CFO Leadership

As part of Vena's birthday we created a timeline for you to enjoy, check it out: A Decade of Planning To Grow: Milestones and Highlights from Vena’s First 10 Years As we celebrate Vena’s 10th birthday, it’s time to look back and reflect on the growth we’ve accomplished so far. This is how Vena evolved from a three-founder startup in 2011 into a cloud FP&A leader with 900+ customers in 2021. April 2011: Longtime friends Rishi Grover and George Papayiannis launch the company. They begin building the software out of George’s parents’ basement.  August 2011: Don Mal joins as the CEO and third co-founder. Vena is officially born! December 2011: After building the original product, refining the go-to-market strategy and hiring some early employees, Vena brings on First Wind Energy as its first customer. June 2012: George and the Product and Technology team launch the first version of Vena’s OLAP financial database, ultimately laying the foundation for long-term growth and innovation. October 2012: Vena moves its office to Islington and Bloor in Toronto after raising $3 million in funding from close friends and family. This also included an angel investment from a PE firm, Klass Capital.  2013 - 2015: The sales team continues to shatter its revenue and customer acquisition targets. Vena signs some huge clients including Nando’s, McDonald’s Canada, Santander and Kobo.  July 2014: The Product and Technology team successfully transform Vena from an on-premise application into a cloud-based SaaS solution. July 2016: Vena secures its first major funding round, a $30 million Series A investment from Centana Growth Partners. May 2017: Hundreds of customers and prospects gather in New Orleans for VenaNOLA, the company’s first-ever user conference. September 2017: More customers + more employees = the need for more space! Vena moves offices again to its current global headquarters at 2 Fraser Ave. in Toronto’s Liberty Village.  December 2018: Vena caps off yet another record-breaking year with enhancements to the modeling, workflow, integration and data mapping features. January 2019: JMI Equity leads a $115 million funding round as Vena continues to attract top-tier talent and grow its market share.  August 2019: Don steps down as Vena’s CEO as the company begins to adopt a more targeted product-led growth strategy. SaaS veteran Hunter Madeley takes the helm as CEO as Vena begins to prepare for a period of aggressive expansion. May 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic sparks the birth of Vena Nation week, a fully-virtual conference for the entire finance and operations community. Vena unveils Plan To Grow™ shortly after, an innovative online learning hub and CPE-accredited content platform. November 2020: Vena launches the Vena Preview—its first product-led growth initiative—and begins work on additional enhancements to drive demand for the business. February 2021: Vena forms a partnership with the Kansas City Chiefs in order to champion digital transformation in the sports and live entertainment industry. Vena also launches pre-configured solutions for SaaS, banking, education and other key market segments. April 2021: Vista Equity Partners leads another $300 million funding round, giving Vena the momentum it needs to continue thriving for the next decade and beyond. May 2021: Vena’s Product and Technology team prepare for major releases including Vena 365 Connect and embedded dashboarding with PowerBI. Happy birthday vena Looking Back (and Forward) After Vena’s First 10 Years Learn more about Vena's growth journey over the last 10 years.

We just wrapped up our last day of Vena Nation week and what a great week we had! We want to thank everyone for their hard work and amazing contributions to make Vena Nation week such a great experience. Today we had Mark Donovan, President of Kansas City Chiefs, sit down with Vena CEO Hunter Madeley to talk about building winning teams. We also had the The Beyond FP&A Panel, which was CPE/CPD accredited for all those in attendance. That panel focused on how Capstone Infrastructure, the Arizona Cardinals and Vena’s finance pros standardized processes, systems and reporting to serve as strategic business partners. Last but certainly not least, we had Liam Bastick (of SumProduct) walk us through Effective Data Storytelling in Excel. Sadly this is our last day, but if you missed it (or anything else during the week), be sure to check out Plan To Grow in the coming weeks for any missed sessions. Here are  our highlights from day four. Top Talks of the Day #1 How To Build Winning Teams With the Kansas City Chiefs “I look for someone who understands how to be a really good teammate. Someone who understands the importance of hard work across the board.” - Mark Donovan, President of the Kansas City Chiefs #2 The Beyond FP&A Panel “With Vena, our budget managers embraced the change of returning to an Excel based platform because that’s where they were comfortable.” #3 Effective Data Storytelling in Excel With SumProduct “If you are telling a story you can’t assume that everybody knows everything right from the get-go, so you’ve got to give them some sort of recollection.” Hot off the Vena Nation Press Finding Balance: Career and Motherhood Tips From a Modern CFO 3 Reasons Why You and Your Organization Should Be Using Power BI 3 Offseason Planning Tips for Finance Teams in Professional Sports Highlights From Vena Nation Week 2021: Day One Highlights From Vena Nation Week 2021: Day Two Highlights From Vena Nation Week 2021: Day Three Don’t Forget To Join Us on Plan To Grow Stay tuned to check out and enjoy Vena Nation week on Plan To Grow in case you missed it!

