While many finance execs run from uncertainty, Stacey Ryan-Cornelius is drawn to it. That may be a slight overstatement, but when listening to Ryan-Cornelius describe her job and mission at advertising and marketing firm Ogilvy, the thrill that she gets from leading finance in a dynamic industry with highly creative people is palpable.
“I like being with a group of people whose entire existence is to figure out something new,” Ryan-Cornelius, Ogilvy’s global CFO, tells StrategicCFO360.
We interviewed Ryan-Cornelius in anticipation of her keynote address at the CFO Leadership Council’s Fall Conference in Dallas on October 8. She discussed the kind of finance people advertising agencies look for, how she motivates her staff and why she believes her accounting education and her experience at Baruch College in New York set her up for success.
Is being the CFO of an advertising agency very different from being a CFO in other industries? And if so, in what ways?
The key operating factor is our talent and our ideas, whereas, for example, in manufacturing, it might be products on a shelf. We talk about talent and ideas and our creativity being our main product. When you cultivate that and want to grow the business, you must be in tune with the people. I have a very strong partnership and relationships with the key leaders in the organization. We’re not just creating a campaign. We need the right chemistry and diversity in teams to determine what will help the client grow their business the best and to have those teams work in a way that will ignite ideas. Knowing what my sales will be is not a straight line—it depends on whether we win this pitch, whether there’s chemistry with that client or whether we crack the idea. It keeps me a bit more on my toes, to be honest.
Does that need for creativity extend to the people you hire within finance?
We’re [part of] a public company, so we need people who are nose to the ground to ensure that the numbers are absolutely correct, that we have the reporting and sound controls, and that we track the cash coming in. But then I have another group of people who are my commercial partners. They’re the ones who work directly with the businesses to craft business models for servicing the client. They need to be very creative, and they need to understand the client deliverables. Because there’s nothing that’s always the same in terms of how we deliver. Sometimes, clients want big teams. Sometimes, they want small teams. The individual who knows how to work across the matrix must be equally creative to keep up and advise [the teams] properly. Some people get very frustrated with that kind of environment. I thrive on it because I don’t want to be in a box.
Have you been able to find the finance talent you need during these years when the labor market has been tight?
We’re trying to get that partnership-focused talent into the organization. That’s been a bit tougher. Once we find somebody who can think outside the box, we teach them the industry. I like to bring in people from investment banking looking for a change. I love the way they do financial models. They apply those to our business, and I want more of that. Scenario planning is critical for us—having people who can take different levels of input and craft an outcome. If they come from investment banking, they just have to be ready for a little culture shock.
How do you approach retaining quality people and providing them with a career path or upward path within the organization?
I say to the people on my team, ‘Look, I want you to be better than me. I’m not the bar.’ I try to be very open and honest with them. You get a lot from people when you understand what they’re dealing with, their own family and personal life. You can then be mindful of that when asking them to do Herculean tasks quickly. Because they recognize that I’m empathetic to their situation, they work harder.
But I learned very early on that you can’t expect people to be like you. I am a type A; I work probably way too much, and I don’t want to set that example, especially, for instance, with a young mother. I want to make sure she sees [my path] is not the only way to get to where she needs to go. She has to choose her own path.
Your work ethic was established early on. You went to Baruch College in New York City—an excellent school for business but hardly an ‘ivory tower.’ Many of the teachers are former business executives or from Wall Street. Most of the students come from a background where nothing gets handed to them.
I paid my way through college at Baruch. You had to get to class and then get to your job. And you fed off your classmates because everybody else was just as busy. There was a discipline that came with that kind of upbringing. I was also in the middle of the corporate world early in my education. The [lecturers] worked in business; we listened to real-world business cases. We weren’t learning from professors with PhDs. When I started working full-time, it didn’t seem like a big change. I got my full-time job at PwC through Baruch’s very strong on-campus recruitment programs; they are a feeder for those firms.
Would you say that an accounting degree is still valuable for a CFO, even though we talk a lot about CFOs needing to be more strategic and not having their head in spreadsheets all the time.
When I was starting my education, I didn’t understand strategy. The only way I got introduced to strategy was [through] accounting theory. I liked accounting theory, which is where I think I got the bug. But there’s no way I could be successful as a CFO if I didn’t know the nuts and bolts of accounting. The other element is risk. When coming up as an accountant, you learn about risk profiles. That’s super, super important, too. As a CFO, what I do every day is strategy and risk.
Click here to register for the Fall CFO Leadership Conference in Dallas on October 7-9.
