1208: Quality, Trust, and Scale | with Cal Brouilette, CFO, Flatiron Health

0:00Cal Brouilette: Support for CFO Thought Leader comes from Salesforce. Unify selling and billing for a seamless customer experience. And one stream, trusted data, faster decisions. Hello, this is Martino Cadoni, CFO at Depot, and you are listening to the CFO Thought Leader podcast. This is episode 1208.

0:29yeah so like the the graduate scheme in the uk that i was on as part of centrica is a three-year program you do three or four rotations you qualify and study to become a chartered accountant in the uk at the same time um and the third rotation is actually funny it just came up i think it was 20 years today i was in portugal when i found out i got this this role in the US like 20 years ago today, which is kind of bizarre. It just came up as an opportunity. I had a friend who'd come over here and they said they'd loved it. And for me, where I was in my life, where I was in my career, I had two opportunities to go and work at corporate strategy at Centric Headquarters, which was arguably the sexier job, or to make a good life decision and go live in New York.

1:16And for me at 26, that's a pretty easy decision.

1:21Cal Brouilette: Hi, it's Jack. On today's show, we speak with Cal Brulett, CFO of Flatiron Health. Finance leaders are being told that AI will make decisions faster, sharpen analysis, and perhaps even reduce the need for some of the work finance teams do today. But speed creates its own problem. When an answer arrives in minutes, how do you know you can trust it? And when the underlying data involves cancer care, quality isn't something you trade away for efficiency. In today's conversation, we hear about the tension between scale and confidence, between what technology can produce and what leaders are prepared to act on.

2:08Cal Brouilette: The larger CFO question may be this. Is AI changing decision-making or simply raising the standard for judgment? it. CFO Cal Brulette helps us shed light on what may be the answer after this. What is a forward finance organization? Finance leaders are under pressure to move faster, adopt AI, and guide decisions across the business. But here's what most people miss. AI doesn't create value on its own You need the right operating model behind it That's what Ford Finance is It's the blueprint for building trusted data with finance and IT actually aligned And AI working right where decisions are made OneStream brings this to life As the AI operating system for modern finance It's all in one platform Your financial and operational data in one place with purpose-built AI embedded across planning, close reporting, and analysis.

3:23Cal Brouilette: The result? Faster decisions, less busy work, stronger governance, and more value from AI. Explore the Forward Finance Blueprint at onestream.com forwardfinance. and see how to turn AI ambition into real business value. Visit us at onestream.com slash forward finance. That's onestream.com slash forward finance.

4:00Cal Brouilette: Hello, CFO Cal Burlett is with us. Cal built his finance career across energy trading, power generation, and connected home businesses before moving into enterprise software with Salesforce and Zendesk. He then joined Flatiron Health, where six years leading strategic finance, prepared him to step into the CFO role. Today, he's helping guide the investments and economics behind a business using oncology data, technology, and AI to advance cancer research and care. Cal, welcome. Thank you for having me, Jack. We always begin with this question. We always begin by asking our guests to take a look back.

4:41Cal Brouilette: Galen, I know you began on the other side of the pond. Tell us about some of those experiences you feel prepared you for a CFO role. Yeah, I think when I look back at my career, and it's hard to believe it's been over 20 years now, I think I've benefited hugely from the cross industry, across the pond, multiple different types of roles, if I'm honest. I was very fortunate to join a graduate scheme out of university that was preparing future finance leaders. So I rotated three times in the first three years, ended up in the US, and that's kind of how my US story started. And then energy is an incredibly interesting industry.

5:25I think a lot from the outside, people don't quite realize how complicated and interesting it is, but the physicality of it always interested me. the power stations they're pulling the gas out the ground and i know sometimes you know energy is a dirty word but we all have to get it um and working for a company that i think did that in the way that we did it in the right way and then moving to the u.s um and looking at delivery side and increasingly the trading side which is super super interesting if you're interested in mathematics and and risk management and those types of things and then obviously uh as you kind of alluded to in the intro, like my shift into technology and all that changes about finance and all the things that are the same.

