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Taking the Helm as an Interim Executive: Vanessa Gage, General Counsel, Cedar
132 Plays1 year ago
What does it mean for a lawyer to take on an interim role? Yes, there will be more work and your time will be divided across functions. But you will also get the opportunity to reevaluate why things are the way they are, and make positive improvements for your legal team.
Join Cedar General Counsel Vanessa Gage as she shares advice on how to make the most of an interim executive roles. Vanessa stepped into the role of interim CFO at Cedar following a surprise executive departure—just weeks after she the started at the company. But it wasn’t her first time taking on an interim position. Find out how she was able to tackle the challenges—and rewards—that lay ahead.
This episode, recorded before Cedar filled their CFO role, offers a glimpse into Vanessa’s perspective as she temporarily extends beyond her purview as general counsel.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-19
Topics:
Introduction: 00:48
Moving from Deputy General Counsel to Interim GC at Opendoor: 3:03
Advice for lawyers stepping into interim positions: 5:49
Catapulting into a GC role at Cedar and taking on the responsibility of Interim CFO: 11:07
Advice for GCs who find themselves taking on additional interim roles: 17:17
Pushing the business forward without tying your successor’s hands: 21:40
Preparing to step back from your interim role: 27:12
What you are proud of and book recommendations: 31:25
Connect with us:
Vanessa Gage: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vgage/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Making Decisions in Dynamic Roles
00:00:03
Speaker
I know 100% there will always be things that somebody's gonna be like, why did you do that? But you just, you make the best informed decision you can in the time you have available and you move on.
Podcast Introduction: Legal Industry Insights
00:00:19
Speaker
You're listening to The Abstract, a podcast where we talk to some of the biggest legal minds in the industry as they take us through their key moments of growth and share advice on how to tackle challenges they've encountered over the course of their careers. This podcast is brought to you by Spotdraft, a leading CLM company that empowers in-house legal teams by streamlining their contract management processes through AI-powered solutions.
GC to CFO: Challenges and Opportunities
00:00:47
Speaker
Picture this, your CFO leaves the company and your CEO comes up to you, the GC, and says, I think you should take on those responsibilities until we hire someone else.
00:00:58
Speaker
A challenge for those without a finance background, yet for a lot of modern GCs, it's a golden opportunity.
Vanessa Gage's Career Path: GC to Interim CFO
00:01:06
Speaker
Today, I'm here with my friend Vanessa Gage, the GC and interim CFO of Cedar, and the scenario I presented to you just now comes straight from her career journey.
00:01:18
Speaker
I can't wait to take all of our listeners behind the scenes as Vanessa shares stories and insights from her experience taking on the challenge of interim roles, both as a legal leader and as a finance leader.
00:01:33
Speaker
Vanessa, welcome to The Abstract. Thanks, Tyler. I'm excited to be here. I'm nervous to talk about this as a topic. I think it's something that a lot of us face, but we just don't talk about what goes through when you have to take on a role that's an interim role. We are really excited and thankful to have you here.
00:01:52
Speaker
a pretty fresh idea for a podcast, not something that we've covered before in any of the preceding episodes. And so I'm really excited to have you here and to have this conversation
Cedar's 2024 Strategy Planning
00:02:04
Speaker
with you. Before we get going and sort of turn back the clock a little bit to your time at Opendoor, what's top of mind for you at Cedar right now?
00:02:14
Speaker
Well, I think a lot of companies were in the midst of 2024 planning, both in the budget cycle and the strategy side. So what are we going to focus on next year and where do we want to take the company?
00:02:24
Speaker
I think this year kind of being in the interim CFO role, it's kind of a different take on strategy planning in the sense that there's a deeper involvement than sometimes legal has in the process. As someone actually who I did not know you were going to say that as your answer, as someone who once upon a time helped run annual planning for Foursquare, I can tell you that
00:02:45
Speaker
the sort of collaboration there between finance and operations and HR and thinking about headcount. Most people don't realize that budgeting is a lot about headcount allocation. That's a very challenging time. So I'm appreciative that you're doing this in the midst of that too.
