#117 From Private to Public, and Beyond: CFO Lessons in Building Lasting Value

Welcome to the Proteus Leader Show, a podcast for forward-looking leaders driving transformation in their organizations, within their teams, or for themselves. Your host today is a senior leader at Proteus International, a firm that partners with companies around the world to make true transformation easier through change consulting, leadership development, and executive coaching. If you're looking for fresh perspectives and practical insights, you can take back to work today, you're in the right place. Enjoy the episode.

Welcome to the Brutalist Leader Show. Today, I'm especially excited to welcome Jason Beasley, CFO of Pattern, a global e-commerce powerhouse that went public on NASDAQ in September 2025. I've been lucky to know Jason for 20 years. We first worked together on GE's legendary corporate audit staff, and later reunited at Comcast NBCUniversal, where Jason was CFO of NBCUniversal International and I served as CFO of the Networks Division. It's been a privilege to watch his leadership journey up close. In this episode, we'll explore what it really takes to go from private to public, how the CFO role shifts, the readiness required behind the scenes, And what happens after that bell rings? We'll unpack the mindset, governance, storytelling, and culture needed at each stage, plus the real differences between leading finance privately and in the public eye. Whether you're planning to go public or just want to lead with more clarity and discipline, this one's for you. Welcome to the show, Jason.

Thanks, Marie. Nice to be here.

So, let's jump right in. So, you've held CFO roles in both private and public companies, from NBCUniversal to Pattern. What do you see as the key shifts in mindset and capability as a CFO navigating those 2 worlds?

I would say maybe before I talk about the shifts, just the key things that are the same is you've got to be an expert in your field, in finance, and you have to be a value-added business partner. And you have to communicate in an influential way. So that's the same no matter what business you're in. Big businesses, like big public companies like GE and Comcast, are amazing training grounds. What happens in those very large companies is you have many specializations. I'll just pick a few. There's entire departments on tax or treasury or technical experts, M&A, compliance, all those things. And you can get very deep. In those different expertises in the finance world, and you can learn a lot. There's also more complicated organizations. Decisions are a bit more complicated, and you learn to communicate a lot internally, particularly upwards. And you can get fantastic training in the big companies, and I highly recommend it. It was great for my career and for my development. In smaller companies, you have a lot less resources to cover so many areas, so you don't have as much specialization. When you're a CFO of a smaller company, you're covering many things. One of the capabilities I had to add to my toolkit was the entire world of equity, debt, and treasury. Big companies, essentially the money comes from the sky. It doesn't really matter if you make— burn cash or if you make a lot of cash. Either way, it gets taken to the big corporate. When you're in a small company, you need to really manage that cash. You need to figure out how you're going to manage your debt. And your equity, how you're going to raise equity, those types of things. That was the biggest difference for me in moving to a private company. It was also what I was hoping to get out of the experience. So I was very happy to add that to my overall learning in terms of as a finance professional.

And I'm curious about how did you learn to do those new things? What was your development plan for yourself?

I think actually A few things help a lot. One is never lose the mindset of being an owner who's focused on long-term economic value.

Mm-hmm.

And that's one of the things I learned in both GE and Comcast, but in a smaller company, it became more real because every decision you can make it faster and you can see the results quicker. But never lose that mindset. And then you go into things like a debt discussion you never had before, or an equity discussion. Don't be afraid to ask basic questions with that mindset. Bankers in particular will throw out all kinds of acronyms and different things that you feel like you should know, but there's a lot of power in just saying, hey, can you just walk me through this specifically from an economic standpoint? Money in, money out, those types of things. Second one would be, don't be afraid to have the bankers compete against each other and give you advice. Some of the best learnings are to ask one bank, well, this is what the other bank is saying. How do you think about this? And they actually are very good at poking holes in others' logic. And then you take the collective knowledge of all of them and make your own best decisions. Third, I'd say use your network. I've been blessed to have an amazing network from my GE days of other public CFOs, CEOs, Just reach out to them and say, this is the situation I'm in. How do you think I should think about it? Or any tips on how I approach this? And then just don't be afraid to make a decision. One of the fun things about being in a smaller company is as a CFO, you get to make a lot of decisions, obviously in concert with your founders or CEOs, but many things, the buck stops here. And that's both high risk, but also high reward. And don't be afraid to just take those decisions.

I love those insights. You started with mindset, asking questions, not being afraid of that. And also the learning ground you talked about earlier at GE really helped us do that. A lot of times we're put in situations where we didn't know much.

