Coworking is a weekly segment where we talk to CFOs and others in the finance space about their experiences, their companies, and the larger economy. Let us know if you are—or you know—a CFO we should interview.
Marsha Smith is CFO of Siemens USA and Siemens Mobility North America, a transport provider and manufacturing company.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How do you think of your role in the wider macro environment with talk of a recession?
Well, in my corporate role, it’s a really hard question because we address so many different industries, that where recession might be a risk for one, it might not be for another. For example, we sell a lot of products to residential housing, like the circuit breakers in the house are from Siemens. So eventually, with rising interest rates, maybe people will buy fewer homes, maybe people will renovate less, and, all of a sudden, our market will shrink.
Having said that, we also sell vehicle chargers, and I’m really hoping that market doesn’t shrink because that means people are buying more EV cars than before in the mobility space, like the government.
The biggest challenge right now, of course, is the supply chain: getting parts for all of the industries and also getting enough people. When we have the parts, do we have the people, and if we have the people, are they waiting for the parts?
When someone joins the organization, what’s the first piece of advice that you have?
You have to understand the product that you’re selling. If you don’t have an impact on the actual product, or project, or customer, then whatever numbers you have in your spreadsheet are somebody else’s—either the project manager did something, the engineers did something, the salespeople did something. But if you’re part of that group that improves a process, negotiates with a vendor, or gets a change order from the customer, then they’re your numbers, and you’ve actually made an impact on improving the financials.
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What does it feel like being in a leadership position in this moment, and what do you think is critical to your role, and to being a CFO in 2022?
I think one of the most critical things is to really try to balance how often you see your team members. And I don’t mean the finance team members necessarily, I mean your project team or your team or our team in person, because that’s where the real conversations happen—sitting together having a coffee, or eating lunch together in a meeting room, people are brainstorming and pull people into a room out of the blue. So it’s balancing that and remote work. I think also, because everyone is separate, we need to improve our tools that we have, whether it’s reports or programs that we use to reduce meaningless processes, the amount of time people are checking Excel sheet formulas. So we’re always trying to optimize and make things as automatic as possible.
What’s something that someone can’t tell from your LinkedIn or social?
When I was 19, I spent six months picking oranges in a kibbutz in Israel. Oh my gosh, that was the hardest job I’ve ever done. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked on a farm. But I think I’m going to make my kids do it, just for them to appreciate where their food comes from. But now that it’s summer, near our house, we have a field of blueberry bushes, and I make my children pick blueberries with me, because I’m obsessed, because they’re so delicious. They hate me a little for it. They stuffed their faces full of berries. I just like picking fruit. I just like knowing where it comes from. So whenever we’re hiking, I’m always on the lookout for raspberries or blueberries.—KT