First Interim Role: Deputy GC at Opendoor
00:02:59
Speaker
So before we dive into what Vanessa's up to at Cedar as interim CFO, I want to take a moment and look back at your first interim role. After you'd spent some time as a partner at different law firms, you took on the role of Deputy GC at Opendoor, pretty exciting company. I think you'll tell us a little bit about what it was like to go public there. And when the GC, who's an incredible leader, Beth Stevens, left, she really pushed you to take on that interim GC position.
00:03:28
Speaker
Take us back to that time. Tell us a little bit about what was going through your mind and how you rose to the challenge that was presented to you. Yeah, and I think maybe a bit of backstory here, Tyler, for those who don't know me is I'm originally from the Midwest, and there's sort of a joke that I'm an incredibly hardworking Midwestern person. And so what comes with that is sort of this model through my life of I work hard
00:03:53
Speaker
I do well and good stuff happens to me and some people are probably listening are like oh well here perfect perfect example of that except that this really wasn't exactly the perfect version of that right it came initially in the form of an interim role.
00:04:07
Speaker
And as I grew in my career, this is something that happens to people, right? You come into this, you get an opportunity, but it's not quite what you wanted it to be. And this was an example of that. And I had a lot of self-doubt tied to it. Honestly, it took Beth kind of pushing me off the cliff and saying, hey, you can do this to take on a role like that.
00:04:30
Speaker
And by that point, maybe I'll step back and say I've been at Opendoor for over five years. I built out and run the corporate legal function the entire time. I helped take Opendoor public via SPAC during COVID. So this wasn't something that I didn't have any chops for. And I'd been a big law firm partner for a few years before that. So it isn't outside of the wheelhouse to say, take on legal in this place. But I was honestly, I was scared.
00:04:59
Speaker
I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a GC. I really liked corporate law and we had an amazing team, right? We had a great team that we had built from the ground up and I knew that this was going to make that it was going to change that dynamic of where things were. And so it was kind of working through, I think, what I'll call feelings, honestly, of can I do this job?
00:05:19
Speaker
I knew on one hand I was capable of it. And on the other, I haven't done all the things that make up being a GC, and that scared me a little bit.
The Emotional Journey of Interim Roles
00:05:27
Speaker
And so I think it was a lot of mentally processing. I cried. I was scared. And then that's sort of how I handled these things. Spent the weekend, kind of soul searched a little bit, and then realized I was capable of this. And then just kind of by Monday morning, jumped in both feet, made a plan, kind of figured out how I was going to tackle it.
00:05:47
Speaker
And you felt like, as you were stepping into it, you really needed that title, the interim GC title to do it well. You also knew that they were probably going to run a search for a GC, a full-time GC in the background. I'm curious how that conversation went and how you prepared for it and if there are things that you know now or advice that you would offer to people who might be in a similar position that you didn't know that.
00:06:12
Speaker
Yeah. And that's funny because if I had to do it again, I would probably have talked to more people and gotten some sage advice. And so I kind of muddled through it a little bit. I think I was excited. I was happy with what I called the interim title. And over what I found is as kind of the days turned into weeks and turned into kind of months of holding that,
00:06:34
Speaker
I came to a great realization that may not surprise some people here, but it was new for me. And that was interim roles, I think, are one of the hardest things that you can take on. You have all of the accountability and responsibility that comes with the full title. But with that interim piece, you don't come with the full empowerment to do that role well. And at some point, there's a tension between those two things.
00:07:00
Speaker
And I was hitting it and it comes down to things like hiring and capacity and planning. And you are given, you're essentially in what becomes the longest job interview of your life, but you're not given the kind of the vote of confidence in the tools that someone who just came in knew would have. And kind of going back to me, I don't like to ask for things, but I realized
00:07:24
Speaker
kind of into that process that I needed to ask for things to be able to do my job well and whether you're going to hold that job kind of truly on a temporary basis or you're going to hold it in kind of a you really want to hold it for in a full-time capacity I think being given the tools
00:07:41
Speaker
that allow you to do the job entirely are really important. I was thinking back to it, it's sort of, you know, for those who spend a lot of time in law firms, it's sort of the same thing of, oh, we won't make someone a partner until they can prove the king of business. Well, one of the things you need to get business is the title. So it becomes kind of this self fulfilling prophecy that you just you can't leap over. And since I was kind of running into the same thing, and I finally just asked for it. And I said, Hey, I need this to do my job.
