Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to AYNA Insights, where prominent leaders and influencers shaping the industrial and industrial technology sector discuss topics that are critical for executives, boards and investors. INA Insights is brought to you by Ina AI, a firm focused on working with industrial companies to make them unrivaled. Segment of one leaders to learn more about Ina AI, please visit our website at www. Dot. Ina dot AI.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Good morning, folks. Welcome to another episode of our Titanium economy podcast series hosted by AYNA AI. Our guest today is Miss Kelly Jansen, finance executive in residence for Fernway. As an executive in residence, Miss Jansen advises Fernway portfolio companies and INA clients on their most pressing financial challenges, as well as technology, HR and legal matters. Miss Janssen joins Fernway after serving as CFO for Blue Links Corporation in three years.
Prior to her first into CFO, Ms Jansen has held a number of leadership positions supporting mission critical financial operations across a variety of industry leaders, from Baker Hughes to Westrock to General Electric to return International.
Kelly, welcome to the podcast. We're super excited to have you on and look forward to talking about your journey as a financial executive.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Absolutely. So I thought we'd start out the podcast by talking about your career. You've had a very tenured career across a number of finance positions. Can you talk about some of the roles that you've enjoyed the most and what you learned in each of those?
[00:01:52] Speaker C: Sure. Well, my journey started on the accounting side. So I started in public accounting and worked through various, they call it controllership roles, accounting and controllership roles through organizations after that time. So public accounting for four years, then went right into industry as actually a controller of a smaller public company and continued from there. Some of the best roles I had in the early days were where I was learning a lot of the more technical aspects of accounting. And that was really important because that helped me later on be a good consultant around contracts. Once I was in business and leadership positions, I was really able to help other leaders make good decisions around different transactions. We had, whether it be an m and a deal, whether it be a commercial contract, whether it be vendor relations, whatever it is. So I think getting that good foundation through some of the technical roles, such as when I was at GE Healthcare, I was their assistant controller, working on most of the technical aspects. And even in West Rock, as an example, I was the chief accounting officer and it was very complex accounting there. So I was able to deal with a lot of technical areas there. But on the flip side, I think you can't be a good CFO or a good leader if you're just one. There's one aspect about you such that. So I really think some of the other roles that were really fun and interesting were a lot of the project roles that I did to broaden myself. For instance, back in GE, I did a good role where I worked on the commercial contracting process, and it was less around accounting and it was more how does that process work? How is it efficient? How do we make sure we've dotted our eyes, crossed our t's, we're getting the best contract out there for the customer and for us. So pricing and the number of pricing projects and how do we get to the right price? And then even more recently in blue links, we had really worked on a big working capital project around how do we optimize our working capital and how do we manage our commodity risk. So those are some of the aspects of roles that I've had that have been exciting and helped me to really form good skills for the long haul.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: Do you think a lot of CFO's follow a similar trajectory starting in that accounting domain, or is that a road less traveled that you've seen to the, the CFO position?
[00:04:12] Speaker C: Yeah. When I was first starting out, I knew of a number of CFo's that had come up through the accounting ranks, but that became less and less popular over time. I think as time has evolved, when you're looking for a CFO, I think most, most companies are looking for a CFO that can really cross across multiple areas and can be really broad and not even be, and even beyond finance. How can they really add value on the operation side? A lot of times you'll say a CFO is a little bit like a coo if there's, especially if there's not one there. So that being said, I don't see it as often. And actually it was a bit of a challenge for me to be able to make the switch. It took a long time for, I think people to recognize that someone that does, did come up through the accounting side can be broad enough to be an effective CFO, but it can happen. And I think there's a lot of good accountants out there that can straddle that and reach up to CFO role, but they do have to be strategic in their career to make sure they're hitting different roles to get that exposure.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Picking up those projects across working capital and pricing, like you mentioned.
