From auditor to controller to CFO

Being CFO of the nation’s largest Girl Scout council is no easy task. It’s a demanding job, one that involves managing the finances needed to keep 46,000+ Girl Scouts and more than 30,000 volunteers and lifetime members active. But it’s also a rewarding one, as Jessica McClain can attest. Growing up, she was a Girl Scout in Nation’s Capital, the same council, or geographic region, where she now serves as CFO. “I came home,” she said.

The nonprofit organization’s purpose resonates with her deeply. “I believe in the mission, having been a Girl Scout myself,” she said. “It gives me such a sense of fulfillment in the role that I play helping build the next generation of leaders.”

McClain spoke with CFO Brew about how she prepared for the CFO role, what it takes to be a nonprofit CFO, and yes, about how she forecasts cookie sales.

From auditor to controller to CFO. McClain started out as an auditor for a public accounting firm, and originally her goal was to become a partner. When she pivoted to the nonprofit space, she set a new goal: becoming a CFO.

To that end, McClain searched CFO jobs on LinkedIn to see what skills and experience she needed to gain. She also networked with CFOs, meeting with them “to learn about their challenges and successes during the transition to the CFO role” or from going from smaller organizations to larger ones, she said. And she joined professional organizations such as the CFO Leadership Council, and read publications about CFOs to stay abreast of industry trends.

Before taking the role at Girl Scouts in 2021, McClain was a controller at a nonprofit organization. As a controller, she said, she was more focused on the “day-to-day financial operations.” The CFO role, she said, “is more broad, strategic, and future-focused” and “the breadth of responsibility is different.”

She recommends that aspiring CFOs cultivate their emotional intelligence and communication skills. As a CFO, she often needs to communicate “complex financial information to individuals that do not have a financial background,” a task which requires her to “humanize the numbers” while providing key financial insights, she said.

CFOs also need to be perpetual learners, McClain said. “Stay informed about industry trends, changes in the profession, advancements in technology,” she advised. “You can never stop learning.”

A data-driven CFO. In many ways, being a CFO at a nonprofit is similar to being one at a for-profit company, McClain said. “I tell people our organization is a business. We just have a different purpose and mission,” she said.

Many of the issues McClain contends with on the job are the same ones that for-profit CFOs tackle, including staffing, cybersecurity threats, and macroeconomic conditions. Inflation, for instance, affects her operational costs—it’s driven up the cost of insurance and food at Girl Scout camps, which the organization owns—and talk of a recession can dampen donations. “It impacts the amount or the frequency of donations,” which “plays a role in our investments, in our reserves, and what those look like as well,” McClain said.

Like most CFOs, McClain relies on data. She monitors data around growth, declines, and retention in membership and donations, and tracks reserves “so we can manage financial risk and uncertainty.” She also examines a KPI highly valued by donors: the proportion of funds that go to programs, as opposed to management and fundraising.

And she looks at volunteer hours, new volunteers, and retention. Volunteering, she notes, has changed since the pandemic. “How people want to give their time has changed,” she said. They’re making fewer long-term commitments, such as becoming troop leaders, but are willing to volunteer for short-term events, such as speaking to troops. “We want to be as flexible as we can and provide various types of volunteer opportunities for people who are committed to what we’re doing,” McClain said.

How the cookie crumbles. And, of course, McClain tracks Girl Scouts’s crunchiest data: cookie sales. (Girl Scouts in her region, which covers Washington, DC, and parts of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, sold more than 4.4 million boxes for earnings of over $4 million in 2023). She forecasts cookie sales by studying such data as historical cookie sales numbers, numbers of Girl Scouts in each grade level, and by speaking with other council leaders. Every month she participates in a call with 10 to 15 leaders of the largest councils in the country, and they discuss topics like cookie demand and supply changes. “Even the baker that makes the cookies provides data and insights,” she said.

So, which cookie would we find on her desk? A lifelong Thin Mints fan, McClain gained a new favorite when Girl Scouts came out with Adventurefuls in 2022. “It’s a brownie-inspired cookie that has caramel-cream filling and a little bit of sea salt,” she said. “That cookie is delicious.”