On the Edge

Stephen Brown (00:01.39)
Welcome to On The Edge brought to you by Elite Sales Edge with your host, Stephen Brown. In the series, Getting to Know Your CXOs, we'll be diving deep into conversations with various C -level executives. We'll explore the formidable challenges they encounter, the critical decisions they make, and the lessons that have left a lasting impact on them. Sit back and prepare to gain some insightful knowledge from the leaders who shape the business world.

Stephen Brown (00:37.966)
Welcome to On the Edge. I'm your host, Stephen Brown, and this is another episode of Getting to Know Your CXOs. Today our guest is Bob Bobbiieri. Bob is a highly successful CFO with extensive C -suite experience in transforming underperforming organizations into quality companies. Bob has in -depth experience in finance, business analytics, global &A, and capital raising, and a track record of achieving growth, profitability, and increasing shareholder value.

Bob, welcome to the show. We're glad to have you. Steve, very much appreciate the opportunity and glad to be here with you. Thank you so much. Sure. Hey, why don't you take a take a couple minutes and introduce yourself to the audience out there. Tell them a little bit about your experience. Sure. Thank you, Steve. And and hello everyone. My background right now, I've had the opportunity to launch and start an organization called Newport Partners.

with a couple of very esteemed business colleagues. The reason for us starting that is we've each seen the experience of businesses out there needing some additional experience, some additional guidance, maybe even some backfilling, some key needs that are not easily available quickly for an organization to thrive. How I've shaped my journey is I've been a serial

C -suite executive in both public and private companies. My background is at core finance, but I've always been in situations where my responsibilities included operations, included strategy, included other administrative areas, and in many times challenging global times and environments. So all of that has kind of shaped my experience to date. Most recently, I was a public company global.

CFO of technology company. Prior to that, I did some additional consulting work.

Stephen Brown (02:43.565)
I did additional consulting work for an organization focused on growth stage technology companies. And prior to that, I had some very, very solid experience with technology companies that were growing really quick. I took Lawson Software Public, orchestrated some other both transactions and high growth spurts from other technology companies that were both private and public.

But early stage would help shape as I worked in a more fundamental business at a business school, which was a very large global player where a lot of the difficulties that come into technology are everyday present in some of those organizations. So we do live in a world where a lot of people have not seen a correction or lived successfully through a correction. And we've seen situations where people never saw downturn.

The good news is the three of us at Newport Partners bring those experience to help an executive team, a financial sponsor or a board help navigate through those circumstances. So. Excellent. Thanks Bob. Thank you. No, I appreciate it. This is a, this should be a lot of fun. So you know what, with that, let's, let's get right into it, Bob. So, you know, with all your experience as a CFO, working with different, different companies at different stages, what would you say?

are the most important things for a new CFO coming into that role to get accomplished in the first 30 to 60 days? Yeah, initially I think it's one of very active learning. And what I mean by that is you need to know first the situation you're in. Companies and situations is a wide spectrum. You may have a high growth, very profitable juggernaut, so to speak.

that you fortunately are in and your job is to help keep it that way. The other end of the spectrum, you may have the turnaround that's all but impossible and variations in between because each of them will require a different action and a different priority. Second in your learning, you need to do 360s of learn what is onside the executive team's mind.

Stephen Brown (05:10.925)
what your functional team that you're responsible, what they're thinking, what the board's thinking, and either what the public company investors, if you're public, or what the private financial sponsors mindset is. The other thing that will be important is you're going to be worked. And what I mean by that is everyone has an agenda and the new person gets to hear all kind of spin of what their particular...

view of the world is, which typically in too many cases is one sided, especially in a time when people are challenged. And so you have to be thoughtful. You have to both pay attention, but you have to be very analytical because some of the stuff you'll hear will not be the right story. And you need to process that. The other thing too, is you need to be seen as a person who pays attention to what they're hearing and someone who could blend into the team.