[00:05:21] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. They have to be really raise their hand to do some of the hard things that are outside of their comfort zone. If you're just sitting there closing the books and worried about technical counting and doing SoC sign offs, that's not going to get you to CFO. But if you're a CFO, it's incredibly helpful to have that background because it is a big piece of the role.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Speaking of raising your hand, it feels like that's something you've done across your career in a lot of ways. Cause you've seen the finance function across several variables, from small to big, private to public, domestic and international. Can you give us a sense of how the function changes across these dimensions? Like when you go from a small to a large company, from a private to a public, what are some of the key considerations? I mean, I imagine the reporting standard is increased when you go from private to public, but any other kind of nuances like that.
[00:06:14] Speaker C: I have found it to be very beneficial to have had roles both in small companies, large companies, mostly public companies that I've been with. But then also like for instance, with the GE role, I was in a division most of the time, so I didn't see as much of the public piece. But what's helpful about those, there's a certain amount of fixed work and an amount of knowledge that you need to have regardless of the size of the company, and I think that's really important to know. So in the smallest companies, I still had to have a good command of the accounting, I still had to have a good command of FP and a. You still have to put a budget together, you still have to forecast, you still have to manage balance sheet, you still have to manage risk. None of that goes away, and it's completely irrelevant on size in many cases. Some of the most complex roles I've had were small revenue dollar companies, and the more straightforward ones were some of the largest companies I worked with, because either the business model was more straightforward or the team was robust, and we had a lot of experts in the team. So. So, yeah, I think some of the nuances for public companies is certainly understanding the SEC reporting and requirements, and even you can't just leave that up to your controller. The CFO really should have a pretty good understanding of the requirements around that. In addition, you're managing a public company board and their relationships there and their expectations. And so the board work, I'm sure, in private companies as well. It's important. You always should be making sure you're managing and meeting expectations of your board and stakeholders. But in the public company world, it's a little bit more because of the risk that's associated with being that public company. And then finally in a public company, the investor relations piece is huge, both at McDermott, where it's a little more behind the scenes, but writing and the scripts and press releases. And then when it came time to be on the stage at Blue Links as the public company CFO, I was ready for that in that capacity and then had to build my skillset around the more selling side and the front end side and the discussions with the external investor community. So that was different from a public company CFO. But again, whether you're small public or large public, you're going to have that and those aspects. And then always across every company, you need to be a good people leader teams, making sure you have the right team, the right roles in the team, and being able to really see that, manage that well, that's required in every company.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Small, big, public, private, you're always a team leader. And actually the investor relations piece, I think we'll touch on that a little bit because I think you've got some give some really interesting examples at a firmware conference recently of that. But before we dive into that, it wouldn't be a podcast in 2024 if we didn't talk about AI. So how do you see AI being leveraged across corporate finance in particular? And then also given your experience in HR legal, it matters if you feel like there are robust use cases there as well. What are your thoughts on that kind of adoption ramp and timeframe and use cases?
[00:09:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm very optimistic about AI. I actually am a big proponent of it. I think it's going to be incredibly useful. It's going to help. It's kind of what we've always said around. We had the robots coming in and all of that. It's just the next generation of that where you're going to let data type of work be done automatically, maybe, and think about this research. So back in the old days, we had to look up a book and then we got to look up online and now we can just do chat. Hey, what's that standard on this in the accounting world? And similarly in other areas, like from legal for sure, that's a big area that AI is helpful. Just any kind of research is a great example, a great use case. But just pulling together information, searching your databases, there's so much data work that people do today manually or we have offshored that can be done through AI. I wish the adoption would go faster. I know some of the bigger companies with the right resources are starting to really employ that but I think the general normal size company has not been able to get there quite yet. Part of that is because of data cleanliness. A lot of companies need to do master data cleanups to get ready for that. And so I always encourage starting there, making sure you can take advantage of all those opportunities. But once that's done, the efficiency is just going to be incredible. I see it in so many different ways where AI would be effective, and I'm excited about it coming into business. What it will do is, is allow the team to actually finally spend the time to understand what it's saying.