There's a real benefit to moving around to a lot of different places early in your career so that you are constantly uncomfortable and have to learn fast. And have to trust your training, your intellect, and in some cases, your instincts. And you just take those with you as you go further and further in your career.

And then the other tips I just want to reiterate is to leverage the experts, right? Because you mentioned at GE, the experts were within GE. Here, you might need to tap into other experts like bankers, and then you leverage them between each other.

Yeah, they love to have opinions on each other, which just gives you More data points to think for yourself what's best for the company.

So when you joined Pattern, I think a couple of years ago, what were your early priorities to build financial discipline and scalability? Because I remember from our earlier discussion, the business has grown so quickly, and whether or not there was an IPO on the horizon.

To give you context, Pattern's a 12-year-old company. I joined at about year 7. And they were just about $500 million in revenue, profitable company, burning a little bit of cash. And they had a very small finance and accounting team. The prior CFO was a fantastic accountant. I probably couldn't have built what he built at the first 7 years and hired a very strong VP of accounting. And so they had very strong accounting framework, but the rest of what I call the finance puzzle was missing. And maybe I can just take a step back and give you my philosophy on how finance fits into a business. This is my own analogy and it may not be perfect, but it's just how I think about finance. So if I think about a business as a human body, there's lots of different functions in a business and there's lots of different functions in a human body. And I used to work in media entertainment with you, and that's one of the fanciest businesses in the world. Everybody gets to see it. They see it all the time. And I found myself wondering, how would I motivate my finance team? to feel a part of that. And so I came up with this analogy, a business like a human body, so where does finance fit in? And finance and accounting provides a lot of structure and a lot of process, if you will, that is quite structured, whether it's budgeting, forecasting, all the accounting, the controllership, tax, treasury. There's a lot of structure. And that structure is actually really important for a business, similar to how the skeletal system is important for a body. Muscles don't do very well with broken legs. Like you can't run very fast with broken legs. And I don't go as far as to think that finance is really the muscles of a business, but without that structure, a business just falls apart. And we've seen that in many cases. A very old case now, but important is like Enron. There wasn't a lot of financial structure there. And the whole thing is just a big blob of a business that died. So that's the first thing that finance and accounting provides is structure or like a skeletal system. And the second I would say is a portion of the nervous system. Really good finance provides a lot of signals to the business of how is it progressing. Are things too hot? Are they too cold? Are you running out of cash? Are you creating a lot of cash? You know, what's going on in your revenue cycle? What's going on with your inventory? All those things are important signals to the business of how it is performing and how it should react. And so that's where the financial planning and the business partnering functions like commercial finance or operational finance really—

Mm-hmm.

come to the fore as critical inputs to running the business. So that's my philosophy on finance generally. In terms of what happened, we had very strong process and structure, thanks so much to my predecessor and the team that was already in place. They were just under-resourced, so that structure was cracking and they needed better systems to help that. So we put more resources there. And then they had just basic rudimentary financial planning. So we put more resources there. To provide the right amount of budgeting, forecasting, kind of performance management, those types of things. And then the 3rd pillar that really builds off those first 2 is what I call business partnership, which is decision support signals, commercial finance, helping with deals, helping to monitor the progress of the business on the revenue side, and then operational finance, managing your expenses, in our case, inventory flows and things like that. And providing those signals to partner with that team. So those are the things we had to build. And what really mattered most and always matters the most to me is that all 3 of those pieces, the controllership, the financial planning, and the business partnership, are adding value to the company and helping the company run the best it can. And if that's the case, no matter if you're private or public, we're doing our job and the company's going to do very well.

Amazing. So you strengthened the skeleton, the structure, but there was a very strong one in place already. And you added more of that nervous system, which especially includes the business partnership. I'd love to go a bit deeper in that because for some people it's mysterious. What does it mean? What does it mean to be a finance business partner? How do you make those informed decisions?

Yeah, I like analogies to try to explain things to a broad audience. Another analogy that I'll use is at the end of the day, business is a team sport. It's what one of our co-founders says here at Pattern. And frankly, in my business, I don't need finance and accounting to just be the scorekeepers or the commentators. Here's how we did in the pack, or here's the numbers. To me, that is like table stakes, lowest level finance and accounting support. And it's actually disappointing if that's all that team does. I want my team to be out there playing with the other players and predicting what's going to happen and saying, here's the changes I think we should make. And I'm going to dig in and help you do that. We're going to win this together. That's to me really what partnership is. It's not just scorekeeping or commentating. It's digging in and helping the team win with valuable information, valuable actions, valuable follow-up, and appropriate, like I said, structure and signals.

