While there are many ways to get there, accounting is still a time-tested pathway to the CFO spot. Ron Wangerin began his career as an auditor for Deloitte before working as a CFO for tech companies, beauty companies, and online fundraising platform Classy, Inc. He’s now CFO at estate planning firm Trust & Will.
In a recent Campfire webinar, he talked about why CPA experience can be invaluable for someone who aspires to the CFO role. Here are some of his insights:
Why accounting experience and knowledge are valuable.
In public accounting, I got to see why companies succeed and why companies fail without spending my own money, and it gave me insights as to what the drivers were for success…It was a great training ground, and I still think it’s a great training ground.
I’ve always been a strong advocate on the CPA side. I had a couple of nephews work for me, and they were both finance majors, and then after spending the summer as an intern, they [were saying], “I gotta go get my accounting degree as well.” Because finance wasn’t teaching them enough of the language of business and the flow of information that they needed to have to do the things they wanted to do down the line.
Why having an accounting background has made him a better CFO.
Accounting is the language of business. And ultimately the measurement system is, what are your financials at the end of the day?...Do you have a clean balance sheet? Is your P&L clean? Is your EBITDA accurate? Whatever those metrics are that you’re trying to peg…ultimately, it’s the financial statements prepared in accordance with GAAP.
I always found having a good accounting background helps me in meetings, mostly to be able to guide the conversation or ask the questions so that we are going to get the right economic outcome that we’re expecting…whether that’s in an M&A situation where you’re doing real-time purchase accounting in your head and modeling the balance sheet in your head while you’re negotiating the purchase and sale agreement, or with a customer, particularly with software rev rec rules or SaaS rev rec rules. If you don’t have a good understanding of those, you may end up with a bunch of deferred revenue…But if you can address those in real time and explain them to your customer in real time…they’ll have a better understanding.
News built for finance pros
CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.
Why accountants should get curious about where the numbers come from.
I would encourage people to step outside that box of accounting and really look at, where do the numbers come from? Why are the numbers the way they are?...What I found was, in finance, either someone’s not paying you, or you need to pay someone. And if either of those two aren’t happening, then something’s broken…I spent a lifetime swimming upstream to figure out where the breaks were in the operations and where the bottlenecks were.
How numerical knowledge can keep you from becoming the “CF-No”.
I always approach it with, how can we do this? Not “no.” I want to think about, how can we structure it, how can we fund it, so that I’m not always starting from the position of “no.” I would say that matured over time. I used to be the “no” person, and then I [thought], “Well, that doesn’t serve the business.”…I try to proactively work with the other management team members, the CEO, the board, on educating them on the “why” behind numbers, decisions, budgets, whatever…to me, it’s communication and education.