The team still, even in today, in 2024, spend way too much time pulling data and manipulating it versus actually understanding it and making good business decisions with it. So if it takes all that work off and lets the team actually really say, hey, why is this happening? We can understand this quickly and we can make a real time decision with the field or the business team that you're supporting, that would be a huge win.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And to your point, on adoption barriers as well, there's also this component of getting the smaller mid market companies comfortable with what does it mean for my data to be used in these applications and starting to get reps and understanding what a data like data policy looks like for some of these smaller enterprises? I think Slack came out. Slack had something come out pretty recently that there was, in their terms and conditions, there was a small line that your messages and whatnot will be used for kind of training our messaging service. In particular, there was a big that's come back recently out of that, but interesting to see kind of more iterations of that as companies grow more and more comfortable or perceptive to how their data is being used.
[00:12:29] Speaker C: I think that's a fair point. Another area I've been very involved in is cyber and putting cyber programs together, and it's legitimate risk and concern around how is data used, where will it be, how do we secure it? However, I think that's just going to have to be figured out because that's where we're going. We can't resist where we're going. AI is here, it's here to stay. And smart companies will actually put a strategy around figuring out how they can use it faster than their competitors and wisely to make their teams really efficient for the ones that really take advantage of that. It's going to be a huge game changer.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: Absolutely. Awesome. We got the AI topic in, so appreciate you opining there. So if we could switch over to your experience at blue Links. Now, as I mentioned earlier, you gave an interesting presentation at Fernways RPT 30 conference in Dallas on the share price transformation you oversaw at Blue Links, where you saw 17 times share price increase over two years, which is incredible. And you talked a little bit about the playbook you used to facilitate that appreciation. As the CFO, could you talk a little bit more about what the strategy was you employed there? You talked about roadshows and just simple investor memos and comms. What are some of the staples and cornerstones of an investor comm strategy like that?
[00:13:57] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, I think it's really important to know it was kind of the coming together of all kinds of aspects at the same time that were positive for the company. A big team effort, not just from the office of the finance team, but for all the groups it started with. Just got to make sure I phrased this rightly, because certainly Covid was not a positive experience, for nobody would have wished that would have happened. However, it did happen. It was the reality. And so I think I joined in March of 2020, right as that was starting.
And I think the team, given the environment, was the most open and probably ever been to saying, what do we need to do to secure our business, to make it through Covid, and to make sure that we secure for the future. And it gave us that opening to say, maybe there's some changes that we could make. And so the level of resistance to change management was really low, and it gave us a really good opportunity to say, okay, how can we rethink some of these things and how can we make things better? Multi pronged approach. The first step was really ensuring that we protected working capital. The company had high leverage at the time, was focused on cash, and working capital was critical. So as a group, we put our heads together and we came up with thoughts around how we could get that working capital down. And in the first quarter after Covid, so kind of that second quarter of that year, we worked towards really halting purchases, mostly of commodities, so that we could manage our commodity to risk, have less commodities on the ground that are subject to the wild fluctuations that were going on on wood and panel commodities at the time, and bring cash and hold more cash. We took about $50 million off the balance sheet between March and I'd say, June July timeframes. And I think we proved to ourselves as a company that, hey, we can still do business without it. We can be more efficient with inventory. So that really was a good learning for the team. They embraced it, and we continue to hone that over the next year to even get more down and still fulfill our customers just fine. So we did more of a just in time type of inventory approach. Not only did that help with the cash and the balance sheet and help us delever, but it also really helped with the P and l side because we were seeing a lot of variability in our EBITDA from the commodity fluctuations the P and L hit there. So that was a big aspect of it. In addition, towards the end of that year, we took a step back and we looked at our strategy and said, hey, are we being more strategic about the products that we're selling at the highest returns? And we did some workshops with the team and came to some conclusions around putting more focus in some of these specialty products that the company sold and a little less and less focus on the commodities because the specialty products was much higher margin and more profitable, not just to the company, but the customers like those as well. So doing coming up with a different view of how we should focus our commercial efforts. And that really paid off over the next year. That team, the team, the commercial teams just took that and really ran with it. And then finally the IR piece, kind of there's more legs in the stool, but let's call it the third leg in the stool. We had been a public company for many years, but we had not really ran an IR program. And so a lot of people didn't know about us. They just kind of, our stock kind of just went with the commodity charts. But in fact 60% of our revenue was not commodity. So the message wasn't out there. And we hadn't managed our commodity risk as well as we had we probably should have in the past. So once we started managing it and we had a strategy that we agreed we were able to package that up and I was able to really build up that IR program. We went from one analyst to five.