It's more looking forward also than just like the past. And I think it makes finance more interesting. Oh yeah.

At the end of the day, every function in a business is a piece of a puzzle. Every function brings the important things, the human resources, operations, strategy, sales and marketing for sure. They're all just pieces of the puzzle. And if you can build an environment where they all feel like, okay, my expertise is helping just one single purpose. And each group appreciates the parts that other functions bring, that's the recipe for success in the team sport that is business.

Winning team.

Yeah, together.

Yes. And on that note, taking Pattern public was a major milestone. So walk us a little bit through the journey from building that internal readiness to managing the IPO process and leading the company. Through day one and beyond. Now, what did you learn?

I think the most important thing, as always, is just build a great business. The greatest public companies are great businesses. So you have to keep your eye on that ball. And for me, that means a business that has high growth, strong profitability, and is generating cash in a reasonable way so that they just control their own destiny. And that's how we got that all in place with Pattern. A lot of it was already in place when I joined. We just tweaked a few things and that becomes the foundation of confidence that you can have going into the public space. If you think people have got opinions on your business, boy, just wait until you're public and then everybody's got opinions, which is totally fine. And part of the beauty is if you want to teach people about your company, you got to be ready for everybody to have views on it. So I think that's number one is just keep building a great business. I would say in terms of the journey, the things that surprised me was you create a massive team when you go public. There are not just one or two bankers. Usually you have a consortium of bankers that are a part of the team. They have their own analysts. analysts that are going to eventually do coverage on the company. So they're part of the team. Then you have lots of lawyers for you, the company, as well as for the banks that are also part of the team. You've got PR and investor relations, and the group becomes quite large quite quickly. And the first fun thing that you get to do as part of that team is what I— in hindsight, I'm happy we did it and we did it well. But during the process, I called it the worst group project ever. Which is you write about a 300-page document called the S-1, and it describes your entire business. And then once you get 30 or so people on board with what you're going to say, which is a long thing to do, then you get to send it to the government. The government opines on what you said, but doesn't necessarily walk you through why they say that. So then those same 30 people have to get together and talk about, okay, how do we respond to the government? And that cycle just goes over and over until you get it all finalized. That's a big process. It's important because it gives the potential shareholders the right information about the company, but it is a lot of work. So that's one thing I didn't know going into it, that it would be that much work on that side. But you build the right team, you get really good advisors, bankers, and you make your way through that. The biggest second learning I had that's probably more important is the most advice I would give to CFOs that are going to take a company public, don't underestimate the need to educate investors and the time that it takes to educate potential investors on your company, particularly if your company doesn't have a very simple comparable already in the public markets.

Mm-hmm.

Investors are extremely smart, but they also see many companies, and so they generally like to compartmentalize what they see into a safe space of what they call comparable companies. And in our case, we're an e-commerce tech company that grows very fast, very similar to other tech companies, has very high NRR or net revenue retention, similar to tech companies, but we do it by buying inventory from brands and selling to consumers. And so then investors are like, wait, I don't understand this. How can you be a tech company that holds inventory? They're like, no, it's just a great way to monetize it. And so that takes time. They have in the IPO process a vehicle called testing the waters where you can talk to investors under certain regulatory circumstances to help them understand the company. And I would say don't underestimate the need to do that for a long time. And as you do that, and as you come back to those investors and build rapport, they'll get more and more comfortable with taking a bet on your company at IPO or beyond and investing in your company and really appreciating what your company's about and how it performs.

What I'm taking away from that is effective communication is a big skill that you put into use when you do that. Can you share some of the best practices? How do you educate those potential investors? What are the effective ways?

Good question. The most important thing about effective communication is to quickly understand what is the baseline knowledge that I'm working with here, and how do I build off of that baseline understanding in a way that is productive to the receiver's understanding?

Okay.

So most investors are extremely strong in what I would call financial analysis, but maybe not as strong in what I would call kind of entrepreneurial thinking. And so helping to show them first the financial output and then help them understand the how has been a good tool. Because when you start with, look, we're growing 30% a year, we're profitable, that's improving, and we're generating cash. Now I'm going to lean in and I'm going to understand what do you do?

Got it.