The other thing I think is important is you can't influence the team unless you're part of the team. I've also seen the mistakes of many executives that come in guns blazing. They have all the answers. They want to do what they already have in their mind is right. They may actually be right, but if they don't take the team with them, doesn't work. The other benefit I had in kind of my career development is I work for two.

guys that were Air Force fighter pilots. And one of the things I learned was if you race too fast, you lose the squadron. So you have to kind of meter your own pace, even though by nature, all the people in the C -suite are pretty aggressive in nature. Kind of keep the team with you. You can't just be the lone ranger and fly off and do everything yourself. So anyway, a lot to think about in that first 30 to 60 days.

Yeah, there's been a constant theme that has emerged throughout the numerous interviews I've done with C -level folks as part of this series. And listening is just by far the core attribute I've seen from all the leadership personalities. Listen first, act second, which seems to be the key element of success in getting off on the right foot.

Stephen Brown (07:34.861)
Totally agree, but discriminate. You are going to listen to things that are either not true or are political spin. So you do have to be discriminating in that as well. Gotcha. Awesome. So one of the next areas I'd like to dive into is building a team and leadership attributes. So when you're putting a team together, Bob, what are some important attributes you look for in leadership and how do you go about assembling a team?

Well, when you look at an individual bringing them on, I think there's two. One is you're looking at the range of competences for that particular role. So, you know, you get that from the interview process, you get that from resume, you get that from background. Second, which is interesting that I picked up along the way is ask yourself, would this person be someone you want one of your children to work for?

because leadership is important and you're trying to come away with a sense of style, not just the best particular skill who may not be a good fit longer term with the team. Third, I like diversity, diversity of thought, diversity of approach. I like to have teams that are healthy in debate of attack and problems from different vantage points and different experiences.

but also be a team. And what I mean by that is once you decide the team has to run the play one play. Or if you're an orchestra, once you decide what your piece of music should sound like, you basically then execute that one way. The bait is good, but you have to break the huddle, so to speak, and then go out as a singular team.

Yeah, I've noticed that over the years there's the fundamental, you know, paradox of agree and commit, which is good. You can disagree and commit also acceptable. What's not acceptable is to agree, to agree and not commit. If everybody's not on the same page, there's you're destined for failure. Absolutely. And the other thing is there's when you have that alignment, even if there's a healthy debate before it, there's.

Stephen Brown (09:59.213)
There's a synergy of the power of the right team that it's a, you know, no matter what the number is, it multiplies itself. If they synergistically come out a hundred percent behind that execution.

So moving to the next area, one of the things that both of us have had the opportunity and basically anybody who's been in a leadership position for the last four or five years had a pretty big curve ball thrown at them with a global pandemic. And the theme of this question is around decision making and making tough decisions. So the question is, do you have a process that you use when you have to make tough decisions? And then just...

You know, can you give me or the audience a little bit of your thinking around some of the learnings that came out of leading through the pandemic that are going to help us as we move forward? Yeah, both good. And, and Steve, yes, I, you know, part of it is, and maybe more financial because we're very quantitative and there's a lot of facts. You cannot wait too long. So the first thing is you're never going to have a hundred, a hundred percent.

of the facts that you may think you need. So I think you want to have the right collection. You also don't want to shoot before you aim, so to speak. But you want to collect as many facts as you can, but act with speed. And then again, I'll go back to my Air Force fighter pilot things. When you're flying from point A to point B, no matter where,

You're only rarely on the exact course, but what you are doing as a pilot is you're frequently course correcting to get to that point B. So collect your facts, act quickly, swiftly, so to speak, and then keep course correcting because even if you're off base, if you use speed as a competitive weapon to get back and take the right corrective action, you could win. So you don't need to be perfect.

Stephen Brown (12:06.637)
moment one and then just hit the on button and then things take care of themselves. It'll be a series of adjustments along that journey. And I think the pandemic taught us all of, you're not going to have full effects. We all lived in a world where we didn't know what we didn't know, even though the talking heads at TV acted like they knew perhaps more. And part of that was they needed to show confidence. And I get that.