We just wrapped up day three of Vena Nation week and it was jam-packed  with some amazing talks and experiences. Our Chief Solutions Architect Rishi Grover gave a talk about the future of data transformation. We got to learn about The Ultimate Excel Shortcuts With Chandoo. This is just a taste of the day we had today, so if you missed it, be sure to check out our highlights: Top Talks of the Day #1 The Future of Data Transformation With Rishi Grover “We’re living in a world where we can bring cross-functional data together and extract real, tangible insights from it with powerful technology solutions.” #2 The Ultimate Excel Shortcuts With Chandoo “If you want to leave with all of this data, you can use a shortcut to select everything you want on your spreadsheet.” #3 A New Era of Storytelling With Jeanne Lam “One of the most interesting challenges is, ‘how do I convince the 200 other people at this company that this is the way to go?’ This is where finance teams and storytelling help everyone understand business decisions.” Hot off the Vena Nation Press 10 Reasons To Attend Vena Nation Week 2021 Get Ready To Be Inspired by Our Vena Nation Week Speakers Excel Nerds Unite in the Ultimate Community Finding Balance: Career and Motherhood Tips From a Modern CFO 3 Reasons Why You and Your Organization Should Be Using Power BI 3 Offseason Planning Tips for Finance Teams in Professional Sports  Don’t Forget To Join Us for Day Four!  We still have one day left to enjoy Vena Nation week and that includes: 20+ talks still to watch live and on demand 2 live and interactive sessions  Don’t forget our influencer sessions with SumProduct on June 18 Plus, Vena customers get access to additional exclusive roundtables and training sessions at Vena Nation week

Today was the second day of Vena Nation week and we had some great talks that we wanted to highlight. Our COO Tina Goulbourne and our Vice President of Revenue Operations & Strategy, Burzin Contractor talk about the ultimate business planning playbook. We had our finance-led collaboration exchange and our influencers SumProduct (Liam Bastick) and Finance Femme take the lead as part of the top talks of the day. We still have two days left to enjoy Vena Nation week. Check out our highlights of the day below: Top Talks of the Day #1 The Ultimate Business Planning Playbook With Tina Goulbourne and Burzin Contractor “The best business planning in the world isn’t going to do you any good unless you execute.” —Tina Goulborne, Vena COO #2 Creating Effective Spreadsheets in Excel With SumProduct “How often have you taken a block of calculations in Excel and copied it somewhere else and something has gone wrong?” #3 Life and Business Hacks With Finance Femme “There is nothing more logical than numbers in finance, because one plus one will almost certainly always equal two.” Hot off the Vena Nation Press 10 Reasons To Attend Vena Nation Week 2021 Get Ready To Be Inspired by Our Vena Nation Week Speakers Excel Nerds Unite in the Ultimate Community Finding Balance: Career and Motherhood Tips From a Modern CFO 3 Reasons Why You and Your Organization Should Be Using Power BI 3 Offseason Planning Tips for Finance Teams in Professional Sports  Don’t Forget To Join Us for Day Three! We still have two days left to enjoy Vena Nation week and that includes: 20+ talks to watch live and on demand 4 live and interactive sessions  Don’t forget our influencer sessions with Chandoo and Jeanne Lam on June 17 Plus, Vena customers get access to additional exclusive roundtables and training sessions at Vena Nation week

Today was the first day of Vena Nation week and we had some fantastic talks from our speakers, including Vena CEO Hunter Madeley and Vena CFO Darrell Cox. We even had influencer Chandoo join in on day one. We still have 3 days left to enjoy Vena Nation week. Check out our top talks of the day and more below: Top Talks of the Day #1 Find the Strength in Your Numbers With Hunter Madeley “When the world was trying to figure out what was going to happen next, finance teams were at the forefront trying to forecast and adapt.” #2 The Evolution of the Strategic CFO With Darrell Cox “Think big. When you think about setting something up or analyzing something, are you learning from it?”   #3 The Ultimate Excel Shortcuts With Chandoo “This is what I mean by XLookUp is natively array capable, you can use this powerful functionality of XLookUp to get an entire range of values and send them across the screen like this.” Hot off the Vena Nation Press 10 Reasons To Attend Vena Nation Week 2021 Get Ready To Be Inspired by Our Vena Nation Week Speakers Excel Nerds Unite in the Ultimate Community Finding Balance: Career and Motherhood Tips From a Modern CFO Don’t Forget To Join Us for Day 2! We still have 3 days left to enjoy Vena Nation week and that includes:  20+ talks to watch live and on demand 6 live and interactive sessions to attend and participate in Don’t forget our influencer sessions with Rainn Wilson, SumProduct and Finance Femme on June 16 Plus, Vena customers get access to additional exclusive roundtables and training sessions

