People and Places: The Geography of a CFO Career

0:00Mike Brower: Support for CFO Thought Leader comes from OneStream, Trusted Data, Faster Decisions, and Salesforce. Explore new research on the future of finance and AI at Salesforce.com slash CFO Report. Bonus episode.

0:23Mike Brower: We tend to tell executive career stories as though geography were incidental. A promising opportunity arises, a company recruits the right person, an executive accepts the position. The map merely records what happened next. But listen closely to the career journeys of finance leaders. And place often seems to be doing far more work than the resume allows us to see. A city can create a network. A region can determine which industries a young accountant encounters. A move can offer a family the life that a more prestigious address could not. And sometimes the place an executive repeatedly chooses not to leave becomes as consequential as any promotion or job title.

1:20Mike Brower: In this episode, we hear from five finance leaders whose careers were shaped by very different geographies. For Mike Brower, Wyoming's close-knit business community allowed relationships to compound across accounting, restaurants, insurance, and mergers and acquisitions. For Tim Zhu, Boston became an ecosystem. MIT, Bain, the Boston Public Schools, and eventually Fenway Park, where a speculative email led to an unpaid internship, and years later, the CFO office. For Greg Clavanger, Rochester, New York offered something that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Manhattan had not. The opportunity to reset both the career and family life.

2:19Mike Brower: Dallas Clement arrived in Atlanta, expecting another career chapter. More than three decades later, his story reveals how staying can become a series of active decisions rather than an absence of ambition. And Michael Bannon assumed that his first operating role would keep him in the Bay Area. Instead, one conversation with a London company redirected both his career and his family's geography. These are stories about people and places, but also about the choices connecting them. Because CFO careers are not shaped only by the positions finance leaders accept. Sometimes they're shaped by where those positions allow them to belong.

3:14Mike Brower: Our episode begins after this. AI is changing the finance function. But how much business value is it actually delivering? According to new research from Salesforce, 90 % of finance leaders using AI report a positive return on investment. And as AI agents enter the picture, finance leaders are seeing opportunities to improve productivity, reduce costs, and strengthen forecasting. But there's another side to the story. CFOs are also confronting growing revenue complexity With more subscription, consumption-based, and hybrid business models to manage And that raises an important question How can finance leaders gain the visibility they need to make better decisions while putting AI to work?

4:10Mike Brower: Salesforce explores these challenges and the opportunities ahead in its latest CFO research Discover what finance leaders are saying about AI, revenue complexity, and the evolving CFO role. Visit salesforce.com slash CFO report. That's salesforce.com slash CFO report.

4:36Mike Brower: Cheyenne, Wyoming. When the local network becomes the career path. Mike Brower followed what might initially sound like a traditional finance route. An accounting degree from the University of Wyoming, public accounting, and then a controller position with Taco John's International. What followed was less predictable. Brower was able to remain in Wyoming while moving across industries and accumulating increasingly broad responsibilities. The state's relatively small business community meant that clients, employers, and future partners frequently knew one another. An insurance firm that handled Taco John's account later placed a supposedly blind advertisement for a finance executive in the Sunday newspaper.

5:35Mike Brower: Brower immediately knew who had placed it. What happened next illustrates how local network can expand rather than restrict a finance career, and how Wyoming itself became the setting for Brower's first CFO role and first significant M &A experience.

6:03Mike Brower: You had had several CFO tours of duty, and what I think is interesting is that you're able to remain in that geography as you built your career. And it's such a variety. It's different industries and what have you. How am I doing? Do you think that's a fair assessment of what you - Yeah, absolutely.

6:23Tim Zue: From Taco John's, I went into insurance, which was a great opportunity. We did property and cashing insurance. We were a large brokerage. You got to remember, this is Wyoming, mid-90s, pretty small. Everyone kind of knows everyone. And they wrote our insurance at Taco John's and they actually put a blind ad in the newspaper. Back then you went to the newspaper to find jobs and stuff like that. And usually it was in the Sunday newspaper. And so I looked at the ad in the Sunday newspaper and I thought, hmm, I know who that is. And it was a blind ad. So I called the guys up. The one guy's name was Bill Murray.

7:04Tim Zue: We called him Murph. And the other guy was Garth Boresky. And I called him up and I said, hey, guys, if you're looking for someone, I'd be perfect for it. And I'd love to talk to you about it. Well, we don't want to lose the account. I said, you're going to lose the account. Barry's not going to. Barry was the CFO. Barry's not going to take the account away because you took his controller. And so we worked it out and eventually I came on board there and it was great. It was a time that was kind of exciting for insurance. I went through a lot of M &A stuff. The one guy, Bill Murray, his family had owned the business since 1877.

