Spend Culture: Stories Of Cfos And Company Culture

CFO. Finance Consultant. Digital Evangelist. Regional Director of the CFO Centre. Paul Riegel, CPA, CGA is the Regional Director at the CFO Centre, a firm that provides the skills and experience of large company CFOs to small & medium sized enterprises on a part-time basis. In this episode, Paul shares the red flags to look for when it comes to poor spend management, and the tech stack recommended for CFOs to cultivate a healthy Spend Culture.

Steve currently serves as the CFO and Assistant Dean at UCLA School of Law where he has worked for the past 21 years. Steve oversees the $90 million budget and 200+ staff at UCLA Law. Learn about Steve’s roots starting out as an assistant accountant, the secret tools to “level up” your game as a finance leader, and what it takes to be the CFO of a world-renowned law school.

Digital transformation officer. IBM Executive. Procurement strategist. Hans Casteels is the Head of Digital Procurement at IBM, and has over 25 years of professional experience working within and with Fortune 150 or start-up companies. Opinionated, passionate and experienced, learn what Hans thinks of the future of procurement and why automation is a tool, not a goal.

Serial traveller. The “problem fixer”. Generalist. Constant Learner. Rob Dibacco is the COO/CFO of The Arizona Charter School Association. Learn how Rob manages the financial operations of a non-profit organization, how to implement a purchasing process for educational institutions, and how to scale spend management sustainably.

Lindsey Head is the CFO of J Public Relations - and she has figured out her way to financially manage an efficient and lean PR agency. Rather than asserting controls or pushing a budget onto the operations itself, Lindsey truly believes that giving her employees the power to make decisions from the bottom up is the culture she wants to promote as a CFO - a proactive spend culture.

In the seventies and eighties, GE was the training grounds for overachievers who would go on to head other companies and challenge the status quo. It was Jack Welch who famously said, “I’m desperate to get myself people who are smarter than me…I’m desperately trying to get people with energy. I call them the 4 E’s: Energy, ability to energize people, to execute, get it done, and have edge. And I want passion. I want them to care more.” Welch had the uncanny ability to identify high performers and groom and cultivate them into future leaders. One of these leaders is Michael Dinkins — our guest today, who also happens to be one of the most visible faces in the community of Corporate Finance.

Peter Gebert is an unusual Finance leader. Right from his beginnings as an accountant working at mining sites in the Arctic Circle, to his astonishing successes leading Finance departments for billion-dollar tech and biotech companies in the Valley, Peter has shown a healthy contempt for workplace silos. His career as a leader in Finance is replete with examples of breaking out of the confines of spreadsheets and financial reports, and actually working side-by-side with every department in the company to steer companies into new and path-breaking directions.