Driving Innovation With David Marberger, CFO Of Conagra Brands

Conagra Brands products are household names in kitchens around the country. A major force in the packaged food industry, the company is behind an impressive array of popular brands, from Hunt’s ketchup, to Healthy Choice frozen meals, to Pam Cooking Spray.

In this episode, Jack McCullough speaks with executive vice president and CFO David Marberger about his journey to becoming CFO at Conagra Brands and the company’s transformation—selling or spinning off $7 billion worth of business in 2016, and making a major acquisition in 2018—to become the pure-play branded food titan it is today. He shares how they successfully handled the trials of the Covid-19 pandemic, maintain constant innovation and keep up with emerging food trends.

Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly edited and trimmed for clarity, follows.

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Listen to the episode here

We have a great guest. I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while. My guest is David Marberger, who’s the CFO of Conagra Brands. David, welcome to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. 

Thanks for having me, Jack. It’s great to be on.

Company Overview

The company’s interesting, but one of the interesting things about Conagra is probably the products are better known than the company itself. So I think when you list the product, I would say, yes, of course, but can you share a little about Conagra at the 10,000-foot view?

Conagra is a more than 100-year-old, well-established public company, but its roots go back to being an agricultural company. Consolidated Agriculture, I think, was the original name of Conagra. Over the years, the business has evolved. When I started in 2016, I came on board to work with Sean Connolly, our CEO. Sean and I worked at Campbell Soup together. Sean’s vision and strategy were to make Conagra a pure-play branded food company. All the non-branded businesses we had, we had private label businesses, we had spice businesses and we had distribution businesses. 

We sold or spun off over $7 billion worth of business to make Conagra the business it is today, which is a pure-play branded food company. We have approximately 100 brands in our portfolio, things like Slim Jim’s, Whistmas, Hunt’s Tomatoes and Pam Cooking Spray. The list goes on, but to your point, the holding company, the consolidated company, is Conagra. You wouldn’t know by that name that we own so many great brands.

It’s interesting. You mentioned Slim Jim. Over the weekend, I happened to see a Slim Jim commercial, which is great. It was a feature for pro-wrestler who I don’t know, but you’re still using Randy Macho Man Savage in your ads.

It’s amazing because when I first saw that too, I thought, Randy’s no longer with us, an icon. If you think about brands, and we have a lot of brands in our portfolio, Orville Redenbacher and Marie Callender were people who were entrepreneurs way back when they started these brands. Those brands carry on. The same thing with the Randy Macho Man Savage is iconic and stands for a lot of great things that the Slim Jim brand stands for. It works, and it resonates with our consumers. It’s a brand carrying on.  

He was the most imitated person when those ads came out. You heard that raspy voice. “Oh, Yeah. Step into a Slim Jim.” You mentioned Orville Redenbacher is the guy that we remember from the commercials. Is that the actual Orville Redenbacher? 

Yes, it is. 

David’s Background

Like Colonel Sanders, he was a real person, and he was in the commercial, so cool. Anyway, as fascinating as Slim Jim is, I’d love to chat a little about your background. You grew up in Philadelphia and you’re the youngest of six. 

I am, yes. Born and raised in Philly and yes, the youngest of six. Raised mostly by my mother and grew up in the Philly area, big sports fan, love sports and love all the Philadelphia teams. Now, Conagra is here in Chicago, so I’ve had to reconcile my Philadelphia roots and sports rooting interests with Chicago, but both are great cities.

I was going to ask you that. Bears play the Eagles. Which way are you going? 

I went to that game. The Eagles played here in Chicago. I went to the game, and I rooted for the Bears because everybody I was with was rooting for the Bears, but I was rooting for the Eagles. The Eagles are my number one team in football and the Bears are second. 

That’s a pretty reasonable thing. I’ve never not lived in a New England state. I’ve never had my loyalty to the Patriots or any of the local teams tested. You grew up in Philly and then you studied accounting and economics at UMass Amherst. Always great to talk to somebody with a connection to Massachusetts. When you were a young person, what was it about business that you found attractive? 

It’s interesting because I have three kids now, and they all went to school and college. Ultimately, they were business majors. It seemed like when they were in high school, they took business classes, and they took accounting. Back when I graduated high school in 1982, I never took an accounting class. I didn’t have much business experience. 