7:44Tim Zue: The business is over 120 years old almost. There's a lot of old families in the insurance business in Wyoming. And we had an office in Cheyenne, and then we had one up in Sheridan and one in Jackson Hole. We were looking for a presence in the middle of the state, and the second oldest agency in the state, and probably the second largest agency in the state, was in Casper. And we went up and we negotiated the deal. We had a consultant out of Chicago who helped us with—they actually helped Bill and Garth buy the agency from his uncles and the family. Now, had you done a deal before? No, no. At that time, I had not done a deal.

8:27Tim Zue: And this was my first dabble into any kind of M &A stuff. And I learned quite a bit. We structured the agreement so that we were paid out based upon the performance and what happened after the sale. So we set a benchmark at the beginning. That was the established price when we closed the sale. and then two years down the road we revalued it and then adjusted adjusted the purchase price at that time you know we bought it on a contract with them um with with the owners and it was it was an interesting purchase and then we ended up three years after we bought that turned around and sold it for probably about an eight multiple of what we bought it for and um to uh to the banking industry because the laws in Wyoming had changed and banks were allowed to sell insurance.

9:21Tim Zue: And Bank of the West was really interested in getting into the insurance business in Wyoming. And they came and offered us a great price and we said, sure.

9:38Mike Brower: Mike Brower went on to complete a five-year tenure as CFO of Office Evolution. and today is with M2 Orthopedics. His story remains a reminder that a finance career can gain breadth not only by crossing geographies, but by becoming deeply connected to the businesses and people of one region.

10:05Mike Brower: Boston, when a city's institutions begin to connect. Tim Zhu's journey to the CFO office of the Boston Red Sox did not begin in accounting. He studied mechanical engineering at MIT, worked as a management consultant with Bain, and then made what he calls a career 180 by becoming an 8th grade math teacher in the Boston public schools. Between his third and fourth years of teaching, Zoo wondered whether he might spend the summer working as an unpaid intern for the Red Sox. He guessed the email address of then-CEO Larry Lucchino and sent him a note. Lucchino responded, The internship became a business analytics role, and Zhu gradually built a career using data to inform the organization's decisions.

11:10Mike Brower: His story demonstrates how seemingly unrelated experiences can begin to connect when they occur inside the same geography ecosystem and how a speculative email sent by a Boston school teacher eventually led to Fenway Park's finance office.

11:40Tim Zue: Yeah, well, you know, I've had a unique career journey to my current position. You know, I think like a lot of people, bounced around a little bit in the earlier part of my career. Dating back to college, I actually studied mechanical engineering at MIT. My favorite part or my proudest moment at MIT was I won a robotics design contest as an engineer. There's an annual contest where all the engineers have this contest to design a robot, and I was fortunate enough to win that. And at the time, maybe thought I was going to be an engineer. Turned out when I graduated, I worked at Bain & Company as a management consultant for a couple of years.

12:14Tim Zue: Those were probably the two most formative years of my early professional experience, just learning how Bain approached business problems. Bain used data to answer some of the problems. but really just thinking through, you know, making businesses more efficient. And those years were really valuable. I did a career 180 and went and taught eighth grade math for four years in the Boston public school system. So I sort of left Bain, went and taught eighth grade math for four years, coached the after school basketball program, enjoyed that time, but realized that probably wasn't for me. And I got lucky.

12:48Tim Zue: One of the benefits of teaching is you have the summers off. And I thought between my third and fourth year teaching, how cool would it be to work for the Boston Red Sox as an unpaid intern? And I emailed the then CEO, Larry Lucchino. And I guess this is his email address, in fact, at llucchino at redsox.com. And long story short or long story long at this point, he wrote me back. I was shocked and offered me an unpaid internship. And that sort of led me to the Red Sox in the summer of 2003. And I've been here ever since.

13:17Mike Brower: Now, was it a traditional finance role you jumped into or what was it exactly? Yeah, no. It was an internship, I think you mentioned.

13:25Tim Zue: Yeah. So, you know, even my career here at the Red Sox has evolved quite a bit. And again, I don't have a standard finance background. You know, I don't actually have my CPA, believe it or not, sort of a secret, you know, not well-kept secret around here. I was always a data guy. So, you know, my first job at the Red Sox was business analyst. And I'd always been, you know, I'd always loved numbers. I was on the math team, you know, back in high school and always really loved numbers. And so I'd always really been focused on the use of data. But at the Red Sox, when I started in 2003, business analyst was my first title.

