. It’s earnings day—and you’re about to lead the earnings call, analyst questions and all, and you might not even know where the water cooler is yet.
For Emily Reuter, Instacart’s CFO, that hypothetical nightmare came to life this May.
Her first day in the CFO seat was also the same day the grocery delivery company reported Q1 2024 earnings. Don’t worry: She lived to tell the tale. The only reason it wasn’t a waking nightmare? Her entire career leading up to it—including some particularly savvy career moves that any aspiring finance chief can learn from.
Well prepared. Reuter joined Instacart in January, making a speedy transition from VP of finance to CFO by May (and more on that in a minute). She came to Instacart after almost a decade at Uber, where her roles spanned both the finance function and posts outside finance). That all added up, in Reuter’s mind, to “collect[ing] the different skill sets of the CFO along the way.”
She held everything from strategy and analytics roles supporting corporate development to later running the IPO process for the company, and taking the lead on investor relations. Eventually, she spent her last couple of years at the company as CFO of mobility, Uber’s core ride business.
“I will fully admit that not all of those roles were things that I was at first incredibly excited about, meaning not all of them fit the profile of: ‘Oh, I can imagine doing this for the rest of my life,’” she told CFO Brew. But by saying yes, she started to see more and more connecting dots across business units.
“They’re all pieces of the puzzle,” she said of her previous positions’ connection to the CFO seat. “You don’t have to do everything forever, but having spent time in different parts of the business, you just get a deeper appreciation and understanding for it.”
And when it came to her first day at Instacart, the “put me in, coach” mentality she’d already cultivated for nearly a decade had already given her one of the exact skills she needed: investor relations.
“Even if you’re at a public company, most people are not in and around their earnings process. It’s usually a pretty small group,” Reuter pointed out. “So, having been in investor relations [at Uber] was just so incredibly important for me, because all of the stuff around earnings—the lead-up, the prep, the Q&A prep, the follow-up calls, even going to the conferences—was all very second nature to me.”
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Clear intentions. That’s where another sharp career move came in. Reuter was consistent about her long-term career intentions ahead of stepping into the CFO seat, and that’s why she could make the leap in a matter of months.
“When I came to Instacart, and really, when I went to leave Uber, I was first and foremost interested in becoming a CFO,” she explained. Even during the recruitment process, her desire to eventually be a CFO “was a conversation I was very explicit about, and I do think being explicit about what you’re looking for is really important, regardless of whether that’s in a current job or when you’re making a transition.”
That proved true: When Instacart’s prior CFO was ready to move on, Reuter, the experienced VP of finance who’d made her CFO aspirations abundantly clear, was a logical pick.
The real first day. Still, Reuter’s actual first day as CFO was one for the books. As you might imagine, it was a high-pressure blur—and deeply abnormal.
“It was not a typical first day in the sense of, I didn’t have the luxury of time to meet with internal people,” Reuter explained. Her first day, and ultimately first two weeks, “was almost entirely external focused,” she explained, given that it’s a public company.
She had to put going deeper with her team “a little bit on hold,” even though it’s “where I naturally would have spent more time,” she said. Those relationships are her top priority: “Whether you’re talking about May or January, you would have just seen me spending a lot of time with the executive leadership team, meaning I was going out to dinner with people and just having a glass of wine and getting to know them, going on walks with my finance team,” she continued.
That kind of relationship-building is a recipe for success in any role, on any day.