👩💻Watch the recording here:
Nailing Your First 100 Days as a Startup CFO _ CFO Connect Summit 2022.mp4
🎤 The Speakers:
Veronika von Heise-Rotenburg: CFO & MD, everphone
- Dr Veronika von Heise-Rotenburg is Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Co-Managing Director at everphone. In this role, she is responsible for accounting, controlling, data, refinancing and legal for the phone-as-a-service provider. Veronika is a proven expert in digital finance and asset-based financing and has many years of experience in the field of fleet lending. Before everphone, Veronika, who holds a doctor of law, was with the British online used cars dealer Cazoo. Here, as director of the legal and finance department, she was responsible for the company's expansion into the European markets on a legal and financial level. She joined Cazoo as part of the acquisition of the car-as-a-service service Cluno, which she led as CFO and Managing Director. From 2014 to 2018, Veronika was commercial director and authorised signatory of TraXall Germany, a provider of sustainable fleet and mobility management. She had spun off the service provider together with a co-founder from Hannover Leasing Automotive GmbH, where she was responsible for risk management She began her career as an associate at McKinsey. Veronika studied law and economics in Augsburg. She also holds an MBA in General Management from the University of Dayton and a PhD in International Capital Markets Law from the University of Augsburg.
Jan Kalmer: Finance Director, everphone
- Jan is the new Director Finance at everphone. Formerly he directed finance at scoutbee, was Head of Treasury & Accounting at Outfittery, and managed Treasury at Zalando. He started out doing consulting in Banking Capital Markets at PwC.
🧠 Questions
Questions asked during the session:
- How does one account for expenses which have long term benefits - while these are incurred upfront, investors also expect them to be expensed in the year of incurring since it would be more prudent but it has a huge impact on value and perception. how does one balance this?
- What is the tech stack/tools that you recommend implementing in those first 100 days? (tool to sync bank account & CF forecasts, tool to play with financial metrics to compute MRR & Financial retention by cohorts, tool for invoice generation & dunning, tool to OCR & sort invoices, etc. etc.)
- What are your favourite examples of digital finance tools that you use?
- I would have expected to see team, job and task descriptions and potential new hires or fires within the hot topics? Can you elaborate where you would see that?
- Can you provide some sources, templates, recommendations, reports - all what will help during first 100 days as new cfo?
- What would be your advice for new CFO in a small startup in a completely new sector (for the person on position)?
- With changing workforce what is your take on the responsibility shift of employee retention from CEO to CFO ?
- When building C level relationships, what level of importance do you place on understanding and improving the level of financial literacy of your peers? It may be that in smaller start ups there is not a high level of finance knowledge that can be assumed
- What are your frustrations when it comes to the preparation of the monthly financial report? As this seems to be a huge manual and inefficient task for most companies.
- Acc. to your experience: What are the Top 3 Don'ts starting a new position as CFO?