Craig Conti0:00
We're just looking for one moment of insight that you experience that you can share with us reveals how Finance plays a strategic role in business. What comes to mind when we ask for a financial dream?
Yeah, the one that comes to the forefront of mine, unfortunately it wasn't a very good story, but it taught me a ton. This was in about 2008 to 2009, and it really had very little to do with the financial crisis. I had moved from GD Capital to another part of the company, and within the first couple months in that role, I realized that we had a pretty material issue on the balance sheet, very material issue, and large enough to have attention from headquarters and the SEC at one point. And that was a really tough time. It was an old business that had been around for a hundred years, and it's one of those decisions that you need to make as a finance leader that says, do I continue doing what's been done and worked for everybody before me, or do I go out on the edge here and say this isn't right, regardless of what that could mean for me or my career?
Like most crossroads, they look kind of obvious right when you're looking back 15 years, but at the time I really struggled with that, and I made the choice that I was gonna raise the issue, be very unpopular person, and push it through. And there were some dark, dark months that I went through there. I really thought it was going to be the end of my career. I didn't know if I'd made the right decision. When you're in a situation like that, I'll bring this back to why how it influences how I behaved today, I promise. When I look back at that, I felt very lonely. The whole thing, success has many fathers, failure is an orphan, you can certainly feel that when you have a controllership issue that's been building over 20 years. The decisions that caused that issue were made when I was in middle school, right? But at the end of the day, you can't let it go any further. And it ended up working out just fine. I credit the culture of the company to do that, but it took a year and a half. And what that taught me was you need to put the numbers aside sometimes, put the career aside, and you need to go in and say, morally what should I be doing here? What does my gut tell me is the right thing? And once you've had that conversation with yourself, you need to stay the course. And I think that that was the defining moment for me and how I was going to make really, really hard decisions, impactful decisions, go forward. That was one when the answer is not super clear. And I think the second thing is, as I've set up control infrastructures after seeing that experience, it's really good, a positive from a negative, it's really good to say this is what can happen over term if you don't do this up front, right?
So one thing, I noticed in my career a lot of people, there's a book out there called Good to Great, which I'm sure you've read, a lot of people have read. And there's one thing about studying success that I think will teach you one thing, but you really need to look at failure too, right? Not just looking at who did it well, but where did it go bad and what did you learn from that that you can put go forward? And every new role I've taken since then, not even between companies, anytime I've had new folks in front of me, I've told that story. And one thing that I say is, on my team, the culture that I'm going to be a part of, that I'm going to drive, is always going to reward the person who would stand up when it's difficult, okay, with the right perspective, but stand up when it's difficult. And if we fail to invest in these controllership type infrastructures over term, this is what can happen, and it's not fun.