00:08:07
Speaker
And they were saying, oh, that's kind of a no-brainer. Here you go. We'll just take that interim piece off. And all of a sudden, my job became much easier. And through that, what I'd say is, yes, the company may still run a full process. I think that's important depending on the dynamics of the company and its growth stage. So you expect
Evaluating Fit in Interim Roles
00:08:23
Speaker
that.
00:08:23
Speaker
But you're going to be empowered to do the job as it needs to be done and have the right tools for it. And during that process, I think it is a golden ticket. It's an opportunity to look at, well, do I like this job? Do I like this job at this company? Would I like this job if the circumstances were different?
00:08:42
Speaker
Now, that could be yes, definitely to one or more of those questions, or it can be, well, no, this is not really my cup of tea. Those are both okay. And I don't think we talk about that enough of one of the things with interim roles is they really are a chance to try out a job and see what you think. They're also a chance to build the skills in a way where you are empowered with the tools you need to build those skills well.
00:09:05
Speaker
versus hitting a ceiling where you can't get through it. But regardless, you need to go into that process and assume, I think that the box that you filled in the company is not going to be the same when this is all over. I think that was something that took me a little bit of time to get my arms around in the sense that I was being elevated into a different role and I was trying that out
00:09:30
Speaker
But I probably was never going to be happy back in the box that I was in originally, and that's okay. But I think working through that also gave me
00:09:39
Speaker
the ability to do my job better and kind of just come to terms with that. And so what kind of flows from that is what I'd say is you really do need to own it from day one or week one, or at some point early on in this process and just say, hey, I'm going to do this job. I'm going to dive in. I'm going to learn new things. I'm not going to be perfect. But with that, I am going to be better for it. But if I kind of hold myself back of, oh, I might want to go return to this thing that I had before,
00:10:09
Speaker
you're not going to succeed at it and you're going to set yourself up for failure. I think also in that process, when I talked about this, this can be a tough subject to talk about because what overlays interim roles is often a lot of things that are just completely outside of your control. There's dynamics at every company that go far beyond whether or not you're good at your job.
00:10:31
Speaker
And that often is particularly at a point where you're managing a situation where you've kind of stepped into an interim role. So I think it comes also with maybe just reading the tea leaves and accepting that that can be how things go. But that doesn't, you kind of have to just internalize that and then move past it if you're going to succeed in the role and really learn and enjoy and grow from it. Otherwise, it just becomes like a very hard mental hurdle for you.
00:10:58
Speaker
Yeah, politics can be small pea politics or something that are oftentimes outside of your control and the business may be heading in whatever direction they're heading for reasons totally absent your own career and your own sort of hopes or aspirations. But you really use this opportunity as a catapult, right? Because it should be said, you know, you left Opendoor and became the GC of Cedar, pretty hot company in the healthcare, health tech space.
00:11:24
Speaker
and after a few months, the CFO left and the CEO asked you to take on those responsibilities as well.
Volunteering for Interim CFO Role
00:11:32
Speaker
So especially in light, I guess, of your experience as an interim GC and then a full-time GC and now a full-time GC and now an interim CFO, how did you think about whether or not you wanted to take on the interim CFO title and responsibilities as well?
00:11:50
Speaker
this one's kind of interesting because in this case I actually sort of raised my hand and it was at a point where I probably took a job that was relatively new to me that I had just gotten my sea legs underneath me and yeah I made it harder but the reason I raised my hand is because looking around the room at the time of kind of where we were at a point where we needed someone to oversee finance
00:12:12
Speaker
is that one, I thought I was the best place to do that. I had the financial background to be able to oversee and understand what was happening on the finance side. I was also from the executive team, the one with the least reports on my team. The legal and compliance team was also the smallest.
00:12:30
Speaker
So there were some natural synergies to saying, hey, can you take over and oversee this function? And to be honest, it didn't start out with the interim CFO role. It really started out with can you oversee finance, right? Because that's the kind of lean in version of this. But kind of quickly realized, yeah, I need, going back to my other story, I really do, one, we actually needed to have a CFO in certain circumstances and to do my job well and to do all the things that needed to be done to support finance and to support the company from a financial perspective.