When I went to UMass, I majored in business, but I didn’t know what I was getting into. When I started taking courses, it opened my eyes to business, but I connected with accounting. Accounting to me was always the language of business. I always liked numbers. I’m a numbers person. I took a liking to accounting and that became my major there. As I did a little bit of research, I realized that there’s a pretty good chance of getting a job in accounting if you have good grades. That was a motivator as well. 

It’s interesting because I heard you say high school, 1982, the same year as me. We’re the last of the baby boomers. I was advised in ’82 not to go into accounting because computers would replace all of the accounting jobs. By the way, these were smart people giving me this advice, but with hindsight, it would be hard for them to have intentionally made a less accurate prediction. Information technology has created a million accounting jobs. 

Yes, and there’s a shortage of accountants. Not as many people are getting into it.  

I tell people that you can write your ticket. I had a 40-year career. I was unemployed for a total of three months over 40 years. That’s nothing. It’s a summer. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a summer. It was March to May, when there was nothing to do. Nonetheless, you graduated from UMass and started your career at PwC, which was probably not PwC at the time. 

No, I started at Price Waterhouse. I went to school at UMass at Amherst, but I went back and started at Price Waterhouse in the Philadelphia office. I decided I wanted to go back home and I started there and enjoyed it. What is great about public accounting is it puts you on a lot of different clients. You could get a feel for what industries you liked. I was on banks, I was on mutual funds. I had a couple of manufacturing clients. I had just different types of businesses and real estate partnerships. 

One of the clients they put me on was Campbell Soup Company. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the manufacturing aspect. I loved the consumer side of it, to be able to go into a store and see the Campbell Soup products and talk to consumers and see why they buy it or why they don’t buy it. I loved that client when I was at Price Waterhouse. That was my favorite client and ultimately was where I went and took my first job outside of Price Waterhouse. 

Campbell’s has to be one of the biggest employers in the Philadelphia area, I have to think. 

It is, a big company and it’s in Camden, New Jersey, but it’s five minutes from downtown Philadelphia. 

You’ve worked at Campbell’s, Tasty Baking and Godiva. If you love food, what a great way to start your career. Who wouldn’t want to work at Godiva at some point in their career, right? 

You can see a theme here, Jack. I was at Campbell for more than 10 years. A great company, even though Campbell’s is a competitor right now with us being at Conagra, really a great company. I worked with some amazing people. I had the opportunity to do a lot of different things at Campbell. I was in the internal audit department. 

I went into a lot of different businesses. I was the CFO of the soup business. I was in food service. I did M&A work in corporate development. In my last job, before I left, I was the CFO of the food and beverage division of Campbell, which is all the non-soup brands like Prego and Pace and a lot of brands like that. That’s when I worked with this fellow named Sean Connolly. Sean and I worked together at Campbell. That’s how we met. Fast forward to today. He’s the CEO of Conagra, and I’m the CFO.

Mentorship

I’m curious because every very successful CFO I’ve spoken to, along the path, can reference a mentor or maybe even multiple mentors who made an impact on them. Do you have anyone that sticks out when you look back that made you say, “Wow, I learned a lot from that person?” 

Yes, I feel that you accumulate your list of mentors as you go and they change along the way. A gentleman by the name of Ed Lovelidge at Pricewaterhouse. He was the first person I worked for. He became the managing partner of that office. I just learned a lot from Ed. When I got to Campbell, there were so many people there, but an HR person I worked with, Chris Brewer, was impactful in my career. 

Gave me great advice on how to navigate my career. Then I worked for a guy named Jerry Lord, who was the controller. Very good. You pick up different things from different people. A mentor like Jerry Lord, who was the controller, really helped me understand how to navigate the street expectations with what you have to do to be a good controller and the process you need to go through to generate results and set targets and all those kinds of things. 

Whereas Chris Brewer, who was HR, gave me a whole different set of things to think about in terms of navigating a career. How do you work through different challenges, take different jobs and navigate different situations? The mentors I’ve had have all played different roles for me at the given time when I was in my career. Then I met Sean later and a guy named Jim Goldman, who Sean and I worked for, and they were just amazing in terms of the branded side and talking about the consumer and brands. It’s gone on from there to this day.  

That’s fascinating. I’m guessing at this point, you probably are mentoring a lot of up-and-coming professionals yourself, either formally or informally. 

