Be open-minded,

listen, learn,

remember, and be prepared

Join us as we get Up-Close with Paolo Savini Nicci, Chief Financial Officer at Jobandtalent. Paolo shares his firsthand experiences of cultivating a high-performing culture, as well as navigating through difficult economic climates.

What are the top 3 attributes of a CFO?

I think first and foremost, you have to be humble, as there are so many things you learn as you go, so you have to stay open-minded; the second is being dynamic and in constant movement to make sure you learn new things every day and stay on top of your game; and finally, staying focused on what is relevant, knowing how to prioritise and putting stronger emphasis on those priorities. It is important to have people around you to steer you and give you signs if you’re going too much in one direction or the other. I have been really lucky to have a strong team around me that “keeps me on my toes”.

“staying focused on what is relevant, knowing how to prioritise and putting stronger emphasis on those priorities.”

What have been your priorities as you’ve been building and developing your team at Jobandtalent?

Definitely scaling up the team and the processes to operate as a world-class business. We are a company that has grown a lot in terms of size and complexity; that has put a lot of pressure on us to make sure we have processes and systems that are fit for purpose. I have also been focusing on identifying the opportunities that we don’t know about – be it around optimising how we work or around spotting the business development and growth prospects. Very often when you embark on this journey of rapid scale up, you start with what you know, but there is so much you don’t know or anticipate at all. In our case, there were a few opportunities, for example, raising debt in the US as opposed in Europe. I think we were overseeing that over the years, but it turned out to be very useful for the business of our size and stage of growth. None of this would be possible without the right team, so before anything else, I have focused on making sure we’ve got the right skills and talent in place who will enable us to grow.

What is your approach to creating high-performance culture? Is there an example you can give us?

I try to explain this to my team using a sports metaphor. I always give them an example of a rowing team – we are as fast as the slowest one on the boat. So, you need to make sure you build the right crew, and you row at the right pace in the right direction to optimise the results. And you mustn’t forget to help each other along the way – this is not an individual sport. We are a global finance team of c. 300 people across multiple countries and that means we need to interact with each other efficiently, making sure we have right processes whereby we can leverage each other’s skills and have higher outputs than the initial inputs. Having such a dispersed team means that we need to spend much more time together, both in person and virtually as well to improve the flow of information. We have worked a lot over the past few years on standardising the way we work and improving the routines.

“Build the right team, row together for optimal results.”

How have the current economic climate and market circumstances influenced the way you lead the finance team and the broader business?

In times like these, experience is what definitely helps. If you have been through a similar scenario a few times, you build the instinct and pattern recognition to deal with uncertain outcomes. I’ve been through the financial crisis in 2007, more recently through Covid pandemic and have now been exposed to geopolitical and therefore broader economic uncertainty – all this has given me substantial resilience and ability to focus on what matters and what could be existential. I think you have to be able to pre-empt the situation to avoid finding yourself being too exposed if the wind changes. For example, more recently we have been preoccupied with inflation so one exercise we did as a team was going back to the drawing board and trying to understand the micro-environment. We put inflation in the context of our business and realised it impacts us in different ways. First of all, wage inflation tends to go in our favour as it’s ultimately a part of our revenue stream. On the other hand, if we look at Opex inflation, this doesn’t impact us as much because Opex is 1-2% of our revenue base. Nevertheless, we spent a lot of time thinking about how the micro-environment works and trying to get different points of view – we looked at projections of GDP, interest rates and unemployment that are very relevant for a business like ours. We also carefully looked at traditional and non-traditional players in our sector and what has been their short and mid-term trajectory and that helped us to get a better view.

If I look at my core finance team, I recognise a high level of resilience, both physical and psychological, as well as the ability to deal with problems efficiently as they arise. I’m really proud of that and it reassures me our business has the right team in place.

Paolo, you mentioned yourself you’ve been through a few “crisis situations” in the past. What would be your advice to finance leaders navigating through such circumstances for the first time?

I’ve always been incredibly lucky to have worked with strong management teams. You need to be surrounded by the right people – for example here at Jobandtalent, people ARE our business. But you also have to pick up the job that matches your skills. There are different types of CFOs out there; I’m personally more a strategic and fund-raising driven CFO, as opposed to being too operational. Make sure you speak to your peers and people more experienced than yourself. I remember finding helpful speaking to seasoned finance leaders and getting their perspectives on various aspects, long before I became the CFO myself. Even nowadays, there is a group of people I speak to from time to time to exchange ideas. They all have different views on a particular issue and gathering different insight helps you to form your own opinion and ultimately to come up with a solution.

“Delegate, trust your team, and bring your true self as a leader.”

What I have seen is that this depends on the company, to start with. If we focus on tech companies for example, the fundraising market has evolved a lot, especially in Europe. Therefore, for the CFO to be able to work with the investors has become more relevant. Equally, as the market for start-ups and scale-ups becomes more mature and developed, the ability to work with banks is crucial. One other thing I would add – as the businesses have become more international, and in some instances truly global, a CFO needs to think how to address and fix global, complex issues, rather than just manage a pure geographical footprint.

What do you think, how has the CFO role evolved in recent years?

What would be your advice for first time CFOs?

I would say, surround yourself with good people to work with and build a strong finance team to support you. Be humble when thinking about what your strengths are and what is the best opportunity to match them. For example, if you’ve never done fundraising, being in a business that is heavily focused on that might stretch you too much. Be open-minded, listen, learn, remember and be prepared for a journey that will not be easy, but will be an extremely rewarding one.

I don’t think of it as highlights, but rather the experiences that have stretched me and shaped me to who I am today. This is my third CFO job and I think each one has taught me something significant. In my first CFO job, we had to go through a complex restructuring process and working closely with the entire senior leadership team was the opportunity that taught me a lot – this is in line with what I said before: listen to other people’s perspectives. My second CFO job was actually the first one in a tech business, where I learned a new way of doing things and where I constantly had to challenge the status quo. This was a great training ground for doing my job today, which has been a combination of some of my previous experiences but on a much larger scale; we are a business close to €2bn in turnover. All these learnings have been incredibly valuable and have allowed me also to transfer my experience to my teams and perhaps save them from some of the difficult lessons I had to learn on my own.

What would you say has been your career highlight to date?

Has there been a particular book, content or a leader who has influenced your career or your leadership style?

There have been a few things that have helped me a lot. On the one hand, I’ve spent quite a lot of time with former CFOs – the people who have been in my seat for much longer – and that has been invaluable. It helped me to shape my own style and find my own way that works for me. In all honesty, because of my professional background (early career in investment banking and then working in private equity), I realised my leadership style was somewhat different. I used to behave as one of those generals that fights with his soldiers and doesn’t stay much behind. My point here is, I used to be much more hands-on, and I learned how to delegate, which inevitably correlates with trust you have in people. I like to read a lot and one of my favourite books is “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. It forced me to reflect on what are the difficult aspects I face and helped me to realise you need to tackle them, otherwise it just gets worse.

Another thing I learned along the way is that sometimes I forget to “bring my true self”. I often forget how important the people are outside of work who shape you into what you are, for example my family. As you manage a diverse team, there are different sensibilities and personalities you need to be aware of. Bringing your own self and showing your true colours helps to come across as a more authentic and therefore trusted leader. People want to know what type of father, husband, brother and son I am – this helps them to understand me fully and how I behave and make certain decisions.