Whereas if you start too far into what I would call, here's the strategy, here's all the pieces, here's how we do it. You may not fully be building on a base that they can understand to move the conversation forward and have them really be particularly interested in your company.

Got it. So talk the language and then you can go deeper into how do you get to those numbers.

Build on the foundation that they start with and then go from there. Yeah.

I love what you said about the fundamental is to build a great business and being on boards of publicly listed companies, I see how much time being public is and the demands of the market. So how do you stay focused on building a great business while also meeting those demands?

Yeah, I think you do have to put the right team around you. So I've been blessed to hire some amazing folks that I consider my lieutenants to help run the business. And so you do get, as a public company CFO, get pulled into the world of investor relations more. It becomes a significant portion of your time and it's very important for the whole company, but you still gotta help run the business. And so I lean more now on my direct reports to run with stuff than I did 2, 3 years ago. But we've had the benefit of working together now for 5 years and, and we built it all together. So I don't really need to be concerned that they're going to do something dramatically different than I would do. And frankly, it gives them more ability to grow and develop while I'm growing and developing on the kind of investor interaction side. So I wouldn't be able to do it without my team, but you have to build a team that can handle that. I always find that's one of the critical things. Are you building the right team underneath you that frankly, if for some reason you were out for a while or you got pulled away, That the company would still be in good hands. And so that's probably the biggest thing I've done so far that I'm really proud of the team on how they can handle so many things when I get pulled into that investor arena. That's probably the biggest thing.

Having that high-performing team creates capacity for you to do those other things that are required as a public CFO. You've given so many tips along the way, and we love leaving our listeners with Maybe a recap of those tips, especially around scaling finance, preparing for growth, leading through the massive change you've been through, high growth and going public. So what would be those top tips?

I would say great finance teams provide structure, process, and don't be ashamed of that. That's very important for a company to be strong, but they also provide valuable information And help drive business decisions and help the business be forward-looking on what it can do to win the game of business. That's probably number one. The second I would say is the general mindset for excellence in finance is one of being part of the team, really partnering with other functions to drive joint success, not being just scorekeepers or commentators, but real players in the game. And winning together with, with the entire team, all the other functions. And then the last tip I would give that I've always found is a real differentiator for the best finance leaders is influential communication matters.

Hmm.

And I'll end with a short story. I started my career in General Electric, amazing company. I started working with bankers and engineers and other finance professionals and You could essentially walk in the room with a spreadsheet and say, here's a spreadsheet. You can see it here. Obviously this is what we should do. And everybody would nod their head and be like, yeah, I understand this. Let's do this. Then I got thrown into the world of media entertainment as financial planner for the movie business, head of FP&A. And if you walked into the room with a spreadsheet with the chairman of Universal Pictures, they'd be like, I don't know what to do with this. What is this? And so you have to, as a finance professional, if you're really going to be influential, figure out how do you communicate in a way that matters to your business partner and synthesize it in a way where there is recommended actions and opinions on what to do that they can respond to and that you can work together to figure out the result, the right path. Too many finance professionals get lost in the spreadsheet and don't spend enough time thinking about how I'm actually going to communicate in an influential And productive way. And the ones that figure it out become extremely valuable assets to the company and have a much better time helping run the business.

That's music to my ear, all 3 tips, but especially the last one, because you know what, I don't know if we ever talked about that, but the reason why I went into finance being an engineer by background is because I was annoyed by the jargon and being rejected in my proposals and not understanding that language. I was like, this has to change. And then I think I never forgot the feeling when you're on the other side and you're being brought up like those spreadsheets. And I don't know what this is to make finance the language of business and that everybody can follow, understand, because then, as you said, your influence grows and this is how you get things done. So thank you for sharing that.

No problem. And good summary.

So it's amazing to go through this conversation because you walk through the steps, but also the mindset and the leadership behind Patents IPO. And I think there are a lot of tips that are not just valid for finance leaders, but for leaders in general. And also demystifying a little bit what it means to go public and what happens afterwards. So thank you so much.

You're welcome.

To our listeners, If you're thinking about how to lead through transformation and build readiness for whatever's next, visit proteus-international.com for more tools and insights. Thank you for tuning in, and until next time, here's to creating the financial leadership you truly want.

Thanks for listening to the Proteus Leader Show. We hope you're leaving with ideas you can put to use on your team, in your organization, or in your own career. To learn more about how we support true transformation through change consulting, leadership development, and executive coaching, visit us at proteus-international.com. Until next time.