Bobby Bray brings his perspective from more than 20 years in banking and consulting with Capital One, Oliver Wyman, and Regions Bank. The retired Navy Captain with four commands talks about strategic decision-making under pressure, working with Fortune 150 C-Suite executives, and the rigor required in FP&A.

He says: “To use an aviation term you need to be able to follow the drop of gas through the engine and understand the different cogs in the engine that turns a drop of gas into thrust, but it also is what turns raw data into usable analytics on the back end.” In this episode

• A Truly Non-Traditional Path to Finance
• Commercial banking as the most educational finance job
• Discipline and rigor in FP&A
• Cloud infrastructure changes in the past 7 years
• The rigor of a capital market stress test
• Explainability of AI in finance

Five-time CFO Rick Smith has led finance at companies including inVentiv Health Communications, Exos, Parchment, Solera Health before founding Bonfire advisory. He is also the author o fDemystifying the Role of the CFO in Venture and Growth Stage Companies, a no-nonsense approach to the topic. Reviews for the book include: “This book is a must-read if you want to understand how to scale a company as a CFO” and “Should be required reading for CEOs and PE people along with CFOs.”

In this episode Smith provides his take on being a CFO and his long background in FP&A, providing insights on:

• The path from FP&A to CFO (without a CPA)
• Why I like being CFO at SMBs (sub $50m)
• Being a dreamer, artist and buildingFP&A
• Audits vs QOEs
• The unspoken challenges working with PE firms
• FP&A and M&A – what you need to know

Link to the book: Demystifying the Role of the CFO in Venture and Growth Stage Companies

Preston Naegle started his career in private equity at Leavitt Equity Partners (founded by Michael Leavitt, the former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Negale then moved into the operating world and for more than 2 years has led strategic finance and FP&A at a PE-backed Midway Mechanical Services in the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) industry at the company which has completed 15 acquisitions (3 in 2025 alone) within the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing sector across the Western US region.

In this episode

• An origin story in Private Equity
• Learning from a “firehose” of business models
• Bringing PE thinking to a head of finance role at Midway Mechanical
• Bringing people with you as you create FP&A, budget and forecasting processes
• Choosing an FP&A solution
• Enhancing time to insights that bring long-term business partnering and profit growth