00:12:59
Speaker
over this time period, that's what it took. And so kind of said, yes, I'll do that. But I think in this case, it was a little different. This was never going to be a stretch into a CFO gag. That was not really what I went in with. And it was not the expectation from either side. And so I approached this one kind of differently. Am I happy with interim CFO in the title? That's totally fine with me.
00:13:25
Speaker
I really wasn't, in this case, I'm not title chasing. I'm after starting the business from a financial perspective. The CFO actually was really just something we had to have because in some states we needed to have a CFO. And so it really wasn't about that. It was about keeping the financial lights on for the company while we worked through a process of finding a really terrific CFO.
00:13:47
Speaker
That's really interesting. It's been the point especially about needing someone to step in and actually take on the title. So you've been in the role about six months or so now. What was that transition like in terms of approaching sort of leading the finance team, supporting them, building trust with them? Tell us about the early days of taking on those direct reports as well.
Building Trust in Transition Periods
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's been both hard and easy and a little bit of both. I think some of the things that were easier actually is that I had some strong inroads in with the team. I worked day to day with a number of the financial leaders and so I didn't start from ground zero managing a function where I had no interaction.
00:14:32
Speaker
And that gave me something to build from i think it was also coupled with a team where the majority of the team really leaned in they supported and they stepped up and that. Filled a lot of gaps and it allowed me to ask questions and learn about some of the areas and it is like a kind of a deeper level than i had gotten to.
00:14:55
Speaker
kind of previously because there's a lot, the weeds are different over there. And so I had a lot to learn as well about how we did things day to day and where the team needed some support. And that kind of became the foundation for helping the team through transition. It started with kind of some basic things of looking at the team strength and weaknesses as it stood.
00:15:16
Speaker
kind of without the former cfo and a couple other leaders that we had had to change through and going you know where are we capable of doing more than keeping the lights on during this period you know where some because we had some parts of the team where i think that was the case and then we had some holes
00:15:31
Speaker
And so kind of sitting down with those team members in the areas where we had some gaps and figuring out how are we going to close those gaps? How can I support? Where do we need to bring in some outside resources to supplement? Because one of the challenges of interim roles sometimes is depending on where your whole set within the team, you may or may not be able to really successfully backfill. And you may not want to. But in the meantime, you still have to kind of find that path to
00:15:58
Speaker
making sure that all the things that need to get done get done. I think the other kind of on the harder side or maybe challenging side is in this case is capacity for myself. I'm not going to back like this is not a scenario where I'm going to backfill myself in any of my roles. I think
00:16:14
Speaker
People have suggested that. I'm like, no, that's not really what this is about. I came here to build the legal and compliance function. I'm happy to do this because I think it's the right path for the company for now. So figuring out how do I make sure that I'm providing the strategic guidance to the team at the right levels even in that process is really important. One of the things I've patted myself on the back for just a little bit is
00:16:41
Speaker
When I came in to Cedar in the fall of 2022, we needed to rebuild compliance and we needed to build out legal operations. I made some great hires in those areas. By getting those leaders onto the team, it allowed me to
00:16:57
Speaker
not have to be as deep in the ways on the legal and compliance side. I could be more strategic and give a little more time and resources to the finance team during this time. There's still a lot of work to be done, but it's one of those things I got really lucky in that I hired the right people at the right time that allowed me to do that.
00:17:15
Speaker
That makes a lot of sense. I think there's a lot of GCs out there who might think, okay, I might follow the same sort of path or I might agree to take this on. Are there any challenges that you'd be willing to share with us that you've experienced in the first few months that you think might be consistent across this sort of executive departure or
00:17:35
Speaker
taking on the role of interim CFO for those folks who might want to be able to sort of think ahead and try to head off problems that you've experienced or navigated through.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's always challenges to come with this, and it's like you can replace CFO with Chief People Officer. I've seen people pick on other operational roles. I think a lot of what I'm talking about is not actually unique to overseeing.
Managing Projects in Interim Leadership
00:18:01
Speaker
It's just overseeing a function that is outside of what you do day-to-day. You can kind of scramble that.
