CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Six weeks before Lehman Brothers went under, Shiv Verma tells us, he joined a hedge fund as the world felt like it was falling apart. After building structured-credit and CLO models at J.P. Morgan from 2006 to 2008, Verma says he helped buy back assets originated at par for five cents on the dollar.
A mentor there supplied a rule Verma still carries: “The best trade you ever make is often the trade you don’t make.”
For Robinhood’s CFO, the line offers a double meaning—and a little fun. In the interview, however, Verma applies it to corporate resource allocation. According to Verma, it is easy to make an investment, become excited, and sell yourself on the idea. The harder work is asking the right questions and “knowing when to say no.”
That standard reaches beyond securities. Verma says he applies it when Robinhood considers funding an investment, approving a marketing campaign, or pursuing an acquisition. Restraint is not timidity: Robinhood wants to grow and say yes to many opportunities, he tells us, while balancing business enablement and controllership.
According to Verma, acquisitions must offer technology, talent, or greater speed to market, generally accelerating Robinhood by 18 to 24 months. They must also pass the company’s IRR, NPV, and internal thresholds.
The title may wink playfully at Robinhood’s trading platform, but Verma’s underlying finance lesson is serious: sound capital allocation is ultimately defined not only by the opportunities a CFO pursues, but also by those finance has the judgment to decline.

Ross Grainger remembers an early chapter of his career when finance was only one part of the job.
After stepping outside a traditional finance path to own and operate a Mako auto-body franchise, Grainger tells us he learned what it meant to “act like an owner.” That sometimes meant cleaning toilets, learning to paint cars, welding, doing body work, handling customer service, and making outside sales calls. But the experience also taught him another lesson: even if a leader can do everything, “you shouldn’t do those things forever” if they pull you away from where you can provide the most value.
That owner’s mindset later followed Grainger back into finance. At a healthcare software company, he tells us he was passed over for a CFO role he wanted. The executive hired instead brought a different perspective—one that showed Grainger how finance could move beyond “the debits and credits” and help shape company direction. Grainger says he ultimately became “extremely happy” they hired someone else because the experience accelerated his development.
Years later, that broader view surfaced again when Grainger helped lead a pricing overhaul at a prior company. According to Grainger, management initially proposed a 7% increase after nearly 10 years without one. Challenged by the board to reconsider “the art of the possible,” the team ultimately achieved a 22% to 23% increase in average ACV.
For Grainger, finance leadership repeatedly returns to the same idea: understand where value is created, and focus your effort there.

Cal Brouilette recalls a sleepless night in Houston, speaking at 3 a.m. with someone from Blackstone about a purchase-and-sale agreement and transition-service agreements. It concerned a power-plant portfolio sale at Direct Energy, a Centrica subsidiary, that Brouilette places in 2013.
According to Brouilette, the assignment arrived in late September, when the CEO wanted the portfolio sold and announced before year-end. That left at most 120 days. Brouilette says he was managing finance and accounting, functioning as a business-unit CFO and loading up on MBA classes at Rice because his job had seemed stable.
The new assignment changed that calculation. Brouilette says he ran its finance work “soup to nuts,” covering the valuation taken into negotiations, management presentations, purchase-and-sale terms, and transition-service agreements.
The transaction presented him with what Brouilette describes as a $700 million “go or no go” decision. “Yes, this was hard,” he recalls thinking, but the experience prompted this realization: “I can do this job. I can make these decisions.”
Brouilette says the moment gave him confidence to make high-stakes decisions quickly while recognizing that he could “still keep learning.” He describes it as his shift from operator to strategist.
At Flatiron Health, Brouilette says his focus as CFO is not to “make a decision and let it ride,” but to consistently track results before the organization travels too far down “the wrong path.”
His remarks present strategic confidence not as certainty, but as the discipline to decide, keep learning, measure results, and correct course.

Jamie Schroeder’s finance career began on the shop floor at Ford Motor Company. As part of Ford’s rotational development program, Schroeder tells us, he spent a month working in the paint shop at an assembly plant outside Cleveland. The experience was designed around “learning the business and getting your hands on the business” so that finance could become an informed partner to operations.
That operating mindset followed Schroeder to Scotts Miracle-Gro, where unfamiliar assignments became a recurring source of development. According to Schroeder, he was repeatedly placed in situations involving ambiguity, collaboration, and the need to “create something brand new that didn’t exist before.” Over time, embracing discomfort became part of his professional identity.
One experience taught him what it meant to be a growth CFO. According to Schroeder, stagnant category growth had led finance into a “profit preservation” posture when leadership changes at a major retailer created an opening for Scotts to pursue a more aggressive commercial program.
The proposal involved aggressive pricing, promotions, and products—and considerable risk. Instead of retreating, Schroeder tells us, finance supplied data and scenario analysis, quantified the risks, and developed playbooks for possible responses. Transparency ensured that operating partners understood both the opportunity and the guardrails.
According to Schroeder, the resulting market-share battle produced category growth that Scotts had not seen in ten years, while sales and profits rose across the category.
Now CFO of Premium Guard, Inc. (PGI), Schroeder brings that lesson to another transformational setting: Finance can help a company pursue disruption without ignoring risk. The discipline lies not in avoiding uncertainty, but in understanding the business well enough to move through it together.

At Timken, it was generally known that Phil Fracassa knew he would become CFO after the company separated its steel business. But first, he tells us, the board gave him a different assignment: lead the project management office and set both resulting companies up for success.
The separation followed pressure from an activist investor and extensive board consideration of strategy, stakeholder impact, operating performance, capital allocation, risk, and long-term shareholder value, according to Fracassa. Once the decision was made, his team had just under a year to carve out a business that had been part of Timken for 85 years.
That meant standing up and staffing a company, capitalizing it, unwinding entanglements, separating systems, establishing processes, and developing public-company protocols. Fracassa tells us the work reached virtually every function, including legal, HR, IT, operations, finance, treasury, and tax.
His own position carried a particular tension. Although Fracassa knew where he would land after the spin, he says he had to remain “independent, fair, impartial.” His decisions had to serve both companies—not just the one where he would soon hold the CFO title.
According to Fracassa, the experience brought together the disciplines he had accumulated across his career. It also left him with a durable conviction: “Strategy really lies in the execution.”
Great ideas and thoughtful analysis were not enough, he tells us. Value emerged only when people came together, worked through the issues, and executed. For Fracassa, that is where finance becomes most powerful: beyond the numbers, serving as “an architect of execution” inside the business.