I try to Jack. I have a lot of experience now. I try to allocate a higher percentage of my time just meeting with people here at Conagra and outside. My kids are at the age now where they’re in the business world, and they’re on LinkedIn, and they’re networking. A lot of times, I’ll be talking to friends of theirs to help them navigate career decisions. I spent a lot of time here at Conagra working with my direct reports, but in the broader organization, I have over 700 people who ultimately report through me. 

I try to, whether it’s town halls that I have twice a year with the finance and IT organization, or I’ll do coffee chats where I’ll just meet with groups of people or my direct reports. I’ll meet with their team, just go around the roundtable, and get them to introduce themselves. I’ll give some general career advice or just a quick update on the business, things to think about and some philosophies that I have. I try to try to do that as much as I can.

It’s such an important thing. I’ve mentored some people along the way. It’s interesting because a lot of them have become vastly more successful than I ever did. It’s a strange feeling, but it’s mostly positive. 

But you did your job.  

Yes, I was a better mentor than I was a CFO, perhaps. Anyway, you joined Conagra in 2016 if I recall correctly. That must’ve been a crazy time because it was around the time they moved from Omaha to Chicago. You also did the rebrand from ConAgra Foods to Conagra Brands. Welcome to the neighborhood, wow. 

Jack, it was one of the most professionally challenging times of my career, but that’s why I came here. As I mentioned, I worked with Sean at Campbell Soup. From the first day that I met Sean Connolly, we always hit it off. He is a talented leader in terms of understanding brands and consumers, the financials, people and just being fun. I like to have fun when I work. Humor is a part of what I like to inject. 

We think CFO and humor, those two things don’t come together, but they do. I think it’s a big part of operating effectively. Sean called me and asked me to come on board as the CFO and a lot was going on. Sean was leading a transformation and transformations are never easy. We wanted to take this established company that was in a lot of things and transform it into a pure-play branded food company.

When you sell or spin off $7 billion worth of business, the stark reality is you have to take SG&A out. You cannot have the same infrastructure you had when it was a much larger revenue company. We had to take out about $350 million worth of SG&A, which is a lot of hard decisions. You have to change spans and layers. It’s just a lot of people’s implications when you do that. 

That’s what we did, and as part of that process, we moved the headquarters from Omaha to Chicago, but we still have more employees in Omaha than we do in Chicago, even though the headquarters changed. Omaha, that’s a great location. We just don’t have as many people as we had when the business was larger, but it’s still proportionately the same. Half of my direct reports are actually in Omaha, and half of them are here in Chicago. 

Interesting. I wasn’t aware of that because the D&A is all about Omaha, the company.

That’s where the business was for many years.  

They don’t have any competitive sports teams. If you were there, your loyalties wouldn’t be divided as they are now. 

They have the College World Series, so that’s fun. 

Challenges At Conagra Brands

I wasn’t aware of that. It must be great. One of the other challenges since you’ve been in the role, I have to think, COVID impacted everything in every company. You faced in your industry and your company a lot more challenges than others with just inflation, supply chain disruptions and everything else. Three or four years into it at this point but what were some of those challenges and how did you and the team overcome them? Because it [was] a scary time.  

It’s amazing actually, if you go back. I started in 2016, we went through that transformation that I talked about. Sold or spun off $7 billion of business. Then in October 2018, we did a large acquisition of Pinnacle Foods. That was a $3 billion revenue company. That was a big acquisition for the company. It was a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of integration work. We had made a lot of great progress with that. 

We’re integrating this business. We moved a lot of that business. It was in New Jersey. We pretty much moved it to New Jersey and we’re running it out of Jersey and Omaha. Then COVID hit and that obviously changed the world and turned everything upside down. Every industry was impacted differently by COVID, which is what’s so fascinating. 

What was interesting is that in the food industry, everything we had, we sold because everybody was working at home and they just loaded up their cupboards and their freezers and refrigerators. There was just no food. Everything we had, we sold. I’ve never experienced anything like that in my career. At the same time, supply chains were stressed because the people who were in the plants, and the people who were in our company were getting COVID, or they were quarantined because they were exposed to someone with COVID. 

It created this situation where demand spiked and supply became strained. That imbalance was a big cause for a lot of the things that we saw or are still seeing with inflation, and it just disrupted everything. That’s how it impacted us. Our mode was just to try to produce as much product as we could to get back on the shelf and to meet our customer’s orders because all food companies, were cutting orders. 