6:10I think I just benefited from all of those multiple roles, you know, different geography, and I know we're all English speaking, so there's a lot of similarities. But I think all of that has contributed to kind of me being who I am today.

6:25Cal Brouilette: Yeah, I have to say, it looks like on paper, it looks like quite an exciting career. Just stepping back to when you're in the UK and you raise your hand to go to America. I mean, how does that happen? You're a financial accountant. How does that happen? Yeah. So the graduate scheme in the UK that I was on as part of Centrica is a three-year program. You do three or four rotations. You qualify and study to become a chartered accountant in the UK at the same time. And the third rotation is actually funny. It just came up. I think it was 20 years today I was in Portugal when I found out I got this role in the US like 20 years ago today, which is kind of bizarre.

7:10It just came up as an opportunity. I had a friend who'd come over here and they said they'd loved it. And for me, where I was in my life, where I was in my career, I had two opportunities to go and work at corporate strategy at Centric headquarters, which was arguably the sexier job, or to make a good life decision and go live in New York. And for me at, you know, 26 is, that's a pretty easy decision.

7:31Cal Brouilette: As a CFO, I just want to point out to the listeners, you have jumped around quite a bit. Not that very often finance leaders don't really have to move as quite as often as perhaps sales executives or what have you, but you're in Texas for a good number of years, half dozen years. You moved to Silicon Valley with Salesforce. You're there for a number of years. Now you're back on the East coast in New York. How am I doing? Am I? You're right. Yeah, it's been a jump around for sure. Help us understand the energy sector to technology. How? Why? Interesting question. It's funny because that was the question in all of the interviews when I was interviewing for tech and the transition.

8:12But I've always been interested in technology. I was very close, weeks away from going to do a computer science degree instead of a general business degree um and i kept that interest throughout kind of my my career the move was really about geography uh we made the decision to move to california before i had a job my wife had accepted a job out on the west coast we knew we didn't want to end up in texas long term that wasn't our choice so we were going to go give it a give it a good try in san francisco and if you want to work in San Francisco, you should probably work in technology. So that was the, it was just inevitable.

8:49It's logical.

8:50Cal Brouilette: Did executive search help or were you networking? No, it was a bit earlier in my career. I'm going to be honest. It was the first time where I've kind of quit my job and said, right, I'll go find one. And I enjoyed probably 48 hours of freedom. And then I was like, oh God, I might never get a job again. So it was, it was very much a little bit of executive search, but really cold calling on tech companies. And if I'm brutally honest, there's a, arrogance probably isn't the right word, but there's definitely a misunderstanding about how complicated energy is and how those skills and things that I'd learned about, you know, low margins, complex issues, the difference between power generation economics, trading economics, and how that might translate into supporting a business like Salesforce was a difficult thing for me to bridge.

9:43And that was my job in interviews was to kind of bridge that.

9:45Cal Brouilette: Yeah, very interesting. Again, just for the audience to appreciate this, again, you were in Houston with an energy company for six years. Talk about a cultural shift. Then you go to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and you establish yourself there. And you're talking about the interview that got you there. Anyway, just it seems a little bit risky. you know and and some folks wouldn't be willing to uh or be able to make the cultural change i think um did you initially misjudge any anything here as i said i think i was i did misjudge quite how um quite how small like esoteric industries are to those outside of industries whatever industry it is right the lack of it unless you're in it you don't really understand how it works and how people work and how people think so you know technology people and people in silicon valley looking at uh someone who comes from an old industry and a mature industry like like energy similar to the way that those people will look at silicon valley and not understand the way that cfos and uh and leaders think and work over there um i think i misunderstood quite the gravity that I assumed I've come from business school and I had a pretty well-rounded back.

