In early 2009, Paolo Poma found himself navigating what he recalls as a “really tough” period. At the time, he was helping steer Ducati through a leveraged buyout negotiated before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Debt obligations had arrived just as markets were “plummeting,” Poma tells us, while lenders closely monitored covenant compliance and private equity owners pressed ahead with the deal.

Poma remembers sitting with bankers and shareholders through repeated discussions about liquidity, budgets, and cash generation. “Planning cash was crucial because covenants on cash were really tight,” he tells us. The experience forced him to balance operational performance with financial discipline while uncertainty spread across global markets. Ducati ultimately avoided breaking its covenants, Poma tells us, and the period became one of the defining stretches of his finance career.

The challenge also reinforced the leadership style that would later shape his tenure at Lamborghini. Trained originally as an engineer, Poma tells us he built his finance career by combining analytical rigor with business understanding. He later expanded his responsibilities from controlling to investor relations, treasury, and accounting before formally becoming CFO in 2011.

Today, that long-view mindset influences how he approaches Lamborghini’s growth. The company grew from roughly €200 million in revenue to nearly €2.4 billion over the last decade, Poma tells us, while maintaining a focus on profitability, product discipline, and sustainable expansion.

Patrick McClymont still remembers the moment at IMAX when the numbers began moving in the wrong direction. Hired to help drive external growth through acquisitions and partnerships, he instead found himself sitting with CEO Rich Gelfond building what he calls an “early warning system.” Together, they agreed to monitor the next three film titles and “hold ourselves accountable” to a short-term scorecard, McClymont tells us. If the numbers shifted further, strategy would have to shift with them.

That experience reinforced a lesson McClymont carried from his earlier years at Goldman Sachs and into multiple CFO roles: “the numbers don’t lie,” he tells us. Before Goldman, he worked in real estate development, where he learned to “boil it down to the numbers” and find clarity quickly. At Goldman, advising transportation giants including UPS and major airlines exposed him to CEOs and CFOs navigating large-scale operational complexity.

When he joined Sotheby’s as CFO, however, McClymont discovered that financial fluency alone was not enough. The art specialists running major parts of the business “didn’t think about the world the way that Goldman Sachs people do,” he tells us. Rather than force financial terminology into conversations, he changed his communication style, using “brown bag lunches” to connect financial priorities with the realities of individual business units.

Today at Hagerty, that same mindset shapes his focus on customer economics, profitability, and building “one version of the truth,” he tells us.

Alex Chun already knew the management team at NEOGOV long before he became its CFO. As an investor at Warburg Pincus, he spent more than four years “in the trenches” with NEOGOV’s leadership team, flying to Los Angeles to work through operational challenges alongside them, Chun tells us.

His path to finance leadership did not begin in accounting or FP&A. Instead, Chun spent nearly a decade evaluating companies at Morgan Stanley, General Atlantic, and Warburg Pincus, developing what he calls “pattern recognition” by analyzing “dozens, if not hundreds” of businesses, Chun tells us.

That investor mindset now shapes how he leads finance. After joining NEOGOV in 2021, Chun focused on transforming finance into the company’s “centralized insights engine,” bringing quantitative discipline beyond the finance department and into sales, customer operations, and product decision-making, Chun tells us.

He contrasts the polished presentations of boardrooms with the reality of operations, where even changing the pricing of a product can require “90 steps” across multiple teams, Chun tells us.

Today, Chun is equally focused on AI’s impact across the business. At NEOGOV, teams are using AI to analyze customer conversations, automate workflows, and rethink scalability itself, Chun tells us.