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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.
If you’ve ever driven over a toll bridge in a rental car, or had a parking permit when you were a college student, or been caught running a red light by a traffic camera, you’ve probably interacted with Verra Mobility. The public company’s transportation monitoring software is integrated with city governments, schools, and law enforcement.
Verra Mobility CFO Craig Conti has been with the company for three years, after a long career working across industries like healthcare and the aluminum industry. He spoke with CFO Brew about his transition and the role of the CFO in 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Previously you were the CFO of a few companies that made physical products. What’s the difference between being CFO of a company that makes physical products versus a software company?
What’s different is the amount of customer interaction you need to have. With a physical product, you can hand somebody something. With a software product, you really need to understand your customers’ needs, because what you’re selling is something they can’t put their hands on.
So I think the ability to articulate value, both from a customer standpoint and from the CFO chair, from an investor standpoint, you need to be very tight on that when you’re working with an intangible product. That articulation, the way you tell your story and how you demonstrate value, needs to be even that much more clear when you don’t have a physical product to hand to [a customer].
Was there anything new you had to learn at Verra Mobility?
The biggest one...was the rise of remote work. I was an in-office guy. What I learned is what works best for my work style is not necessarily where other folks do their best work. That was probably the biggest learning for me. There are folks I have on my team who, for either preferential reasons or family reasons, can’t be in the office or aren’t in the office as much as I am, that I would bend over backward to retain and promote.
How do you educate an operations team and commercial leaders on what it means to have a successful return on capital investment?
With folks in the corporate world, you have to take the time to show people what good looks like. I was the CFO of a welding business. We had a bunch of technical folks who would do really detailed manufacturing. And I would talk to them from time to time. They would ask me questions. I’d answer their questions.
I was walking through a stamping facility in Appleton, Wisconsin, and one of the guys I’d met earlier tapped me on the shoulder, and he said, “I need a new machine.” He showed me how the stamping press was wearing out. He said, “See this? It’s not as good, not as high quality. It could fall apart.” I said, “Okay, I get that. How much is it?” He gave me some number in the millions. And I said, “Well, how do you know that’s a good investment? Wouldn’t it make more sense to hire somebody four feet away just to do that extra bend and then stack it?”
He said no, because of all these other reasons. And that’s when I realized, what he was articulating to me was what you would put in a discounted cash flow analysis. He just didn’t know the term. For a year he had struggled with this thing that he didn’t know how to quantify to show that it would make a lot more sense for the company to actually buy the new thing. So I showed him how to do it and I got him the new machine.
The moral of that story is, if you arm operational people or frontline people with the ability to translate their knowledge financially for decision-making, you have unlocked a lot of horsepower within the organization. And you’ll learn things that you never would have known. That machine has probably saved millions of dollars in the last 10 years, and it probably was a year overdue simply because the person who needed the work didn’t have the language to make the ask.
The cliche about CFOs is they’re CF-Nos. How do you feel that term should be updated in 2025?
Maybe it should be CF-how? It’s very rarely CF-yes. Just by the very nature of the role, the CFO needs to be a gatekeeper of resources. But it comes back to the path to getting a yes. If you’re the wizard behind the curtain, you’re not going to build followership. You’re not going to build trust. You’re not going to build independent thought. Never be yes, no and then go away. It’s always how. How could we get there and bring people along? Once you do that, you build the critical thinking of the organization, and the quality of the asks you get start to get increasingly better.