11:07I just assumed everyone saw leaders as leaders. And being in a mature industry, leaders like myself benefit from lots of history and lots of learning and lots of structure that doesn't necessarily exist in Silicon Valley and is sometimes frowned upon because you want to move so quickly. And I get that. But I think I've benefited from that in that I've had great training and great education. I've seen good leaders. I've seen what good looks like. And translating that across was quite complicated to explain that that was going to be a benefit to them. And I think I proved that once I got there, but explaining that is really hard.

11:45Cal Brouilette: Is there maybe, and you're sharing something that's changed, but is there a belief about finance that maybe you've acquired early and abandoned along the way? um you know sort of a a notion of the role finance played perhaps for sure yeah i definitely yes there's there's definitely a different way to look at it i think you know i'm 46 coming up 47 now and you know i was educated on classic finance and classic market finance and market economics and that has just you know it's it's not true anymore uh whether we want it to be true whether we want free long-term cash flow to be the driver of valuations for businesses and the way that businesses are run and the way that we incentivize people um that has changed hugely and you know sitting next to the investor relations team at salesforce like with my back to to those guys and being able to be immersed in a very different industry that worked in a very different way um is which just changed my perspective entirely i think the combo of those is benefits me usually here because I can see the advantage of both, wanting to run a very economically positive, cash flow positive, long-term strong economic models, but also understanding the importance of the markets and the importance of investors.

13:09That's something I didn't really understand until I'd moved into tech.

13:13Cal Brouilette: At Salesforce, I made a note that it was go-to-market finance and strategy. I mean, you were really in the guts of the operation. Yes. Salesforce is structured in a very odd way from a finance perspective it's a single p &l so the finance teams are structured around functional support rather than you know business unit support with all functions within them for example so yeah i'm like and salesforce is a is a sales engine for sure uh and being part of that hiring um sales strategy and the go-to-market changes and what the acquisition means and quotas and incentives and all that type of stuff was very, very eye-opening.

13:55Not really the thing that I love the most, if I'm quite honest. I much prefer to be closer to business decisions than I am to kind of just go to market stuff, which is one of the reasons why I left. But it was super, super interesting. And I learned an awful lot from my experience there.

14:11Cal Brouilette: You, uh, is it that part of your career when you land in Silicon Valley that you begin thinking, and maybe it was earlier, maybe you always wanted to be a CFO, but when did the office seem to come into focus for you? Honestly, I've, I've gone back and forth on this. I've always really wanted, and I've said this and I've meant it to find my natural ceiling. Right. And I didn't necessarily think that, and at some point, probably about five years ago, I was like, maybe I won't get there and that's okay. Um, and maybe the only thing dragging me to want that is pride. Um, which, you know, a lot of us have, we want to be, get that title and be at the peak of the pyramid.

14:53And, um, so I don't, I don't think it ever, it ever entered my mind specifically. I've always thought at least from kind of seven, eight years into my career that I could do the job. Um, and I could probably do the job better than some of the people I've seen it. And there's a degree of arrogance and confidence in that statement. I'm very, very self-aware of that. Um, but that is the only thing that kind of drove me to it. Like this, you know, the way I got to this role was to, to do my job here and for people to see that I could do that job before I took the job. Um, and then, you know, I found a natural home, felt comfortable here, uh, wanted to do it, was excited about the opportunity.

15:30Um, so I, I don't think there was ever a point. It's never anything I've like climbed the greasy pole for, you know, for want of a better term. Um, but yeah,

15:38Cal Brouilette: it's it's you know it's just natural progression i guess uh just uh you were at flat iron you came in to head up strategic finance you were in that uh role for for five years before uh you entered the cfo office you are a known entity can you tell us how that might have changed your leadership style the role of strategic leading strategic finance how that changed yeah and i I would say like strategic finance is an interesting term because it's just a very sexy way to say FP &A with, in the best possible sense of a traditional FP &A. Yeah, exactly. So, and I think I've run teams very similar to this one before.

