What Running a Business Taught Me About Being a Better CFO

I ran a luxury ground transportation company for three years.

We handled every major West Coast film and television premiere. Global touring artists. Corporate events for Sony Pictures. The kind of work where a problem at 11pm on a Friday isn't a problem you escalate — it's a problem you solve in the next 30 minutes or the client remembers it forever.

One night, a tour bus carrying a major artist's production crew broke down on a desert highway outside Las Vegas. Show in four hours. No backup vehicle on site.

Within 30 minutes we had three SUVs and a Sprinter van deployed from Vegas. The crew made the show. The artist never knew it happened.

I didn't know it at the time, but that night taught me more about what it means to run a finance function than most of what I learned in a formal CFO role.

Operating under pressure with no margin for error. Managing relationships at multiple levels simultaneously — the client, the talent, the venue, the crew — each with different information needs and different definitions of success. Absolute discretion with sensitive information. And the judgment to know when to hold a business and when to wind it down cleanly.

When the writers' and actors' strike effectively shut down the Hollywood support economy in 2023, we made the decision to wind down on our terms. Not because the business had failed — because the conditions that made it viable had changed, and recognizing that clearly and acting on it without drama is the same skill I bring to a client's finance function.

The best CFO work I've done has never been purely financial. It's been about understanding people, reading situations, and knowing when the numbers are telling one story and the business is living another.