You’d see the things where there was no toilet paper in the stores and everything. That’s what was happening. You just couldn’t keep up with demand. There’s nothing worse in the food industry when a customer orders something and you can’t supply it, because you miss a sale. That was the situation. Our priority was to make as much food as possible to get it sold to our customers. That shifted, and we were doing that the best we could. 

Then, slowly we were catching up, and then the inflation supercycle hit. That created a whole new dynamic because our cost of goods over two and a half to three-year basis went up over 30 percent. When that happens, you can’t cut enough costs to offset that you have to increase your prices to your customers. In our case, we sell to all the grocery stores. In all the places you buy food, there are customers. Our costs were going up 30 percent. We had to take our prices up.

That’s resulted in a lot of people buying less. The volumes of products we are selling have been down again for all food companies. That’s been this crazy dynamic that started with this big acquisition we did, followed by COVID, followed by this inflation super cycle. Here we sit today, our supply chains finally normalized. We finally are running our operations. We’re much more efficient than we were. We’re in stock on everything.

Consumers are still working through all the price increases that have been taken, because you go into a grocery store, everything’s more expensive. We had to take our prices up because our inputs have been up significantly. That’s where we find ourselves today. We talked about it a lot last week on our third-quarter earnings call. 

We’re investing in innovation. We’re investing in advertising and what we call trade merchandising, which is just in-store promotion and advertising at the point of sale. We’re confident that we’re moving in the right direction with the volumes improving quarter on quarter. That’s what we’re looking for, to just keep improving every quarter with the volumes.

It’s interesting because, as someone who is a layperson not in the industry, I’ve developed a sensitivity to things that might be impacting you because if they impact you, they impact my family. Even a couple of weeks before this conversation was the situation with the bridge in Baltimore. I immediately was thinking about food disruption again, and these are the types of things, these events that you don’t know what they are, but they seem to be increasingly common, and you just have to be fast and flexible in preparing for it.

Jack, I’ve been doing this a long time. Any CFO, if you’re publicly traded, especially if you have your filings every quarter, especially when you file your 10K, which is your annual report, you’re just going through pages and pages and pages of risks. That’s part of your disclosure. This could go wrong. That could go wrong. 

Inevitably, you wake up and something like that happens where the tragedy, where the ship hits a bridge and knocks the bridge out of commission and disrupts transportation. A global pandemic, right? All of a sudden, that came out of left field and impacted the world. You spend a lot of time trying to think and plan for every possible risk. 

What I’ve learned is you just have to have, and it’s one of our core values here at Conagra, agility. You just have to be ready for anything. You have to have processes where you assess, you get the right people together, you get information, you make decisions and you move forward. You have to be ready to do that at all times.

Innovation In The Food Industry

That makes a lot of sense. Earlier, you referenced innovation. I think a lot of people don’t think of that industry as necessarily particularly innovative. I have to think just about all the challenges you’re facing, not the least of which is consumer tastes are always changing. When I talk to my nieces and nephews who are Gen Z, they have very different tastes than what I was eating and drinking at the same time. How important is innovation in the industry, and how do you approach it strategically?

Innovation is important in any industry. It’s particularly important for the food industry, and it’s core to our strategy here at Conagra. Back when I worked with Sean at Campbell, we worked together a lot on innovation. How we’re going to drive the brands? What was the innovation? I developed a great appreciation for that whole innovation process and how it works in food. 

I think we do it as well as anybody here at Conagra. It all begins with, “What are trends around food?” We have unbelievable chefs at this company. They’ll periodically go out into the marketplace and different areas around the country to see what the trends are, what flavor trends and what people are buying. Then we bring that back, and we just get immersed in it and brainstorm. We have sessions and say, “Not all of it is applicable, but some of this could apply to our brand.” 

We’re big on frozen food. We have brands like Healthy Choice, Marie Callenders, Banquet, PF Chang’s and Bertolli. “How can some of these trends possibly work with the products that we sell?” That’s where it all starts, with that inspiration. Then we use data to say, “If we think that’s a trend, how big could this be?” “Is it small?” “Is it niche or could this be substantial?” It all starts with that. 

Then we come up with ideas for food. We taste food, we figure out what’s the branding going to be. My people make sure that we make enough money if we’re going to go forward and do it and make sure it has the right margins and cash flow. That’s how we do it. You look at some of the brands we have. When I started here, the whole narrative was about frozen food. Remember the old TV dinners? The old frozen food was like a frozen puck of terrible food. 