As Vena Nation week approaches, we sat down with our CFO, Darrell Cox, to talk a little bit about the evolution of the strategic CFO and what we can expect from his upcoming talk for Vena Nation week. How has the role of the CFO changed over the years? How do you see it developing in the future? Darrell Cox: The role has definitely evolved over time. And I believe it has in a way also remained the same.  At the root, a finance leader's role is still always about taking ownership of the numbers and bringing insights to the business and enabling better business decisions in the most timely manner possible. The evolution has been in how we do this and how far we can take this. And what’s enabling us to evolve is technology. With the latest technology, businesses are producing more and more data that is very relevant to finance. Technology is also making it less expensive to get very large amounts of data to business stakeholders. Technology is also much easier to use and more easily embraced by business users outside of finance. The most evolved finance team leverages the latest in technology to bring in more data from more places from across an organization, engaging all business stakeholders and delivering insights to them more often and ideally on demand. I see this trend continuing for the foreseeable future. And leaders who are embracing modern cloud technology today will be able to build and maintain a competitive advantage for their organizations over lagging competitors. What does it mean to be a strategic CFO in your opinion? And how has being a strategic CFO impacted your approach to your role? DC: This can mean a lot of different things depending sometimes on an exigent situation. For me, generally, it means being action oriented and growth minded—proactively looking for insights and leading the change by driving forward-looking business motions. It means thinking big, not just focusing on the details and being done with that, but finding clues in the details about how to drive a great business. Seeing a detour where some might see a change in direction, or conversely. It's not just about being a contrarian, it's about bringing insights to the table that bring real value and impact the direction of the business. Being a strategic CFO has earned me leadership roles and enables me to feel like I am fulfilling my potential. It gives me a great sense of satisfaction in what I am contributing to my team. How does a CFO influence strategy? Why is it important to be a strategic CFO in one’s organization? DC: That's a great question. A CFO and a finance team are responsible for empowering strategic decisions through our stewardship of the management operating process. We are directly responsible for helping the business build a great plan and for measuring and evaluating performance against that plan which will ultimately determine what the next plan will look like.  How well we fulfill this function will have a direct impact on how well our organizations perform against this plan and in what direction this plan or the next plan will take us. The more data we bring into our plans, the more people we bring into our planning processes and the better and more timely insights we bring back to our teams through performance measurements and evaluation, the better we will do as a team. We, as finance leaders, become more important to our teams by behaving in a strategic manner. For Vena Nation week this year, you are going to be talking to us about The Evolution of the Strategic CFO. Without giving too much away, can you talk to us about what your session will cover? DC: I believe that every finance leader—CFOs and those who aspire to become CFOs—have the ability to be strategic finance leaders if they are not already.  I believe that to be the most that we can be, we should continually think and act like strategic CFOs. I want to deliver a little bit of inspiration and remind us about why this is so important and how we can enable our organizations to be more successful and to achieve truly great things by approaching our roles in a strategic manner. And I will talk about all of this in the context of my principles of the Agile CFO, which frame what being a strategic CFO means to me. Plan To Grow Watch Darrell's Talk On Demand Missed Darrell's talk during Vena Nation week? Watch his keynote The Evolution of the Strategic CFO on Plan To Grow.

