The history-making USA Hockey won golds (and millions of fans in the process) at Milan’s Olympic Games. But behind the on-ice glory is a $75 million organization with a finance function as disciplined as its players. Kelly Mahncke , CFO of USA Hockey, joins Glenn Hopper and FP&A Today to pull back the curtain on what it takes to fund the gold-winning national hockey program — with business interests from memberships and sponsorships to restaurants and insurance. Kelly traces her own journey from center ice to chasing the bottom line, explaining how a hockey career shaped her instincts as a finance leader. She walks us through four-year "quad budgets" and the typical annual cycle, and what it took to weather COVID's financial shock, from cash management to the logistical nightmare of paused travel programs. She also gets into the digital transformation underway at USA Hockey. And why she believes curiosity is the defining trait of great FP&A professionals. Catch this fascinating look at finance leadership — at the peak of Hockey USA's Olympic moment.

Sahil Kamani, is a Berlin-based senior finance leader and FP&A professional at Ellie (Volkswagen Group), Starting at a credit rating agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis — inspired, fittingly, by a fascination with the documentary Inside Job — Sahil moved through regulation, capital markets, and an MBA before pivoting into operational finance

In this episode:

• Being the person handing out credit ratings
• Cash burn and the KPIs that matter most in a turnaround
• What bankers and regulators instinctively look for
• How the CFO you work influences your storytelling
• Being CFO of Berlin's fastest-growing pickleball club.

Sahil R Kamani on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahilrkamani/

John Glasgow, is the founder, CEO and CFO of Campfire AI native ERP with more than $100m in funding, built to help high growth companies close faster, get richer visibility from their accounting data, and scale. John brings his insights as an operator who has spent time in FP&A and strategic finance, including at Adobe and an executive at Invoice To Go, leading that finance company to a $625 million sale to bill.com. Campfire came out of firsthand frustration with legacy ERPs and a need to rebuild the general ledger for the AI era.

In this episode:

• My years in FP&A and strategic finance at Adobe before becoming a founder
• CFA Certification
• Invoice to Go acquisition what I learned
• The frustration and origin story of frustration and why Campfire was set up
• Why building our own AI model makes sense

Key quote: “If you slap AI on top of an ERP with summarized revenue data, then you’re essentially gonna get no insights that are of any value.”

Marko Horvat has been a public accountant, Controller, head of FP&A and CFO, as well as VP in Gartner's research and advisory practice, specializing in topics most relevant to CFOs and finance transformation.

In this episode he talks:

• Interplay IT and CISO and organizational politics (“if it runs on electricity, it’s ours”) CFO skillsets gap
• Real change in CFO’s Office with AI (audit pattern recognition to forecasting)
• Last mile transformation in finance
• Mindset, skillset, toolset transformation
• Treating forecast as in perpetual beta
• The power of the subtotal function

Recommended books:

There's Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Troy Anderson is CFO of Kelly Services, a staffing solutions provider to various industries, who has spent his career driving transformation across some of the most complex business environments. Before joining Kelly, he served as CFO at Universal Technical Institute, where he helped double revenue over five years through a mix of organic growth and strategic acquisitions. Earlier in his career, he held senior finance leadership roles at Conduent, a $6billion player (bought by Xerox).

• Conduent life cycle a $6b public company acquired by Xerox
• Investor relations at Xerox as a game-changer for my career
• Making finance a partner across the value chain
• Business Process Outsourcing vs AI
• The need for a deep understanding of your business

Catch the full transcript below

Stephen Hedlund is head of finance at Rillet, an AI-native ERP which has raised over $100million from Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. In Steven’s words Rillet is “building the modern NetSuite.” In this episode:

• How Isaac Asimov’s Foundation helped me discover finance
• Experience from enterprise at Walmart to building startups
• Go-to-market (marketing) to Head of Finance Gillet
• The moat for leading ERPs and our strategy
• Being the ICP and marketing voice for Rillet

“To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.” ― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

Eddie Reynolds, CEO of UnionSquare Consulting, opens up about the often-fraught relationship between CFOs and CROs. Eddie shares insights from his unique journey—from banking and private equity to being an account executive at Salesforce which forecast within 5% accuracy despite 30%+ growth.

The conversation tackles the critical disconnect between finance and go-to-market teams: Why do CFOs struggle to trust CRM pipelines? What breaks when companies hit $50-100M in revenue?

In this episode:

• How Salesforce was able to forecast with 5% accuracy,
• The role of FP&A and CROs in go to market strategy and efficiency
• The issues with LTV to CAC ratio in SaaS
• Biggest challenges of the CFO/CRO relationship
• Bottoms up annual planning working with finance

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