The journey from FP&A to SaaS CFO - with CJ Gustafson, CFO PartsTech

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by CJ Gustafson, the CFO at Parts Tech, and the founder and author of the Mostly Metrics newsletter. We'll be covering three main areas with CJ today. First, the role of metrics in a journey from FP&A to CFO. Second, the importance of thought leadership in finance, and specifically the CFO role. And third, how does the use of metrics change once you're the CFO of an organization? CJ, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**CJ Gustafson** (1:16)
Thanks for having me on, Ray. I think we crossed paths online a bit. This is like internet friends becoming better internet friends. So I'm excited to be here and talk metrics and finance with the fellow Metrics fans. So I started my career out of college, I went to Boston College at PWC, Big Four Consulting group I worked in, mostly mergers and acquisitions. I did that for two years, mostly because I didn't really know what I wanted to do out of college, but it gave me the reps or repetitions to see different business models, which was neat. And that introduced me to SaaS I think from the outset. A lot of companies back then were selling perpetual based licenses, and there's a lot of professional services that went along with the implementations of those. And that was the first time I was introduced to enterprise software, which kind of caught my eye. And then from there, I went over to a private equity firm, large buyout firm, and I helped with the valuations of their portfolio companies, making sure they stayed on track with profitability targets, revenue targets, and I also helped with some of the fundraising there. And so that's kind of where I got my Excel chops, I think, in financial modeling. And I also learned how the funding side of the table works and how they spot good companies. And then from there, I kind of made the switch over to the dark side or maybe the fun side, but went over to help scale some hyper growth software companies. I went to a backup and recovery software company for a couple of years, worked in a number of different strategy roles.
Eventually made my way to FP&A, didn't even really know what FP&A was at the time, but learned on the fly and built out a group. And then I extended that FP&A trajectory as a fast growing cybersecurity firm. So those are my roles up until this CFO position most recently.

**Ray Rike** (3:07)
It's a varied background from mergers and acquisitions analyst to FP&A at hyper growth, really successful companies including Veeam and Sync, to now a CFO. But first of all, I wanted to go back to something you said. We went from internet acquaintances to Zoom friends.

**CJ Gustafson** (3:26)
Yeah.

**Ray Rike** (3:27)
And maybe soon we can actually hang out at the Circle Tavern and become drinking buddies. What do you think?

**CJ Gustafson** (3:32)
I'm always in for that. I'm a big Miller-like guy, so maybe I'll even let you buy me one.

**Ray Rike** (3:38)
Okay. Happy to do it. So it's the least I can do for you being a guest. But let's talk a little bit about those experiences. This is your first CFO role, correct, CJ, that you're in today? Yeah. Tell me a little bit about how those experiences prepped you to become a CFO. And I'm really looking at it from a rearview mirror now that you're a CFO. How do you see it's really helping you?

**CJ Gustafson** (4:02)
Yeah. I think I learned in FP&A how successful people organize their resources for success. And FP&A gets you into the room to talk to different people within the organization. And now as a CFO, I'm helping those people run their departments more effectively in a more holistic way. So I think FP&A gave me an excuse, I think, to ask questions that I may not have had the chance to ask in other positions. So if I was working in, say, product marketing or something, yeah, I would get across the org and certain projects I would work on, but I probably wouldn't have an excuse to ask more pointed questions. And I think FP&A it's kind of almost a detective license to go around and ask people things that you're both curious about, but also to try to deconstruct the levers of how you can improve performance.