14:02Tim Zue: And for the first 10 or 12 years of my career, I was really focused on using data to help make business decisions, make our business more efficient. When Sam Kennedy, the current president and CEO, took over for Larry Lucchino in the fall of 2015, he put me in charge of the finance department. And so that's when my role transitioned from sort of a more business analytics role to more finance. and I've been in charge of finance for the last really four years, 16, 17, 18, 19. I remember joking with Sam at the time when he actually brought me the idea. He said, I think I want to put you in charge of the finance department.

14:43Tim Zue: And I said, well, Sam, I'm not an accountant. I said, that's perfect. He's like, I need you to translate the numbers for me, put them in a format that I can understand, be a resource for me, get me the information I need. You can rely on your team, your core, those folks that have the accounting background to take care of the details. I want you to lead them. I want you to be strategic. I want you to manage them. But it was a unique transition because I was a little bit hesitant, to be honest, at first when Sam brought the idea to me. But it's really worked out great. The last four years have been incredible.

15:20Tim Zue: I'm fortunate that I've been here since 2003. And I'm also fortunate that most of our executive leadership team has been here for a similar amount of time. So our chief marketing officer actually started before me. He started in 2002. Our head of ticketing, similar, started in 2002. Our chief strategy officer, I think eight or nine years. Our COO, 16 years. Our head of sponsorship, 18 years. So we've been really fortunate that our senior management team has had an incredible amount of continuity where people really haven't left. I think the shortest amount of tenure is probably seven or eight years.

15:55Tim Zue: So what that has created is the ability to us to just create relationships where we've worked together for so long, And we respect each other so much that we, that we, you know, we, we enjoy working with each other. We enjoy solving problems together. We enjoy the challenges that we face. And, and, you know, just over time, I've building relationships within the organization has also been something that I, that's been really important to me. You know, ever since day one, I felt like I wanted to, you know, establish relationships with people across all departments. That was always something I did, even as an intern, I did that, you know, because I thought it was important.

16:30Tim Zue: And I think that I've been able to benefit from establishing those relationships across multiple departments and, you know, those relationships growing over time and becoming stronger and just fostering a collaborative spirit as well.

16:52Mike Brower: Tim Zhu is today Executive Vice President and CFO of the Boston Red Sox. More than two decades after first joining the organization as an unpaid intern, he continues to help lead the business side of one of Boston's most recognizable institutions.

17:15Mike Brower: Rochester, New York. The place that made a different life possible. Before entering the CFO office, Greg Clavanger had already built an international investment banking career. He worked in Asia, lived in Singapore and Hong Kong, and later returned to the United States and Goldman Sachs. From the outside, it looked like the unenviable global resume. What the resume did not reveal was that Clevenger had young children, whom he rarely saw. In Asia, he spent much of the week traveling through other countries. After returning to the United States, he commuted from Connecticut into Manhattan, leaving before his children awakened and returning after they had gone to sleep.

18:12Mike Brower: Then came an opportunity in Rochester, New York. Clevenger says he never would have imagined choosing Rochester, but the move offered him something the more celebrated financial centers had not. The ability to live, work, raise children, coach soccer, and participate in one community. It became, in his words, both a career reset and a personal one.

18:51Tim Zue: No, I never really planned to be a CFO necessarily. I had been a banker for 10 years, and because of the transitions that I had made as a banker, where I had originally been with Morgan Stanley in the U.S., and I moved out to Asia and was out there for several years, And in that period of time, I got recruited away by Goldman Sachs. And so I joined Goldman in Singapore. Right. And, you know, I described the Asian currency crisis and how that kind of really turned everything upside down on its head. And so I had to recruit, but I ended up going back to the U.S. And all of a sudden, I find myself an eight-year senior VP type investment banker, landed in the most profitable and active park of Goldman Sachs in the telecom media and entertainment, investment banking, and M &A.

19:51Tim Zue: And nobody knew who I was. And, you know, I'm kind of the period of time when people are being promoted to partner and I could tell that that that was not going to happen for me, that I didn't have the right kind of sponsorship, you know, at the partnership level because people didn't really know me in the U.S. context. and so it was going to be a very tough you know road to hoe and and so i started looking around and and i could have made it you know at the change to another investment banking firm but you know frankly when you're old and sacks you know we're going to start sliding down from from america it's a it's a pretty great firm and and it was also a period of time you know it's like free, you know, dot-com media and telecom media.

20:37Tim Zue: And I had, you know, certain industry expertise, particularly as a telecom banker, that was in high demand. So there's a lot of companies out there trying to go public and that were looking for CFOs. And for better or for worse, they were, like, seemed to be hunting and investing in banking firms. So I was getting a lot of calls for CFO positions. And that just seemed like the the right, you know, kind of thing for me to do where I could be sitting here today, having been doing this for 20 years. It's hard for me to imagine being an investment banker for, you know, for 30 years. But, you know, making that transition at that point in time, kind of get me the ability to have a kind of longevity where I could have, you know, an exciting career to do different things for a long period of time.