But at the same time, we're all going to live in worlds that we won't know everything we're going to know. So act, mobilize, and then keep taking high speed corrective action. That's what I would recommend. Gotcha. Well, speaking of speed, that's kind of a good segue into the next question I have for you, which is AI. Can you just give us your broad thoughts on AI and how?

You know, you think executives ought to be thinking about AI as it applies to business because it's here to stay. But just as all new technologies come in, what's your what's your guidance around new technology like AI for companies? Yes, that's very interesting. And Steve, I think if we do this call six months from now or a year from now or year and a half from now, every answer you and I exchange on will be different.

only because it's so rapidly moving. A couple of things. One is it's totally transformational. It will be that. Second, I think everyone, they don't know what they don't know. Even the AI experts are learning. The interesting things I'm starting to see pretty rapidly is how there's so many competing AI.

Organizations and apps and so on. Not all of them were survived. Same thing with approaches. So if I had to land on my, at least my thoughts is I don't think AI ends the world and I don't think it eliminates broad -based sets of jobs. I don't believe that. I like the term that Microsoft, not because they will be the big winner in this, but the whole term of copilot.

Stephen Brown (14:27.341)
So I know in another setting, I'll borrow something that I heard in your personal life. If you had a personal AI robot, so to speak, or an AI cloud just for your life, you want to spend time with your spouse and your kids. You want to exercise. You want to do all of that yourself. What would AI do in your personal life? Take out the garbage, mow the lawn.

They'll kill the spider that's in the corner, do all of the things that you don't want to do, don't like doing, and you view as lesser value. I think in the business world, there'll be more and more of that. In the things that I touch, AI is great for research. So if you need to decide upon something, the traditional way of talking to people, doing traditional searches, compiling facts, thinking through those.

There are some great tools that jumpstart that in a very, very high speed manner for you. So that'll happen. There will always be a human element because like, for instance, things that people will say, I've been thinking about, like customer service will be all transformed to AI. I think much of it will be. If I am I flying to Chicago and I need to change my flight or change my seat assignment, I think AI could handle that.

If my spouse is very sick and I really need to take emergency steps, I want a human on the phone. And I think in those circumstances, the more routine stuff will be part of AI, but then you still need that human touch in other situations. So the folks that are involved in all of those practices and processes will have their co -pilot, so to speak, to do the more mundane things.

And their time and energy focus, intellect experience will be more reserved for the higher order things where people need that. It will be, it'll be totally transformational because we don't know. So five years from now, let's do another one of these. We'll see what happens. Yeah. We'll probably have some avatars from each of us making up the questions for us. Yes, absolutely. Well, let's, let's switch gears a little bit. You know, you've spent, you know,

Stephen Brown (16:51.021)
A lot of time in corporate America, you probably worked with some startups and now you founded a company, you've been in public companies. Can you, so it's kind of a two part question. One, what are a couple of life lessons that you've learned along the way that you'd like to share with the audience that you think are valuable that really impacted your trajectory or your career?

And then the second part of that is having, you know, started a new, a new business, you know, let's talk a little bit about your passion behind that. What are you, what's driving you? Yeah. Let me, if I may, let me start with the second first. We, you know, analogy. If you look at professional golfers, they have coaches for their golf technique and they probably have a variety of both.

physical trainers and maybe other types of individuals around them to help them with their game. That's how they stay on top of the game. If you look at kind of other professions, you know, like LeBron James supposedly spends over a million a year outside of his organization on just his personal training, his care, his physical therapy, even his, some of his mental and psychological coaching.

of those things in the business world, people are afraid to ask for help. So what we would like to say that we can help with is we have scar tissue. We've been through some of these things. We're not there to take anyone's job, but we're there to be a co there's a great book that bill Campbell wrote called the trillion dollar coach. And he was husband advisor in Silicon Valley.

for a long time. And I think if he revised the title, I think the new one would be the $2 trillion coach. But everywhere from Steve Jobs until all of the iconic startup, Bill was a board member or advisor. And in many cases, you know, as you read the book, he would just take a walk with Steve and they would bounce ideas off each other. And I think all too often what we think we could help, maybe not to the $2 trillion level, but in some way just be that advisor.