Remember the days when we had water cooler talks? Or went for a coffee run with a colleague? It’s hard to imagine creating those same kinds of connections through Zoom or MS Teams. Well, it’s not hard to imagine, it’s just plain old hard to do. So how can we continue to build meaningful connections with our colleagues and inspire creativity as we continue to work digitally? For Vena Nation week this year, we had the opportunity to explore these questions with Rainn Wilson. And, oh yes, you read that right. It’s the Rainn Wilson. Rainn is best known for his role as Dwight Schrute in the NBC sitcom, The Office. He is also one of the co-founders of the digital entertainment company SoulPancake. Rainn sat down with Vena CMO Allison Munro and CPO Tracey Mikita to walk them through how creativity and self-expression create a more meaningful and collaborative work model. He also shared his advice for fostering creativity and connecting socially in a virtual environment (which is the norm nowadays). Here’s a sneak peak into Rainn’s Vena Nation week talk, The New World of Work with Rainn Wilson. How can we be expressive virtually? According to Rainn, the best way to express ourselves in a virtual world is by showing our humanness. “People are connected and listening so you have to assume that’s happening. I would just say that the number one thing I’ve seen on Zoom meetings and production meetings is a certain self-consciousness. But the more human you are, the more relatable you become,” he explains. As we continue with virtual connections for our work, mistakes and slip ups will often happen. Perhaps we forgot to unmute ourselves on a conference call or our PowerPoint crashes— whatever the case may be, it’s important to let your personality shine through. “Letting your humanity, vulnerability and your eccentricities show will really draw people in,” says Rainn. The best way to connect with others and to be expressive in a continued virtual environment is by being yourself. We all have stories to tell and we are all unique human beings so sharing that with our colleagues is important to form positive connections. How do we bring our authentic selves to work? “For a large part of my life I felt very disintegrated,” says Rainn, “I lived my life in these different compartments. I had my work life, my faith life, my social life, hobbies, family, friends and stuff that I did for myself in all of these different compartments.” Part of Rainn’s long-term goal has been to integrate all of these aspects of his life and reinforcing how he can be of service throughout all of these aspects. He says that as he began to integrate his beliefs into his work and integrate his work into service, the better he felt and the more authentic he became. “Authenticity comes in connection and in service to others. I would equate authenticity with integrity and integration,” said Rainn. How important is laughter to the human experience and building connections? “We need to laugh,” says Rainn, “humour helps us survive.” According to Rainn, humour allows for a deeper human connection. Humour invites vulnerability and relatable experiences between people. This is so important especially when we all continue to work together virtually. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and to share relatable experiences builds trust, which is the foundation for any healthy team environment.    Missed Vena Nation week? Join us on Plan To Grow! If you missed out on Vena Nation week this year, be sure to check out our talks on Plan To Grow.

Let’s be honest, we can sometimes stumble here and there and make mistakes when it comes to working with our colleagues and executive leadership. I know I have. We’re not always going to be perfect—we’re humans and we make mistakes. But as professionals, we always strive to be collaborative and problem solvers. When you are working with multiple departments and teams, you’ll often collaborate on projects with chief level executives. So, in this blog, I’m going to share with you three things you need to know about working with your CFO whether you’re in finance or not. Let’s get into it. What do CFOs really care about? 1. They Need Collaboration and Trust When it comes to working with a CFO, it’s all about collaboration and trust. Working with a CFO takes a great deal of transparency and accountability since you are more often than not basing your conversation around team metrics and ROI. These metrics and data points need to be delivered with honesty in order to cultivate a strong relationship with your CFO. According to Vena’s CFO Darrell Cox, when you are collaborating with finance, “knowing your numbers helps bridge the gap and sharing the numbers helps you build the relationship.” Cultivating a good relationship means aligning collaboration between finance and other teams. This ensures that all teams work together to reach their business goals. When relationships are strong and built on a foundation of trust, your organization is also aligned. When team relationships aren’t built on trust, you can confidently assume that the business goals will not be met since there is misalignment among teams. Plan To Grow 7 Principles of The Agile CFO Is finance exciting? Absolutely, according to Vena’s Chief Financial Officer, Darrell Cox, in his new talk on Plan To Grow, 7 Principles of The Agile CFO.  2. They Care About the Metrics You’ll often hear CFOs asking, “What’s the ROI?” The top three things CFOs always have on their radar are expenses, revenue and net income. They also look into lead funnel, conversion rates, new account opportunities, accurate reporting and cost of customer acquisition. These are the kinds of metrics that CFOs care about and have top of mind. It’s important to keep these metrics close by when you are speaking to your CFO. It’s also equally as important, if not more, for different departmental teams to communicate with one another and to share pertinent metrics like these. It’s not necessarily one team's job to chase the other for