16:23The teams that I ran at various points within my energy experience were very, very similar in that we had an FP &A team and a decision support team so essentially your traditional fpa and um and your support of the business uh investments so it wasn't a huge stretch for me it was the first time i'd come into a relatively small company we were you know and still are under a thousand people when you exclude some of our part-time employees um and built something from scratch and that was very very different and the first i would say 18 months we're kind of rebuilding team um building the team building the infrastructure that still supports us today and putting that in place in a way that was stable the reporting and all the things that go around building something from scratch that was super exciting right you don't usually take someone else's um mess sometimes and have to fix it uh you know this was all on me and that opportunity was was great for me and obviously i worked for a great CFO, our CFO at the time, Jason, was very, very supportive, was very clear about what he wanted from me and what his skills were and what his future was.

17:33And, you know, that the long-term opportunity of the role is what got me here and, quite frankly, has kept me here.

17:40Cal Brouilette: All right. Well, we'll have a few more career-related questions for you a little later. Right now, for listeners who might be new to Flatiron Health, what does the company do what does it provide whom does it serve and where's the opportunity here yeah so um i'm going to try as everyone has here is to take something that's quite complex and make it as simple as possible um fundamentally we're a we're a flat iron health is a is a health tech company focused on oncology uh our goal is to essentially do whatever we can to learn from every oncology patient to generate better outcomes for oncology patients so all people that get cancer um learn from as many of those people as possible and ultimately that will lead to better care for those people and better outcomes for those people so that's what that is our goal how do we do that it's most simplest simplest concept we have a two-sided pnl so we're not a single product company we're essentially a two-sided pnl on the left side of that it doesn't really matter left and right but just for just for labeling purposes we have our biggest customers on that side are community oncology so for those that don't know community oncology is basically where between 50 and 60 and some depending on some estimations more than 60 percent of cancer care is administered in the us so that is hugely hugely important the other is big hospitals that we're all used to big hospital systems if you live in new york or big cities that's where you go to get your cancer care community oncology is is more than half so most more than half of the people who have cancer are treated in these places and what we do is help through software and technology we help those community oncology clinics be as efficient and effective in delivering care as possible the primary way that we do that is our core onco emr product and emr is um electronic medical record uh product that has a bunch of services around that um and the technology around that and that is our left-hand side of our P &L.

19:45So doing what we can to support those clinics to provide the best care they possibly can in the most efficient and effective way. On the right-hand side, just because, again, I'm labeling things, of the P &L, we service pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies with real-world evidence. Now, real-world evidence is just learning from all the data that is collected from our community oncology clinics and some partnerships that we have with bigger academic medical centers. All of the data that is captured, structured or unstructured, when someone gets care over the lifetime of that care exists. What we do and where our technology and our oncology-specific expertise, the scientific expertise that we have in-house, is to take all that data and turn it into really, really useful information.

20:35And what that results in at the core is these disease-specific longitudinal data sets that we can learn from and work with our partners to kind of generate the, understand oncology's biggest questions in the real world. Because these aren't scientific settings, these are real world settings. And that information is just unbelievably invaluable.

21:00Cal Brouilette: Now, today it's owned by Roach, is that correct? And I'm curious how that's ownership has shaped Flatiron's investment priorities while at the same time, you know, preserving its independence, its credibility. yes yeah actually you know when it comes to when when it comes to the acquisition it was pre-me but i'm i know and and you know it won't come to a surprise as anyone that when a big pharmaceutical company buys someone like us and we service small oncology clinics um and other big pharmaceutical companies right so both sides of our pnl there was you know some questions about integrity and trust and what are we going to do with the data um and how we how are we going to invest how is roche going to invest but we've spent an awful lot of time building the trust it's taking years to build the trust that we are wholly we are independent fully independent yes we're a subsidiary but we work very very independently of roche roche is a major customer of ours and continues to be but we work fully independently of that and we've worked really really really hard to build that trust on both sides of of the pnl from an investment perspective they have been fantastic owners i can say that um i would say that they probably weren't as um focused i would say we weren't as focused on how we invested money in the first few years of that um of that partnership uh and of that ownership structure but over the past four years we've i think uh with a little bit of focus uh and some more constraint which is you know helpful to a finance person who wants to drive economic improvement um we've we've done great things together and have a fantastic partnership with the board um and you know we think about this business long term still roche is roche thinks in 10 20 year cycles right it's very different to traditional owners of tech companies so we benefit hugely from that i'd like to understand better how uh flat iron makes money today and which economics matter more is it technology platforms or is it data evidence services yeah yeah so there's really three pieces when you look at the way that flatline makes money one is that we we have this um community oncology software that we sell think of it as a traditional sas just to be really easy really simplistic and it's over simplistic traditional sas product that is sold on a per md basis to our community oncology clinics um the second part is the actual sale of the data so um you know we have these single disease data products that are longitudinal in nature.