I remember. Some of them, in hindsight, were awful. I don’t know that we thought that at the time.  

People associated the frozen with bad. As Sean always says, “Frozen is just a temperature state. Frozen is great because you don’t need to add preservatives. You can flash-freeze something, and then it’s available when you want it. The problem was the food, not the frozen.” Our whole thing was, let’s make better food. Let’s come up with more contemporary things. Let’s put more food in the product. We’re going to have to charge more money for it, but instead of it being a $1.99 frozen thing that nobody wants, let’s charge $3.99. 

It’s still a good value relative to going out to dinner. You can have a power bowl and a Healthy Choice that is healthy, fills you up, gives you protein or whatever you’re looking for in your diet. It has great contemporary flavors. The results of the Healthy Choice business are amazing. We’ve doubled the business, and we’ve improved the margins and profit. That’s just an example that was all driven by innovation and insights.    

Young people won’t know this, but I remember in the 1970s eating Salisbury steak dinner. I was with my Aunt Kerry, and it was like the frozen steak, mashed potatoes and I think it was pudding or some dessert.  

Or the brownie. I used to love the little brownie that you would get. That was a home run if I could have the brownie.  

Exactly. I just remember my Aunt Kerry having it, and she just thought it was awful. She said, “I have potato, steak and pudding, and if I were blindfolded, I couldn’t tell you which was which.” 

We’ve come a long way.

Mergers And Acquisitions

You certainly have. I’ve had them recently, and you’re right. The quality is just very high. It’s not like it used to be. I just thought somehow freezing stuff made it worse, but it is the food quality. Good for you. The other thing I wanted to talk about, you referenced a couple of times the large transactions that you’ve done. I’m almost as interested in exploring them as the cultural impact on the company because most acquisitions and mergers fail not because the businesses don’t work. 

Usually, really smart people have figured out that the businesses are going to work, but it’s the cultural change that these types of huge transactions bring. What has that been like integrating brand-new companies and working with different cultures and whatnot? I’m sure it’s challenging and fun, but sometimes a headache too, right? 

It’s a great question because I’ve done a lot of different acquisitions in my career, larger companies, and even smaller brands. Sometimes one of the dilemmas is you’re buying a company because you believe that company is worth more to you than the seller would believe it’s worth to them, so you do all the, you run all the numbers and all the assumptions and everything, and you ultimately agree on a price that you pay for a particular asset. 

You have to be careful because you have to understand the secret sauce that made that business what it is. A lot of times, when you buy it, you’ll get synergies because you’re running it. We’re a $12 billion company. If we buy a small brand, we can start buying all the stuff, leverage our scale. We can cut the costs, but you have to be careful because you don’t want to make changes to a business that could change its core. 

The consumer could look at it and say, “You’ve now changed my product. You’ve saved some money, but I don’t want to buy it anymore.” That’s the trick. A lot of times, you’ll hear different philosophies where people will say, “You buy a company, you leave it alone.” Let it be separate. You’ll have other people that say, “No, you want to bring it into corporate and run it out of corporate so you can integrate it as part of how you run the broader company.” 

I’ve learned over the years that I don’t think there’s any one right answer because I’ve seen it work both ways. I think it gets down to, Jack, you have to understand the essence of what you bought. What was the strategy? What made it special? What is the competitive advantage? Make sure that you don’t lose that as you own it now and you run it.

That makes a lot of sense. You’re right, there’s no one answer for it. An example of a company that took over everything is Cisco, the networking company, not the food company. I was with a company that was acquired by them. I was a contract CFO. When the acquisition went through, it was like boom, they had like a SWAT team. All the Cisco signage. We had to give up our Dells for Toshiba’s. 

They wanted you to be part of Cisco immediately, a part of the team, working together to develop great technologies for our customers. That works for them. It doesn’t work in every industry and for every company. They certainly made it work.

Impact Of Generative AI

I’m legally obligated as a podcaster in the CFO sector to ask you this question. How do you see generative AI and technology generally changing the nature of financial leadership? Yes, it’s a legal obligation. I’m under contract.  

Yes, you’re under contract. It is going to have a major impact on things. If I look at the way I think about it now, a lot of it is just trying to get your hands around what it is. From our perspective, we start at the top, what’s the governance around this? How, as a company where we have an R&D function, we have finance, we have HR, we have all these different functions. 

