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Coworking is a weekly segment where we talk to CFOs and other leaders 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.
Sarah Spoja is the CFO of Tipalti, a finance automation platform.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in finance?
Being CFO is like being a jack-of-all-trades: I’ve helped to raise over $550m in funding, globalized our footprint, liaised with the board and investors, and scaled revenue/spend for our 1k employees and 3k+ customers. As CFO of a fintech company, I’m a power user of our own software, and even test out new products before launch. I partner with the product team by providing feedback, speak with prospects for the sales team, participate in webinars for the marketing team, and much more.
How do you think the CFO role has changed over the past five to 10 years, both for you, and in general?
One of the most apparent shifts to me is how many CFOs are the ones driving digital transformation at their organizations. The CFO tech stack is modernizing, and automation is playing a key role. They are finding a greater appetite to adopt digitization, allowing for data that was once otherwise buried in manual processes or in disparate data sets to be merged and used to unveil valuable insights, improve processes, increase efficiency, and save money. CFOs want their teams to be focused on strategic tasks that ultimately grow the business, so driving that digitization is key.
The last 12 months have also turned a bright light on companies’ abilities to find efficiencies without sacrificing growth, or at least being very strategic as to how they will drive a path to profitability. This puts a lot of pressure on senior finance leaders to drive the right cadences in budgeting processes while also ensuring capital adequacy through incremental fundraising. For many years fundraising was easier than it is today—now, more than ever, having a strength in that area can help CFOs have a big impact on their companies.
What advice do you have for future CFOs?
Know your strengths and gaps, the needs of the organization, and prioritize early hiring to scale the finance team. Hire people who are smarter than you and complement your skills, so you can make each other better. On the strategy side, I wrote the first three annual budgets and still do most of the capital markets work. Over the last two years, it’s been fantastic to build out our FP&A, data, and procurement teams, which provide leverage and analytical horsepower to finance.
Who’s a CFO you admire or you try to model yourself after?
I find if you’re a household-name CFO, it likely means you’ve done something wrong. Instead, I strive to emulate qualities of leaders I admire in my day-to-day: authenticity, followership, and curiosity.
If you weren’t a CFO, you would be...?
I’ve been a CFO for almost five years, and now it feels like a perfect role for me. But prior to Tipalti, I would have assumed my path after private equity would have been as a GM or COO in a company. I am, at my heart, an incredibly curious person. And that curiosity means I want to really understand, at a detailed level, as much as I can about the business. I love solving challenging problems and understanding the full breadth of an organization.