This CFO helps companies grow and head for an exit

Brian Barnum has a track record of helping numerous companies “realize their value potential,” which usually led to exits, including sales to strategic buyers or an IPO, and then “the excitement of moving on to something new and meeting new people.”

Some of his early experiences were at post-dotcom-crash companies (including Rent.com and business.com), but more recently, Barnum spent nearly a decade at private equity firm Shamrock Capital, advising its portfolio companies as an operating partner and sometimes as a board member.

Now Barnum is looking to work his magic one more time at online learning platform Skillable, a Shamrock portfolio company with a virtual lab platform for employee training on products and IT.

Barnum, who had served on the Skillable board, joined the company in May as its CFO. He took the Skillable post, he said, as a way to “get back to my roots.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, you helmed several businesses, usually as CFO, that were eventually sold or went public.

I spent most of my career as an exec in growth-oriented software and technology companies. Often, I was CFO or what I used to call “CFO-plus” or “CFO with a pretty operational orientation.” Sometimes I was COO. Sometimes I had different elements of organizations reporting to me. So I got a pretty good experience in overall understanding of how technology companies grow successfully and execute successfully. Always kind of from the perspective of, “How do we create a great financial business and how do we hit metrics that make us valuable?”

How did you get involved with Shamrock Capital? Did you sell a company to them? How did they find you?

Shamrock’s a very strong firm on having a network in its ecosystem and relationships that it uses, both for deal flow and for getting expertise out of operators when they need to…And I had been sort of part of that network over the years, and so when they decided they wanted to hire an operating partner, the head of the firm called me and said, “Hey, would this be something you’re interested in?” And I was just finishing up on a deal where I was the COO of a SaaS company in the insurance space….We were kind of in the final strokes of that process of selling the business. I sort of said, “Hey, this actually sounds pretty fun. I get to employ this skill set that I’ve learned as an operator.”

As Shamrock’s first operating partner, what companies did you work on?

My kind of specialty as an exec was, “Hey, here’s a company, it’s a growth company, it’s got a great strategy, it’s got a great product offering, but we need to turn all the dials and accelerate the growth and drive it toward an exit, either an IPO or an M&A exit.” That was what I was known for as an operating exec. I got lucky that we were able to do that a number of times…My career was really almost like a growth equity portfolio in and of itself.

When you’re done with one company, you like moving on to something new?

I used to love it when I was young. One of the nice things about being an operating partner [at Shamrock] was that I got the best of both worlds…Every company [is] a little bit like a puzzle. If we can get all the pieces just right, we can really capture the most value. And there’s a lot of fun and enjoyment in that for me. And yes, I think that’s probably still going to be a part of my career going forward.

Shamrock invested in Skillable in 2021. Skillable is a private equity investment, not a growth investment?

We thought of [Skillable] as probably more than just ‘“Hey, we’re helping the company go from point A to point B in an underwritten plan.” It was more of a larger transformation that we took on. So I would say that it now looks more like a growth investment than a traditional sort of highly profitable, slower-growing PE investment, but it sort of bridges the gap between both. We are focused on growing the business, but doing so profitably. But our emphasis is on growth and on tackling this big market opportunity…I think [Skillable] is a company with a lot of runway and a lot of potential, and we’ll do the right thing for Shamrock and for our shareholders. But to me, this is one [company] that I think could have a lot of legs.