The CFO role is filled with duties specific to the industry in which their company operates. For Razzak Jallow, CFO of FloQast, whose customers are primarily CFOs, he understands the necessity of buy-in from his customer base.
Not only is he an executive leader of a company filled with finance and accounting professionals, but FloQast has also gone so far as to create a sitcom about accountants modeled after the TV show "The Office" — with “Office” alumni to boot — to portray the quirky subculture of the corporate finance world.
For Jallow, who is in his inaugural CFO position, it’s all about instilling a culture that helps develop his team and continue organizational growth.
Razzak Jallow
CFO, FloQast
- First CFO position: 2021
- Notable previous companies
- Lending Club
- Apple
- Adobe
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
ADAM ZAKI: You’re essentially the customer of your product. What advice would you give CFOs who have been tasked with being able to confidently relay the company’s mission to stakeholders and peers?
RAZZAK JALLOW: There isn’t a single piece of advice I would give to how this is done, but what I will say is you don’t have to be a salesperson to do it. You just have to be able to understand the value your product brings to the customer, regardless of who that customer may be, while also being able to articulate your understanding in different ways to different groups of people. We have to be mindful as CFOs that there are lots of people with knowledge and mindfulness around how sales work.
As CFOs, we need to understand how impactful a great sales process and team can be. [But] our job is to take a slightly different approach. We have to define the value and ask questions about the bottom line, getting down to the brass tacks of things and defining ROI for both our customers and investors. We are a company of accountants. Our motto is by accountants, for accountants. This is a super important part of our brand and how we engage and relate with our customers.
Given your product and your role, do you feel pressure or motivation to increase your presence through things like webinars or event keynoting in recent years?
JALLOW: It's something I didn't think I would be doing, but we've seen a lot of traction with it internally with our marketing team. So, yes. Just in the last couple of months, I recorded a video for our account-based marketing team who had specific requests from our customers who said they had particular questions to be answered by the FloQast CFO.
This was a good thing. I think that's a big piece of just who we are as a brand. We are a very accounting-focused company, with lots of our employees, especially in the sales department. Most of our salespeople are also former accountants. This is something we encourage, going back to our company motto.
Your company has invested a lot of time and money into building company culture. How do you envision this moving forward in a market where the future of what work looks like is unclear?
JALLOW: I think we’ve realized remote work is here to stay. There’s a lot of people that love it, there’s a lot of freedom that it provides people in their personal lives, and for us as a growing company, it really broadens the potential talent pool we can tap into. We have also been able to retain top talent who because of life changes cannot provide the same in-person commitment they once could.
That being said, we equally recognize the value of getting all of our employees in the same room. So, we host a very big company get-together, which will happen in February, that we do every other year. We go big on it, so it’s a big lift for us, but we see the benefits it brings to our teams and what they do.
"Most of our salespeople are also former accountants. This is something we encourage, going back to our company motto."
Razzak Jallow
CFO, FloQast
It’s also the smaller interactions that we prioritize, too. My first day at Google [after Google acquired Looker] was kind of the first day everyone was starting to go home because of the pandemic. They gave us our badges and said, “Don’t come back to the office, we’re going remote.” Everyone I already had a relationship with — we didn’t miss a beat and got our work done.
[But] the issue was forming new relationships with people, especially at this new company that just acquired us. It was really hard to formulate a bond there, which made the adjustment challenging.
What are your thoughts on how CFOs can benefit from technology like GenAI, and how have you used the technology in your workflow?
JALLOW: I think the reason why people are attracted to AI right now is because there are no right answers to some of these things, especially with how it can impact people’s workflows. In the office of the CFO, our workflows must be 100% filled with the right answers. It can’t be right 90% of the time, it can’t even be right 99% of the time. It also can’t be a black box where you don’t know how the information is coming out.
I’ve certainly used it to help me draft long emails, and my team does that too, but I think the idea here is these things won’t replace workflows, but automate them.
The real power is these large language models are ubiquitous. I think you’ll soon see us and other companies use that interactivity, being able to connect and ultimately communicate with a technology or an automated workflow. That would be much more valuable to us at a large level versus something that is more tool or chat-based.