Everybody can find a way to be able to use it to become more efficient and make decisions more timely, but you have to have structure around that. You need a governance model. You need to be able to say, all right, somebody is going to oversee how we prioritize where we spend money to be able to leverage this. We spend a lot of time working on that now. 

We’ve developed what we call an AI kitchen, where we have all of our different opportunities, so we can constantly, as a leadership team, understand what some of the opportunities are out there. What will it do for us? Is it a cost savings, or can we make decisions more quickly? Is it eliminating work that people don’t want to be doing so they can do more value-added work? 

It’s all of those things, but you have to have some structure and prioritization just like anything else. You can’t do it all at the same time or you’ll have chaos. We’re working through that now. I feel that many companies are just working through the early phases of that, but it’s undeniable that the technology is powerful. 

To me, it all comes down to we’re a food company, and we’re innovating and making the best food possible that we can sell so that people will want to buy it and it’ll enhance their life, given whatever they are looking for in their nutrition and their food. How we do that, we spend a lot of money making decisions, buying things and doing things. 

The more efficient we can get at that by using technology, it improves our profits so we can invest more in the food, advertising and everything else that keeps that cycle going. I’m excited about it. You can tend to react to these things incredibly fast, and we’re reacting fast, but we’re doing it with a process and a structure so that we can prioritize what we are doing in the supply chain versus what we do in some of the administrative areas.  

It’s one of those things that’s such a competitive advantage. At some point, it’s not so much that it’s an advantage as much as it’s a disadvantage if you don’t embrace it because your competitors certainly are going to be doing so. It changes finance and accounting, but just the general business generally. I have a question, hypothetically, do you think GenAI will eventually be able to replace a CFO’s role? I’ve asked this of a few people and always have some interesting responses. 

I think there’s always going to be a need for critical thinking in human beings. It’s Charlie Munger who said there’s artificial intelligence because it’s like the good old-fashioned regular intelligence or whatever he said. I think at some point, being able to use judgment, there’s a role for that. I’m a CFO, so I look at what I do every day, and a lot of it is decision-making. 

I am making micro-decisions. I’ll make six decisions in an hour. I don’t think of it that way, but that’s really what I’m doing. I’m prioritizing. I’m saying, “Yes.” I’m saying, “No.” I’m saying, “Think of this.” I just feel like there’s a lot of critical thinking and judgment involved with that, Jack. I don’t think that’s going to go away.  

Some people have said you should think of GenAI as a productive employee who can help you with decisions, but who can’t make decisions. There’s a professor at Stanford, I like what he said, “Gen AI will not replace CFOs. However, CFOs who use GenAI will replace CFOs who don’t use GenAI.” That’s a good way to put it. 

Relationship With The CEO

Earlier, you mentioned your relationship a couple of times with Sean Connolly, who’s the current CEO. I’d like to explore that a little bit because you don’t have to do a whole bunch of research to that suggests that the critical relationship in the C-suite is the one between the CEO and the CFO. You’ve chosen the metadata job, but you’ve chosen, having worked together before, to do it again. I’m curious what that relationship is like, and are you his most trusted lieutenant, as they say?

The reason that I took the job is because I had the chance to work with Sean, and I’ve worked with him before. You know this, you interview CFOs all the time, and there’s a lot of opportunities for CFOs to get into more than just the numbers. That’s the expectation today. I’ve always enjoyed the operational side of being a CFO. 

I want to be able to understand not just the numbers, that’s a given. I have to make sure we have internal controls that are issuing financial reports and we’re projecting the business, and every CFO has to do that. I want to be able to be involved in the discussions around strategy and around different decision-making we make at the operational level. 

I want to be brought into those decisions and it’s every day we’re here, that’s the way that Sean and I work together. Most of our conversations are around the business, around trends that we see, opportunities we have in the business, challenges we have in the business. What I think about something, I tell him what I think.

That’s what I want, and I want a CEO who embraces that. I don’t think every CEO or CFO has that relationship, but we do. What I like most about my job is the fact that we can operate at that level. He lets me do the job that I have to do, which is the financial aspect of it, but most of our conversation is around the business strategy, operations, portfolio, different things like that. 

I think we share that as a leadership team. Sean has developed a team where we’re all wired the same way. We don’t always agree, just like anything else. We’re paid to make decisions and we don’t always agree, but we have a lot of good dialogue and debate. I look forward to some of the debates we have around the business. That’s the culture and environment that he’s created and I love it. It’s how I operate the most effectively.