these metrics. In fact, Darrell suggests, “Everyone needs to be doing their roles and working together as one team. You can’t look at any responsibility on one individual to reach out to the other.” Darrell also points out that it’s important for teams to align and that things often boil down to the numbers and trust. “There have been situations where teams have been struggling to achieve their objectives with their budget. My role is to get in there and understand all the numbers and if we need to reallocate budget,” he says. Since numbers and metrics are pertinent to teams, aligning tools that can speed up the process and accuracy of reporting make all the difference. Vena utilizes a dashboard of leading indicators of business performance and if you see that there is an issue with any project, a change can be made relatively quickly. Our dashboards also help teams talk through the numbers and understand the risks. Ready to start your own growth journey? For a CFO, it’s not just about the numbers, but rather what those numbers represent. A common mistake made in working with CFOs is not having accurate metrics, or worse , manipulated and biased metrics. According to Darrell, financial metrics are a great way to make your case a point to your CFO on a particular project or team goal. Having an honest conversation about metrics helps CFOs feel comfortable and also builds trust. Not all metrics will be positive month over month. But don’t throw away trust by manipulating metrics to look better than they really are. It’s the CFO’s job to help you get your metrics to where they need to be. 3. They Need You To Speak the Same Language Outside of accurate metrics, trust and team collaboration, it’s really important to speak the same language with your CFO. What we mean by this is ensuring that different teams are all sharing the same view of data. For example, CFOs are focused on growth and cash or growth and profit whereas marketing teams are focused on growth, but they’re not always able to relate it to profit or spend. Once the marketing team is able to tie marketing results to early indicators and late stage results, then marketing and finance are speaking the same language. As Darrell claims, “Communicating in a way that illustrates the results over the activity” is the most important thing to remember when speaking with your CFO. One last piece of advice from our CFO is that “the only thing for sure about a plan is that it will go wrong.” So plan ahead when you can and learn to be nimble and agile in response to unpredicted changes. Curious about what the world’s top CFOs have in common? Read our blog. Watch Darrell's Talk on Plan To Grow Missed Darrell's talk during Vena Nation week? Watch his keynote The Evolution of the Strategic CFO on Plan To Grow.

As we celebrate Earth Day this month, it's important to remember how to keep our planet sustainable and healthy every day. As finance and operations professionals, you may be wondering how you can bring your colleagues, teams and entire organization together to keep sustainability top of mind for everyone—inside and outside of the office. The good news is that within your professional roles you’re situated to help drive action in your organization when it comes to sustainability. According to this article, finance teams are uniquely positioned to evaluate new sources of value, and in effect integrate these new sources into the organizations sustainability plan. Sustainability is something that’s important to investors, customers and employees and it can also become the key to your organization's strategic plan. Learn more about why CFOs should be firmly focused on sustainability by reading our blog. In this blog, we’ll share three tips to make sure your CFO is on board with sustainability, but before we dig in, let’s look at a few of the reasons why some CFOs might not be on board just yet. Why Aren’t Some CFOs On Board With Sustainability? Many organizations are focusing on improving their environmental impacts and building what’s considered a sustainable brand. According to this Forbes article a sustainable brand is one that has successfully integrated environmental, economic and social issues into its business operations. A few examples of building a sustainable brand at your organization could include developing sustainability reports and publishing them, as well as creating new roles like a Chief Sustainability Officer. But even with the movement to become more sustainable and an environmentally friendly organization most CFOs still aren’t on board. According to this Harvard Business Review some CFOs still feel that sustainability is an unnecessary and costly expense for their organization rather than a source of value. Reasons being that CFOs generally need to see the long term financial benefits of sustainability integration within their organizations and sometimes that can be hard to illustrate. Most organizations aren’t really taking the time to accurately track their returns on sustainability investment— and there lies the problem. The article goes on to highlight that CFOs often find themselves puzzled by the language and metrics used by their environmentally focused colleagues. CFOs talk finance and their lingo is focused on ROI while their sustainability focused colleagues might use language like waste reduction and energy efficiency. In fact, separate reporting processes for finance and sustainability may cause a lot of confusion and a lack of communication. Financial reporting generally views things like ROI, revenue, net income, and CapEx while sustainability reporting may view process changes, material and product replacements and cost. Since most organizations aren’t tracking returns on sustainability investment, there is also a lack of planning and dependable accounting structure to clearly report sustainability initiatives. All the more reason why ad hoc financial reporting tools make all the difference in organizing reports to track returns on these kinds of investments. With ad