23:44They get refreshed. We can sell that on a one-time basis, on a subscription basis with very, very recent data. So that data sale is a large part of what we do. And then increasingly, particularly over the past two or three years, we have a services and analytical support business that essentially puts the data and services together to help clients really understand and use that data in the best way possible. So there's three ways. There's software, there's pure data sales, and then there's broader solutions that encapsulate both services and analytical support and the data.

24:16Cal Brouilette: When you're really looking into the business, trying to understand performance and future performance, we're always interested in what are your early signals? Is it just simply customer renewals? Is it stuff from the SaaS world that we're familiar with? Yeah, it's a combination of things. We look at, so from a growth perspective, most of our growth, because we have quite a big oncology, community oncology footprint today, so that will not grow hugely. That is not our growth engine. Our growth engine is essentially on the right-hand side of the P &L, so these data and analytical sounds. so where we focus on that is and where we focused our technological investments over the past kind of three years is in increasing the scope and scale of our data sets so for example we went from half a million we used to have to because it was manually curated and we used a lot of humans and now ai and llms are incredibly incredibly powerful and powerful enough to reach the quality bar that we have here at Flatiron, we now have 5 million patients instead of 500 ,000 patients.

25:26What that enables us to do is solve different use cases for clients. So now when I look at it, I look at segment by segment, customer by customer, how we grind, what we provide into them, how those partnerships developing, very much about bookings. Renewals are important, but when you look at the customers that we have and some of the deal sizes that we have, we're really talking about long-term relationships and sometimes within that it's it's a swap in or a swap out you know this is a problem that we wanted to solve before this is the problem we need to solve now so it's very much about the broader renewals plus new sales component of that and then the account management aspect of those types of things how happy are they how are the relationships um who we engage with what types of problems are we solving

26:10Cal Brouilette: So as the company expands its oncology data capabilities globally, how do you decide where further investment should be made? Yeah, so there's two real ways. So globally, we have spent a lot of time building a footprint outside of the U.S., as you just kind of stated, particularly Japan, Germany and the U.K. they are the three biggest markets outside the US for pharmaceutical companies. So that's the place where the data is most valuable. So when we made that decision to go in, it was very much about size, scale, opportunity. Today, where we invest and how we think about investment is very much about how quickly can we...

27:00There are two ways that we can kind of broaden what we do. Our goal is to continue to broaden the number of patients that we can learn from because when you think about the way increasing the cancer is treated and thought about and researched, every one of those buckets is getting narrower and narrower and narrower, which is great because the bigger buckets we're getting better drugs and better treatments and better outcomes for. But it's an incredibly complicated problem curing cancer and the bigger the data sets are the easier it is to get to the specific types of patients that we're trying to look for in order to learn from so scale is one that we look at as a lens not just the size of the data set but the types of people within the data set that is hugely hugely impactful for us so we put a lot of time and effort in thinking about how we grow that network so that we can support the types of questions that our partners have um that's probably the biggest one the second biggest one obviously i'm going to talk about is ai and technology and how we make um what we do as efficient and effective as possible but we've come so far as everyone has with with the the llms and the technology that we have with ai today you know that's not going to let up soon and working out how we build that in a sustainable way um and in a way that helps us grow as quickly as possible and provide the data and the answers to the complex questions that we have as quickly as possible is where we put a lot of our chips right now.

