I really, truly believe that finance is a valued member at the table, and a lot of it is in understanding who we serve. Part of it was really sitting down and asking, "What do we want this organization to be?"--listening to the board to the other executives about what they want. We put in place a monthly operations meeting, which finance leads, which includes leaders from the operations team and the rest of the executive team so that we can understand, what are the pressures today, what can we do about them, and what does the future look like? We're proactive. We're building in enough time and processes and infrastructure in place so that we can say, "OK, this is a good investment decision"--or not. I will tell you some of my proudest moments have been when finance has said no: "No, this is not a good decision. This is not good for the shareholders." I promised myself that I would leave this company in better shape than I found it when I started. Sometimes leaving it in better shape means making an unpopular decision.

Today's CFO has to be really, really broad in terms of knowledge because you have to be able to have the trust of the organization. I have to have understanding of operations, marketing, real estate, strong communication skills, leadership skills. You can't work in a silo. If I'm sitting down with marketing, and they don't trust that I know enough about marketing to have a conversation with them, they're not going to trust my advice.