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Jenny Decker recently became the CFO of corporate travel platform Engine. Previously, she served as CFO of customer service platform Front and held numerous finance positions at Atlassian, the company that owns Jira, Trello, and Confluence.
A two-sided marketplace, Engine serves both buyers such as companies and suppliers such as hotels, rental car companies, and airlines. Decker spoke with CFO Brew about positioning a company for rapid growth and shared her advice for advancing to the CFO role.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You've been a CFO before. How did you prepare for the role coming into this company?
The CFO skill set’s very transferable. I was an investor in a prior life…I understand the qualitative and quantitative scorecards of investments, and so I can understand what investors are tracking. Being a CFO of a high growth SaaS [company], there's a lot of similarities in terms of scaling the organization, knowing the systems, prioritizing, and making sure we're ruthlessly focused on achieving a handful of outcomes.
This is a new industry for me…What I did coming in is talk to a lot of people in hospitality- and travel- and consumption-based companies, to understand the nuances and dynamics of these industries.
What advice would you give someone who aspires to a CFO role?
Take the long view on your career. Rather than trying to go for title and compensation, accumulate knowledge…At Atlassian, I was the head of business partnerships, and then from there, I added corporate and moved on to G&A and sales and marketing. And by the end, I had experienced business partnership and corporate and was running that. While people would [say I] could have continued to rise in R&D, I said I needed to accumulate different experiences so that I could be very well-rounded as a CFO.
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What’s one pattern that you recognized that’s helped you make a decision?
Over a decade at high growth SaaS companies, I came to appreciate how hard staying ahead of your hiring plan is, and so I knew year in, year out, this is always where we fall short.
When I came to Engine, we were relying very heavily on external recruiters. I said, “I don't think this is going to help us scale, and if it does, it's going to be extraordinarily expensive.” And so…we've effectively doubled our internal recruiting team.
We're going to add 500 people this year. It's hard to bring 500 people in via external recruiters. It's ensuring you build the team, the processes, and systems in which you can bring in 500 people….Two months in we are ahead of our hiring plan.
What's one KPI that you always pay close attention to?
For us it is growth rate. The more volume that we push through Engine, the more negotiating power we have with everyone…the more volume, the more relevant we are to our suppliers, the more we can push on supplier rates, and that helps our end users. And so volume growth is tremendously important to us, but I'll never lose sight of profitability.
What's something that you're passionate about outside of work?
I really love supporting women in tech. That’s partly why I live in San Francisco. That's partly why I continue to work, to blaze the path, in addition to all the other reasons people work. One of the metrics that I will carry onwards is not only how many people did I help become CFOs that have worked for me, but also how many females did I help advance their careers in finance.