28:27Cal Brouilette: Well, that's where we'd like to dig a little deeper with you. Where is AI perhaps producing the most meaningful business value today? yeah for for us most definitely um it is in the the basically the secret source of what we do the extraction and curation of data so when i joined the company and we we have and had at that point in time a big force workforce of um part-time nurse nurse practitioners who translate a lot of the information into data that can be structured right so unstructured data interstructured data that was always been supported for at least for the past eight years uh through machine learning and things that support that type of extraction increasingly one of the things i talked about earlier was the fact that we used to have you know we used to learn from half a million patients that wasn't because we only had half a million patients it was because it was incredibly labor intensive and therefore incredibly expensive to extract that information over the past two and a half three years llms have become so powerful and we've worked so diligently around that that we can now use llms to extract a lot of that information not all of it and not for all diseases but increasingly extract information at the level of quality that we have we are the gold standard for quality rwe i've got no qualms about saying that we want to maintain that we will maintain that but llms now are powerful enough um to enable us to build those in a way and use those in a way that we can now learn from every cancer patient.

30:07And our goal is to increasingly roll these out. When you look at our product suite, what we call this is our panoramic data set. And that means we use everything within the data set. It's not a sampled data set. And we have many of those in markets. We'll release more this year and we'll release more next year. It's a massive, massive unlock for us, both in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, but speed of that. So that's been hugely, hugely impactful for us. Massive driver of growth. this year and i would say probably over the past 18 months we've also been investing an awful lot of time uh in an agentic layer that sits across the top of that you know we've advertised it it's out there and being tested by by some of our customers today we call that flat iron telescope and what that enables us to do is essentially in real time from a scientific perspective with natural language question and analyze that data in real time.

31:03Whereas before it would have taken potentially days to answer a question about do you have this type of patients? What type of patient is in here? What about this? What about this criteria? And if I put this criteria in, and we would have a bunch of scientists and data scientists sitting around to work out how to answer that initial question, just to work out if we have the data to answer the real question. And today we have Telescope, which just does that in real time. It's a fantastic piece of software that sits across, and we're super excited about getting that out into the space.

31:35Cal Brouilette: Interesting example for us. Thank you. We wondered, let's narrow our lens on finance for a moment here. And, you know, we've had these conversations with different finance leaders and heard about how AI has improved perhaps the speed, the automation of things uh but we're looking to see how it might be changing analysis or how decisions are made um any any reflections on what you've seen or yeah look i i think ai is incredibly powerful but it's just a tool right and i think the the and it's an it's a powerful tool so i'm going to come i'm going to be really honest about how i feel about ai and that it is i think Sometimes we jump the shark a little bit on this type of stuff.

32:21For me, because we're a relatively mature company with stable, good systems in place, there isn't an easy way for me to plug it in. But I would say where we are spending most of our time, to get to your kind of actual question around analytics, we've spent the last two years trying to build a really robust data platform, pre-AI, pre-before we knew we could afford it and could use it and could implement it well. um a customer you know essentially a data warehouse that sits and takes all our operational data centralizes that and makes it available to um to me and to operations and analytics teams the fact that ai can plug into that now and i can answer questions in real time is is insane and i we've been piloting it piloting various different um general ai to sit across that and to to plug into that that i think is is hugely important i i for myself piloted it for for about three months um we've used various different tools to try and see which ones are the best from a finance perspective but i can literally just answer it ask it a question and i would ask an analyst and it will give me back um an answer as long as you have the right context layers of course within there that is probably 90 90 of a verbal answer that i would get from from probably an entry-level analyst in minutes and don't get me wrong the only reason i trust it is because i understand the data in a way and that's that's the thing that's going to be most interesting jack i think is is how do we get from yes that's a great answer it looks great you know it's almost email ready to do i trust it and that trust piece is where we internally at flatline we're not quite there yet we're still trying to work out how we build the right or the level of audit the right level of sophistication um uh and the right level of you know double checking and confidence in that tool for us to really get the best value out of it but it's it's incredibly powerful i'm i've been

