Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2018 Winners Edition

www.finance-monthly.com 17 You have been the CFO of Mehiläinen Oy for over three years now. Tell us about your appointment and your priorities in this role. I was appointed at a time when Mehiläinen had just made the largest acquisition of its over 100-year history and had acquired a fast growing challenger Mediverkko. Mehiläinen’s own growth had stalled several years prior and its owners wanted to make a radical change and turn around the company. At that time, they had just employed new, entrepreneurial-minded management from Mediverkko and needed a business and growth oriented CFO to complement the team and start driving change. My first task was to ensure realisation of synergies following the acquisition, but soon the focus shifted to taking the company’s finance and IT to the next level. The company embarked on a growth path on the back of both organic growth and business acquisitions, leading to a need to increase the scalability and adaptability of support functions. With increased scale came the need for more efficient processes and controls, which were the subsequent focus area. With those in place, we went through a successful sale and refinancing project of Mehiläinen, requiring a lot of time and effort from the finance team over the past year. Currently, the focus is on enablers of growth and efficiency, such as systems and tools for data-driven business management, automation and capabilities for even faster integration of acquired entities and greenfield units. What have been your most significant achievements thus far? How has your role impacted the company’s performance in the past three years? Mehiläinen has experienced strong growth and has gone through major changes in the past three years. I took on the task of transforming the finance department from one used to status quo to one that is capable of handling constant change and growth in several businesses with ever-evolving business models. During my tenure at Mehiläinen, the company has made 90 large and small acquisitions and expanded organically by opening dozens of new units and via the largest healthcare outsourcing deal ever made in Finland. These alone pose a massive challenge to a finance team and I am proud about how well Mehiläinen’s finance team has handled it. At Mehiläinen, the integrations were also done at the same time as the company’s accounting and reporting were raised to the next level. Being able to integrate the acquired companies and businesses and to extract synergies quickly is a major value driver that helped grow the value of investment for Mehiläinen’s owners significantly in the period leading to the sale of the company earlier this year, and that continues to drive value for the new owners going forward. What education or prior experience have helped you succeed at your current role? My background is a bit unusual for a CFO. I have always been interested in a broad range of things and hence e.g. during my university years I studied simultaneously in two universities, shuffling between business and engineering studies. While having also an electrical and telecommunications engineering background in addition to an accounting background does not directly help in day-to-day accounting and finance issues, it helps me understand IT and digitalisation, which are increasingly important in our field. Having a technical background has also been very beneficial in helping understand the products and business in my prior jobs in telecommunications, manufacturing and software industries. But what has been even more beneficial is understanding the business and how people in different parts of the company think. After graduation, I took up a job that was neither in engineering nor in finance, but in sales and partner management. This experience has been of tremendous benefit down the road as an important part of a CFO’s role is selling ideas to others in the organisation and managing relationships with financiers, investors and other stakeholders. I then moved to corporate development, followed by business management and general management and after eight years in operational roles, I took on my first CFO job. It was a steep learning curve as I had not gone through the traditional path in finance jobs. On top of that, I was also working for a family-owned business that had a do-it-yourself culture - everyone had to figure things out and understand them thoroughly themselves instead of using consultants. The experience built a solid foundation for my future CFO roles. FINLAND Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2018 Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2018