00:18:07
Speaker
In one of them the first ones you hit is there's just projects you need to tackle that really can't wait until that other new executive comes on board and so you have to figure out how to prioritize them get the right resources for them and figure out how you're gonna do them even if you don't have the other leader that you would have expected to partner with on them.
00:18:29
Speaker
And then the other one, I alluded to it a little bit. And it's just going to happen. And that is there's always going to be some attrition tied to executive departures as much as you can. You could try and get to 100%. I think that's just very false. There's always going to be some people that, for whatever reason, just can't see through this gap. Or there were already some issues at play. And so you have to work through that. It can also become
00:18:57
Speaker
a cycle that is hard to break and that what happens is as you have an executive departure you have other departures on the team and the work then starts to be pushed down to more people they get overworked and then they leave and so trying to break that cycle and get ahead of it really early in the process is critical because there's going to be there's going to be some of those roles like someone who is going to be a direct report to your new executive
00:19:25
Speaker
Honestly, you're not going to be able to fill those roles. And so don't spend the bandwidth there. One, because that leader's going to be really mad at you if you've hired somebody. Two, my view is I don't necessarily know that I would trust anyone who took a role not knowing who their boss was going to be in six months.
00:19:42
Speaker
Or they know that they're just coming in for a limited period of time. So you do have to solve capacity at that level in a different way. But you can focus on the other hiring you need to do within the team, right? So those roles are, I think they're quite fillable with the right support. Like if the individuals you're bringing in believe in the overall leadership team, that's a hurdle you can get through. But kind of getting ahead of that cycle, working through it, it comes down to the kind of trust thing we talked about a little bit as well.
00:20:12
Speaker
of needing to make sure that the team feels trustful, that they have transparency, and that they believe in the rest of the executive team during that process. Because if they do, if they trust the executive team, they will trust the executive team to pick another leader who will kind of fight for them, or they'll see through to see what happens. And then you can go back to doing the keeping the lights on work. But it's something that really any exact transition you're gonna go through
00:20:42
Speaker
I think maybe the other thing in this category that I've had to come to terms with is that, honestly, I'm a gold star type A person. I want to do all the things and I want to do them really well. But when you're in these interim roles, you don't have the capacity for that and you're going to have to live with
00:21:00
Speaker
that is good enough for now. That is probably one of the hardest things, Tyler, that for me to deal with is that good enough has to sometimes be enough. And getting comfortable with that is really important. It's probably true all the time. In the tech emerging growth spaces, you're just always resource constrained a little bit. But I think particularly when you're holding an interim role where you might be doing two jobs that
00:21:25
Speaker
and your team may be doing multiple jobs to just go, you know, we don't need to tackle that. Put it up to the back of the back burner.
00:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's a mindset shift, right? I mean, I think it's a mindset that a lot of folks encounter when they become a GC to begin with, and now this adds a whole other sort of layer of complexity on top of that. Another sort of layer that I think would be interesting to talk about to your decision making, and you've alluded to this a little bit from the perspective of backfilling some of those direct reports to the CFO who may have departed and the challenge is there, is that you have to keep pushing the business forward, but you also don't want to make
00:22:00
Speaker
big decisions that you think should be within the remit of whoever your successor is or that might tie your successor's hands when you think they might have potentially made a different call on kind of a hot button issue. How and where do you draw that line? What's your approach to whether it's hiring or setting up processes or bringing in a new tech solution? What's your approach to where to leave it to your successor and where to make the call yourself?
00:22:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think some parts of it are easy. You know, the rule number one of interim roles, I joke is don't drop the ball, right? So anything that is tied to the don't drop the ball, or keep the lights on however you want to think about it, those things are sort of no brainers, you have to do them. That's fine. And that's great in theory. And then there's oh, it just gets gray. It's a gray modeled mess underneath that. And what I tried to do is to break it down into probably a couple of categories. The first one you alluded to, which is the stuff that truly can't wait.
00:23:00
Speaker
And things i put in that category are strategic projects that really can't sit during that that time right there business mission critical and you know i can drop the live examples deals work right and cedar is an is an enterprise be to be company.
00:23:19
Speaker
So it was a long sales cycle we deal support can't just stop in the interim and we have to support that along the way and so how do we how do we do that that's an example of something that i'm just gonna have to make sure we continue to do.