34:17Cal Brouilette: incredibly impressed by just off the shelf software so if we were trying to uh summarize uh the challenge facing your your finance team and uh flat iron health i guess at large you're you're scaling it would be the challenge is to scale ai extracted data while protecting trust and turning that capability into you know sustainable economics how'd i do that's absolutely right no no absolutely right it is uh is about quality it is about trust and it is about scale and managing and balancing those three three things is is bang on that's exactly what we're trying to do Well, we are up to what we like to refer to as our finance strategic moment.

35:07Cal Brouilette: And again, this might have happened any time during your career, Cal. So it might have happened 20 years ago when you were just arriving in the States. It might have happened last week. What comes to mind when we ask for a finance strategic moment? Yeah, it's actually a question I thought. obviously i've listened to your podcast uh multiple versions and episodes of it and i i've thought about this quite a lot and the one that always comes back to me is um when i was at direct energy uh subsidiary of centrica it was 2013 i think uh at that point in my career i was managing a pretty big team i had the finance and the accounting team so i was essentially a small kind of business unit cfo um i was at business school so i'd gone to rice to do my mba and i decided that i was going to load up on all of my classes in the fall because i thought i you know i'm pretty stable in this job you know fall is relatively quiet except for budgeting uh and you know i thought that was a great decision and then i got called into the ceo's office and he said i want to sell we need to sell the power plant portfolio that we have and we'd really like to have it sold and announced before the end of the year and this was you know late september so we had a hundred and you know 20 days max to to sell this business so i had to manage that workload i ran that from you know soup to nuts from a finance perspective every everything from you know the whole valuation that we walked into negotiations with through you know my place in management presentations um through to um the purchase and sales agreement terms you know i remember sitting in my bathroom in houston at 3 a.m talking to someone from blackstone negotiating you know those the specifics of both um the purchase sales agreement and the transition service agreements that we had in place and um i think that's from my perspective that was the first time where i was like you talked about it earlier and asked me when i thought about being a CFO.

37:14Like that was the first moment where I was like, you know what? Yes, this was hard, but I'm confident coming out of that, that, you know, this was a$700 million deal. And they were asking me to make the call about whether it was a go or no go. And, um, you know, that was the point where I was like, you know what? I can do this job. I can make these decisions. I've, I've learned enough at this point. I can still keep learning that I have the confidence to make important, incredibly high stakes decisions in a short period of time that I know will drive value for the company. So that was the first point where I went from being like an operator, I would say, to someone who thinks kind of more strategically, because you have to in those times.

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38:51Cal Brouilette: That's salesforce.com slash CFO.

39:00Cal Brouilette: uh and you just mentioned the this in passing your your mba when you're down in houston um just for those career builders out there we'd love to know your decision making around that was it just a good time to do it you were there for you know a spell five six years down in houston yeah um look i'd recommend it to anyone who can afford it and i'm gonna like i'm brutally honest and my you know everyone that's ever worked with me will know that that's the case uh i was very fortunate um that my mba was essentially funded by the company and i'd found out that that was an option for me and i was considered a high performer and the ceo had to sponsor it but they did so when i looked at what my career might become and what i might want it to become i knew that an mba whether you agree with it or not is beneficial to anyone's career um and i looked at that and i looked at my career and i looked at the investment it would require and quite frankly i walked on rice's campus and said wow i've never learned in a place like this and i always like to learn i think it'd be great to come and learn here for two years um the risk is relatively low i want to stay at direct energy for for a couple of years and you know that's all they're required um and i think it would be i think it would be fun and you know it's always been those life decision plus work the big decisions whether i moved to new york or san francisco or back to the east coast it's always been a bit of both it's never really been driven by one or the other and that was very much true of my mba um i have a ton of friends from that and learn a lot was that uh were you aware of that when you joined uh uh direct energy here it was an opportunity that came just one of those things random conversation in a hallway with someone from hr that's how i got wonderful all right well that's that's very interesting hey cal we always like to ask a question from the personal side of things we're wondering if you could share something that maybe your colleagues might not know about you after six years they know a lot about you but something from your past something most people might not know about you i probably here's what i would say here's what a lot of people don't know about me i once got hit by a double-decker bus and survived so i think that is an incredibly kind of random fact that most people do not know um very much like the night bus from harry potter for anyone that reads Harry Potter, managed to survive it, gave the bus driver a heart attack.

