Richard Brown has had, as he describes it, an exciting international finance career. He’s worked as a controller for Walmart in Mexico, traveled around the world as a consultant on Sarbanes-Oxley, and was a longtime CFO in New York City. Today, he is the director of finance for New York City-based Champion Elevator.

But that’s just one half of his work life. He is also a novelist, publisher, and member of New York City’s famed Writer’s Room.

Writing as Rip Brown, he published his first novel, American Faust, in 2022 and is planning to publish his second, The Goat Herder’s Tale, in 2024. Brown also founded Ibex Press, an indie publishing house.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did your creative path start?

My creative path, as you called it, started when I was at Walmart in Mexico. My daughters were getting a little older, and one of our providers of newspapers and magazines knew this American writer who had workshops. I took this woman’s [Jennifer Clement] workshops in Mexico for creative writing and I loved it. I just learned so much from her.

When I came back to the US, I went to the Harvard Extension School for creative writing, all while working.

The old saw is to ‘Write what you know’: Did you start off writing about finance and people working as controllers?

I could have gone down that path. Instead, the stories I wrote were far removed from finance. Normally, you write what you know. The CFOs that I know that write, they write what they know, and they’re very successful at it. But I went with a different approach. I was more into fiction.

I’ve always kept my worlds apart. To this day, at Champion, nobody knows I wrote a novel. I haven’t promoted myself within the finance community as a writer. It’s something I’m interested in doing because I have this interesting background: A guy who goes to work as a finance guy in the day, and at night, he's in the Bohemian clubs in New York. And he’s writing.

But it’s like I have these two different identities. If you look at my book, you’ll notice it’s written by Rip Brown. Rip, that’s the writer me; Richard by day and Rip by night, if you will. How can you not keep reading here?—DA

You know the saying: It takes money to make money. Figuring out how much profit your organization is making on the money it is investing is, at the most basic level, the management accountant’s most fundamental job.

But there’s another question implied in that saying that can get overlooked: As a business, how long does it take to turn money into more money? Finance professionals need to know how to answer this question with an understandable, consistent formula.

If you are a finance professional, accountant, or CFO trying to gauge how effectively your company is managing its working capital—the money you’re using to make money—the cash conversion cycle is one metric you can use to measure the amount of time it takes your business to convert investment in inventory into cash sales.

The cash conversion cycle can help CFOs guide their organization’s strategic decision-making process and pinpoint areas of improvement, such as creating quicker accounts receivable processes or implementing leaner inventory management. Continue reading here.—DA

Stat: 49%. That was the YoY increase in Uber’s fourth-quarter revenue, which came in at $8.6 billion, its “strongest quarter ever” according to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. (Financial Times)

Quote: “I read all the spy novels.”—Judge Lewis Kaplan, Federal District Court in Manhattan, explaining why he wants the bail agreement for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to include conditions that restrict his use of electronic communications so that Bankman-Fried does not delete text messages he might send or receive while he awaits trial on wire fraud and money laundering charges. (the New York Times)

Read: Tech is laying people off, restaurants are starting to hire again, what *is* this economy we are in right now? (the Wall Street Journal)