The accountant-to-CFO pipeline in action

First-time CFO Lucas Zettle has learned a lot since he rejoined the CPA, accounting, and consulting firm Aldrich that was his first job out of business school.

Aldrich’s client work centers on relationships, Zettle told CFO Brew, and continuing to invest in Aldrich relationships after leaving is what helped him “get a foot in the door and ultimately helped in building trust” that facilitated his return to the Lake Oswego, Oregon-based firm as CFO.

Zettle said he knew it was a risk, but that his time away from the firm was fruitful at software company Webtrends, where he worked his way up from a revenue accountant to VP of finance and sales ops in less than five years.

Now, eight years into the CFO role at Aldrich, Zettle told CFO Brew about his priorities for the company, why he believes process comes before technology, how he measures progress on his teams, and why the biggest challenge this year is imagining “the art of the possible.”

Why did you return to Aldrich? Was it always in the back of your head?

I’ve always been fairly people-first, and good at building relationships—or I like to think that I am. So in my first couple of years that I was [at Aldrich], I did meet some really great people and even after I left, I made every effort to stay connected with them…I think that played a big part.

Are you tracking any KPIs within the accounting and finance team?

The first KPI that I would hone in on is: What’s our days to close, and our time to report out to business? That’s sort of a silly KPI, because you’re like, “Yeah, that should happen in any accounting and finance organization.” I think the underlying sentiment behind that is really, how quickly are we going out and engaging with our stakeholders, and talking to them about the information that we see, to help influence better decisions in that month, or in that quarter, or in that year? Ultimately, in our role within the accounting and finance team, we’re safeguarding the assets of the company, and so I really view it as a high-responsibility objective for us to make sure that we’re bringing forth the right information at the right time.

Did you take anything away from your time in tech that you have been able to implement as CFO of Aldrich?

I'll talk to the people-side, and I'll talk about why…You can have the best technology in the world, but if you don’t have the processes, it ain’t gonna work. That’s just a reality. So it all comes back to: Do you have the right business processes first? Are those clearly documented? Are they standardized? Are exceptions appropriate for what they are? You’ve got to make sure that you don’t have those all over the board. If you do, I think that any technology tool you bring in, is ultimately going to be really challenging to get the value out of it that you want.

We’ve got—I call them SOPs, standard operating procedures—documented, and let’s also make sure that they’re adding value. Sometimes you’ll find, “Hey, we’re reviewing this thing,” it’s like “Well, let's pause for a moment. How long have we reviewed it for? How often are we finding mistakes, and what is the risk if a mistake is made?,” really being able to take that risk-based approach in how we go about some of our processes.

But I found once you have those, then you can actually pull the technology in to really help support you.

What are the biggest obstacles or challenges that you and your team are facing?

The biggest obstacle we have in front of us this year is, how do we imagine the art of the possible, around what information we can surface to make better decisions? Which is the fun part. Then the next part is, how do we execute on that as a team? Which is the really challenging part, because that’s where you get into working across different areas of the business, really trying to tear down those silos, that’s not the work that can just be done within the four walls of the accounting and finance department.