Challenging times have hit the construction industry, as investors hold back capital and put off projects until interest rates fall. The slowdown can be tough on the industry’s suppliers. In general, they are confident of a rebound even if they don’t know the timing. For growth companies like Built Technologies, which has a software platform that streamlines the construction loan management process, sitting and waiting would be a mistake. “We have to focus on the things we can control,” says Sam Kemp, the CFO of Built.
After five years at publicly held GoDaddy, Kemp joined the 275-employee Built in September 2023. A former equity research analyst, he started in investor relations at GoDaddy and rose to chief strategy officer.
To Kemp, his first CFO role doesn’t seem that different. In an interview with StrategicCFO360, he explains why and discusses the planning process, connecting operating drivers to financial outcomes and teaching the company’s mid-level leaders how to use context to generate belief in the company’s game plan.
You’ve been at Built for almost a year. What have you been working on?
We’re a growth company. We’re not a startup, and we’re not a big company. Stepping into that situation, you need to quickly assess and ensure that the company can scale structurally. It’s about having a thoughtful capital allocation approach and connecting strategy to that capital allocation approach right off the bat. I had to dive into the annual operating plan process right away. We have a solid strategy, and my experience around [that process] is when you think about managing resources, you need the strategy and the scope of your focus. That will flow directly into how to resource the business. Too often, finance leaders let the strategy figure itself out; they don’t involve themselves. Later, they do the brute force approach, trying to bludgeon costs out of people.
What else has been high on your priority list?
We’re doing a lot of general leadership building, creating a leadership bench, middle management and up, that can lead through influence … to compel our broader [employee] population forward. Finally, one of the things I think most growth businesses go through is having disparate systems that don’t talk to each other as well as they ought to. When systems talk to each other, finance can get very crisp on the connection of the business model to the operating drivers and the operating drivers to the financials. Building that tight system has been one of the biggest things I’ve been focused on.
Does that require removing some systems and investing in new product implementations? What else is involved from the CFO’s standpoint?
Is there systems work to do? Yes. Surprisingly, the hardest thing is often identifying what you will measure—the definitions and the metrics. The definitions matter a whole lot to the signal you start sending to the business. The questions are: how are we pulling this [data]? How does it connect the operating unit and the financial outcome? What’s the gap between those two things? It’s seldom a simple answer when you’re pulling data out of a system. But doing so helps you learn a lot about the edge cases within a business—where you have breaks in your business model, like inconsistency in pricing or inconsistency in monetizing.
You also mentioned leadership building. What kind of leaders is the organization developing?
I always start this conversation by asking how you think people change their minds. That default answer, explicitly or implicitly, is that humans make up their minds because of better information—that if I bring in new data or compelling logic, that’s the way to change your mind about something. But if you’re talking about generating belief and followership as a leader, presenting people with clear logic isn’t how you get them excited about a strategy or operating model or get them to follow an idea. A lot of our training introduces these fundamental concepts—as a leader, how do you generate belief?
Inherently, people are far more narrative-driven than they are information-driven. We’re using narrative and storytelling tools to help people sort of step back from their day-to-day and internalize things and put them in their own context.
Given those management principles, what does the organization expect from a leader?
It’s about being a “sensemaker”—breaking across organizational boundaries, connecting people and having people decide that they want to pursue something. Taking a company’s strategy and objectives, what it’s trying to pursue, and whittling it down to what it means for a team and [an individual]. To be part of the leadership team, you need to take the context and translate it for your team. That results in a context-led leadership approach instead of a prescriptive, ultra-tactical top-down one.
What’s the difference between being a strategy leader, your job at GoDaddy, and being a financial leader?
I thought being a CFO would be a very different role; there’s a lot of overlap. If you’re going to be a very effective CFO, you need to start by influencing strategy. It’s not an ego thing; it’s very practical. If a company doesn’t have the right scope, the right set of priorities and the right amount of capacity consumption, then the CFO’s ability to influence things like resourcing and aligning revenue growth and the expense profile is impeded.
I was shocked at how relevant many of my skills [from GoDaddy] were. In my heart, I’m a finance person. At GoDaddy, frankly, there was a lot of stuff that I missed working on. I think there’s something wonderful about the way financials articulate value creation. Bringing together customer value creation from my strategy background and shareholder value creation from my financial background has been a tremendous experience here at Built.