It sounds like a great relationship and it sounds like you two are probably close on a personal level as well, but the mutual respect, the shared strategic vision and just the ability that you can say things to him that he needs to hear that he might not want to hear. It seems like you have all of those things going for you. 

It’s funny you say about that, like close on a personal level, because there’s always that thing, “Are you friends with people at work?” I have a reality. I’m the CFO, and Sean and I work closely together. We are friends, but I understand I have a job to do. If I don’t do my job, he’ll bring someone else in who can do it. I’m crystal clear on that point. I have no problem with that point. I can still be his friend, but he knows I have a job to do and I have to deliver. I think people just always have to keep in mind that there’s a job we have to do for shareholders as a publicly traded company. Every day, that’s the mindset and the priority. 

Fun Fact

That makes a lot of sense. I like to ask a fun fact, but it worked itself into the conversation naturally earlier. I was going to ask you about the Eagles versus the Bears. Do you have any interesting hobbies or things about you that people are surprised to find out about the CFO of such a large company? 

It’s funny, because when I get asked these kinds of questions from time to time, it always just reinforces how boring I am, because I don’t have any crazy hobbies that you’d say, “Wow.” I love sports. I play golf. I play a lot of golf. I reignited my passion for that. I just love to travel and go out. I love to go out to dinner. We’ll go on vacation with my family. We go out to dinner a lot. 

I find that going out to dinner is the one time when you just talk. I just love that. We’ll go out for dinner for a long time just because it’s the time when everyone’s connected, and in this day and age where everybody’s on their phones and doing everything. I just love that. We go out, we go on vacation and we go out to dinner every night. For me, that’s the best part because I’m a food guy. I live it, I work it. I love going out to new restaurants and experiencing different things, but I have no crazy hobbies. 

Advice For Future CFOs

I’m with you. I was on someone else’s podcast, and I was asked, “What are your hobbies?” I don’t have anything interesting. As a joke, I tried to convince the guy that I did Brahman bullfighting, and he believed it. I’m 30 seconds in, he’s asking me these follow-up questions and I said, “You are aware that I’m not a bullfighter?” I had to edit that part out, it’s too bad but cool. I always like to conclude this with any advice you can share for the next generation of CFOs, things that maybe you wish you had been aware of early in your career.  

I think when you’re starting, especially in your career, it’s all about building your foundation and having that continuous improvement mindset. Somebody told me once in my career, “Dave, you need to be relevant. You need to be doing something so when someone looks at your job, it can become apparent the value you add, like what you do.” 

The way you get there is you’re constantly learning the technical aspects of whatever job it is, whether it’s finance or outside of finance. I think that’s always there, and you always have to continue to get better. To this day, I’ve been a CFO for more than 20 years, and every day, I feel like I’m learning through reading and just keeping up to speed. 

Then I think it’s the technical side, it’s the leadership and understanding that the differentiator is being a good leader and it’s about motivating people, building good teams, doing things the right way, holding people accountable and making sure it’s clear that they need to know what they have to do. That’s the key to me, understanding what that means for you to be a leader. Being a leader is a broad definition, and it can be defined in different ways. 

Understanding what that means for you because you want to create a culture where people want to be there, and they want to work and they want to work hard for you. That happens by being a good leader. You don’t want to work for somebody that you don’t like, and it just makes your life miserable. We have a job to do, but understanding how to create a culture and be a leader, I think, is the biggest single thing that will progress your career. 

That makes sense because there are probably a lot of people, not a lot, but enough, that have the finance and accounting skills to be a serviceable CFO. It’s the elite ones who have those leadership skills and the strategic vision to help their companies grow. Dave, this has been a lot of fun, and I know you’ve got a lot going on. I certainly appreciate you taking the time today, and I’ll give you the final word. 

Jack, I appreciate it. It’s great connecting with a Massachusetts person since I had some great years at UMass and spent a lot of time in New England. I love what you’re doing with your podcast and interviewing CFOs. I think CFO is a really interesting role, and I think it’s an evolving role. In some cases, it’s an underappreciated role because there are so many different things that you’re responsible for. I love it. Every day, I have different challenges that I enjoy, but it’s great. I love that you dedicate your time and your passion to this. I think it’s great.