21:24Tim Zue: So it was just, I think the time was right.

21:26Mike Brower: Sort of as you described, though, you were sort of living this sort of glamorous investment banking, you know, from Asia to New York, you're back, you step into the role for the first time. And again, you made a connect. Can I mention the company Empower Communications? I don't know if it exists anymore. It was telecommunications companies. You said you invested seven years of your career there. You were CFO for at least four of those years. Correct me if I got anything wrong. But it was in Rochester, New York. I mean, Did you move to Rochester? Yeah.

21:58Tim Zue: What you don't see from a resume is that I had little kids, and I never saw them. My first two children were born. One was born in Singapore and went on college. And while we lived there, I worked in all these other countries. And so I would spend five days a week in any one of countries other than the country I lived in. And I would come home on the weekends and I'd be exhausted. And, you know, it was just not the right, you know, way to be the kind of father that I wanted to be. New York was no better. I lived in Connecticut. Then, you know, you get up early and I'm gone before the kids wake up and I'm home after they're asleep.

22:43Tim Zue: And that just, you know, the whole Rochester thing, I never would have thought, hey, let's move to Rochester. But it was kind of a personal reset as well as a career reset to be in a job where I could live. You know, we could all live and work and kids could go to school in a community that's all there together. And I could do things like coach soccer and, you know, be there for things that my kids, you know, did at school and stuff. And it's something I never had the ability to do. So that was one of the big attractions to it as well.

23:26Mike Brower: Greg Clevenger is today CFO of Commie, an education tech platform. His move to Rochester became one chapter in a career that has continued across industries, company stages, and finance leadership roles.

23:48Mike Brower: Atlanta, the career built by repeatedly choosing to stay. Dallas Clement arrived in Atlanta after graduate school at Stanford. He had been raised in Florida, wanted to return to the East Coast, found the strategic planning role at Cox Enterprises appealing, and thought Atlanta sounded like an enjoyable place to live. He did not expect to remain with Cox. for more than three decades. And he nearly didn't. Early in his career, Clement was accepted to the University of Florida Law School. He imagined becoming an estate attorney in Sour Soda. Later, he and his wife traveled to Silicon Valley and looked at homes, as he considered another opportunity.

24:39Mike Brower: Each time, Clement stayed. His account is valuable because he does not portray the long tenure as an uninterrupted period of certainty or contentment. Instead, Atlanta became a place he repeatedly reconsidered and repeatedly chose. His lesson is not simply that the grass is rarely greener elsewhere. It's that once a person has seriously weighed the alternatives and decided to remain, the next responsibility is to stop second-guessing the choice and become fully invested in the life already being built.

25:36Tim Zue: And so I left and went to graduate school. And out of graduate school, the internet hadn't been invented yet. I was in Silicon Valley. That hadn't been anointed yet. It was at Stanford. And so I sort of looked at the paper and, you know, how do you decide where to go? And I landed on this media company in Atlanta called Cox Enterprises. And I said, hey, I was born and raised in Florida. Get back to the East Coast. That's a good thing. It was a role in strategic planning. That sounded interesting. And Atlanta sounded fun. So I came to Atlanta and I never thought I'd stay at Cox for now 33, 34 years.

26:16Tim Zue: And I've been very lucky in that I've done a variety of things, not just strictly, quote, finance.

26:29Tim Zue: I would be disingenuous and lying if I said that the entire time of my 33 years I was happy and I wasn't enticed by job offers and I wasn't looking. There were several times throughout the career that I took calls and I had at least two, maybe three job offers to move somewhere else and do something different. And I'll tell you, and I tell sort of young folks that are thinking about their career, you know, you do the best you can and you look at what's important to you. You look at what you have. The natural human inclination is to think grass is greener on something else. But you also learn that, you know, you are where you are and that's the devil you know, and you go somewhere else and hardly ever is the grass greener.

27:24Tim Zue: But for me, early on, I wasn't even sure I wanted to be in Atlanta and I might want to get back to Sarasota. So I applied to University of Florida Law School and was accepted and I kept deferring and I thought I might be an estate attorney down in Sarasota living on the beach. And that seemed like a pretty good life. And I kept being enticed by the activities, the learning, the people, Atlanta, etc and so I kept deferring and finally I just said no that's not for me and then later in my career when I had offers or when I had downturns I took calls and I went out to Silicon Valley and my wife and I looked looked at homes and I you know for whatever reason in your heart it just didn't feel right.