41:27But I think that's probably one thing

41:29Cal Brouilette: Americans don't know how to cross the street in London. What were you doing? I don't know. Well, thank you for that. That's a scary thing. Hospitalization or? No, no, no. I was very, very fortunate. You know, I was a young rag doll and just bounced across the pavement a little bit. Wow, okay. And survived. Good one. What about, But would you have a book selection for us? And it doesn't have to be a book. Maybe it's a resource, something that's influenced you along the way. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Most of what I read is fiction, to be quite frank, because I need an escape from work sometimes because I love work and it defines me.

42:07Harvard Business Review still continues to be, for me, a fantastic source of learning, both kind of academic and non-academic. Like it doesn't matter what subject it is. They've, you know, a lot of things don't change that much. A lot of books are just recycling kind of old concepts. But Harvard Business Review is always talking about whatever is front and center in a way that just resonates with me. So I've always have a Harvard Business Review subscription and find it incredibly valuable and find it valuable to kind of educate kind of my teams with because they're usually short form. They're easy to understand.

42:47And they explain concepts really, really well. And they have a massive back catalog of things that can be used for kind of training and education. So I would say Harvard Business Review is probably the strongest.

42:56Cal Brouilette: Great reminder for us. Thank you for that. We are up to our final question. We're going to ask you to look forward finally. We're interested in your priorities for the coming 12 months as a CFO. What would those be? Yes. So actually, we touched on exactly kind of a few of these things just a moment ago. but growth is the number one priority of the company so um we are profitable now and i don't think it's you know you know we're not a publicly traded company we sit within roche but i think it's well known that we're profitable now and balancing those two things so helping drive the right level of change and the different emphasis um and the right level of investment to drive that growth and that is exactly what we talked about ai how much do we invest in ai and technology to drive that um how much do we invest in network development network growth the next three months is where we go through planning and long-term planning and short-term kind of what we would call budgeting and we will spend an awful lot of time over the next few weeks talking about what is the right place and the right speed of investment in these areas given and that that tug and pull of ai is moving so fast we we can't get behind but at the same time we've got to do it in a very thoughtful way that maintains trust, maintains quality, and gives, quite frankly, our customers what they want and what they need, not necessarily what we think they need.

44:26And that is a battle that we're fighting every day. It's one we talk about every week at the executive team meetings. But that's really the focus. How do we grow in the right way? And as we're growing, and after we make these decisions, how do we make sure what we thought was going to happen is happening that is a piece of rigor and a muscle that we've started to build and are getting better at but there's really been my focus since i've become cfo is that how do we really not just make a decision and let it ride but how do we make a decision and understand how we're going to make sure we know that that decision was the right decision and how do we track that and make sure we don't go too far along the wrong path.

45:08So continuing to build that muscle and understanding within the organization is kind of my point of focus.

45:15Cal Brouilette: Cal Burlatt, thank you for joining us on CFO Thought Leader. Thanks, Jack. Appreciate it.

45:44Cal Brouilette: Hello, we're benchmarking the CFO path. Join 500 finance leaders helping define how today's CFOs rise and lead. If you're a CFO or senior finance executive, contribute your experience. It takes just a few minutes and you'll receive early access to the findings. Visit cfothoughtleader.com slash benchmarking.