BONUS | Doreen Remmen - Today's CFO

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Mitch: (00:05)

Hey everybody. Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Mitch Roshong. Thank you for joining us again today. You're about to hear the third bonus episode of our IMA focused mini series within Count Me In. We're going to listen to Adam speak with IMA CFO and senior vice president of operations, Doreen Remmen. This episode will be especially relevant as you'll hear Doreen talk about her various responsibilities which really highlight the changing role of the CFO in today's industry. I'll let Doreen and Adam fill you in on the rest. So let's head over to the conversation now.

Doreen: (00:46)

So Adam, it's really nice to have you visit me here in my office today.

Adam: (00:50)

Glad to be here Doreen. Could you tell us a little bit about your roles and responsibilities here at IMA?

Doreen: (00:56)

Sure. Well, as you know, I'm the chief financial officer and I have the traditional role of leading the finance organization. I ensure that our financial reporting and regulatory reporting are timely and accurate. I lead the budgeting process and I work with the external advisors, the accountants and attorneys, who keep us moving in the right direction. And thankfully I have a very professional finance team in place that's led by a highly skilled controller. So I have other responsibilities as well. My title is senior vice president of operations and my role goes beyond finance to include information technology, human resources, customer service and facilities. And here again, luckily I have wonderful teams in place and talented leaders.

Adam: (01:46)

So during, I also know you work with the board of directors. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Doreen: (01:50)

Okay. Well, my favorite part of my job is being the staff liaison to the strategic planning committee of the board of directors. And in this role I ensure that we have a continuous systematic process for refining our strategic plan every year. And that includes collecting input from our stakeholders who could be our members, our staff, our board, our vendors, performing an environmental scan and risk assessment and communicating the strategic priorities.

Adam: (02:22)

So we know that there's many changes happening in the accounting industry. So how do your various responsibilities reflect those changes?

Doreen: (02:31)

Well, Adam, there's been a lot written about the changing role of the CFO and I think more and more finance leaders are broadening their scope and becoming involved in strategy. And I think this is very true in large companies, where the CFO may have been seen as a functional trusted advisor in the past. That CFO is now being called upon to be a true business partner in strategic decisions. And this requires that we expand beyond a financial reporting and develop those analytical skills that help us predict an influence the future. But I'm asked this question quite often, Adam. And what I've said before is nobody told me at the beginning of my career that I was supposed to just stay in the finance function and I had the opportunity to work as the finance leader in mid size companies typically, but not always privately held. And as the CFO I was always the next person to the CEO in every business decision. So people relied on me to bring my analytical skills to different roles. Uh, in the company that I worked at before IMA I was able to move into a vice president of supply chain role. I also worked as the vice president of sales and marketing for a period of time. Having competent leaders on the teams that reported to me was really important. Having a highly competent controller in place enabled me to trust that she had everything under control. And I could step away from finance when necessary, go on a sales call, close a deal, or visit a supplier's factory and try to understand if they had the quality systems in place that would make them a reliable partner in a supplier managed inventory program. So nobody ever told me I was supposed to stick to finance. If I'd gotten that lesson early in my career, I think my life would have been a lot simpler. But I've enjoyed my career and I've enjoyed being in a lot of different roles and I have a lot of different roles here at IMA as well.

Adam: (04:43)

So as you've already mentioned, how your different roles here at IMA kind of spread that and you've become that business partner with, you know, whether it's with the board or helping out with operations and in the finance function as well.

Doreen: (04:58)

I'm just naturally curious person. I'm nosy. I like to get involved in different things. And uh, here at IMA I'm passionate about what is going on because I'm an IMA member and I am a, was always a really important, support system in my career. So I'm passionate about making sure that we're doing the strategic things that will serve the profession in the future.

Adam: (05:23)

So on that same note, measurements and metrics are obviously very important for the CFO to monitor, as you've already mentioned. So what are a few keys of your key performance indicators or goals as a CFO at IMA? And how or why might they be different from those at a CFO to public organization?

Doreen: (05:41)

Okay. So many of our financial metrics are very, very similar. Even though we're not for profit, we operate like a for profit business, in a very disciplined manner. We look at all the traditional indicators of financial that include profitability, cashflow and balance sheet ratios that measure liquidity and stability. Of course we do all of those things, but as a mission based, not for profit organization, not everything we do has dollars attached to it. So we look deeply at measures of member engagement to understand whether we're delivering the value that we should be.

Adam: (06:20)

So one of the biggest areas of emphasis in finance and accounting competencies is data analytics. And we had, I may know that a very important and so how heavily, how heavily do you use or rely on data analytics for financial decisions and recommendations?

Doreen: (06:37)

Well, we rely very heavily on data to support our decisions. We try to walk the walk here at IMA and we know that data analytics are very important to all of our members. We look at leading indicators in our data such as the number of new candidates for the CMA program. We also look at things like pass rates on the exam by region and it's very important for us to understand the trends as they're developing. My staff has been exploring new technology products such as Tableau and the advanced features in Excel to unlock the secrets and the trends that are showing up in our database. We also look at external data such as the GDP in our target markets and the numbers of students that are graduating from accounting and finance programs at universities.

Adam: (07:27)

So how do you think the use of those new tools that they're looking at will help IMA]?

Doreen: (07:3...