28:11Tim Zue: And then I have four kids. And during the financial crisis, it would have been pretty disruptive to the kids and highly risky, given that I got to put food on the table for four kids. Even if I wasn't completely happy in the current role, it would have been disruptive to leave. So I didn't leave. But then what I tell young folks is, once you've gone through that exercise and you've decided to stay, don't second guess yourself, be all in and find ways to be happy when you decided to stay. Happy not only with the role, but more broadly about your life, your family, your, you know, your outside the work activities, because, you know, work is what you do.

28:55Tim Zue: It's not who you are. And I, over time, have learned to be more mature about it and more of thoughtful about it and really appreciate how lucky I've been in a variety of areas.

29:16Mike Brower: Dallas Clement is today president and chief operating officer of Cox Enterprises. The Atlanta opportunity that initially appeared to be one stop in his career ultimately became the foundation for more than three decades of leadership across the Cox organization. We'll continue 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.

30:10Mike Brower: 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. 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.

31:09London.

31:11Mike Brower: When the unexpected geography becomes the CFO destination. After nearly 15 years in the Bay Area, Michael Bannon assumed that his move from investing into an operating role would also take place there. His criteria were clear. He wanted to join an earlier stage company, help build something, and occupy a role in which his contribution could have a visible impact. Then one conversation led to another. And one of those conversations was with a London-based technology company The opportunity aligned with something Bannon and his family had also wanted The experience of living internationally As he puts it, he made a career move and a geographic move at the same time London became the place where he entered the CFO office for the first time It also gave him the opportunity to bring years of Bay Area investing experience into Europe's developing technology ecosystem.

32:21Mike Brower: Bannon's story closes our episode by reminding us that sometimes the most consequential place in a career is the one the executive never expected to choose.

32:42Tim Zue: And so, you know, I found that this this isn't exclusive to finance, but I found that when you work in a business in a part of the world for a number of years, you know, I at least found for myself that I started to think that all the smartest and the best and the brightest people worked in finance. And, you know, I knew, of course, that that wasn't true. And for me, a lot of it was really understanding what else was out there. And so what I loved about business school was getting the opportunity to find people who are a whole lot smarter and had done all these interesting things. And it opened up my view of what was out there for me.

33:22Tim Zue: I think also I used it as an opportunity to see some of these other places. So, you know, my internship in between my two years of business school, of all places, I ended up in Kansas, where I was interning for Payless Shoes, if you remember them, because I had the opportunity to shadow the CEO for the summer. And that was an experience where getting to see what someone at that level within a company was able to do was amazing. It also helped me to see, you know, what people at different levels of that organization were able to do. And I think when I put it all together, I knew that's where I wanted to go.

33:59Tim Zue: I also knew that I probably had more to learn and I probably had, you know, more to understand about those sort of roles before I could jump into them, which is why I went back into investing. And it was another several years before I made the move to the operating side. I found that, and this isn't exclusive to finance, but I found that when you work in a business in a part of the world for a number of years, I at least found for myself that I started to think that all the smartest and the best and the brightest people worked in finance. And I knew, of course, that that wasn't true. And for me, a lot of it was really understanding what else was out there.

34:40Tim Zue: And so what I loved about business school was getting the opportunity to find people who are a whole lot smarter and had done all these interesting things. And it opened up my view of what was out there for me. I think also I used it as an opportunity to see some of these other places. So, you know, my internship in between my two years of business school, of all places, I ended up in Kansas, where I was interning for Payless Shoes, if you remember them, because I had the opportunity to shadow the CEO for the summer. And that was an experience where getting to see what someone at that level within a company was able to do was amazing.

35:22Tim Zue: It also helped me to see, you know, what people at different levels of that organization were able to do. And I think when I put it all together, I knew that's where I wanted to go. I also knew that I probably had more.

35:42Mike Brower: Michael Bannon is today president and chief administration officer of Sitecore based in London. When we spoke with him, he was CFO of Typeform. But the geography of his career has remained remarkably consistent. the move to London that once represented an unexpected turn has continued to shape the leadership roles that followed. Five finance leaders, five different maps, from Wyoming and Boston to Rochester and Atlanta, and finally across the Atlantic to London. These stories remind us that careers aren't built by job titles alone. Sometimes a place creates the network. Sometimes it offers a reset.

36:28Mike Brower: Sometimes we choose to stay. And sometimes an unexpected opportunity gives us a reason to go. We tend to think of geography as something that follows a career decision. But perhaps we've had it partly backwards. Because sometimes the place doesn't change where the career happens. It changes the career that happens.

37:10Mike Brower: 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.