How Covid-19 supercharged the CFO role: An oral history

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The Covid-19 pandemic transformed the role of the CFO.

In 2020, the CFO was already evolving into a strategic partner of the CEO, involved in many business decisions. But the pandemic put that evolution in overdrive.

The work of CFOs and their teams—scenario planning, cash management, FP&A, digital transformation—became key to businesses’ survival when the world went into lockdown and the global economy came to a screeching halt.

CFO Brew spoke with pandemic-era CFOs in a variety of industries, including a toilet paper company, fast food chain Chipotle, a multicity church, and others. They told us stories from the first days of shutdowns, how they planned on the fly, and what they learned from the pandemic.

Here’s CFO Brew’s oral history of the Covid-19 pandemic, as told by finance and accounting professionals.

Interviews have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

In the beginning. CFOs had to leap into action when the World Health Organization declared Covid-19, an infectious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

Samir Kanuga, CFO of Royal Paper Converting, a toilet paper company, in 2020: I never thought toilet paper would trend on Twitter. It was a crazy time. When we were first getting the news of Covid, the first thing we thought was of our employee safety. How do we keep everyone safe? And luckily we already had access to N95 masks and a lot of Purell. We were really early in getting a bunch more delivered to our factories for the employees. We knew we would be considered essential and had to keep producing and stay in business.

Adam Rymer, VP of finance at Chipotle in 2020: So the two sides of the company are obviously the corporate offices, but then also the restaurants. At the corporate offices, it was simple, in the sense of there’s a working from home mandate going into place. We’ve got great technology. We can switch over and start using all the teleconferencing services that we have. So that one was a much simpler process to keep everyone safe and to continue working.

In the restaurants, it was much more complicated, for obvious reasons. But the first thing was, are we going to be able to operate as a business? Will we be required to shut down, or can we continue on? And if we do continue on, how do we keep everyone safe? What can we get out to the restaurants in terms of PPE, and just how do we ensure that our employees are safe and that they can safely serve food to guests in that environment? But even before we got there, we weren’t even sure in the early days if we were going to be allowed to operate as a business in a restaurant.

Planning in overdrive. As the global economy shut down and supply chains ground to a halt, CFOs rushed to adjust their planning. Cash and liquidity management became critical.

Kanuga: We called an emergency board meeting, and drew all the money on a revolver, on the line of credit, and just got flush with liquidity, just in case. Because nobody knew if this was two weeks or two years or what. And then we immediately got on the phone with all of our vendors to make sure that everyone was still manufacturing…checking up on friends and colleagues, and making sure that all of our raw materials would still be coming in, as we would definitely need production…It was daily financial modeling.

Steve Webb, finance director for the Northern Kentucky Area Development District in 2020: With all the leadership, we had a Zoom meeting every morning to talk about what challenges were coming up…Things were so rapidly changing in terms of where we’re directing resources, and also just various operational challenges. On the fiscal side, you’re plotting out who’s going to be in the office each day…trying to ensure you have appropriate controls and separation of duties and appropriate reviews.

Rymer: We definitely started to run different scenarios for how much cash we had on hand and how much we would burn through. And the most dire scenario would be, we cannot operate our restaurants. Basically, our sales would go to zero. How do we retain our people? How do we continue to pay our people, knowing that we weren’t sure if this is going to last a week, two weeks, a month, but we want to do what’s right by our employees, and continue to pay them. But also have them readily available when we are able to open so that we can open quickly, because in order to be really successful at Chipotle requires quite a bit of training.

Natacha Clesca, CFO of Christ Church, a 13,000-member church in New Jersey in 2020: Most of our services are feel, touch, physical presence. As an executive team, we were thinking, how are we going to pivot so that even if we’re not providing the services to the community the way we normally do, how can we do it? And how prepared are we to be able to provide the services that we do, given the limitations of Covid?

Tech takes over. The pandemic accelerated digital transformation for many organizations.

Webb: That was definitely an environment where, “hey, we need to throw a little bit into the technology here so that we can keep things moving and stay compliant and have the right controls in place.” That was an opportunity to get things modernized.

Clesca: We included online services, online outreach, where people can actually contact us, if they were in another country, or in another state, or bedbound. That began the online presence or the non-physical presence. So that strategic thinking in terms of aligning that to our already existing programs, and a way of conducting our services, and providing services.

Paul Oliphant, CFO of medical device manufacturer Velentium in 2020: We’re not scalable [at the start of Covid]. We sat down and evaluated what are the things that would allow us to be more scalable. And the very first thing was a system overhaul. We knew, in order to grow, we’re gonna have to put a system in…We spent money on systems and processes that really gave the company a firm cornerstone or foundation…We had good people. We had good processes. We didn’t have a very good system. And so that was something that was going to impede our growth, and we saw that as a result of the Covid project. And then had the money to be able to spend it to upgrade our systems. We put in a new ERP system…so we were able to be ready to grow.

New role, who dis? CFOs and their organizations emerged from the pandemic to find that they were in a new world.

Kanuga: Extremely good at cash management after that. We tended to be good at that before, because we were operating a very high volume, low margin environment, and that just accentuated all those details to the nth degree. Now, as a CFO, I run risk management scenarios that I’d never even think about, because we never, never projected that. It was not a possibility to happen in our modeling. I run a lot more scenarios for risk management, and even more disciplined on cash management.

Webb: That experience helped some of the leaders realize that the fiscal people have more to offer than those compliance bits…Being in the finance seat, you have a very horizontal view of the organization…I see everything that’s going on. So any change they’re making in the police department, the fire department, public works, building and planning and inspections, I am on the front end of that change…So I think it opened the door. I think that capability was always there. It just maybe wasn’t exercised or expected or sought.

Neil Cohen, CFO of Windsor Capital Group, owner of Embassy Suites Hotels: It wasn’t about the financial statements anymore. Everyone looked at the CFO as, here’s the financial statements. This was more about, where are we going, where’s the future, how are we going to get through this? That talent of the CFO that always was hidden, that no one really looked at, all of a sudden became the forefront of everything. Where are we going? How are we going to get out of this? And what does it look like?

Your CFO has gotta be a storyteller. He’s telling you where it’s going. Recording history was part of his job, but it became a smaller part.

This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.

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