hoc reporting you can bring finance led planning to every corner of your organization. Ready to start your own growth journey? Since most business decisions are influenced by every aspect of your organization, with collaboration between departments and insights from all of your data— Vena’s financial reporting software allows you to store real-time data from your finance, sales, and marketing and other systems in a central database so that you can make ad hoc decisions quickly. Ad hoc reporting can help you plan your sustainability initiatives with a clearly defined ROI for your organization. Get Your CFO On Board With Sustainability 1. Outline Your Current Sustainability Strategies It’s important to outline your current sustainability strategies for your organization. Not only will this help you see areas of opportunity, it will also help you make a case to your CFO on where things are in terms of sustainability and where they ultimately could be. Your outline should take the form of a materiality matrix, an in-depth analysis to identify issues most pertinent to your organization and its stakeholders. According to this article, a materiality matrix helps an organization evaluate two focused needs. It measures the value of needs between the impact on the business and the importance to stakeholders. For finance and operations professionals in a commercial bank space for example, a materiality need may be to have regulated and safe data and security protocols put in place. This could be higher on the materiality matrix as a priority for organizations in commercial banking than for organizations focused on distribution as an example. Materiality matrices can also be used for sustainability practices if you want to reduce plastic waste and manage energy efficiency for your organization. You first need to evaluate the sustainable solution and how it will impact the organization’s growth, costs or trust. Secondly you need to outline how important the solution is for stakeholders. Generally speaking, these matrices will build a visual representation of opportunities to prioritize according to their importance to the organization's goals.  These matrices also help make your case to your CFO on why ESGs are important to your organization and how your team can report on ESG data. Terminology ESGs The Financial Times Lexicon defines ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing as a term used in finance within capital markets and by investors to determine the future financial performance of an organization. EGSs review non-financial performance indicators including sustainable and ethical issues such as an organization's carbon footprint and the measurement systems in place to ensure organizational compliance and accountability. ESGs are important to review for investment considerations and are also leveraged in risk assessment strategies for investment decisions. Moral of the story here is that outlining your materiality matrix to show opportunity—and making the point to your CFO that it can benefit your organization from an investment perspective—is very important. 2. Suggest New Sustainability Strategies for Implementation Once you have the opportunity to review your current strategies and find some of the areas for opportunity through your materiality matrix, it’s time to put together a list of new sustainability strategies that can be implemented at your organization. As you suggest new strategies for your CFO, you can also take the time to highlight their monetary and non-monetary benefits. Consolidating all of this data into a single source of truth can really help you organize your point across to your CFO. You can learn more about how to leverage FP&A software to consolidate your data by reading our blog. Vena’s extended planning solution can also allow you to get at-a-glance visuals of key company metrics, operational and financial at any time to improve key decisions around sustainability initiatives. Non-monetary benefits for example can look at more sustainable practices like better energy, waste and water management. You should plan out and even make suggestions on products or solutions that can be implemented with each of these sustainable changes. Part of your suggestions should also show the cost of each implementation, which leads us to our last tip. 3. Outline The Monetary Long-Term Benefits for Your CFO This Harvard Business Review article highlights the importance of calculating the monetary benefits of sustainability implementation. It also goes into detail on how you can quantify benefits for new sustainable strategies with examples. According to this research, you need to total the financial value created by each of the new sustainable strategies. From there, you can identify which sustainability strategies generate the most value for your organization. The idea is to plan out new sustainability strategies that make the most sense for your organization and that are feasible to do from an operational and financial perspective.  Long-term sustainability investments are shown to have a great ROI. In fact one example referenced in the article highlights an auto company’s goals to reduce VOC emissions and implement a new sustainable solution that allowed them to reuse a solvent. The result of reusing this solvent revealed a savings of $8 million. And when the organization compared the unit cost of the reusable solvents to the traditional new solvents, they realized that this translated to a total annual savings of $90 million. Showing these long-term benefits for your CFO will speak volumes. Not only will it show the ROI, it will also allow you to make your case and point that sustainability strategies can only benefit your organization now and in the long term. Sustainability and Your Business Getting your CFO on board with sustainability will help everyone think differently about the ways sustainable strategies can be implemented throughout your organization, making social and environmental issues a regular part of your business.