898: Making Finance Proactively Persuasive | Russell Lester, CFO, Versapay

By the time Russell Lester landed inside Intuit’s department of analysis in 2009, the unremarkable career path on which he had first set out nearly 10 years earlier had become brimming with possibilities.

Back in the early 2000s, Lester tells us, he was hired by the company Harland Clarke (now Vericast) as an analyst specializing in customer information and insights.

“This was not traditional finance, and I was sort of tiptoeing around what we would broadly call ‘analytics’ today,” remembers Lester, who notes that his adeptness with data analysis eventually resulted in his assignment to a role responsible for pioneering the company’s performance management discipline, which subsequently helped to open the door to Harland’s financial planning and analysis function.

At the time when a recruiter for Intuit called, Lester was responsible for overseeing Harland’s FP&A discipline. It seemed that one of Intuit’s divisional presidents was seeking to hire a senior finance executive with a distinguished data insight and analysis resume.

“I had the FP&A background, and at the same time it was clear that I had been involved with things that touch the customer as well as the go-to-market team,” recalls Lester, whose career at Intuit is notable in part for his inclusion on the due diligence team involved in the headline-grabbing sale of Intuit’s financial services data insight division to private equity firm Thoma Bravo for more than $1 billion.

No longer an anomaly, Lester’s customer-centric, data insight resume was now capable of opening doors to both senior finance and operational roles.

In 2017, Lester accepted a VP of marketing operations position with Keap, a CRM applications vendor that immediately tasked him with establishing a single source of truth for data across the organization. It wasn’t long before Lester’s world was once again intersecting with the finance function, a development that eventually led to broader planning and analysis responsibilities across both operations and finance.

A couple of years later, Keap found itself in search of a new finance leader—a development that Lester was monitoring somewhat passively until a mentor challenged him to throw his hat in the ring.  

“He told me that he thought that I was already ‘doing the work’ and that I should have a conversation with board—so I did,” explains Lester, who would be named CFO of Keap in early 2020.

Reflecting on the career path behind him, Lester can’t help but draw our attention to the quarries of customer information that he once mined daily.

Says Lester: “We all perhaps have heard the advice ‘Connect yourself to numbers, and you will always have a job.’ Well, someone once told me: ‘Connect yourself to the customer, and you will never go hungry.’” –Jack Sweeney