CFOs Juggle Needs of In-House Teams and External Customers

At any company today, but especially at a startup, chief financial officers (CFOs) must be ready to do several jobs, help teams throughout the organization and partner with customers.

“Even if you’re at a large Fortune 100 company, a CFO’s role these days is not just, I hope, to balance the books and put out financial statements,” equipifi CFO Colleen Shannon told PYMNTS. “You really should be a trusted partner to the business and actually thinking about the strategy.”

Shannon joined equipifi in September, bringing extensive experience in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), startups and venture- and private equity-backed companies.

The pre-launch company is a FinTech that provides banks and credit unions (CUs) with a white-label buy now, pay later (BNPL) solution. It has customers with contracts signed and plans to release its platform in December.

As equipifi scales, Shannon plays a key role in determining growth and hiring strategy, back-office infrastructure and new partnerships.

Working With Different Parts of the Company

Interviewed for the PYMNTS series “A Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO,” Shannon said she undertook similar responsibilities in her previous position at CampusLogic, a company that grew from 56 employees when she started to almost 200 when the company was sold.

“When I started there, we went in with the thesis that we were going to grow and we needed to put systems in place to help us grow,” Shannon said.

Starting with QuickBooks and the data visualization tool Grow, CampusLogic implemented new systems and a data warehouse to serve up data for its constituents — the rest of the business — and get a single source of truth across the company.

When CampusLogic did a funding round a year later, it was able to do so quickly and cleanly because it had set up these systems in advance.

“That’s a lot of what I think CFOs need to spend their time on,” Shannon said, “is making sure that the data is accurate, that you are working with different parts of the company and asking what they want to see, and then looking at it with them to make sure that they’re looking at the right [key performance indicators (KPIs)] and the right information.”

Being a Good Partner With Customers

CFOs must also work with their company’s customers, understand what is happening in their world and be a good partner with them, Shannon said.

She experienced that during her time with CampusLogic. As the company serves colleges and universities, its customers were under great stress in March 2020 when students had to leave campus with no set date of return.

CampusLogic worked with these schools on payments terms to ensure they could buy the product that would help them become more efficient — in this case, a product that allowed students to manage their financial aid online.

“We were able to be a good partner with them by coming up with creative ways to help them buy the products that they needed in a way that they weren’t going to break the bank from a cash flow perspective,” Shannon said.

Moving the Company Forward

At a startup, CFOs must also have an entrepreneurial spirit, Shannon said. As equipifi is young and has only 29 people, Shannon’s daily tasks can include anything from onboarding a new employee to discussing a contract to working on an annual budget.

When there’s only a few people working in a company, everyone is counting on each other, and everyone must be prepared to do different jobs.

“I think you have to be able to say, ‘I am not above doing anything,’ and whatever it’s going to take that day to move the company forward is what you’re going to do — and then you have to spend your day maybe looking at financial statements too,” Shannon said.

One of Shannon’s current tasks at equipifi is putting together the company’s first budget so that the leaders can understand the burn rate and the runway.

The company has raised a Series A round and needs to make sure it doesn’t burn too much money before going to raise a Series B. So, for example, knowing how many people can be hired over the next year, the company can better determine the most important hires that will move the business forward.

“Investors are going to invest in good businesses, and they invest in people,” Shannon said. “They will back good ideas at this point in time. You just have to make sure that you spend wisely — you’re talking to the CFO — and you don’t run out of runway.”

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