00:23:37
Speaker
Until i have a permanent leader in it and do it the best i can right and then in areas where i don't have that expertise either because it's a strategic project or it's just an area that's more technical than i have is just making sure i have a phone a friend or i have lined up an outside resource you can be my advisor.
00:23:56
Speaker
because often interim roles, especially at an executive level, is you're, you're being counseled, right? Like the role in lawyers are lawyers are used to being this person of providing the counsel. But I think often an interim role, you have to also be open to receiving that counsel. And that can come from different places. And so that's how you can get through these points where you have to do critical things, even in areas where they're not
00:24:22
Speaker
deeply within your wheelhouse, you can be informed and help make a guided decision for the business. You can ask the right questions. And that is more executive leadership than it is particular knowledge about it.
Technology Decisions in Interim Roles
00:24:33
Speaker
an area, great on those things. And then you kind of alluded to a few areas that I think are more challenging, which is technology and tools. I can say, oh, I would never put in a new tool, and then I'm going to laugh, and I'm going to go, but am I going to pick the new modeling tool we're going to use to manage our budget?
00:24:53
Speaker
No, right? I'm going to try to avoid that if at all possible. Am I going to continue to see through tools that were picked before I came in get implemented? Yes, 100%. And then I've given an example of a tool that we did go ahead and move forward with. And one of them for 2023 was putting in place procurement software. We'd already decided that was part of our plan. We hadn't picked the tool yet when the former CFO left. So that work still needed to move ahead. It was highly cross-functional.
00:25:22
Speaker
And it wasn't a project that for financial or operational reasons should really sit for, you know, nine to 12 months while we waited to make a final decision. So we made the best decision we could with the leaders that we had in place at the time.
00:25:38
Speaker
That's maybe also segues into one of the other things you can do, which is when you are forced with one of these decisions is to get executive buy-in from as many people as you can in place of the leader that is missing. Yes, they may still be like, Vanessa, why did you do this thing? I'm like,
00:25:56
Speaker
Okay, yeah, hindsight is always 20-20, so you do the best you can. Sometimes what I will also do is go, do I need to make that decision now? Could we, for example, on a software or a tech tool decision, can I extend the existing thing for six months to buy some time?
00:26:14
Speaker
You don't have even gotten so far so like sometimes these things become interesting interview questions right actually brainstorm with some people who might take the job and see how they feel about it you know i've kind of used that sometimes in my wheelhouse as well. You just you do your best i know one hundred percent that will always be things that somebody's gonna be like why did you do that.
00:26:33
Speaker
but you make the best informed decision you can in the time you have available and you move on. That makes a lot of sense. I love that idea about asking an interview question. That's pretty interesting because you get to actually sort of get a sense for how they might deal with something that's on your plate right now. That's really thoughtful.
00:26:53
Speaker
Yeah, and it's an operational I like often I end up taking operational interviews. And so understanding how someone attacks a similar problem, it tells you a lot about how they think about day to day real world things. And often those are ones that you can ask in a way where you're not revealing company competences, you're sort of unpacking, how do they think about a real world issue?
00:27:14
Speaker
One other area that I wanted to explore with you is, and of course this varies based on company,
CFO's Role in Company Decisions
00:27:20
Speaker
right? Some places the CRO or the CTO or the GC or CLO is super, super influential and serves as a counselor to the CEO on most big decisions. But I think typically, right, the CFO is often seen as a right hand to the CEO or a very important voice at the table.
00:27:41
Speaker
And so I want to know sort of one, like, have you felt a little bit of a difference in how your voice is perceived or heard wearing both the GC and the interim CFO hats and also how you're preparing for sort of a transition when the CFO comes in and you step back into being the GC voice full time?
00:28:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting because at Cedar, I would say the way that our executive team structured is we all had a pretty significant voice. And so it wasn't a situation where really only the CFO was being listened to. And so I'm not starting from a position of only the CFO voice matters. So it was very much a different dynamic to that. But what you're saying does resonate a lot. The CFO has
00:28:31
Speaker
has a pretty publicly facing voice for the company, both internally and externally. And that is something that was greater than the voice or the role that I had as general counsel. Now, your question actually was interesting as I started to think about it, because it was not necessarily, oh, it had to be that way. Because in my scenario, the CFO was there first.