We went on the road, we did our first ever investor day. And people really started hearing our story, feeling confident in our numbers as we took the volatility out and we started doing what we said we were going to do every quarter, every quarter. And it took a couple of years. I mean, it didn't happen overnight. As you said, it was about a two year program. But all those coming together combined with certainly tailwinds from the COVID environment and inflation into our products, which was beneficial to our business model as a distributor of home building products. Yeah, it all came together and worked really well for the company and the shareholders.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: It definitely helps. And I'd imagine launching an IR kind of campaign. When you have done all of that legwork, it's not just, okay, let's tell the story that's been, it sounds like it was really a period of transformation and then being able to take that to the market was powerful. What is the experience like of adding an analyst to cover your stock? It sounds like you scaled that up pretty significantly. What are those conversations look like? What's the, what are the really, it's really time.
[00:19:24] Speaker C: Time consuming is what it is.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:27] Speaker C: I spent a lot of time on it. Well, I think this is a good lesson for, especially something like an accountant coming in to be a CFO with my first CFO role. And I felt like a lot of areas I had done before, including FP and a back in the McDermott days, et cetera. So a lot of boxes I had checked but had not really checked the box on investor relations being the key person.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: So I hired an investor relations consultant to help me think through the strategy. And most importantly, he had so many connections to mid market banks and potential analysts and investors, it was, he was helpful for me to really put together a really cohesive launch program. And then I probably met with 2025. Banks are potential analysts over about a three week period the same, selling their story, telling them what we're trying to do. And out of that, I think I got three in the next quarter, next few months, and then a couple later came on board. One.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: And what are they looking, what are they looking for to say, okay, I'll cover your stock. What's the kind of, in a nutshell, checklist of, okay, I need x, y and z to start covering, for example.
[00:20:48] Speaker C: Two things, upside, potential and consistency of earnings.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: Okay. Okay.
[00:20:56] Speaker C: They want to be able to go solve that. Someone's going to make money on our stock and they want it to, they want it. They want to be the one to bring that to the market and say, hey, I knew it. I was the first one of the first groups to know it. And the second thing is certainly they want to look good and be able to feel like they're credible to their constituents. So having covering a company that's all over the place, they put out a note that says, we think it's going to hit $60 and it never does. I mean, that's not going to work.
They're looking for both the potential and the somewhat certainty. Can't be certain, but probability around certainty. And I think it wasn't easy because bluelings hadn't had struggled a bit the couple years leading up to that, but a few people that really understood the industry, heard our story, saw what we were doing and jumped in. And I think, I'm sure if you asked them now, they'd say they were glad they did.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: That was a good decision. Awesome.
[00:22:05] Speaker C: It was a good decision.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: Yeah, awesome. Excellent. Now thats super insightful. And actually going back to that same presentation I mentioned at Fernways RPt 30, you also laid out some tenants for a successful capital allocation strategy. And I think that the number one tenet that you had was time investment from the CEO, the CEO being involved and giving mind share to whatever initiative it is. So what are some of the challenges that you've seen in earning that kind of focus and attention from a top executive? And how do you make the case to get their attention? Like obviously the money is being spent, so there's a level of awareness that comes with that. But to get it to that level that you've seen, that you've seen really drive results.
