The Role of FP&A in Business Strategy - with Christina Ross, Founder and CEO Cube

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Christina Ross, the founder and CEO of Cube. We'll be covering three main topics with Christina today. First, how her experiences at GE and Deloitte shaped Christina's view on the role of finance. Second, the biggest challenges facing CFOs with their FP&A function today. And third, the role of FP&A in business strategy. So with that as a backdrop, Christina, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics at Measure Up podcast.

**Christina Ross** (1:19)
All right. So I started my career in corporate finance. And I always like to say finance is a bit of a dirty word because it means different things to different people. There's financial services, there's investment banking, there's FinTech. That's sort of the more institutional transactional side of finance or within financial services, which is the industry. And then there's corporate finance, which is the function within a business that helps, as I like to say, tell the story behind the numbers. And when I was a young college graduate, I knew one day I might want to run a business or be part of starting a business. And I thought the best way to learn how a business works is to learn the language of business, which is the numbers. And I think of understanding the numbers as like speaking a language that not everyone in the world can speak, and it's an incredibly powerful tool. So that's what led me to start my career. This is the early 2000s now at General Electric, which at the time was on the list of most admired companies in the world. So top five. So if you think of like Amazon today or Apple or Google, that was GE back when I graduated.
And they were known for having a top tier finance department. And what was interesting about the way GE approached finance is a lot of the ways they talked about finance teams then is how we're talking about finance teams now, as the CFO is now being positioned more as a COO rather than just a pure financial officer. They're operational. So that's how I got started at GE and why I joined their program. And it sounds like Ray, you were part of FMP as well, the financial management program.

**Ray Rike** (2:56)
No, I wasn't part of FMP. I was part of their executive management development program. And in this small world, I don't want to spend too much on a company that's, you know, a lot of people don't know is as relevant today. Dennis Damerman was the CFO of all of GE and he became my mentor for a year and a half. So even though I was running a business unit, I actually had the CFO as my mentor in corporate audit, which you also spent time in corporate audit.
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**Christina Ross** (4:25)
It did and it also correlated to something that's very true at Cube that we've learned over the years or that we sort of already knew, which is that this language of finance that we speak is a common tongue across all different businesses and all different industries. So again, going back to this company and this program that was very popular at the time, rotated finance leaders through different types of GE businesses and as a conglomerate, you did everything from the electronics, the GE refrigerators to, I remember I was on the lot at Universal Studios. I was doing a bank audit in Nicaragua. I spent time at their global research center. So it wasn't just looking at numbers in one particular type of industry. You're looking at different sets of books in different types of businesses. And you're seeing how they're all similar and where they differ. So that was a really unique experience in that we got to go really deep in the numbers. And you also learn how auditors think. So if you ever want to be good at inspecting data, which is the most important thing in transition to becoming a leader, is there's this saying that you can't expect what you don't inspect. Being an auditor makes you a really great inspector.