00:28:56
Speaker
And I came in second to a role that hadn't been filled by anyone before. And so at the point when the CFO left, I was really kind of working around to find my place and structure within an executive team.
Executive Transitions and Team Dynamics
00:29:11
Speaker
And so the question was, was it made to be that way or was it that way because that's just how things had been.
00:29:17
Speaker
and which opened up an interesting thing as we made certain transitions. We do quarterly business updates, as most companies do, and one of them was the CFO had always done that, and it was very CFO-heavy. As we went to rethink about that, where I was holding the interim CFO role, is I said, hey, I think we should mix this up and reformat how we do things.
00:29:43
Speaker
Yeah. That revision to how we approach that, we actually changed a little bit of how all the executives work within the business update format. The result has been really good. We didn't set out to go, oh, we're going to just revamp how this works entirely. It came about a little bit organically. What I found through this process is there's always an opportunity when you come into a company
00:30:08
Speaker
to revisit and look at the voices that people have within the room and think about what that looks like. One of the things that I think has changed within the legal community over the years is I think the lawyers in the room, whether that be a CLO or general counsel, have a bigger voice or can have a bigger voice within a lot of companies.
00:30:27
Speaker
number of people who had operational titles and I think so with that the world is changing a little bit so you don't have to assume that it will always be this way but it was an interesting thing to kind of to reshuffle and look at like is it this way for a reason or is it this way just because it's been that way.
00:30:45
Speaker
That is super thoughtful. And I love the idea of using an executive transition or departure as an opportunity to reevaluate whether or not everybody's voices or perspectives are being utilized or heard in the right way, right? Maybe it's time to bring
00:31:05
Speaker
CRO into more of those conversations with the internal teams, even if they have a big external facing role or maybe vice versa, right? The GC or the CFO should be on more of those external facing calls with clients and not just sort of at the company all hands. I love that idea. That's super thoughtful.
00:31:23
Speaker
And this whole episode has been full of all sorts of really thoughtful comments, so I hope people are taking notes.
Celebrating Team Achievements
00:31:29
Speaker
As we start to wrap up, a couple of sort of fun questions for you. I really like this one. What's something that you or your team have achieved recently that you're really proud of?
00:31:41
Speaker
I'm hugely proud of the finance team at Cedar. I can do that earlier. It's not one thing. It's all the things. I could not have asked for people to lean in and step up to the level they have, and that's been great. I also have to plug my legal and compliance team who has just really done an outstanding job of
00:32:03
Speaker
keeping the lights on and doing the day-to-day with a little bit less for me in a number of ways. So it's really a huge team shout out for all the effort that's gone into that because it's easy for me to sit up here in this podcast and be like, I did all the things. In reality, I didn't do all the things. My team did a lot of them and I'm successful for them. And so I'm going to shout them out. That's great. I'm a huge reader and I'm always looking for new suggestions.
Closing Thoughts and Personal Interests
00:32:27
Speaker
I'm also curious about a good book that you read maybe this past summer.
00:32:31
Speaker
So I'm going to, please don't judge me by my book reading, is the one that I recently read is called The Wizard's Butler, and it's by Nathan Lowell. I often read for fun. I will read professional books, but a lot of what I read tends to be as far from real life as possible. I think it's a nice offset to kind of two day jobs. And if you like Jeeves and Wooster and you like wizards and fairies and those sorts of things, it's a great read.
00:33:00
Speaker
That sounds like a fun read for one of my cross-country airline flights. I might have to pick up a... I mean, I'm looking for a new book right now, actually, so I might have to pick up a copy this afternoon.
00:33:10
Speaker
Well, Vanessa, thank you so much for joining this episode of The Abstract and sharing all of these super interesting stories and insights around interim roles with our listeners. I've had a lot of fun having this conversation with you. Thank you, Tyler. It's been great to be here. And to our listeners, thanks so much for listening to this episode, and we hope to see you next time on The Abstract.
00:33:42
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in today. Don't forget to subscribe so you can get notified as soon as we post a new episode. And if you liked this one, I'd really love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a rating or a comment. If you'd like to reach out to me or our guest, our LinkedIn profiles are in the description. See you all next week.