We recently sat down with Chris Nester, Planview’s newly appointed Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Our conversation covered his professional background, his journey to becoming Planview’s CFO, and the best practices he’s gained so far from his extensive career.
He also shared his thoughts on how CFOs can be an enabler of transformation within their enterprises, and how finance can be a competitive advantage in today’s highly dynamic marketplace.
In this post, you’ll learn:
- Chris’s pathway to becoming a CFO
- His advice to his younger self
- The importance of great mentors
Before we dive into the conversation, here’s a little bit about Chris.
Background on Chris
As chief financial officer, Chris Nester handles all of Planview’s financial functions, including accounting, treasury, financial planning and analysis, corporate development, revenue operations, and investor relations. Chris also supports the Planview internal IT and information security teams.
His career has spanned more than 25 years of financial leadership in software and technology companies. Prior to joining Planview, Chris served as the CFO of FinThrive, a software company focused on revenue optimization for larger healthcare providers.
Chris also served nearly four years as the CFO of Transplace, a logistics software and managed services company that was successfully sold to Uber in 2021. Before Transplace, Chris spent nearly 18 years at Sabre, serving in a variety of roles, eventually becoming Senior Vice President of Finance and Treasurer and leading the company’s IPO process in 2014.
Chris holds a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Dallas and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Wichita State University. Chris is also a licensed CPA in Texas.
Chris resides in Coppell, Texas, with his wife and two sons. When he’s not at work, you can find Chris watching baseball (go, Texas Rangers!) and traveling to Colorado to hike in the Rockies.
Now that you have settled into your role as CFO here, what excites you most about being part of Planview?
I’m excited about our mission and the opportunity to help drive the future of connected work. I worked at Sabre for 18 years, a large technology company that spent around a billion dollars on investment, product development, and IT.
It was always a big black box from the finance department’s view: “What’s in that money? Is it being efficiently spent? How do we allocate it?”. Planview helps answer those questions.
It’s exciting to be at a company that helps solve many of the questions I struggled with as a finance leader and throughout my career.
You spent the bulk of your career at Sabre. What did you learn during your 18-year tenure there that prepared you for your subsequent roles as CFO?
Sabre was a great training ground for me. It fostered a culture in which you were expected to rotate and do many jobs in the finance department. So, in the 18 years I was there, I held more than 10 different jobs, from FPA to Investor Relations, Treasury, M&A, and Accounting and Tax.
I was involved in large acquisitions, their IPOs, and their subsequent return to a private company. Like Planview, it was a global company, so I worked with teams in London, Singapore, Uruguay, and the Middle East. I gained a lot of international experience and was able to become a business unit CFO. These experiences were all necessary to ultimately become the company’s CFO.
Who were some of the most influential leaders or mentors in your career, and what did you learn from them?
One mentor was a business unit president at Sabre, who asked me when I was young in my career, to become his business unit CFO. I was able to leapfrog a handful of other people who were more in line for that role. He was hard on me, but it taught me to always be prepared.
As the Finance department representative, you should never attend a meeting without being prepared. You must know your numbers. That’s one thing I’ve always learned and taken to heart.
Another example that comes to mind is a controller at Sabre. He taught me the softer side of leadership, such as the emotional intelligence or “EQ” skills necessary to thrive as a leader. Some of those skills included thinking about things from other people’s perspectives and having a 360-degree view of the world, not just a financial view.
Can you tell us about a particularly successful project or initiative you’ve led as CFO and how it affected the organization?
At Transplace, I had my first CFO job, and it was a North America-based company. We saw a big opportunity to expand in Europe, and I led the initiative to open our European operations.
We first had to decide on a location, and we opened in the Netherlands with a small management team on the ground there. We also had to figure out how to configure our software to work with the intricacies of European regulations and currencies.
While we launched the project in late 2019, most of it was done during the COVID-19 pandemic. We expanded our European footprint during 2020 and 2021 without being able to travel, which was an unanticipated challenge. We hired a team and did all the work virtually. The business got off the ground quickly, and now it’s the European division of Transplace.
Leading that sort of project was something new for me. It was a successful endeavor that had a big impact on my company, and I took a lot of learnings from the experience further into my career.
What advice would you give to your younger self when you were looking to build your career in Finance?
Looking back now, the biggest thing for me was to have a bit more work-life balance. I figured that out later in my career, but when I was younger, it was very much work, work, work. I have two boys who are now in college, but I missed some fun things when they were little kids.
I got better as the years went on. They got involved in more extracurricular activities, and I made sure I was at their games and performances. But earlier in my career, I was too focused on the job, and many people burn out if that’s their approach.
You can be successful for a while, but you can also easily burn out. Luckily, I pivoted and found a better work-life balance. Work-life balance is an important point I make to younger team members.
You’ve got to have the drive to succeed and want to perform and learn, but you can also be your best and most productive self at work if you have the right balance.
It’s not easy. In the finance world and at larger companies, there is a “who’s going to be the first one at the desk and who’s going to be the last one to leave” attitude.
I tell my teams now that I don’t care about any of that sort of stuff. I care about what we get done, the quality of it, and the timeliness of it. But I don’t care if people work at 2:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m., or if they don’t work on Mondays, or if they work on Saturdays. None of that matters. What matters is the work output.
Bringing It All Together
By examining Chris’s extensive experience in various financial roles, we learned the importance of being well-prepared, developing emotional intelligence, and maintaining a work-life balance. These qualities, along with a focus on high-impact initiatives, have been key to his effective leadership and personal fulfillment.
Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll explore Chris’s views on the critical qualities needed for financial leaders in the digital age. In the meantime, be sure to check out our “Finance as Champion of Transformation” whitepaper, which explores the strategic role of finance in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape.
