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Coworking is a recurring 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.
Patrick Villanova took over as CFO of BlackLine in March. This was the latest milestone for Villanova’s nearly decade-long tenure at the software developer, where he joined as controller in 2015 and became its chief accounting officer (CAO) in 2019.
Villanova spoke with CFO Brew about the changes he’s seen in the CAO role over his career, as well as the role that mentorship plays in preparing the next generation of finance leaders.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did your experience as a controller and CAO at Blackline help prepare you to become its CFO?
I was originally brought in pre-IPO [to help] close the books, get the SEC financials out there [to] prove that we can do reporting. My mandate was very narrow, but it was still traditional controllership: running AP, payroll, general ledger, the standard stuff. Over time, after we automated a lot of those processes [and] closed the books quicker, it opened up more time for me and, in working for our CFO, it presented opportunities to expand my sphere of influence. For example…I always helped own day-to-day cash management and treasury. I expanded into investment policy, debt management, and capital allocation strategy.
Globally, you’re seeing a proliferation of data. Everyone’s producing data. The key is, how do you ingest that and turn that into strategic insights for your organization? That requires a high level of automation. You’re not going to solve that by throwing bodies at it. So if the CFO’s primary role in an organization is to be the strategic partner of all the other departments…that CFO is going to look to the CAO for help in generating those insights, processing those insights, and taking all that data and turning it into something meaningful that can be used to make decisions.
Would you say your expanding role as CAO is similar to what you’re seeing across the profession?
You [as CFO] need somebody who’s more automation oriented, more systems [and] process oriented. That’s what we do; that is our expertise as accountants. If you can recognize that opportunity and say, ‘I’ve got this expertise. I’ve got this ability to take large quantities of data and automatically distill it down into something meaningful,’ and you link that to an understanding of the strategic objectives of your business, then the CFO is going to be looking to the CAO at all times to help provide those insights.
When that CFO retires or leaves, well, who’s the natural successor? It’s the person that understands the strategy of the company the best, which you have to as a CAO now…I’m predicting that you’re going to see that pendulum start swinging back, and you’re going to see more public company CFOs being minted through the controllership and CAO with an accounting background and a process orientation over the coming years.
How important is having a mentor in your line of work?
It’s absolutely critical. You have to have it because you don’t know what you don’t know. If my goal, which it was, was to be the CFO of BlackLine…who better to mentor me [or] at least be my primary mentor? You have other people that you ask advice to, even outside the organization, but your primary mentor is the person whose job you’re looking to ultimately succeed in. That is so important, because obviously Mark knows things that I don’t know, he sees things that I don’t have access to, so to open that up to me and explain the bigger picture and explain what I need to know, what skills I need to develop, you’ve got to be open to that feedback.