[00:22:49] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I think, I believe most CEO's are going to care. So we'll just start with the assumption that they care. They want to do a good job running their business, doing the right capital allocation, but their team needs to support them and making sure they're effective at that. Specifically finance.
They certainly need to be the driving force of ensuring they have all the right information. They're making, they're pulling things together, they're making the time, they're bringing those topics to the CEO. So the challenges are, you know, the CEO is spread really thin and they have a huge commercial focus. They should, they should be with customers commercial focused on operations out of the sites. So the challenge really is, I think for finance team is to a, the CFO and the team really need to have their ear to the ground and saying, what does the business need? What resources do the business need? Do they need fixed? Do they need capital? Capital assets? Do they need people? Do they need it? I think sometimes we tend to think of capital allocation as a little bit around kind of, I feel like in the investor world, stock buybacks or dividends or whatever. But actually my opinion is capital allocation starts at home, starts at what does the business need first? Are we having issues meeting customer requirements because we have some old piece of equipment or we have aging fleet or whatever?
Those are the things. Or our technologies 20 years behind our competitors. Those are the things. I feel like the finance team needs to understand what the needs are, help with the operations team, help put the cases together and make the case for capital allocation to the company. Otherwise it may not come bubble upright, and it might not bubble up at all of what's really needed, necessarily, or won't bubble up in the right way, or maybe there's not. CEO doesn't think that's going to be a good payoff or whatever. The finance team is not all over that.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it sounds similar to the IR strategy, like, putting together the pitch that this is the right, whether it's to external or internal, at the top, you want to be able to really just tell that narrative. And obviously you need, like, the data and the finances have to support it, but it's almost storytelling.
[00:25:19] Speaker C: It's not good enough to just say, hey, CEO, I think we need $20 million of capex in this division. That's not good enough. Why do you need it?
What's the ROI on that?
[00:25:34] Speaker B: Put the presentation, what's the risk if we don't do it?
[00:25:40] Speaker C: That needs to be really thought through. And that's where I see people want to speed through that conversation. Just say, oh, but we need it. No, but you got to put all that together.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:49] Speaker C: To make the case. Because why would you do that? Why are. Why are we going to do that? That's spending money versus. Okay. Sometimes you can do the share buyback and get a pop in the stock. Certainly all your shareholders, not all of them, but a lot of your shareholders want that strategy. So I think it's being diligent about understanding the needs of the business. It is being diligent about understanding your stock price and what your shareholders want and managing. Is this the time to do a stock buyback? Is it not? Are you the type of stock that dividends or not? We were a very volatile stock. It didn't make sense to do dividends at blue links. And I did a lot of work and research and discussion to make sure that was to go to the board and say, okay, I really don't think that's a good idea. But we did do some stock buy. We did start a stock buyback program. We did put much more in capex than we had ever had because we saw all the needs that were needed, and we believed, and we did all the math on the return. So those are the challenges, because the CEO is busy and the finance team has got to be the lead. And that's where they can actually distinguish themselves and make a huge difference to the company. That's where they can add a lot of value.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Translating operations to kind of the big picture stock price.
[00:27:04] Speaker C: That's right. Connecting the dots, I spent a lot of time with my team connecting to that. If we do these things, this is what happens. And I'm not saying I don't want to oversimplify it, but it is relatively straightforward.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It probably doesn't seem that way when you're staring at 10,000 lines of sales orders in Excel, but, yeah, that's right.
[00:27:24] Speaker C: That's what our leader's job is to do, is to kind of distill it down and say, okay, and all this noise, this is actually what matters.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: A couple closing thoughts as we come up on time here. I was curious if, what extent do you see that financial standards or methodologies affect a company's m and a prospects? Are there certain structures or practices that allow a company to either integrate acquisitions easier on the buyer end of things, or to be acquired easier that you've seen in different organizations?