Stephen Brown (19:12.301)
maybe help where there's a bandwidth issue, maybe help expand where the team just kind of runs out of time or doesn't have maybe a certain expertise that we could help with. But we think there's a need to augment that organization, certainly during tough times with others. So our passion, and it applies to other people starting up things, is through the void. We believe we have experience to help fill that void.

And how we will come away with, call it sweat equity rewards is just to see those organizations succeed. So in the example that I'm using with Bill Campbell, I'm sure if we met him and he was on the call, he'd have a ton of pride of the organizations he touched and the individuals he touched and in some small way, how he contributed to actually changing American business.

So in our way, we just want to do something very similar. The first part of the question is a good one. I'll go back to what an investor friend of mine said. He said, we don't buy businesses, we buy management teams. So step one is a management team that has passion about what they're doing. Second, that there's a void in the marketplace that needs what that team is onto.

And then I think third is to shape a strategic advantage with staying power to win. Not everyone's going to be the magnificent seven, but there's a place for a whole lot of very, very successful companies. And then you introduce AI, which means the landscape will change dramatically. 10 years from now, there'll be a magnificent fill in the number that will exist. We don't know who they are.

Some of them may be names that we hear now. I bet the majority of them will be names. None of us are familiar with right away. Yep. I agree with you. I want to go back to something you said. I love the analogy of breaking down the walls and using coaches to exercise those muscles. You know, cause I think a lot of times and particularly in corporate America, you know,

Stephen Brown (21:37.293)
people get into positions, they almost feel cornered that they have to have all the answers, you know, and they're afraid to reach out and collaborate, build trust basically. And I think the more that we can reach out across the aisles and help people, you know, get where they need to be, is going to help move businesses a lot further forward than, than if we just continue to try to do this stuff ourselves. I really, that really resonates. I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you. And.

You just reflected a, one of the large search firms on their mailing. they talked about what they're calling CEO imposters. And what ends up happening is when cornered or in a challenging time, people are conditioned to act a certain way, even though they don't have the internal confidence to say, I'm really on my game. so in some ways let's coach up. Coaching is not bad.

It's additive. And that's kind of one of the things that we think we could bring to the table. So last question I have for you is what advice would you have for the modern salesperson when they engage at the C level? Yeah, I think it's important to learn how the decisions are made in whatever space you're in.

It depends, you know, some sales are smaller tickets, some sales are bigger ticket. And I've always sensed that if you learn the organization well, your potential customer, you're dealing with some internal advocate on your prospect site. Your job is to make that person as educated as possible to sell through their organization without looking like they're bought and paid for by the selling organization.

But part of it is not only learning your product and their need, but also how decisions are made in that organization. So, does it go all the way up the C -suite? Does it go to a board? And is the board made up of financial sponsors? All of those techniques really you got to be thoughtful about because that's how you close a successful sale. The other thing is go backwards internally. Get the help you need. In many cases,

Stephen Brown (24:01.933)
folks in the C -suite could pick up the phone, make a call, make a visit, do something that could further grease the skids of getting that deal closed. Someone in the sale selling organization should not be afraid to call upon your own C -suite people to say, hey, I could use someone for a bit of added influence. In a prior life, one of my customers was the Mayo Clinic and my job with them was not

to convince them of my almost went to medical school knowledge. It was to say, if you have any problem for anything that we're doing, one stop shopping, just call me. Thank you, Bob, for sharing that. I really appreciate it. I'm sure our listeners are going to appreciate it. I want to thank you again for joining us here on the edge and participating in our getting to know your CXOs. Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Steve. Appreciate the opportunity. Hopefully we do it again.

We'll see what the new world changes for us and kind of love to follow up with you. Thank you so, so much.