Mar 18, 2020
CFOTL: Share with us a finance strategic moment?
Coletta: The most recent strategic moment that sticks with me goes
back two years to when I moved to our North America organization as
CFO. We were on the battlefield of innovation and the cloud
business, and we were carrying a big share of the company's
business, with high expectations on the street already. We had a
business that had been a bit bumpy in the beginning of the year,
but we had a solid team that was always seeking to improve itself.
To me, it was, Okay, what do I bring to the table and how do I
change the dynamic here? The good news was that we had a lot to
work with, but the bad news was that when you are public and in a
very exposed environment, you never have as much time as you’d
like. It's very important not only to deliver quickly, but also to
change or invert some trends.
I really make sure that I bring value to the business. My team and
I give advice and make fact-based decisions that really form a
success plan for the remainder of the year at any given time. The
strategic moment for me came at the end of the year. We had a very
sound acceleration and great financial results, and the team got
recognized as Finance Region of the Year. We had gotten employee
engagement going up, as well as leadership trust. Service attitudes
with regard to the business were way above the benchmarks, and all
of this was performed with quality, so we had gained in
predictability, efficiency, energy, and credibility. Obviously, the
credit goes to the team all together, and this takes an entire
leadership team really rising to the occasion. But it's quite
powerful to see how dynamics can change and how you can sustain
success when you focus on the right things.
This strategic moment for me was then when I entered that office
and got so much responsibility put in front of me. There were a lot
of areas to improve—I won’t say “fix”—but to improve. At the same
time, we had a very high run rate, and some areas were doing fairly
well. We had a business environment that was quite steady, a big
customer base, and so on. So, how do you really drive change in a
short period of time, which in this case was the seven months left
in the year to make an impact and turn the ship, so to speak? We
have been riding this wave ever since. We have a lot of positive
momentum across the board on the business front and also in
finance, and I think that inverting some of the trends at the right
time was critical. You learn a lot about yourself. You also learn a
lot about the ability to drive change and people. To me, this was a
very strategic moment in my career in terms of really having the
ability to build on everything that I had learned before and
everything that I had seen in different capacities in order to
really move the needle quickly.