[00:27:56] Speaker C: I don't know if there's any particular financial rules, et cetera, that, I mean, there's certainly tax rules, especially with m and a. The number one factor, when you're just looking at a target, the first thing you do is maybe it's the number two thing after you decide you want, that makes sense strategically, that you're interested in that target, is to bring the tax person in and say, okay, what are the tax rules that would either make that have a gain, not have a gain, tax free. All this stuff. Even though I am a CPA, I've never been a tax guru. I've just been part of the conversations. And so I couldn't tell you all the details, but I can tell you that that's the first person I call is to understand, okay, how is the best tax structure for this. For this deal? And then once that's established, then that does affect. Is it an asset deal? Is it a full business? Are you going to have goodwill or not? Then it does affect the way that we put the integration together, set up the legal entity structure, sometimes set up the team, and certainly the accounting. So, yeah, that's probably what I'd say is those are the kind of like the order of how I would think about figuring it out. There's simple, straightforward buying a company, and then there's asset purchases, a little bit more complex of how do you carve that? And then there's carve outs, which can be more complex because they don't come with a whole set of process necessarily all the time. And divestitures can be tricky. So there's a lot of tricky transactions that can happen. And I think dotting your I's and crossing your t's around both the tax implications, the legal entity implications process, making sure you have a good process laid out ahead of time. Trying to do things like those transactions on the fly are difficult. And I know that some smaller go into the private equity world. Private equity companies don't have a ton of resources and, and things happen fast and are trying to do a lot of deals. And I still, I still continue to kind of give the comment around, making sure you're going a little bit slow to go fast, get organized, and then you can go really fast because you've got your game plan and you know you're not going to miss anything.
[00:30:16] Speaker B: Last question, super serious topic. You're an LSU alumna along with Joe Burrow, angel, Reese, shaq, who's your favorite tiger of all time, and how many wins is the football team going to get this year?
[00:30:28] Speaker C: Oh, wow. Okay. So I'm aging myself here because I was on campus when Shaq was on campus. So it's really kind of hard for me not to pick Shaq because that was very exciting at the time, just sitting in the quad watching him walk by.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: Gotcha. No. Any classes with Shaq or like anthropology 101 or never did.
[00:30:52] Speaker C: He was a couple years ahead of me, so we didn't have classes together. But I. What my economics 101 teacher would always talk about in the models, et cetera, he used to reference called the Shack space. I'm not even sure what he was meaning anymore. I'd have to go back and remember, but he was enthralled with Shack. Everybody on campus was. And it was a lot of, it was a lot of fun at the time. And I would say I'm more of a football fan than basketball, but that was really exciting. I can't say I don't love Joe Burrow and all three of those, the ones you mentioned, and of course, many more. And shout out to the women's gymnastics team that won national chance this year, too.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: Yeah. If any of them want to come on the titanium Economy podcast, for whatever reason, we'd be happy to have them. From Shaq to Joe Burrows.
[00:31:42] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Love watching all of them excited. It really has been also exciting to see women's basketball, LSU women's basketball with Kim and the team and angel. It's been amazing to get to see that happen and wins. I actually put some thought into that. Hopefully losing the star quarterback is going to hurt, but hopefully we'll have some more defense show up. So maybe with the balance we can do at least as well as last year, if not a little bit better. I think everybody still thinks it's rebuilding, so maybe I'm going to put it out at nine.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: Yeah, nine wins. We heard it here first, folks.
[00:32:20] Speaker C: Yeah, we'll see.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: Well, fingers, fingers crossed for Tiger Nation. And thank you so much, Kelly, for sitting down. Really great insights and appreciate the conversation. So thanks again for coming on.
[00:32:33] Speaker C: No, thanks. It was so much fun. Really appreciate you having me.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: Awesome. Take care, Kelly.
[00:32:38] Speaker C: Thanks.
[00:32:43] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to Ina Insights. Please visit ina AI for more podcasts, publications and events on developments shaping the industrial and industrial technology sector.
