Being CFO of a company with large growth opportunities requires ‘radical prioritization’

Mission Critical Group (MCG) is a power infrastructure company working to capitalize on the AI boom and its “growing demand for reliable power infrastructure,” as the company put it. In order to keep up with this rapid growth, it no doubt helps to have a CFO familiar with scaling up. Enter Julie Peffer, MCG’s new CFO, who started in October after stints as CFO at BigBear.ai and VP of finance at Amazon Web Services, where she said she helped guide the company through several years of rapid growth from 2017 to 2020.

Doing so required what she called “radical prioritization,” or identifying a short list of priorities that she can realistically achieve given a set of time and resource constraints. “That is what I bring, hopefully, to MCG, that I can understand and help the business understand that we have to be prioritized,” Peffer said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What attracted you to the role and to MCG itself?

I’ve spent almost all of my career in large, high-performing public companies across a variety of industries from manufacturing to technology. I’ve learned a lot about where I feel like I can personally add value to a company. I’m a builder at heart, and so I generally characterize myself as a strategic and operational leader who happens to have a finance filter. So to me, it’s really about the business and how I can add value from a finance perspective, but also as a business leader overall.

What was your approach to being in the first month of the job and learning the specifics of the company?

The best finance leaders are the ones that truly are intellectually curious about what’s happening in the business. [They ask], why is that happening? How do we really help to understand how to scale and look at those problems? I’ve spent a lot of time just diving in and understanding, what’s going on, where do you see the biggest challenges? For us, a big challenge is capacity. [I’m] trying to understand, how are they looking at capacity? Where should we be expanding, whether that’s through partners, or whether that’s through diving in specifically to new build capability? And how can finance be a part of that?

A big priority for us after I get past the first 30 to 60 days is, we’ve acquired a lot of companies, and so our next 12 months are going to have a lot to do with what I call building the foundation for the future. Truly being able to focus on the integration and maturing of all these businesses that we’ve purchased, and building a culture and a one-team process, one-team infrastructure so that we can scale profitably and efficiently.

What do you need to do to ensure you’re helping MCG achieve its growth objectives?

To be true business partners…we have to be part of the growth engine. I see my role is to ensure capital and strategy and the execution are all aligned and moving in the same direction so we can scale. That really means, how do we ensure that we have operational readiness to scale? What I mean by that is, we are laying the infrastructure so that we have good operational review processes, we’re measuring the right KPIs across the organization, we can indicate when things are coming at us, and we can anticipate those in advance. And that helps the organization to be much more prepared to scale.

At the pace that we’re growing, it’s really important that we’re part of that growth engine and that we’re seen as [being able to] provide and fuel that growth by laying the right foundation, creating the right process structure, [and] making sure we’re reviewing the right things at the right time.

You said earlier that you see yourself as a strategic and operational leader who has a finance filter. I think that’s a representation of how the role has kind of expanded, especially into strategy, over the years. How have you seen financial leadership roles change?

I absolutely think it’s a very different role than it used to be. This is not a back-office function. Finance can absolutely be a strategic part of your growth engine, truly driving the future of the business. The way I always tell [it to] my team is, I want you to be the right hand of whoever the executive leader is in your organization…They should not want to go to a meeting without you.