Four CFOs Share Their Unusual Career Starts

During our many conversations with CFOs, a number of finance leaders have told us that they had bracketed the CFO office as their preferred career destination beginning from Day One of their professional lives.

Others, though, have reported that the on-ramp to their finance career-building years showed up as something of a surprise both to them and to others.

When it comes to corporate finance, we often picture a well-trodden path paved with Big Five accounting firms and investment banks. However, let’s take a detour to explore the intriguing first chapters of four finance executives who took the path less traveled.

On the face of it, CFOs Don Bassell of ARKO Corp., Celeste Ackert of Fairmarkit, Russell Lester of Versapay, and Sruthi Lanka of Public.com would appear to share little in common other than their C-suite status, but when it comes to their career-building years, we find that each originally entered through an unconventional door of entry.

Down the Convenience Store Isle: Don Bassell, CFO, ARKO

At the start of his professional life, Don Bassell was convinced that he would never cut it as an auditor—a realization that quickly led him to enter the customer-facing realm.

CFO Don Bassell knew auditing wasn’t going to be an option for him.

ARKO Corp

“I started in retail, surrounded by snacks and customers,” he recalls, “but I quickly discovered the hidden treasure—understanding customer needs and making data-driven decisions. It was my secret sauce.”

Bassell’s early career path led him down the aisles of convenience stores, serving customers and managing inventory. While conventional wisdom might have viewed his role as unrelated to finance, Bassell recognized the power of customer-centric insights. By analyzing sales patterns, inventory turnover, and customer behavior, he honed his ability to make informed financial decisions. Bassell’s unconventional start provided him with a unique perspective on the intersection of business operations and finance, propelling him to success in the financial realm.

For Bassell, the CFO office would become “the destination” only after he received a particular job offer when he was in his early 40s.

“I didn’t think that I wanted to be a CFO,” remarks Bassell, who credits his eventual change of heart to a human resources consultant who pointedly cross-examined his hesitation to pursue the role.

“She took me through this whole process of listing the different roles that I had had and things that I had done during my career, and she then put me through a series of questions,” explains Bassell, who adds that both he and the consultant ended up almost simultaneously saying the same words: “Okay, it looks like the CFO office it is.”

To better reveal the scope of Bassell’s experiences, the consultant had helped him to reformulate his executive resume by using a listing of the different functional roles that he had filled rather than the traditional chronological list—a change that helped even Bassell to better digest the fact that he now had a CFO resume.

Says Bassell: “It was a crossroads for me—she really helped me to assess what it was that I wanted to do.”

By the time he was in his early 40s, Bassell had held a variety of operational and finance roles that prepped him to enter the CFO office at ARKO Corp., a Fortune 500 company that remains one of the largest operators of convenience stores and wholesalers of fuel in the United States.

Earlier this year, Bassell announced his intent to retire as ARKO CFO at the end of 2023, ending a career that will have spanned 43 years in the convenience store space.

Inside RR Donnelly’s Printing Bull Pen: Celeste Ackert, CFO, Fairmarkit

Of all of the places where future CFOs could have been employed in the late 1990s, the printing division of RR Donnelley might seem to have been among the least likely.

However, what’s important to note is that this period predated the wide deployment of EDGAR—the database system that electronically automates the collection, validation, and acceptance of financial documents by the SEC—so printing and marketing communications giant Donnelley still remained as one of the country’s largest hubs of activity surrounding such materials.

Regularly printing company SEC Documents gave Ackert a penetrating view into a world she wanted to … [+] learn more about.

Fairmarkit

“For time-sensitive documents, there would be a deadline to be met each afternoon in order to enable documents to be flown and then hand-couriered to the SEC’s offices,” recalls Celeste Ackert, who tells us that in order to better accommodate any clients who might drop by, the office space that she occupied with others featured a half-door whose bottom was closed and top always open.

For Ackert, who had become an eagle-eyed project manager inside Donnelley’s printing bullpen, the endless flow of financial documents served to satisfy a growing operations appetite before morphing into a portal from which to observe future career possibilities.

“I would be flipping through these SEC documents and thinking to myself, ‘You know what?—perhaps I’d like to see myself in a prospectus someday,’” remarks Ackert, who after 6 years of serving Donnelley clients segued into a series of corporate finance jobs first by leveraging her printing operations expertise and subsequently by climbing the ranks as an FP&A all-star.

Along Yesterday’s Analytics Byways | Russell Lester, CFO, Versapay

By the time Russell Lester landed inside Intuit’s department of analysis in 2009, the nascent career path on which he had first set out nearly 10 years earlier had become brimming with possibilities.

Back in the early 2000s, Lester was hired by the company Harland Clarke (now Vericast) as an analyst specializing in customer information and insights.

Back in the early 2000s, careers in data analytics weren’t expected to lead to the c-suite.

Versapay

“This was not traditional finance, and I was sort of tiptoeing around what we would broadly call ‘analytics’ today,” remembers Lester, who notes that his adeptness with data analysis eventually resulted in his assignment to a role responsible for pioneering the company’s analytics strategy, which subsequently helped to open the door to Harland’s FP&A function.

Lester’s customer-centric, data insight resume would soon prove capable of opening doors to both senior finance and operational roles.

Along the way, he accepted a VP of marketing operations position with Keap, a CRM applications vendor that immediately tasked him with establishing a single source of truth for data across the organization. It wasn’t long before Lester’s world was once again intersecting with the finance function, a development that eventually led to broader planning and analysis responsibilities across both operations and finance.

A couple of years later, Keap found itself in search of a new finance leader—a development that Lester was monitoring somewhat passively until a mentor challenged him to throw his hat into the ring.

“He told me that he thought that I was already ‘doing the work’ and that I should have a conversation with the board—so I did,” explains Lester, who would be named the company’s CFO in early 2020.

Goldman’s BlackBerry Hunter: Sruthi Lanka, CFO, Public.com

Sruthi Lanka is clearly not the only CFO who began her professional career at blue chip investment house Goldman Sachs.

However, she may be one of the only CFOs—if not the only one—who can trace her career roots to Goldman’s tech engineering team.

As a 20-something techie, Lanka was charged with separating Goldman partners from their coveted … [+] Blackberrys.

Public.com

Back in 2009, as the economic downturn dispatched a daily dose of bad news, Lanka was tasked with separating Goldman’s nervous bankers from their long-tenured messaging device of choice: the BlackBerry.

“Most banks would not even entertain the idea of switching because the BlackBerry was so locked down and considered to be ironclad,” explains Lanka, who notes that while Apple’s iPhone had become a popular alternative to the BlackBerry inside a number of different industries, bankers were known for clutching their BlackBerrys—and Goldman was no exception.

After 3 years with Goldman Sachs, Lanka found herself being led into another realm by the same curiosity that had once caused her to become an engineer and subsequently drawn her to all things tech.

A typical self-question of the time was, “How do bankers make the decisions that they make about whether to invest or not invest?”

“This was all lost on me as an engineer,” recalls Lanka, who would return to school for an MBA and subsequently open her next career chapter as an investment banker before swinging the door open to CFO opportunities.

It perhaps goes without saying that none of the aforementioned finance leaders “rewrote the rulebook” when it came to reaching the C-suite. Their subsequent career ladders weren’t outfitted with clever shortcuts or express chutes into the future. However, at the very start of their careers, each of these leaders found an unconventional door of entry and embarked on a path less traveled.

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